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Comment by joemi

12 hours ago

It's odd to see this comment, since I've always had the opposite experience (at least when comparing Windows and MacOS -- I haven't used desktop linux much in the past 20 years). On MacOS, when I click something, something happens, or at the very least starts to happen (and I get some visual indication). While in Windows I often click on something and get no indication that something happened or started happening, so I click again, and then suddenly perform the action twice. This most often happens when opening programs, but it happens in other places too sometimes.

4 comments

joemi

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someguyiguess  9 hours ago

I’ve found Mac OS to be snappier than any of the dozen or so Linux DEs I’ve tried. I use Fedora with XFCE and it’s ok in responsiveness, I’ve got PopOS on another machine. It’s good. But I’ve got MacOS on my other two machines and they just feel so much snappier. And the Macs are 6-7 years old. The other machines are newer (2/3yo).

  • michaelmrose  8 hours ago

    In any case have you tested on the same machine for the most apt comparison? Agr may not be the best predictor of performance when io and memory may be more productive of snappiness than the latest CPU.

    Input devices and monitors can make a difference as well.

lynndotpy  9 hours ago

For Windows, my last experience on a personal install was Windows 10 and that was yeeeaaars ago, so... Grain of salt :)

It's not the default, but IIRC Windows could be configured to have zero animations, and I found it to be quite responsive as such.

I'm not talking about the speed of opening programs, but more of the speed of every-second interactions: Unfolding a folder (or other interactions within a program with keyboard or mouse), alt-tabbing across windows, moving between desktops, etc. At least on Windows, I saw far fewer IO-blocking animations than I have on MacOS.

You're right about the "something starts to happen": Apple hides delays behind sigmoidal animations throughout much of their OS. For those who aren't aware of the trick, the delay between the start of the animation and the tail where it starts appears to just be an animation that started on the interaction.