I liked the path windows was going in late 2010s. WSL, power toys, many great utils, great performance.
But it has since then stalled and got increasingly worse. Especially with this AI shoving everywhere, not even mentioning getting ads at some point in notifications and start menu.
I'm not particularly in love with MacOS either (but have no realistic alternative on my MacBooks).
I'm more and more inclined of switching my desktop (my main working machine) to Omarchy, two coworkers in my team use it and love it and seems the sweet spot for what I need as a dev without the annoyance of Windows or the god awful macos.
If you want an OS to simply do stuff Linux is now clearly superior.
However, I found Omarchy to be whatever the opposite of a sweet spot is. It brings all the complications of a tiling WM, so you still have to learn a complicated new way of using your system, but at the same time it is extremely opinionated so instead of ending with a tailored custom tiling WM that suits your needs at the end of the learning curve, you end up with a tiling WM that is suited for someone else’s needs.
On the flip side, the simplifications it does add, such as a supposedly easier way to add packages, does no such thing. It doesn’t simplify the process at all and in fact makes it harder to understand how to actually remove stuff.
I love Linux. I've been using it for about 25 years now. I try to be a realist, and historically, it has always been my opinion that it is a less polished experience, suitable mainly for power users. But my opinion now is that many flavors actually do offer a superior desktop user experience for most use cases.
This might not be a popular opinion, but in my experience stock GNOME is quite the polished experience.
In the grand pantheon of my experience using operating systems, Snow Leopard-era macOS is probably my favorite, mostly due to how smoothly everything worked and the degree to which it got out of my way once I learned the ropes, but GNOME circa Fedora 30 was a close second.
I say stock because I also remember trying out Ubuntu-flavored GNOME at around the same time and the comparison was stark. It felt like Cannonical went out of their way to tweak the environment in ways that sound good on paper, but just added papercuts and made the overall experience less stable.
I also remember trying Manjaro at around the same time. On first boot, the welcome popup that was designed to come out of the taskbar instead popped out of the top left corner of the screen.
So I wonder whether the benefits you’re seeing in Omarchy are simply the result of using a tiling WM for the first time, which overrode what I believe Omarchy detracted from a general tiling WM.
Or whether my poorer experience was a result of the fact that having used a tiling WM I was more comfortable customizing and so found the Omarchy opinionated behavior restrictive or if the benefits Omarchy brings to someone who’s new to a tiling WM are lost on me.
I've been pretty much exclusively Linux-based for over a decade now, but I used every version of Windows from 3.11 to Windows 7, so I still have some muscle memory from the good ol' days.
Recently I was helping a relative do something on their Windows 11 machine and I asked them to press Windows key + R, type calc, press Enter. And I was astonished at the result. Literally: Mouth agape, frozen in astonishment for about 10 seconds.
I knew about the ads and tracking and the local account bullshit, but I didn't realize just how bad the Windows experience has become.
What does happen? I'm using Windows 10 Enterprise (is that GitHub repo to activate any license still around?) , with policy to disable Internet search from the start menu... so your story makes me wonder what the astonishment is.
I had a similar experience to the OP. After a new version of Windows I tried to run something, or maybe it was just pressing the Start button, and I waited, mouth open, wondering what in $DIETY's name was happening before it responded. The pause was completely alien to a Linux user, who is used to the Window manager unconditionally responding instantly. It would be alien to users of older versions of Windows too.
I decided in the end it was pulling down stuff from the web - in tiles it displayed beside the start menu. If you were on a fast network and had a good internet connection the problem mostly went away. The feature was inherited from WinPhone, I think. So it wasn't that the underling OS or video had got slower, it was them bolting on irrelevant crap to the menu. I later got smarter and deleted all the tiles, so only the menu was displayed. That improved things considerably. I remain gob smacked at them crippling their product like that.
I'm try to avoid Windows now, and am mostly successful. But I read these stories about them adding AI and ads into the mix. If they bolted them into basic window functions like the start menu in the same idiotic way, I could well believe Microsoft has release the slowest Windows ever despite it running on the fastest hardware the planet has seen.
Bit of a clickbaity way of phrasing it, but I'm also curious what the result was? From googling it I don't see any stories about recent changes to the calculator app, other than a few features like graphing.
I'm sorry, I wasn't intentionally trying to write clickbait, I was just agreeing with the parent and did not consider how it would come off to other parties.
What happens is the calculator window pops up ~immediately, but the entire contents of the window are a stupid logo--for at least 5 full seconds--until the UI elements actually load and you can actually use the calculator to calculate things.
The most basic thing our PCs do is they calculate. The Intel 4004 was designed... for a calculator. calc.exe, that erstwhile snappy, lightweight native Win32 application is now apparently some Electron abomination with a footprint the size of Windows 98 and a launch time to match.
No worries! Sorry, I phrased that rudely / like an accusation.
That makes sense though. Yeah, it is really depressing. I guess they just don't prioritize start time at all. The hilarious part is, like... Blender on my computer starts up almost instantly! Versus a calculator...
I bet the friend just pressed the Windows key, and typing "Calc" and quickly pressing enter caused Bing to search for calc instead. Common failure because window's start-menu search/load/discovery is a total mess.
if you are searching for something for the first time (or after caching invalidates), it seems like it prioritizes search sources that have already completed.
on my computer, that means web-search almost always completes first. So most of the time if I type in something "new" and don't wait, it'll bring up Bing.
Sometimes it looks like "downloads folder" file search completes before Installed app search completes, because on one occasion I typed in an app's name and it launched the INSTALLER for the app.
once all the searchs resolve it behaves "as expected". I am very surprised if you don't have the same symptoms I'm describing. Why is your computer behaving different from every Win11 install I ever interact with?
I just tried a search for "downloads" and the first result was "Downloads folder privacy settings". I never search for that so it wasn't cached. I even pasted in the query to give it less time to search before pressing enter.
I don't think I've changed any settings for search. Everything is still enabled. There's over 250,000 items in the search index so I haven't removed indexed locations. My computer is pretty much a high-end gaming PC using last generation CPU and GPU. But really I've never seen this behavior anywhere - including my very basic laptop. Maybe I could see this happening on computers that are still using a HDD but I haven't tested that.
If it loads at all. The last two days, the start menu refuses to launch it when you click on it.
The lack of quality in Windows is simply astonishing. And the new start menu and taskbar are terrible. Quite how a company can transform a product into such a mess in just a few years is incredible.
I love when it takes 3 minutes to open "Add or Remove Programs" because the Start menu search decides that typing a, ad, add, r, re, remove, unin, install, etc. definitely means "let me Bing that for you" instead of opening the one thing I clearly want.
It obviously knows what I'm trying to do (Bing search recommendation is for "Add or Remove Programs"), yet refuses to surface the actual shortcut to that settings page (or "app", or whatever Microsoft calls it this week). Even better: some days it pops up immediately after typing "Add" and other days I'm wrestling with it like I'm training a stubborn animal, clicking the result in the hope that the OS will "learn" that yes, this is what I want when I type "Add".
Most of the time I just give up and dig through the Settings menu like it's 1999.
I still use a copy of Calc.EXE from Windows 2000 that I just move from machine to machine. It stopped being useful after that. That old one is nice. Hex mode. Starts quickly.
This reasoning is actually why I ran Windows XP 64 bit edition for very very long. Most exploits found that it was XP and tried to do stuff and failed on the 64 bit kernel they did not expect.
I'm not going to say that's a good idea, but I've long had an idea along similar lines that a source-only distribution that generates a bespoke calling convention, stack frame layout, syscall number mapping, etc. for each individual machine at install time would do a lot to mitigate RCE threats.
I have a derive.exe from 1996 that I still use. TI's calculator, as an incredibly fast windows app that's like 20% of wolframalpha.
And to think on all "modern" OSes you can't even do that. Neither Android nor IOS let you do this in any way shape or form. Even with portable webapps it doesn't work, as webapps go offline. And microsoft clearly wants to create this situation too (last brute force attempt was windows home)
you can also "add to homescreen" on iOS/android and it acts like a native app & works offline. symbolic math - computer algebra system, integration/differentiation, finance app in rom, 3d graphs.
(emu is not my work, i only packaged it for PWA and host it for myself to use, but you are welcome to as well)
Sure (and thanks for the link, do you have a TI-82 as well?) but it won't "last". You'll take the site offline, sooner or later and I can't just store an exe locally and use it in 20 years. I'll lose the ability to install it on phones.
That is my personal site, I do not expect to take it down, since that is where I post my projects. But also, you can just save it from there entirely, and serve from your own site -- there is no server-side part to it.
I do not know anything about this team, but I worked with a team before that migrated from a native app to an Electron-based version. It was worse in literally every way except one: the developers on that team preferred developing that way. Nothing else mattered.
The kind of developers who are willing to work with native GUI APIs (even though a framework) simply don't exist in enough quantity anymore.
Regardless, at least a few of my colleagues using Windows have reported issues with the new start menu. It seems very slow, and sometimes you have to close & reopen it for content to appear.
Searching for things via the Start menu is also totally hit or miss, on 5 different PCs that I regularly use, especially trying to open "Add or Remove Programs" (as described in an earlier comment).
Oh completely agreed on the start menu being slower.
I don’t use it anymore. Fortunately since my windows usage is restricted only to work and I have an ultra wide monitor, I’m able to pin all the apps I need on the taskbar. With the Win + # shortcuts I can avoid the start menu completely.
In the past I didn’t use the taskbar at all and depended on Win + search entirely.
What does notepad have to do with web based apps? case in what point?
New Notepad in 11, with tabs and autosave (and dark mode), is so much better and more practical to use over old one, it just stays open all the time and become my main notetaking pick. It may take a beat to open a big file (1+ mb) with line wrapping, but it's pretty much just as fast as anything (and may be even faster than some other editors). It's just very easy to reach for and quite snappy.
There are some apps on Windows with actual gripes, but Notepad, Paint, Snipping tool, they're quite solid and have become everyday tools that eliminated the need to reach for some other third party apps.
I see you were fortunate enough to not use notepad aprox 5 months ago, when they were running the rich formatting preview. It was on by default, and would drop around 5% of the characters you type. Literally failing at the only thing it's supposed to do. I repro'd this on 2 out of 2 machines.
Maybe they fixed it, maybe they haven't. I both turned off formatting and am using vscode for notes now.
ahh, it might have been spellcheck then. I turned off all that stuff. In the heat of the moment, maybe I was a bit too angry to do proper root cause analysis :P
I've been a Notepad++ user for about 20 years. It's a pain to use it in Win11 as they force their crappy notepad on context menus and such. It's still usable (with some registry changes) but annoying that they're doogfooding their own an keep on changing settings on updates. I'm only using Win11 at work, I'm done with Windows and MS otherwise.
The reason for this is that it's hard to hire native UI developers, but easy to hire web devs.
Something like 90% of all new devs today learn only cloud-native backend dev or web frontend dev. The only exceptions tends to be mobile and game developers. Collectively cloud+web, mobile, and games account for like 98% of all new devs it seems. Nobody learns anything else.
The web is going to become the desktop UI in the future for this reason alone. It's going to be slower and much more bloated than almost any other alternative, but it's got the critical mass of adoption behind it and that's what determines core technologies in the industry. Technical merit is a distant second or third.
This is frustrating but it's not surprising to one who has studied biology and evolution. In evolution this is called "path dependence," and it's why we have weird things like a man's testicles hanging in a bag below his body. A previous evolutionary path optimized the sperm production process to run at a lower temperature than the rest of the body, so then evolution's hack for this is to put them in a bag outside the body. Ticket closed with "resolved." The pathways taken through a complex solution space determine the outcome and the outcome is often bizarre and "hacky" for this reason. The key is that it's very hard to back-track. Once a path has been taken, it's very hard to un-take it.
Large industries and markets are essentially "biological," not rationally designed, so you get the same kinds of phenomena.
It could be much worse. If Linux+HTML+JS had not taken over, we might have the Microsoft Enterprise Web(tm) where Visual Basic (not VB.NET, OG Visual Basic) is the main language and each service or site would require an NT license for every node and an IIS license for every web hostname. UIs might be written in ActiveX or desktop ones in Microsoft C/C++ with OLE and similar horrors. It might be just as slow and infinitely uglier and more expensive and less open. Apple would be dead and open source would much more marginalized than it is today. The net would basically be a total MS monopoly. If you didn't live through the 90s: this nearly happened.
In my opinion this is mostly self-inflicted by Microsoft.
Sure some push for web-based solution has moved a lot of people away from desktop applications, but even before that Microsoft muddied the waters of native UI development.
Moving from User32.dll and GDI to GPU based rendering with WPF, might not have been the worst idea - and WPF is still going strong - but it's a clear cut, leaving old apps un-upgradable. So if companies need to eventually rewrite it, will they stick with desktop apps or move to "web apps"?
Unfortunately, Microsoft didn't stop there, but we've since seen a bunch of different attempts at new Windows UI libs to the point, where nobody trusts Microsoft anymore (remember Silverlight?) and everyone else is left confused by the chaos of an ecosystem.
Why can’t Microsoft employees learn on the job? When I joined a (non-Microsoft) BigTech company, I was expected to learn C++ and internal libraries and tools within a couple months while working on newbie projects. The company recouped that investment many times over.
There is a lot of idiocy/stubbornness among middle managers. I worked for a large consulting firm for a few years and would see hiring managers pass by candidates with good aptitude whom they could’ve trained in 4-6 weeks. Instead, they had the position open for several months waiting for someone who knew the exact technologies they were using and still didn’t find anyone in some cases. Seemed to me that the middle managers need more tolerance for non-billable time. But when everyone is incentivized to meet quarterly goals, this is what you get.
My thoughts as well. And it's not like we're talking about taking random people off the street and teaching them to program, it's just a UI framework. And the stuff people are talking about in here isn't IDEs or CAD suites, it's like... the calculator app and the start menu. What kind of devs is MSFT hiring and paying $200k a year that can't learn a UI framework?
That can work if you're not expecting to be fired on a whim in one of those 20k+ layoffs when suddenly you have a skill no one seeks while you have not grown in the other area the market wants.
This is the pool of mobile devs. If Microsoft is unwilling to eat the lead time (measured in weeks) for an existing native mobile dev to become productive on their stack, that's a sign of much bigger organizational problems.
Yup, coming from iOS and Android, I learned most of WinUI in two weeks, even before LLMs. GUI frameworks are largely similar, so there’s no real justification for reimplementing single-platform applications with HTML.
>The reason for this is that it's hard to hire native UI developers, but easy to hire web devs.
This ... has been very opposite of my experience:
1) I've seen websites turn into poor imitations of mobile apps that lose all the features of web UIs that I want: ability to open links in tabs, use of affordances to scroll up and down, dense packing of information, ability to edit the size, etc. (Edit: almost forgot how they run the back button too!)
2) Generally, I see that the more UI specialists they have, the worse the UI gets. There's the saying, "developers are responsible for mediocre UIs, designers are responsible for horrible UIs".
The reason is that the web empire is just better at operating systems than Microsoft. If they just had less bad development tools for native UI this would not be a problem. Look at what Google does with Android, or Apple.
The analogy with evolution breaks down because currently the fitness function is broken. It would work in a world where anti trust would be still enforced, where customers could vote with their money instead of having to deal with enshitiffied monopolies. In a world where tech CEOs can buy a dinner to stay above the law, where tech is used as a weapon of influence so that
other countries like in the EU are not allowed under penalty of sanctions to not use US platforms even when it breaks their law, it is reassuring for engineer minds but ultimately pointless to explain the state of the industry from market dynamics alone.
That makes little sense, notepad.exe already exists. The only development required on it would be to add AI shit to it. They could just leave it alone.
That means you have to work on the original code, and modern entry-mid level devs can't do that. It's probably in C++. Your expensive senior and staff level devs are on more important projects.
Make it a web app and your cheap entry level grads can do it.
My first entry-level job just freshly coming out of the University was writing C++ with Qt for a computer vision app. And that was my actual first contact with C++ (had seen C and Java in Uni).
It was no biggie, just joining the low level of C with the class notions from Java. Pair that with the C++FAQ website, and it was easy.
Are entry-level devs generally not able to do that nowadays? I do not believe people are generally more stupid or less capable, so, is education so much worse or what's going on?
But does any junior want to learn C++ Win32? You want to learn something that leads to a long-term career development path, not a sunsetting technology.
I'm pretty sure Microsoft can pay them enough to be happy to learn it.
> You want to learn something that leads to a long-term career development path, not a sunsetting technology.
This seems like such an odd take when web frameworks seem to be obsolete almost as soon as you start using them. C++ has and will continue to be around for a very long time.
This is just the result of bad leadership at Microsoft.
They would want to learn Winforms/WPF/WinUI/whatever if microsoft could settle on one and use it. I suppose part of the react native stuff is that Microsoft hasn’t done a good job of making people, even in Microsoft, bet the farm on any of their “native” toolkits.
> That means you have to work on the original code, and modern entry-mid level devs can't do that. It's probably in C++.
As far as I remember, Notepad was the reference implementation for a Microsoft widget. Nothing more. If "modern entry-mid level devs can't do that" you really have a much bigger problem.
I don’t think you understand. Notepad was literally one of the examples that comes with the SDK. It doesn’t need any maintenance. As long as windows has a native SDK, notepad exists because it is basically the simplest GUI application, provided as a sample.
web is, frighteningly, much faster and more responsive than local desktop apps are now (e.g., gmail is infinitely more responsive than desktop modern outlook generally speaking - even web spreadsheets are superior to modern Excel (though not, say, Excel 2003...))
Those are design languages/styles, not frameworks. There is a fewer number of frameworks but it's still a handful. Win32, WPF, UWP, MAUI, etc... but at least they're fairly consistent at using UWP for system UI, with older bits using Win32 still.
This. It was infuriating to find Notepad got updated to a bloated app with rich text and Copilot. It's so different, it just should have been another program. The whole reason I use Notepad is because it's a simple, dumb, fast, predictable program. If I wanted the rich text, I would use any of the numerous other options!
And for the kicker, the update made it forget my font settings.
Re "just another program" - the old Notepad was deliberately designed with minimal dependencies so that even if everything else in the system went to hell you'd still have a working editor to try and fix things.
This makes me want to suggest to Microsoft to have AI-enhanced safe mode. "Computer can't boot? Reboot to the Recovery Copilot and have this advanced spell-checker try to troubleshoot it!"
It’s opinionated coming from Arch Linux. Compared to MacOS or Windows it’s a big giant push over. Opinionated in this context just means it comes with defaults rather than asking you to research your own display compositor.
Although there are some places you want that! WireGuard is often described as cryptographically opinionated because it doesn't even bother trying to negotiate crypto primitives which makes it immune to downgrade attacks. Though, to be fair, that also means that if its primitives ever do get broken you need to roll out an entirely new release.
opinionated versus unopinionated is a tradeoff. Things that boast about how unopinionated they are often require a lot of hand holding or manual config. I think there's a big audience of people that have non-Appleware that want an OS that is not Windows, but don't actually care to customize it.
It’s by David Heinemeier Hansson. Based on his writings, he’s very inflexible. He’s even unwilling to accept that a person of color who was born and raised in Britain can be British.
I've been daily driving it for months now and really like it. It's a nice introduction to tiling window managers, has a well thought out key mapping and generally looks reasonably nice while getting out of my way as an embedded dev.
There's always been Arch linux based distros that come with more things set up and better (or just more specific) defaults. To my understanding Omarchy is just one of those, like Manjaro or etc in the past?
Or: Steve Ballmer oversaw the decline of Mircosoft's flagship product, but left before he could be blamed for it.
A lot of Windows' current problems can be traced back to the Ballmer era, including the framework schizophrenia, as Microsoft shifted between Win32, UWP, WPF, and god knows what else. This has lead to the current chaotic and disjointed UI experience, and served to confuse and drive away developers. Repeatedly sacrificing reliable and consistent UX while chasing shiny and new technologies is no way to run an OS.
I think MS's biggest mistake was to not properly maintain and develop the Foundation Classes, basically a thin C++ wrapper library on top of the C API that retained most of the benefits of the Win32 API while eliminating a lot of the boilerplate code. Instead they went after Java with the .NET managed stuff, bloated and slow compared to the native API.
Qt is now the best "old school" UI framework by far.
>including the framework schizophrenia, as Microsoft shifted between Win32, UWP, WPF
Ah yes, and the solution being presented is Linux, with Xlib, Motif, Qt, GTK, and your choice of 167 different desktop environments. Don't forget the whole Wayland schism.
Mac is no better, shifting SDKs every few years, except Apple goes one step further by breaking all legacy applications so you are forced to upgrade. Can't be schizo when you salt the earth and light a match to everything that came before the Current Thing.
PowerPC stuff? Anything more than a few years old?
Forget it.
You can't even run versions of iPhoto or iTunes after they deliberately broke them and replaced them with objectively shittier equivalents. Their own apps!
Windows can still run programs from the 90s unmodified. There are VB6 apps from 1998 talking to Access databases still running small businesses today.
Can't say the same for either Mac or Linux.
It's not really a problem for Apple because their userbase is content to re-buy all their software every 5 years.
Well, that's true. It's an interesting point actually. Windows certainly wins in terms of binary compatibility.
I was thinking more about the developer perspective, i.e. churn in terms of frameworks. Yes, PowerPC is gone. Intel will be gone soon.
But both the transitions from PowerPC to Intel as well as from Intel to ARM were pretty straightforward for developers if you were using Cocoa and not doing any assembly stuff.
Carbon only every was a bandaid to give devs some time for the transition to Cocoa.
Maybe I am a bit jaded, but with Apple's yearly OS release cycle — and breaking things nearly every time — I grew sick and tired of software I spent good money or relied on suddenly not working anymore.
Imagine taking your car in for an oil change annually and the radio stopped working when you got it back. It's incompatible with the new oil, they say. You'd be furious.
With the Windows of yore this wasn't so much of an issue — with 5-10 years between upgrade cycles — and service packs in between — you could space it out.
When you work in the computer industry, there tends to be a disconnect with how they are used in the real world by real people — as tools. People grow accustomed to their tools and expect them to be reliable as opposed to some ephemeral service.
Is that a good or bad thing? Yes, Mac chops off legacy after a decade or so, but I don’t see not being able to run apps from the 90s as a problem (or if I did, I’d probably be running windows or Linux instead of Mac OS).
From my own experience things tend to keep working on Linux if you package your own userland libraries instead of depending on the ever changing system libraries. More or less how you would do it on Windows.
Except Windows isn't perfect either, I had to deal with countless programs that required an ancient version of the c runtime, some weird database libraries that weren't installed by default and countless other Microsoft dependencies that somehow weren't part of the ever growing bloat.
Although it's rare for me, I have used some old software that was built for Windows 9X or old versions of NT. So far, the track record is perfect - native programs have worked just fine, though I obviously can't vouch for all of them.
Old, complex games are the worst-case scenario, and are the exception, not the rule. Since they were only beginning to figure out hardware-accelerated 3D gaming in the 90s, it meant that we were left with lots of janky implementations and outdated graphics APIs that were quickly forgotten about. Though, MDK doesn't seem to suffer from this - it should be capable of running on newer systems directly [1]. One big issue it does have is that it uses a 16-bit installer, which is one thing that was explicitly retired during the transition to 64-bit due to it being so archaic at that moment, only being relevant to Windows 1-3. But you can still install the game using the method described in the article, and it should hopefully run fine from there on. Since it has options to use a software renderer and old DirectX, at least one of these should work.
I use WinAmp 2.0 sometimes which was released in 1996. I prefer to use v5 but I like to show friends that such old software still works fine (even Shoutcast streaming works fine).
> Try running windows 11 on old CPUs, or machines without secure boot / TPM 2.0.
The more relevant test is the reverse: running Windows XP and apps of that era on modern hardware. It will work perfectly. The same cannot be said of 2000-era Mac software.
That's because TPM 2.0 module allows M$ to uniquely identify you and sell your info to advertisers - it's not an actual technical limitation, it's just because M$ is greedy, and it's a shame they aren't punished by governments for creating all this unnecessary eWaste just to make even more cash.
With GNU/Linux and BSD I just recompile. I can run old C stuff from the 90's with few flags.
Under GNU/Linux, the VB6 counterpart would be TCL/Tk+SQlite, which would run nearly the same over almost 25-30 years.
As a plus, I can run my code with any editor and the TCL/Tk dependencies will straightly run on both XP, Mac, BSD and GNU/Linux with no propietary chains ever, or worse, that Visual Studio monstruosity. A simple editor will suffice and IronTCL weights less than 100MB and that even bundled with some tool, as BFG:
Carbon is long deprecated and as mentioned was only ever meant as a transitional framework.
Cocoa still exists and is usable.
UITouch is not a framework, but a class in UIKit.
UIkit still exists and is usable.
Same for Catalyst. Same for SwiftUI.
As said, I'm not pretending everything is sunshine and roses in Apple-Land. But at least Apple seems to mostly dogfood their own frameworks, which unfortunately doesn't seem to be the case anymore with Microsoft. WinUI 3 and WPF are supposed to be the "official" frameworks to use, but it seems Microsoft themselves are not using them consistently and they also don't seem to put a lot of resources behind them.
Win32, MFC, Windows Forms, and WPF also exist and are quite usable.
Apple also doesn't always uses their stuff as they are supposed to, Webviews are used in a few "native" apps, some macOS apps are actually iOS ones ported via Catalyst, which is the reason they feel strange, and many other stuff I could list.
> Ah yes, and the solution being presented is Linux, with Xlib, Motif, Qt, GTK
I'm not going to descend into a "my OS's API is worse than yours" pissing match with you, because it's pointless and tangential. The issue is not "is the Windows framework situation worse than Linux" but rather "is the Windows framework situation worse than it used to be" and the answer is emphatically yes, and due mostly to Ballmer's obsession with chasing shiny things, such as that brief period when he decided that all Windows must look like a phone.
July 2014: Microsoft lays off 14k people, a large portion of which are SDET (Software Development Engineer in Test)/QA/test people.
The idea was that regular developers themselves would be writing and owning tests rather than relying on separate testers.
I'm sure there were multiple instances of insane empire building and lots of unproductivity, but it's also hard to not think this was where the downfall began.
Ultimately it still comes down to someone in the chain giving a damn. There are obvious, surface level bugs across most technologies. Yet, developers, PMs, VPs all sign off and say, "Close enough".
You may also want to consider Cosmic. PopOS has consistently been the distro that "just works" for me, though I don't use it much as I prefer to tinker more. That said, they're doing a lot of good work making Cosmic as a better replacement for the ton of gnome 3 hacks they had to do before.
Why would you go for a random Linux distribution backed by DHH (a Ruby developer) instead of a established upstream distribution such as Debian or Fedora?
I’m a user of omarchy and I like it a lot. I wanted a Linux experience that I didn’t have to set up myself, and this one was designed specifically for devs who are used to a macOS environment. It took about 6 minutes to set up and everything just works. I don’t really know that much about dhh or his politics, like some sibling comment mentioned. I just think it matches my sweet spot of ease to set up and provided good UX
As stated before, because my colleagues which whom I share the same projects and test cases made the jump from MacOS and are all liking it so far, I also like what I saw till now.
It's not such a difficult task to set up hyprland. And niri doesn't even need to be configured, the default configuration performs all the required tasks.
From my understanding, to get something at the level of omarchy you need to setup multiple pieces of software. In the end it has to replace the whole "desktop"
Utilities to circunvent the stupid original design. Even Microsoft is forced to use this pattern to correct itself.
But hey, you know what they say: "Selling the disease and the cure is the best bizness plan ever".
macOS is in the worst state I’ve ever experienced since I started using it, but I’d go back to a shitty performing x86 laptop with Linux before living on windows again. Just using it on my gaming pc makes my skin crawl
The fact that, on expensive hardware, I can hit windows+r and start typing before the run box renders/loads is staggering, it beggars belief.
Im generally a microsoft shill, but theyre really on the down hill slope. windows 11 is truly a masterpiece of changes no one asked for or wants, Teams is the least reliable piece of business software I've ever seen. New outlook does not have feature parity with old outlook and has the same bargain bin apple ux stylings as w11.
Maybe ive finally crested the age gap and im officially a dinosaur, but God damn every microsoft product is worse than it used to be.
At work employees generally use okay machines, not great but still at least 3GHz i5 processor with 16GB of ram etc. and they only run an ERP client and a browser with a few tabs.
Sometimes, I click on the windows button and it legit takes 3-4 seconds for windows to render the start menu that only has the program list, nothing else, just the list of programs.
These machines with their 6/8 or so cores can do tasks at the scale of nanoseconds and it takes, 3 whole seconds to render a single window with a list of program names, that’s simply stupid.
Anyone who has ever touched a windows xp machine knows that the start menu can complete drawing before my brain can register that my fingers in fact touched the keys, which takes roughly 20ms or so if I remember correctly. What the hell is this system doing?
I have the computer they handed me 3 years ago still. As soon as it powers on the fans go into full gear. Almost nothing running, just Edge. If I have VS on the thing hate crashes. 64gb ram
I dug out my dad's Windows 98 era PC that he was running Windows 2000 on that we hadn't turned on since 2011, and it felt lightning-fast compared to W10 and W11. Double-click to open apps and they appear, ready to type in. It felt like I was on some kind of futuristic prototype.
Yeah but how much faster is hardware since then? M.2 SSDs, lots more GHz + cores, fast GPUs, etc. Everything is way faster and should more than make up for those security checks IMO.
- dell p2 300 win95
- early core duo era with linux 2.4 (some kali linux image)
in both cases there was something very odd, the crude os design (no parallel systemd etc), gui toolkit and desktop environment (no compositor, glitchy) wasn't an issue and the low amount of lag felt very good. it's the same feeling when driving 90s cars, the drive feels directly connected to the whole, it's cruder but it feels better
and saying this as a fan of recent linux kernel and systemd parallelism with the crazy cpu over ssd speed.. i was utterly surprised
On a more serious note, I really only use Windows for games & I'm still always frustrated with how many updates (& restarts during updates) Windows needs. My fans are always constantly spinning on Windows too (laptop or desktop) whereas my Mac & Linux machines are generally silent outside of heavy load.
This is common for any self-updating software that you use infrequently.
A friend of mine complained that he hated how Firefox "always" wants to restart with an update. I couldn't understand what he was on about. Turned out I use Firefox daily and he uses it like once every 2 months to test something and yeah, Firefox has an update out every 2 months or so, so that fits.
It's the same with Windows (and, I assume, macOS). Use Windows more and the updater will disappear out of sight.
I update Linux maybe once a year. Sure, there are security vulnerabilities. But I'm behind a firewall. And meanwhile, I don't have to spend any time dealing with update issues.
But Windows is made for the big masses. It's definitely a good thing that Microsoft forces Auto-Updates, because otherwise 95% of people would run around with devices that have gaping security holes. And 90% of these people are not being a firewall 100% of their time.
Side effect unfortunately is that they are shoving ad- and bloatware down your throat through these updates.
But that is, because Microsoft does not care about the end user at all. It's not the fault of auto-updates.
My Mac doesn’t randomly reboot, doesn’t force updates on shutdown, doesn’t have weekly updates that require updates. IMO Apple handles updates much better than Windows.
Windows still reboots instead of shut down when you do update and shut down.
> My fans are always constantly spinning on Windows too (laptop or desktop) whereas my Mac & Linux machines are generally silent outside of heavy load.
defender seemingly needs to check every 10ms that you still don't have a virus
I'm always amused by these occasional "you still don't have any viruses" popup notifications from Defender. Well, good to know, thank you very much, I guess.
I feel like I've been monkeys-pawed with the downfall of Windows for gaming. I.e. rather than being at the point where everything just works best/easiest in my Bazzite install it's a game of DRM, modding tool support, feature support, and random "this game runs better on Windows, this game runs better on Bazzite" discovery. Also Windows/Steam OS clone/"normal Linux" setups all have their own very awkward corners around the non-gaming portions. I've not found one that does not require substantial tweaking to get a usable all around experience unless you buy a device to use as more a dedicated gaming console (Xbox/Steam Deck type device).
I miss the ~mid Windows 7 era. Not that everything ran perfectly without issues on Windows 7 at the time, particularly old games, but at least there was an option good enough to assume to always go with first instead of "see if the games you play work best here".
It really depends on what you play. I've been playing online co-op regularly with a bunch of friends since Covid times. We're jumping to new (well, on sale) games regularly, and the only recent time I booted to Windows was because a 4-player mod for Remnant II _might_ not work on Linux. Can't remember the previous game that did not work on Linux.
I'm so used to things working without major tinkering that I forget to check protondb most of the time.
If I could still be running Windows 2000, I would --- it simply flew on a Fujitsu Stylistic ST2300, and I was able to hack the Compaq TC1000 Finepoint digitizer driver for Windows NT to run on it --- w/ a CF--IDE adapter, no spinning rust to worry about, and I even had room for a full install of Encarta, my only worry until it died was buying AAAA batteries for the stylus, and the only thing I missed was pressure sensitivity (but my work computer had a Wacom Intuos, so the delicate stuff was done on that).
That said, my favourite Windows computer ever was the Fujitsu Stylistic ST4110 w/ transflective display and Wacom EMR digitizer --- put an SSD in it, carried a couple of spare batteries, added a USB GPS, and kept a pair of docking stations w/ power supplies at my desks at work and the office and a third power supply in my laptop bag and it just worked --- despair of really replacing it, the Samsung Galaxy Book 12 was close, but then Fall Creators Update came out and crippled styluses down to an 11th touch input so that they would scroll rather than select text... getting by w/ a Book 3 Pro 360, but Windows 11 has me looking at a Raspberry Pi paired w/ a Wacom One or Movink display....
It's not shocking they added even more bloatware to every microsoft program so even with the same OS kernel it would probably take longer. At this point it also got out of hand for Microsoft themselves if you have heard how they are going to speed up the explorer. Not by making it faster but by preloading it on startup so it feels snappier, there are 20 years of technical debt in I think you cannot save this anymore (but I am to inexperienced to know that for sure)
The last time this subject came up someone in the thread jumped up to explain to me how Windows 11 has all these great new features that make it worth being many times less performant.
Every feature they listed was some anti-consumer thing that only a corporate customer would ever care about or want. Every single one.
What I learned is that Windows 11 is great for the customer, I'm just not the customer. I'm just the dummy who paid for it.
It persists across updates, can be customized with extremely granular control over what is removed/re-enabled, or using the default mode which works fantastically for most users with minimal risk of disabling something many people might prefer to keep (e.g Xbox app).
I’ve been using it for years on every machine/VM with Windows 11 installed. The OS gets out of my way completely both in terms of functionality and distractions like ads.
I cannot recommend it enough, I am eternally grateful to the maintainers for making Windows 11 feel like a modernized Windows 7 experience.
Most of it are turned off or possible to turn off in LTSC IoT version, which is only Win version reasonable to use without beenig annoyed when using it.
Unless something changed with 11, this is opt in, with a specific "save to your microsoft account option". I really don't see the issue here.
>- Hardware attestation
This is either a rehash of the "TPM 2.0 requirement" point above, or just outright false.
>- Telemetry/Data Collection
>- Extensive diagnostic data collection
This are the same thing restated
>- Forced automatic updates
>- Limited update deferral for Home users
Again, these are just the same thing.
>- Feature updates bundled with security updates
That's basically... every commercial OS out there? Good luck getting security updates on android (if your OEM even provides it) if you're not on the latest version. Some linux distros even have it as a selling point, aka. rolling release.
>- Device Management (Enterprise)
>- Intune/MDM integration
These are the same thing AND you have to jump through hoops to enable it. I really don't see the issue here.
>- Copilot integration
>- Windows Autopilot
You can just... not use it?
>- Azure AD requirements
???
Is this just restating the microsoft account requirement?
To be fair, while many of those are indeed optional or non-issues, the problem is that user experience has been degraded in w11 while there has been almost zero value-add for end users.
One random little thing to add on to the list of shitty things about Windows 11: the new default image-viewing program (Photos), is incapable of rendering multi-page TIFF files. No error message or anything, just displays the first page and acts like everything’s fine. The OLD image viewing program (Windows Photo Viewer), displays them no problem though…
These kinds of issues can be incredibly disruptive and distressing for non tech-savy users. You update your OS and suddenly it looks like a lot of your data are corrupted, with no explanation of how to get it back.
Forcing saving to OneDrive causes this issue a lot too. I was stunned to find that saving changes to an existing document will often try to save a new file in OneDrive instead. So if you don't notice this and go back to your original file, it will look like your changes weren't saved.
The only part of windows that really matters in the long run is win32 which has been extremely stable. You could go back to XP and not lose that many features. The fact that modern windows runs like ass has very little to do with backwards compatibility.
I don't necessarily disagree, but I do think there's an important distinction between technical debt and backwards compatibility. Yes The former can be caused by the latter, but I've worked in enough projects that didn't have to worry about backwards compatibility but were still riddled with technical debt to know that backwards compatibility is only one source of many.
I switched to Linux after Windows started showing me propaganda on the screen where you enter your password. To me, that's diabolical and forced me to make the switch. Sorry, I don't wish to "Learn more about Black-Owned Businesses" just to access my computer.
We updated my MIL's computer to Windows 11 and now it's giving her ads about Xbox something or other on the login screen. She is in her 80s and has no idea what an Xbox even is.
This is awful in many ways. Among other things what really gets my goat is that Xbox something or other ads can have cartoony sexuality, violence, and so on. Those things don’t bother me, but there are plenty of elderly, conservative, religious, etc. people who would be taken aback by it.
There’s plenty of that content in our media, but those people don’t consume that media. A computer is a critical general purpose tool. Everyone needs it. This is like putting scantily clad elves on every refrigerator.
Probably a Samsung, the company that replaced door handles with a microphone for "open fridge" voice command, and advertises to you based on the contents of your fridge.
Ads on the login screen, ads on my fucking start menu. No intuitive way to access all programs. . . Sorry. Apps from the start menu. Suggested apps instead of that. Hold screens to set a backup using one drive and to link my phone and set telemetry and whatever other bullshit once a week.
It's not great. Linux mint is what I install for older relatives now. It's close enough to windows feeling that they never even question it.
Non power users just want a desktop with a browser shortcut, and maybe office apps. I extended the life of a laptop many years for my aging non technical parents. I even encrypted the hard drive for them and since Microsoft basically committed security malpractice by not making encryption available to Home edition users it was significantly more secure. After a 5 minute explainer they never once asked me a single question about it.
Those landscape photos are a crappy hypnotic effort meant to try and dissociate Microsoft from the feeling most people have when they have to login on a Monday Morning.
Still, complaining about something you can only possibly see when you're not using the computer is such a minor thing, whether you like it or not, I cant find myself to care in any amount.
What got me to angrily turn it off was a gigantic closeup of a moose face. It’s kind of funny now that I think about it but I have two 32” monitors and I really did not need 64” of moose lips and wet nostrils.
Reading HN threads about Windows makes me wonder some times if I’m using a completely different version of Windows on my workstation. I guess I also haven’t seen any “propaganda” among my rotating selection of landscape scenery.
My last Windows PC shipped from the vendor with all the tiles and ads and live updates already disabled. I don't know why I see so many other people struggling with turning them off on here.
Regrettably, I have to use a windows machine for work. The other day I got one where the "fact" was an offer to help me pic out the right laptop or tablet to get the most out of copilot.
To stoke my rage into an incandescent fury, if you go to settings -> Lock Screen, there's no obvious way to disable it at first. You have to change the background image from "Microsoft Spotlight", the one where the image changes to a static background image, and THEN you get a checkbox. The checkbox you uncheck is "get tips, fun facts, and more". I guess trying to sell me shit is under "more".
It sucks because i agree that having the picture change is a nice feature. Microsoft has decided to hold that nice feature hostage to ads.
Back when people customized screensavers, you would put the .scr file (a regular exe) in the Windows directory, and it would populate the list of screen savers? I'm guessing that's no longer a thing in the name of security theater.
Not so much security theater as a large number of exploits were disguised as .scr files as it was easy to trick a user into downloading one and then it would run with full system access
I just reinstalled Windows, so I've had the joy of a bunch of stupid MS stuff (why did you make my /~ homedir the first five letters of my email? WHY?) but I have to admit, this, I have not encountered.
Yeah, it's one of the reasons I use a Microsoft account to collect the PC entitlements and then create a local user account that has a sane profile name and never touch the online account again.
Slowest is unfortunately not even the worst problem of Win11.
I just want an OS that helps me control my computers and be productive, not one that "mines" me to sell me to be exploited.
While I have been using various Linux flavors for my servers, my desktop has been Windows for decades. Microsoft's charade with Win11 has me committed to moving to desktop Linux in 2026. There will be pain, but they crossed a line.
Regarding the video benchmark on the page: what would be fair is testing against the hardware that was available when the operating system was released. Windows 11 is absolutely not meant to run against hard drives, and current notebook and desktop offerings for home and enterprise users reflect that: you can get a 256gb SSD for a pretty decent price nowadays, to the point there's absolutely no reason to put in an HDD. When Windows Vista was released, your computer would absolutely have an HDD, so that would be a fair comparison.
That said, I was restoring a notebook owned by my aunt recently and I decided to run Ubuntu on it so I could mess with gparted a little bit. I'm already a full-time Linux user (have been for about five years now, I guess), but I was still surprised to see that one of the most bloated Linux distributions ran lightning fast on my aunt's Pentium Gold + 4gb RAM + HDD while Windows took over four minutes to boot.
It's absolutely time to abandon Windows if you're still dependent on it. There are alternatives. Heck, I'm not a fan of Apple either but at this point I'd recommend a MacBook for anyone wanting to get away from Windows and not comfortable with Linux or a Chromebook.
As a software engineer who has developed on Macs (and Linux) for most of my career and has recently started a job that requires me to use Windows again, I can tell you from experience that Office on the Mac is far, far more stable, easy to use, and considerably faster than on Win11. Microsoft’s macOS team are really good at their jobs.
But then I don’t find macOS to be slow or a buggy mess, so mileage may vary.
I totally agree with you, just yesterday I edited a document in Microsoft word and opened the second document for comparison. Suddenly, the first document froze and when I closed the program, I did not see the changes that I had made before. After complaining about my life, I started anew, and only the next time I downloaded Word offered me a recovery option.
> Office on the Mac is far, far more stable, easy to use, and considerably faster than on Win11
I haven't had stability issues with any Office program in years, but everything you mentioned is moot because there are Office features (especially Power___ features in Excel) that don't have parity on MacOS. If I get a workbook from a client, I need it to run exactly the same on my machine as it does on theirs.
One would think multi-monitor support is the hardest thing in the universe to solve. My Linux desktop has very bad multi-monitor support, but hey, it's Linux. My $2K Macbook Pro has, somehow, even worse multi-monitor support, so bad that sometimes the productivity of an external display feels not worth the hassle of plugging it in and wrestling with it.
Besides that no problems with MacOS, it feels snappy to me and Office apps work mostly fine (except for all the missing features Microsoft refuses to add to Outlook).
The first time I’ve had my multi-monitor setup(s) “just work” on Linux is recently installing Fedora 43 on my Ideapad. (After becoming exhausted trying to tweak Linux Mint to get tolerable sizing across all the screens).
Wayland per-monitor fractional scaling is delightful and after a couple gsettings tweaks restoring minimize/bottom dock I’ve been loving the polish and snappiness of Gnome. I also had to switch the WiFi backend from wpa_supplicant to iwn due to connection problems on one specific WiFi network but now it’s totally stable.
macOS multi-monitor support and scaling is a constant thorn in my side that was marginally improved by paying for Better Display. Windows 11 really is the most solid option for various monitor combinations not in Apple's happy path of resolutions/sizes.
But I don’t really like the ergonomics of using even clean de-bloated Windows as my main dev machine, so was very pleased to have such a great out-of-the-box experience trying Fedora for the first time.
May not have been a fair test. Windows is running the kernel in a kinda VM which older computers have not been optimized for -- newer generations of CPU can smooth out the overhead.
For a fair test against Windows 10 and below, you'll have at least to do this:
"Temporarily turn off your Memory Integrity and VMP" -- https://support.microsoft.com/en-US
Also, it's important to have all bits and pieces of Hyper-V/Windows Virtual Platform off (which the Menory Integrity relies on), thus cutting off WSL functionality.
We don't need flawed tests to tell us Windows 11 sucks -- yesterday my explorer bar didn't respond to clicks nor Windows key. In the past killing explorer.exe and restarting it, or logging off and back on, worked. Yesterday I had to reboot the machine to fix it.
Why is it, when ever someone points out that Microsoft shits the bed on something someone will come out with ludicrous ideas about changing the default environment.
The default environment is what you get, all this handwringing about whats potentially possible misses the point entirely; for decades we have, as a community, scoffed at linux for requiring you to understand deeply how your OS works in order for it to function. Now we’re in the situation where the out-of-the-box experience for gaming requires less esoteric knowledge on Linux than Windows, yet people defend Windows still.
Do you seriously think the exec running emails even knows what Hyper-V is? Do you think any IT department is going to disable memory integrity?
Would any Dev disable WSL? Do the vast majority of gamers want to do this? Should they have to?
You’re now arguing that overhead is ok because its mitigated by newer hardware, I don’t believe that to be true as I run W11 on A Threadripper 3970x and an i9-14900k and the fuckers feel leagues slower than my M1 Macbook, its a joke! Like 10x the power/thermal envelope- and sure, some of that is down to the M1 being great, but there’s no benchmark putting it above those CPUs.
Stop pretending that this is ok, and stop trying to spread uncertainty about a valid test.
I’d prefer newer hardware too, but this is the compromise if we want older OS’s to be included.
Valid point.
However also note the exec you mentioned wouldn't have Windows 11 on his laptop -- he would be stuck on the out of date, faster, Windows 10.
Windows 11 makes me hate everyday computing. From the adverts in the start menu, to the sluggish performance on a computer orders of magnitude more powerful than any XP machine I used. It's just not fun anymore.
Been using KDE on a secondary machine for 15 years now. However they were always lacking in hardware compared to my main desktop.
I recently installed CachyOS on a USB NVMe drive, so I can dual boot without the dual boot pain. And wow, that thing flies.
I've been a Windows user since 3.0, but Windows 11 is probably getting replaced soon. I've stopped competitive gaming so anti-cheats ain't an issue, and Linux gaming is good enough.
There are some things I'll miss, but the bloat and lack of care from MS I'll be glad to leave behind.
Windows 11 is fast enough if you... disable a million things on it that >99% of users wouldn't know when/how to, or wouldn't want to. Definitely depressing.
Can you expand on this? For example details on any tools to do this. I've been trying to disable features I know use resources and aren't needed but the native UIs to do it are hella confusing and feel purposely useless.
Sure thing. Probably the highest-RoI changes performance-wise (there may be negative implications for security or functionality, obviously proceed at your own risk) are to disable the various services and drivers that belong to either Windows Defender or the various filesystem filter drivers on your system. You can't disable everything (expect a freeze/crash if you disable the wrong ones) but you can disable most.
That, and switch back to the classic GUIs (like with OpenShell) so you don't have to deal with the laggy new UIs.
But seriously though, learn to fish. The answers aren't hard to find if you look, know what to search for, and are at least somewhat discriminating in your investigation.
I say go one step further and learn to fish harder and don't use any of these scripts. I can't even imagine trying to debug an issue on my machine after running one of these "makes arbitrary changes" scripts.
Do it all manually if for no other reason than you know all the changes you made and know where all the different settings actually are.
Also friendlies for the record the person I was responding to mentioned millions of settings, which while hyperbolic, you and I know means just hard to find so please share all fishing tips and other notes.
For the record I am also with you that using WinDebloat is not the best way for the simplest reason that it all seems arbitrary.
I mean, the point is to make it usable. You can set up scheduled tasks where needed. I haven't had to re-disable stuff after that, but I've jumped through a lot more initial hoops than most people are willing to.
I tried this when Win 7 was new, and it worked great. Then I tried it when Win 10 was new, and it was a complete useless waste of time. In a week it was too slow to use again.
I still haven't used Windows since Win 10 support ended, and have no idea how bad Windows 11 is for people to declare Win 10 "super fast" all over the internet. But I don't have any hope it will accept any setup I want. Win 10 already didn't.
Win 10 IOT LTSC is supported for 6 more years, so support didn't really "end".
That being said, W10 (or W11 for that matter) will never be as fast a Win 7 was on an SSD in the 2010-2020 era, even with all the hacks and debloat scripts available in many places on the Internet.
Just an anecdote from yesterday. I got an old Pentium 4 1,5Ghz from a friend, put a Terratec EWX 24/96 soundcard in, installed WinXP, turned automatic updates off and installed a software synth, Native Instruments FM7, connected a midi keyboard via the gameport. Literally 2ms latency and no midi jitter! With an 25 years old setup! And it just works, without any distractions. Really, I almost cried as I saw that. I feel somehow violated by today's Windows11/10/8.
I had a similar experience when helping a friend's parent with an absolutely ancient laptop from like 2007, which which had a crappy Celeron, 256 MB of RAM, and Widnoes Vista.
The damn thing was shockingly performant. We have been played for absolute fools.
Apparently Vista introduced a new audio stack with higher processing overhead and thus latency.
I used to boot up XP in a VM occasionally. It‘s amazing how streamlined everything felt, inviting you to be productive. This was before the Electron apocalypse. Almost all UI looked the same, behaved the same and was easy on the eyes (remember when widgets had depth?).
From the article: "The benchmarks were run on a Lenovo ThinkPad X220 — a model not officially compatible with Windows 11 — which could have affected some results."
MacOS seems to be going the way of Windows, with unnecessary and distracting notifications for things users don't care about. Then on top of that, the whole liquid glass redesign that hurts usability and information density.
Definitely moving in the direction of "what is good for a particular PM" and not "what is good for the user." I would have switched to linux years ago if it were not for the great hardware and I like having access to iMessages from the desktop.
Yeah and I think Apple know from their telemetry that too many users (including me) are sticking with macOS 15 Sequoia, which they need to address with macOS 27 this year (but given how they are, it'll just be Apple Intelligence)
The thing that really offends me about Windows 11 is that new right click menu that takes like 500 ms to appear each time you use it and is less useful than the old one.
Recently I've been experimenting with Atlas, Revi and Ghost Spectre, which are custom stripped versions of Windows, and it's such a breath of fresh air. It really makes me feel like if only they'd just ruthlessly pull out all the new garbage without regard for "but we just made and shipped this", Windows would actually be pretty good.
Say what you want about Apple and their slow descent into a fully walled garden where independent software development is slowly eroded and sabotaged, but even their most reviled update in years (macOS 26) is still miles ahead of Windows 11 in terms of cohesion and polish.
I see no reason to migrate to Win11 when Win10 hits hard EOL. I'm lucky, of course: I only have one game-oriented machine with Windows, and Steam / Proton is going to suffice.
Those beholden to MSO and the One True Excel, which of course is not guaranteed to work well (or at all) under Wine / Proton, are less lucky.
Out of the loop: Why is Windows 11 discussion trending over the past few months? It was released 4 years ago, and the most notable changes from the previous edition are a tabbed file browser, and the taskbar icons are now in the middle.
As the other commenter said win10 went out of support and only recently ~2 months ago the company I work for migrated to win11, I think now all the people that do not want to use win11 are forced to use it and complain
You can still get security updated by enrolling in the Extended Support branch. Did it in a relative's computer and it seems it will get security updates for at least an extra year, with the advantage it won't get any feature updates too (a really nice bonus IMO).
By default the official unmodified Windows 11 ISO enforces CPU, RAM, and TPM/Secure Boot checks. You can bypass these by customizing the installer, configuring some things at install runtime, installing on one machine and moving it over, etc and it may work but the resulting install is not officially supported unless the machine meets the requirements described under https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-11-specifica.... Some ISO-to-USB tools like Rufus can make doing this as easy as a checkbox.
I've run many machines this way without issue yet, but it's not officially supported. I'm hoping Microsoft will really just make "Windows 12" or something if they ever decide to make these true hard requirements to load at all instead of just be supported.
Taskbar icons in the middle are a symbol of general direction Windows is going towards. It's the tipping point where we say enough is enough. We're tired of anti-consumer changes. It's different from Vista or 8 which failed despite MS believing in it. This time MS gives us shit and they know it and they don't care. Microsoft doesn't hold the entire PC OS market hostage like it was the case only ten years ago, and if your use case is development + video games + porn, then Linux is a viable option, which definitely wasn't the case ten years ago.
Not surprising given the amount of Webview2 and WinUI/WinRT that Windows 11 happens to contain.
Note that even though WinRT is largely written in C++, and the team brags about performance, due to the amount of COM/WinRT reference counting and the sandboxing model of application identity, it actually runs slower than .NET applications.
Quite ironic, given the Windows team sabotaged on Longhorn.
I recently had to pay the "Microsoft tax" to Lenovo. Which felt more like an unfair punishment rather than a tax since your taxes are meant to fund public services. I kept on thinking that this feels like it should be illegal. I don't use Windows for my work. My servers all run Linux, my clients servers all run Linux and I have no need for it so why am I being forced to pay?
I keep a Windows virtual machine for software that doesn't run on Linux but my use of that over the years has declined dramatically.
To me, the earlier versions of Windows 10 were somewhat OK when they're stripped down. But Windows 11 is bloated beyond belief. And shoving AI functionality in it is going to make things worse.
The computers they give us at work are pretty powerful. Mine has 64 gigs of ram. When I power it on the fans instantly go into full blast mode because the computer is heating up. why? I have no idea I just run Edge and Teams, if I try to use VS my computer will crash. At home I use Mac and Linux (kububtu) and will never have windows on my devices again
I was surprised the other day when I used a W11 machine that the new context menu took a perceptible second to appear and it still didn't have everything the old had so you still have to call the old one, very dismaying.
Maybe some Microsoft Devs can publish a book about all the secret regedit hacks they use to make it function for themselves. I think Dave Plummer or another Msft vet mentioned you can remove hibernate & get 25GB back on your hard drive.
I'm pretty sure hibernate has defaulted to off for quite a while and has to be turned on if desired (at least, the last several machines I've bought new that was the case.)
The UI switch is not particularly obvious, at Control Panel → Hardware and Sound → Power Options → System Settings
Well yeah it's basically Windows' version of a swap partition where they can dump the OS state when hibernating.
You can get even more of your hard drive back by limiting the size of Windows' page file.
I'm actually a big fan of hibernation on laptops and have mine set to suspend for 5 minutes then hibernate. My real life usage battery life has been noticeably longer with this setup.
JavaScript has taken over UI. Why operating systems do not embrace it and make it a first class citizen? Aka explicitly design the os to run and render fast and efficiently js code
With so many good OSes nowadays, why is anyone still on Windows? Seriously. Unless you need custom hardware or software worth thousands of dollars, I bet it's easier to switch to one of the 4+ other major platforms.
While not being a fan of Windows 11, I had the opposite experience for application launch times. They became shorter after the upgrade for some reason.
to be fair windows 11 is the most secure windows ever created, the amount of random checks it has is astonishing. Unfortunately it gets undermined by poor driver code from third-parties, much less of a problem with hyper-v based security, but still a huge problem.
Obviously all these security features cost performance and something that linux and macos can live without since they generally do not have closed source drivers that can't be fixed (except nvidia, but it seems to be changing as nvidia is giving up and starting to open up due to AI). Windows has to be proactive and that is one of the biggest performance hurdles it faces. It's actually incredible how comparatively safe windows is if you have all the security features enabled, there are obviously still one-offs due to having to maintain compatibility and what was effectively usermode code ported to kernelmode ruining it, thankfully that also seems to be changing since they're slowly rewriting it to be secure by design with Unstrusted<> guards making these issues significantly less common.
as for apple doesn't have third party code in the kernel at all so they can also fix it themselves.
side note, the restrictive linux license might seem like it is preventing adoption since for example the whole HDMI 2.1 spec is centered around proprietary code, but in reality they have this illusion that their 'proprietary' code can be protected and somehow linux undermines it when in reality people can reverse everything to sourcecode if they spend enough time on it - if anyone is curious you can just take one of the firmware dumps from any hdmi 2.1 capable TV dongle, extract the kernel module responsible handling the authentication for hdmi 2.1, extract the code, put it in your amdgpu opensource driver, now you have hdmi 2.1 on linux.
Windows is slower objectively if you use the same hardware.
Now you might say modern software needs modern hardware, but Windows as it is is stagnant in terms of functionality and features, so what justifies the requirement of newer hardware?
I call bullshit on these tests. The baseline doesn't make sense. Software defaults are never minimal (aka bloating) and are designed to scale with hardware. So as faster hardware reaches systems, the core OS still becomes faster but you will never see it when choosing defaults. You still receive baseline OS functioning in faster increments over time. If you tuned these OS installs for performance (no bloating, only core GUI and speed enhancing services) you would reach the opposite conclusion.
Don't software products tend to get slower, not faster, with each release? I think Windows 7 vs Vista was the only time I remember things getting better.
IOS 26 is also terrible (on battery especially). New OS releases always have a ton of new services in them that bog them down.
They do, but that's really not necessary. In the linked video you can see Windows 8.1 is pretty well optimized compared to the other Windows versions.
A lot of this slowdown is just developers getting complacent and getting used to the new hardware capabilities. Windows has a lot of low hanging optimization fruit laying around. It's just Microsoft doesn't really care about that: it doesn't fit the business model at all.
Ah, an opportunity to call upon Hacker News, tech support of last resort…
Someone please tell me if there’s a trick to making the Windows snipping tool faster. I press Win+Shift+S to activate the tool for capturing a region. It takes about 2 seconds to load. I draw the rectangle. Then it takes about 2 seconds to finish capturing.
That is 4 infuriating seconds for something that should be (and I’m sure used to be!) virtually instant.
Now that text is easily recognized in images, screenshots are an important interoperability tool for garbage apps like Teams.
I am not associated with this software, just a very happy user. You get a lifetime license for $20, it's constantly updated with new features, and is a joy to use.
Vista was not bad, it's just that you tried running it on a 128MB computer from 2002. Vista was fantastic on so many levels but people were just not ready for it. People mocked Vista's permission prompts, something that every OS has now. That alone should tell you how misplaced your hate is.
Incredible you could run it in 2005 since it was released in late 2006. I ran windows vista beta that summer on my new 2GB computer, it was a great OS in my view.
Vista changed the Windows security upside down. It brought all the modern kernel features Windows embraced upon. But they went overboard with graphics that average consumer hardware was not ready for. Despite that I don't remember it came with any bloatware like Windows 10 and 11.
c'mon folks, stop being naive - this is bullshit test :D
"Windows 11 is running on unsupported hardware"
I've been using W10 and W11 Pro versions daily and I don't feel any difference except task bar search menu performance (especially this on corpo laptop, on PC this is fine)
Everyone has forgotten how unstable and insecure Windows was back then when it was “fast”. It was also fast to blue screen, freeze, and spread malware. IMO it’s much better now. If you don’t like it, then there are good viable alternatives today especially since everything is web based.
The other day I got tired of using mRemoteNG for RDP it takes ages to start up.
So I went back to Microsoft's own RDP client - they deprecated it and now only support the new Windows App but you need to login with your corporate email and it does not even support RDP but Azure !!!!.
You need to go to the stone age and use the RDP client they shipped with Windows NT 4.0.
Say what you want about Balmer but Satya is now worse - he needs to go.
I liked the path windows was going in late 2010s. WSL, power toys, many great utils, great performance.
But it has since then stalled and got increasingly worse. Especially with this AI shoving everywhere, not even mentioning getting ads at some point in notifications and start menu.
I'm not particularly in love with MacOS either (but have no realistic alternative on my MacBooks).
I'm more and more inclined of switching my desktop (my main working machine) to Omarchy, two coworkers in my team use it and love it and seems the sweet spot for what I need as a dev without the annoyance of Windows or the god awful macos.
If you want an OS to simply do stuff Linux is now clearly superior.
However, I found Omarchy to be whatever the opposite of a sweet spot is. It brings all the complications of a tiling WM, so you still have to learn a complicated new way of using your system, but at the same time it is extremely opinionated so instead of ending with a tailored custom tiling WM that suits your needs at the end of the learning curve, you end up with a tiling WM that is suited for someone else’s needs.
On the flip side, the simplifications it does add, such as a supposedly easier way to add packages, does no such thing. It doesn’t simplify the process at all and in fact makes it harder to understand how to actually remove stuff.
I love Linux. I've been using it for about 25 years now. I try to be a realist, and historically, it has always been my opinion that it is a less polished experience, suitable mainly for power users. But my opinion now is that many flavors actually do offer a superior desktop user experience for most use cases.
This might not be a popular opinion, but in my experience stock GNOME is quite the polished experience.
In the grand pantheon of my experience using operating systems, Snow Leopard-era macOS is probably my favorite, mostly due to how smoothly everything worked and the degree to which it got out of my way once I learned the ropes, but GNOME circa Fedora 30 was a close second.
I say stock because I also remember trying out Ubuntu-flavored GNOME at around the same time and the comparison was stark. It felt like Cannonical went out of their way to tweak the environment in ways that sound good on paper, but just added papercuts and made the overall experience less stable.
I also remember trying Manjaro at around the same time. On first boot, the welcome popup that was designed to come out of the taskbar instead popped out of the top left corner of the screen.
Same here, we’ve hit parity with Windows
To each their own.
I find Omarchy to simply "make sense" out of the box for me. And, I've never used a tiling WM before it (and feel crazy for not having done so)
I guess that’s the difference.
I have used a tiling WM before.
So I wonder whether the benefits you’re seeing in Omarchy are simply the result of using a tiling WM for the first time, which overrode what I believe Omarchy detracted from a general tiling WM.
Or whether my poorer experience was a result of the fact that having used a tiling WM I was more comfortable customizing and so found the Omarchy opinionated behavior restrictive or if the benefits Omarchy brings to someone who’s new to a tiling WM are lost on me.
Even without the AI, it's replacing native apps with web based ones. Case in point: Notepad. It's slower than WordPad on Win 10... and crashes!
And Calc! It takes about 5 seconds to load. And search is so unreliable mixing web and local results.
I've been pretty much exclusively Linux-based for over a decade now, but I used every version of Windows from 3.11 to Windows 7, so I still have some muscle memory from the good ol' days.
Recently I was helping a relative do something on their Windows 11 machine and I asked them to press Windows key + R, type calc, press Enter. And I was astonished at the result. Literally: Mouth agape, frozen in astonishment for about 10 seconds.
I knew about the ads and tracking and the local account bullshit, but I didn't realize just how bad the Windows experience has become.
What does happen? I'm using Windows 10 Enterprise (is that GitHub repo to activate any license still around?) , with policy to disable Internet search from the start menu... so your story makes me wonder what the astonishment is.
I had a similar experience to the OP. After a new version of Windows I tried to run something, or maybe it was just pressing the Start button, and I waited, mouth open, wondering what in $DIETY's name was happening before it responded. The pause was completely alien to a Linux user, who is used to the Window manager unconditionally responding instantly. It would be alien to users of older versions of Windows too.
I decided in the end it was pulling down stuff from the web - in tiles it displayed beside the start menu. If you were on a fast network and had a good internet connection the problem mostly went away. The feature was inherited from WinPhone, I think. So it wasn't that the underling OS or video had got slower, it was them bolting on irrelevant crap to the menu. I later got smarter and deleted all the tiles, so only the menu was displayed. That improved things considerably. I remain gob smacked at them crippling their product like that.
I'm try to avoid Windows now, and am mostly successful. But I read these stories about them adding AI and ads into the mix. If they bolted them into basic window functions like the start menu in the same idiotic way, I could well believe Microsoft has release the slowest Windows ever despite it running on the fastest hardware the planet has seen.
I'm betting a very large loading time.
Bit of a clickbaity way of phrasing it, but I'm also curious what the result was? From googling it I don't see any stories about recent changes to the calculator app, other than a few features like graphing.
I'm sorry, I wasn't intentionally trying to write clickbait, I was just agreeing with the parent and did not consider how it would come off to other parties.
What happens is the calculator window pops up ~immediately, but the entire contents of the window are a stupid logo--for at least 5 full seconds--until the UI elements actually load and you can actually use the calculator to calculate things.
The most basic thing our PCs do is they calculate. The Intel 4004 was designed... for a calculator. calc.exe, that erstwhile snappy, lightweight native Win32 application is now apparently some Electron abomination with a footprint the size of Windows 98 and a launch time to match.
No worries! Sorry, I phrased that rudely / like an accusation.
That makes sense though. Yeah, it is really depressing. I guess they just don't prioritize start time at all. The hilarious part is, like... Blender on my computer starts up almost instantly! Versus a calculator...
I just tried it on regular Windows 11 Pro and it just opened the calculator.
I bet the friend just pressed the Windows key, and typing "Calc" and quickly pressing enter caused Bing to search for calc instead. Common failure because window's start-menu search/load/discovery is a total mess.
Even in this case it opens the calculator. Web search results are further down.
if you are searching for something for the first time (or after caching invalidates), it seems like it prioritizes search sources that have already completed.
on my computer, that means web-search almost always completes first. So most of the time if I type in something "new" and don't wait, it'll bring up Bing.
Sometimes it looks like "downloads folder" file search completes before Installed app search completes, because on one occasion I typed in an app's name and it launched the INSTALLER for the app.
once all the searchs resolve it behaves "as expected". I am very surprised if you don't have the same symptoms I'm describing. Why is your computer behaving different from every Win11 install I ever interact with?
I just tried a search for "downloads" and the first result was "Downloads folder privacy settings". I never search for that so it wasn't cached. I even pasted in the query to give it less time to search before pressing enter.
I don't think I've changed any settings for search. Everything is still enabled. There's over 250,000 items in the search index so I haven't removed indexed locations. My computer is pretty much a high-end gaming PC using last generation CPU and GPU. But really I've never seen this behavior anywhere - including my very basic laptop. Maybe I could see this happening on computers that are still using a HDD but I haven't tested that.
If it loads at all. The last two days, the start menu refuses to launch it when you click on it.
The lack of quality in Windows is simply astonishing. And the new start menu and taskbar are terrible. Quite how a company can transform a product into such a mess in just a few years is incredible.
I love when it takes 3 minutes to open "Add or Remove Programs" because the Start menu search decides that typing a, ad, add, r, re, remove, unin, install, etc. definitely means "let me Bing that for you" instead of opening the one thing I clearly want.
It obviously knows what I'm trying to do (Bing search recommendation is for "Add or Remove Programs"), yet refuses to surface the actual shortcut to that settings page (or "app", or whatever Microsoft calls it this week). Even better: some days it pops up immediately after typing "Add" and other days I'm wrestling with it like I'm training a stubborn animal, clicking the result in the hope that the OS will "learn" that yes, this is what I want when I type "Add".
Most of the time I just give up and dig through the Settings menu like it's 1999.
I still use a copy of Calc.EXE from Windows 2000 that I just move from machine to machine. It stopped being useful after that. That old one is nice. Hex mode. Starts quickly.
If I could get regular security updates for Windows 2000 I might still be using it- peak Windows
I wonder if it's ancient enough that the exploits floating online are too modern for it...
Hah, I guess the Internet really is like a sewer, you have to have good protective equipment to wade in it...
This reasoning is actually why I ran Windows XP 64 bit edition for very very long. Most exploits found that it was XP and tried to do stuff and failed on the 64 bit kernel they did not expect.
I'm not going to say that's a good idea, but I've long had an idea along similar lines that a source-only distribution that generates a bespoke calling convention, stack frame layout, syscall number mapping, etc. for each individual machine at install time would do a lot to mitigate RCE threats.
Gentoo-by-obscurity?
That's exactly how I think of it. Gentoo plus ABI obfuscation.
I'm sure there are issues (particularly around binary blob drivers) but they seem surmountable given enough effort...
I have a derive.exe from 1996 that I still use. TI's calculator, as an incredibly fast windows app that's like 20% of wolframalpha.
And to think on all "modern" OSes you can't even do that. Neither Android nor IOS let you do this in any way shape or form. Even with portable webapps it doesn't work, as webapps go offline. And microsoft clearly wants to create this situation too (last brute force attempt was windows home)
https://dmitry.gr/89
you can also "add to homescreen" on iOS/android and it acts like a native app & works offline. symbolic math - computer algebra system, integration/differentiation, finance app in rom, 3d graphs.
(emu is not my work, i only packaged it for PWA and host it for myself to use, but you are welcome to as well)
Derive is more sophisticated. TI-89/92/Nspire is close though.
Derive doesn’t run on my iPhone sadly
Sure (and thanks for the link, do you have a TI-82 as well?) but it won't "last". You'll take the site offline, sooner or later and I can't just store an exe locally and use it in 20 years. I'll lose the ability to install it on phones.
That is my personal site, I do not expect to take it down, since that is where I post my projects. But also, you can just save it from there entirely, and serve from your own site -- there is no server-side part to it.
no 82. I only liked the ti-89
Best part is that on a fresh install without internet you are not able to use it...well all of the modern replacement apps.
Yeah first time Windows Clock wouldn’t restore because the net wasn’t ready I was shocked
It was rewritten into WinUI, hence why.
I do not know anything about this team, but I worked with a team before that migrated from a native app to an Electron-based version. It was worse in literally every way except one: the developers on that team preferred developing that way. Nothing else mattered.
The kind of developers who are willing to work with native GUI APIs (even though a framework) simply don't exist in enough quantity anymore.
I remember reading that even the Start menu is now a React app.
Apparently this is not entirely true. It’s just a section of the start menu that’s based on React/React Native.
Regardless, at least a few of my colleagues using Windows have reported issues with the new start menu. It seems very slow, and sometimes you have to close & reopen it for content to appear.
Searching for things via the Start menu is also totally hit or miss, on 5 different PCs that I regularly use, especially trying to open "Add or Remove Programs" (as described in an earlier comment).
Oh completely agreed on the start menu being slower.
I don’t use it anymore. Fortunately since my windows usage is restricted only to work and I have an ultra wide monitor, I’m able to pin all the apps I need on the taskbar. With the Win + # shortcuts I can avoid the start menu completely.
In the past I didn’t use the taskbar at all and depended on Win + search entirely.
React Native*
What does notepad have to do with web based apps? case in what point?
New Notepad in 11, with tabs and autosave (and dark mode), is so much better and more practical to use over old one, it just stays open all the time and become my main notetaking pick. It may take a beat to open a big file (1+ mb) with line wrapping, but it's pretty much just as fast as anything (and may be even faster than some other editors). It's just very easy to reach for and quite snappy.
There are some apps on Windows with actual gripes, but Notepad, Paint, Snipping tool, they're quite solid and have become everyday tools that eliminated the need to reach for some other third party apps.
I see you were fortunate enough to not use notepad aprox 5 months ago, when they were running the rich formatting preview. It was on by default, and would drop around 5% of the characters you type. Literally failing at the only thing it's supposed to do. I repro'd this on 2 out of 2 machines.
Maybe they fixed it, maybe they haven't. I both turned off formatting and am using vscode for notes now.
I think I had to disable spellcheck to fix the ignored keystrokes, it happened even after disabling formatting
ahh, it might have been spellcheck then. I turned off all that stuff. In the heat of the moment, maybe I was a bit too angry to do proper root cause analysis :P
I've been a Notepad++ user for about 20 years. It's a pain to use it in Win11 as they force their crappy notepad on context menus and such. It's still usable (with some registry changes) but annoying that they're doogfooding their own an keep on changing settings on updates. I'm only using Win11 at work, I'm done with Windows and MS otherwise.
Yes, some nice to have features were added, but it’s a text editing app, and not a good one at that, so it shouldn’t be crashing like that.
The reason for this is that it's hard to hire native UI developers, but easy to hire web devs.
Something like 90% of all new devs today learn only cloud-native backend dev or web frontend dev. The only exceptions tends to be mobile and game developers. Collectively cloud+web, mobile, and games account for like 98% of all new devs it seems. Nobody learns anything else.
The web is going to become the desktop UI in the future for this reason alone. It's going to be slower and much more bloated than almost any other alternative, but it's got the critical mass of adoption behind it and that's what determines core technologies in the industry. Technical merit is a distant second or third.
This is frustrating but it's not surprising to one who has studied biology and evolution. In evolution this is called "path dependence," and it's why we have weird things like a man's testicles hanging in a bag below his body. A previous evolutionary path optimized the sperm production process to run at a lower temperature than the rest of the body, so then evolution's hack for this is to put them in a bag outside the body. Ticket closed with "resolved." The pathways taken through a complex solution space determine the outcome and the outcome is often bizarre and "hacky" for this reason. The key is that it's very hard to back-track. Once a path has been taken, it's very hard to un-take it.
Large industries and markets are essentially "biological," not rationally designed, so you get the same kinds of phenomena.
It could be much worse. If Linux+HTML+JS had not taken over, we might have the Microsoft Enterprise Web(tm) where Visual Basic (not VB.NET, OG Visual Basic) is the main language and each service or site would require an NT license for every node and an IIS license for every web hostname. UIs might be written in ActiveX or desktop ones in Microsoft C/C++ with OLE and similar horrors. It might be just as slow and infinitely uglier and more expensive and less open. Apple would be dead and open source would much more marginalized than it is today. The net would basically be a total MS monopoly. If you didn't live through the 90s: this nearly happened.
In my opinion this is mostly self-inflicted by Microsoft.
Sure some push for web-based solution has moved a lot of people away from desktop applications, but even before that Microsoft muddied the waters of native UI development.
Moving from User32.dll and GDI to GPU based rendering with WPF, might not have been the worst idea - and WPF is still going strong - but it's a clear cut, leaving old apps un-upgradable. So if companies need to eventually rewrite it, will they stick with desktop apps or move to "web apps"?
Unfortunately, Microsoft didn't stop there, but we've since seen a bunch of different attempts at new Windows UI libs to the point, where nobody trusts Microsoft anymore (remember Silverlight?) and everyone else is left confused by the chaos of an ecosystem.
Why can’t Microsoft employees learn on the job? When I joined a (non-Microsoft) BigTech company, I was expected to learn C++ and internal libraries and tools within a couple months while working on newbie projects. The company recouped that investment many times over.
There is a lot of idiocy/stubbornness among middle managers. I worked for a large consulting firm for a few years and would see hiring managers pass by candidates with good aptitude whom they could’ve trained in 4-6 weeks. Instead, they had the position open for several months waiting for someone who knew the exact technologies they were using and still didn’t find anyone in some cases. Seemed to me that the middle managers need more tolerance for non-billable time. But when everyone is incentivized to meet quarterly goals, this is what you get.
My thoughts as well. And it's not like we're talking about taking random people off the street and teaching them to program, it's just a UI framework. And the stuff people are talking about in here isn't IDEs or CAD suites, it's like... the calculator app and the start menu. What kind of devs is MSFT hiring and paying $200k a year that can't learn a UI framework?
That can work if you're not expecting to be fired on a whim in one of those 20k+ layoffs when suddenly you have a skill no one seeks while you have not grown in the other area the market wants.
There are still plenty of C++ jobs available.
> The reason for this is that it's hard to hire native UI developers, but easy to hire web devs
Funny. Back in the 90s Microsoft just hired kind of random kids from college to write their OS in C.
This is directionally not totally off-base, but:
> it's hard to hire native UI developers
This is the pool of mobile devs. If Microsoft is unwilling to eat the lead time (measured in weeks) for an existing native mobile dev to become productive on their stack, that's a sign of much bigger organizational problems.
Yup, coming from iOS and Android, I learned most of WinUI in two weeks, even before LLMs. GUI frameworks are largely similar, so there’s no real justification for reimplementing single-platform applications with HTML.
>The reason for this is that it's hard to hire native UI developers, but easy to hire web devs.
This ... has been very opposite of my experience:
1) I've seen websites turn into poor imitations of mobile apps that lose all the features of web UIs that I want: ability to open links in tabs, use of affordances to scroll up and down, dense packing of information, ability to edit the size, etc. (Edit: almost forgot how they run the back button too!)
2) Generally, I see that the more UI specialists they have, the worse the UI gets. There's the saying, "developers are responsible for mediocre UIs, designers are responsible for horrible UIs".
The reason is that the web empire is just better at operating systems than Microsoft. If they just had less bad development tools for native UI this would not be a problem. Look at what Google does with Android, or Apple.
WinUI 3 was pretty decent even back in 2021, and much easier to learn than the clusterfuck of Android SDK.
The analogy with evolution breaks down because currently the fitness function is broken. It would work in a world where anti trust would be still enforced, where customers could vote with their money instead of having to deal with enshitiffied monopolies. In a world where tech CEOs can buy a dinner to stay above the law, where tech is used as a weapon of influence so that other countries like in the EU are not allowed under penalty of sanctions to not use US platforms even when it breaks their law, it is reassuring for engineer minds but ultimately pointless to explain the state of the industry from market dynamics alone.
Excuses, a $4 trillion valued company can surely afford some training on the technology it owns.
That makes little sense, notepad.exe already exists. The only development required on it would be to add AI shit to it. They could just leave it alone.
That means you have to work on the original code, and modern entry-mid level devs can't do that. It's probably in C++. Your expensive senior and staff level devs are on more important projects.
Make it a web app and your cheap entry level grads can do it.
Notepad was basically the "Hello world" of win32 apps. A kid in highschool could have "maintained" it.
My first entry-level job just freshly coming out of the University was writing C++ with Qt for a computer vision app. And that was my actual first contact with C++ (had seen C and Java in Uni).
It was no biggie, just joining the low level of C with the class notions from Java. Pair that with the C++FAQ website, and it was easy.
Are entry-level devs generally not able to do that nowadays? I do not believe people are generally more stupid or less capable, so, is education so much worse or what's going on?
Shouldn’t the AI technology that Microsoft is spending billions on make this trivial?
Microsoft has the resources to train people.
But does any junior want to learn C++ Win32? You want to learn something that leads to a long-term career development path, not a sunsetting technology.
> But does any junior want to learn C++ Win32?
I'm pretty sure Microsoft can pay them enough to be happy to learn it.
> You want to learn something that leads to a long-term career development path, not a sunsetting technology.
This seems like such an odd take when web frameworks seem to be obsolete almost as soon as you start using them. C++ has and will continue to be around for a very long time.
This is just the result of bad leadership at Microsoft.
They would want to learn Winforms/WPF/WinUI/whatever if microsoft could settle on one and use it. I suppose part of the react native stuff is that Microsoft hasn’t done a good job of making people, even in Microsoft, bet the farm on any of their “native” toolkits.
For money, anything is possible. That’s the employment contract, trade money for time doing things you would rather not.
Indeed but if the pay needs to be high, you may as well pay someone experienced.
The delulu who think C/C++ is "sunsetting". Hilarious.
> But does any junior want to learn C++ Win32?
That's why they got the job, didn't they ? /s
But there's no need to change it, that's the point. It's a finished product pretty much. Just ship it as is.
If a PM needs NotepadAI for their career progression then start it from scratch.
> That means you have to work on the original code, and modern entry-mid level devs can't do that. It's probably in C++.
As far as I remember, Notepad was the reference implementation for a Microsoft widget. Nothing more. If "modern entry-mid level devs can't do that" you really have a much bigger problem.
I don’t think you understand. Notepad was literally one of the examples that comes with the SDK. It doesn’t need any maintenance. As long as windows has a native SDK, notepad exists because it is basically the simplest GUI application, provided as a sample.
web is, frighteningly, much faster and more responsive than local desktop apps are now (e.g., gmail is infinitely more responsive than desktop modern outlook generally speaking - even web spreadsheets are superior to modern Excel (though not, say, Excel 2003...))
Linux? You mean the C nest? KDE and QT (the default serious framework) with C++?
You pushed ActiveX on the web, and viceversa with IE4 and Windows98. Now, the web turd came back with Electron. If any, thanks Microsoft for that.
> The reason for this is that it's hard to hire native UI developers
Yeah, it's a wonder they were able to do it so many years (ftom win 1.0 to Win 8).
I for one like the comparison of web apps with scrotums
But Notepad is not web based? It's still a native app but now uses UWP instead.
Which is exactly the problem, and isn't UWP, rather WinUI/WinAppSDK, the WinRT version on top of Win32, instead of UWP.
UWP is actually faster, yes that is that bad.
UWP, one of the 10+ frameworks used to run Windows 11's system components. Wonderful! Exemplary!
https://old.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/o2a0kp/there_are...
Those are design languages/styles, not frameworks. There is a fewer number of frameworks but it's still a handful. Win32, WPF, UWP, MAUI, etc... but at least they're fairly consistent at using UWP for system UI, with older bits using Win32 still.
This. It was infuriating to find Notepad got updated to a bloated app with rich text and Copilot. It's so different, it just should have been another program. The whole reason I use Notepad is because it's a simple, dumb, fast, predictable program. If I wanted the rich text, I would use any of the numerous other options!
And for the kicker, the update made it forget my font settings.
Wasn't Wordpad the rich text editor on Windows?
Re "just another program" - the old Notepad was deliberately designed with minimal dependencies so that even if everything else in the system went to hell you'd still have a working editor to try and fix things.
So, you're just screwed if you need a working editor in safe mode now?
This makes me want to suggest to Microsoft to have AI-enhanced safe mode. "Computer can't boot? Reboot to the Recovery Copilot and have this advanced spell-checker try to troubleshoot it!"
I recommend https://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html - it's even snappier than Notepad++
Use MetaPad - like Notepad.
https://liquidninja.com/metapad/
> I'm more and more inclined of switching my desktop (my main working machine) to Omarchy
Never heard of it and the website and GitHub repo sure aren't doing a great job of describing it's benefits.
"Beautiful, Modern & Opinionated" are vague and really aren't adjectives I'd be looking for in an OS.
When anything is described as "opinionated" I just read it as "wilfully inflexible".
It’s opinionated coming from Arch Linux. Compared to MacOS or Windows it’s a big giant push over. Opinionated in this context just means it comes with defaults rather than asking you to research your own display compositor.
Although there are some places you want that! WireGuard is often described as cryptographically opinionated because it doesn't even bother trying to negotiate crypto primitives which makes it immune to downgrade attacks. Though, to be fair, that also means that if its primitives ever do get broken you need to roll out an entirely new release.
opinionated versus unopinionated is a tradeoff. Things that boast about how unopinionated they are often require a lot of hand holding or manual config. I think there's a big audience of people that have non-Appleware that want an OS that is not Windows, but don't actually care to customize it.
It’s by David Heinemeier Hansson. Based on his writings, he’s very inflexible. He’s even unwilling to accept that a person of color who was born and raised in Britain can be British.
I would instead recommend going for Fedora KDE Edition which will give you state of the art Linux desktop experience.
I've been daily driving it for months now and really like it. It's a nice introduction to tiling window managers, has a well thought out key mapping and generally looks reasonably nice while getting out of my way as an embedded dev.
There's always been Arch linux based distros that come with more things set up and better (or just more specific) defaults. To my understanding Omarchy is just one of those, like Manjaro or etc in the past?
Yeah, it's just one of those, but worse. It's basically run by a bunch of badly written bash scripts:
https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/a-word-on-omarchy/
It sounds weird to say, but Steve Ballmer was probably the best CEO of Microsoft.
Or: Steve Ballmer oversaw the decline of Mircosoft's flagship product, but left before he could be blamed for it.
A lot of Windows' current problems can be traced back to the Ballmer era, including the framework schizophrenia, as Microsoft shifted between Win32, UWP, WPF, and god knows what else. This has lead to the current chaotic and disjointed UI experience, and served to confuse and drive away developers. Repeatedly sacrificing reliable and consistent UX while chasing shiny and new technologies is no way to run an OS.
I think MS's biggest mistake was to not properly maintain and develop the Foundation Classes, basically a thin C++ wrapper library on top of the C API that retained most of the benefits of the Win32 API while eliminating a lot of the boilerplate code. Instead they went after Java with the .NET managed stuff, bloated and slow compared to the native API.
Qt is now the best "old school" UI framework by far.
Experimentation is a cost center?
>including the framework schizophrenia, as Microsoft shifted between Win32, UWP, WPF
Ah yes, and the solution being presented is Linux, with Xlib, Motif, Qt, GTK, and your choice of 167 different desktop environments. Don't forget the whole Wayland schism.
Mac is no better, shifting SDKs every few years, except Apple goes one step further by breaking all legacy applications so you are forced to upgrade. Can't be schizo when you salt the earth and light a match to everything that came before the Current Thing.
macOS has Cocoa since 2000, which is still useable, and SwiftUI since a few years. No comparison to the mess of UI toolkits on Windows.
And what about Carbon?
Gone.
32-bit apps?
Gone.
PowerPC stuff? Anything more than a few years old?
Forget it.
You can't even run versions of iPhoto or iTunes after they deliberately broke them and replaced them with objectively shittier equivalents. Their own apps!
Windows can still run programs from the 90s unmodified. There are VB6 apps from 1998 talking to Access databases still running small businesses today.
Can't say the same for either Mac or Linux.
It's not really a problem for Apple because their userbase is content to re-buy all their software every 5 years.
Well, that's true. It's an interesting point actually. Windows certainly wins in terms of binary compatibility.
I was thinking more about the developer perspective, i.e. churn in terms of frameworks. Yes, PowerPC is gone. Intel will be gone soon.
But both the transitions from PowerPC to Intel as well as from Intel to ARM were pretty straightforward for developers if you were using Cocoa and not doing any assembly stuff.
Carbon only every was a bandaid to give devs some time for the transition to Cocoa.
Maybe I am a bit jaded, but with Apple's yearly OS release cycle — and breaking things nearly every time — I grew sick and tired of software I spent good money or relied on suddenly not working anymore.
Imagine taking your car in for an oil change annually and the radio stopped working when you got it back. It's incompatible with the new oil, they say. You'd be furious.
With the Windows of yore this wasn't so much of an issue — with 5-10 years between upgrade cycles — and service packs in between — you could space it out.
When you work in the computer industry, there tends to be a disconnect with how they are used in the real world by real people — as tools. People grow accustomed to their tools and expect them to be reliable as opposed to some ephemeral service.
Is that a good or bad thing? Yes, Mac chops off legacy after a decade or so, but I don’t see not being able to run apps from the 90s as a problem (or if I did, I’d probably be running windows or Linux instead of Mac OS).
> Can't say the same for either Mac or Linux.
From my own experience things tend to keep working on Linux if you package your own userland libraries instead of depending on the ever changing system libraries. More or less how you would do it on Windows.
Except Windows isn't perfect either, I had to deal with countless programs that required an ancient version of the c runtime, some weird database libraries that weren't installed by default and countless other Microsoft dependencies that somehow weren't part of the ever growing bloat.
> 32-bit apps?
The Core 2 Duo, used in the last 32 bit Mac, was released in 2006.
> PowerPC stuff?
The last G5 PowerPCs were, similarly, discontinued in 2006.
> every 5 years.
20?
Your stance is all software should die as soon as the generation of chip it was developed on stops being sold?
Sorry, I see how my post might have been somewhat unclear. No, my stance is that 2006 is closer to 20 years ago than 5 years ago.
Even WinAmp 2.0 from 1998 still runs on Windows 11.
> Windows can still run programs from the 90s unmodified.
Did _you_ tried ? Because i hear this mantra a lot on HN, but my experience is different. MDK ( the game) cannot _run_ on a current Windows.
Although it's rare for me, I have used some old software that was built for Windows 9X or old versions of NT. So far, the track record is perfect - native programs have worked just fine, though I obviously can't vouch for all of them.
Old, complex games are the worst-case scenario, and are the exception, not the rule. Since they were only beginning to figure out hardware-accelerated 3D gaming in the 90s, it meant that we were left with lots of janky implementations and outdated graphics APIs that were quickly forgotten about. Though, MDK doesn't seem to suffer from this - it should be capable of running on newer systems directly [1]. One big issue it does have is that it uses a 16-bit installer, which is one thing that was explicitly retired during the transition to 64-bit due to it being so archaic at that moment, only being relevant to Windows 1-3. But you can still install the game using the method described in the article, and it should hopefully run fine from there on. Since it has options to use a software renderer and old DirectX, at least one of these should work.
[1] https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/MDK
I use WinAmp 2.0 sometimes which was released in 1996. I prefer to use v5 but I like to show friends that such old software still works fine (even Shoutcast streaming works fine).
Try running windows 11 on old CPUs, or machines without secure boot / TPM 2.0.
> Try running windows 11 on old CPUs, or machines without secure boot / TPM 2.0.
The more relevant test is the reverse: running Windows XP and apps of that era on modern hardware. It will work perfectly. The same cannot be said of 2000-era Mac software.
That's because TPM 2.0 module allows M$ to uniquely identify you and sell your info to advertisers - it's not an actual technical limitation, it's just because M$ is greedy, and it's a shame they aren't punished by governments for creating all this unnecessary eWaste just to make even more cash.
With GNU/Linux and BSD I just recompile. I can run old C stuff from the 90's with few flags.
Under GNU/Linux, the VB6 counterpart would be TCL/Tk+SQlite, which would run nearly the same over almost 25-30 years.
As a plus, I can run my code with any editor and the TCL/Tk dependencies will straightly run on both XP, Mac, BSD and GNU/Linux with no propietary chains ever, or worse, that Visual Studio monstruosity. A simple editor will suffice and IronTCL weights less than 100MB and that even bundled with some tool, as BFG:
https://codeberg.org/luxferre/BFG
IronTCL:
https://www.irontcl.com/index.html
Good luck finding some VB5/6 runtime libraries out there without being a virii nest.
I suggest paying attention to some mac development podcasts.
What would I learn there?
That development on macOS UI frameworks isn't as rosy.
I'm not saying it's perfect. Just that it's less of a mess than the situation on Windows.
Again, listen to those podcasts, especially how Apple has (not) handled bug reports.
Between Carbon, Cocoa, UI Touch, UI Kit, Catalyst, Swift UI, there is plenty to chose from, with many non overlapping capabilities.
Then there is naturally the whole plethora of Kits, with several deprecated and replaced by others without feature parity,
https://marcoeidinger.github.io/appleframeworks/
Carbon is long deprecated and as mentioned was only ever meant as a transitional framework.
Cocoa still exists and is usable. UITouch is not a framework, but a class in UIKit. UIkit still exists and is usable. Same for Catalyst. Same for SwiftUI.
As said, I'm not pretending everything is sunshine and roses in Apple-Land. But at least Apple seems to mostly dogfood their own frameworks, which unfortunately doesn't seem to be the case anymore with Microsoft. WinUI 3 and WPF are supposed to be the "official" frameworks to use, but it seems Microsoft themselves are not using them consistently and they also don't seem to put a lot of resources behind them.
Win32, MFC, Windows Forms, and WPF also exist and are quite usable.
Apple also doesn't always uses their stuff as they are supposed to, Webviews are used in a few "native" apps, some macOS apps are actually iOS ones ported via Catalyst, which is the reason they feel strange, and many other stuff I could list.
Two measures, two weights.
> Ah yes, and the solution being presented is Linux, with Xlib, Motif, Qt, GTK
I'm not going to descend into a "my OS's API is worse than yours" pissing match with you, because it's pointless and tangential. The issue is not "is the Windows framework situation worse than Linux" but rather "is the Windows framework situation worse than it used to be" and the answer is emphatically yes, and due mostly to Ballmer's obsession with chasing shiny things, such as that brief period when he decided that all Windows must look like a phone.
> Xlib, Motif, Qt, GTK,
Xlib and Motif are stable APIs. Qt and ... GTK on the other hand...
Yeah, it sounds weird because the person you’re replying to is using examples of things that came in under Nadella, not Ballmer.
Feb 2014: Satya Nadella becomes CEO.
July 2014: Microsoft lays off 14k people, a large portion of which are SDET (Software Development Engineer in Test)/QA/test people.
The idea was that regular developers themselves would be writing and owning tests rather than relying on separate testers.
I'm sure there were multiple instances of insane empire building and lots of unproductivity, but it's also hard to not think this was where the downfall began.
Ultimately it still comes down to someone in the chain giving a damn. There are obvious, surface level bugs across most technologies. Yet, developers, PMs, VPs all sign off and say, "Close enough".
And that's also on the CEO, especially after this much time.
He has failed to correctly incentivize/hire/motivate/plan/structure/etc.
Does Satya Nadella even use a windows laptop?
Yes, probably.
Danluu has a great piece on why Ballmer was better than people gave him credit for: https://danluu.com/ballmer/
You may also want to consider Cosmic. PopOS has consistently been the distro that "just works" for me, though I don't use it much as I prefer to tinker more. That said, they're doing a lot of good work making Cosmic as a better replacement for the ton of gnome 3 hacks they had to do before.
> Omarchy
Had high hopes for it but in my testing the mouse cursor chokes and drops frames/precision under load which I just can’t deal with.
Why would you go for a random Linux distribution backed by DHH (a Ruby developer) instead of a established upstream distribution such as Debian or Fedora?
I’m a user of omarchy and I like it a lot. I wanted a Linux experience that I didn’t have to set up myself, and this one was designed specifically for devs who are used to a macOS environment. It took about 6 minutes to set up and everything just works. I don’t really know that much about dhh or his politics, like some sibling comment mentioned. I just think it matches my sweet spot of ease to set up and provided good UX
As stated before, because my colleagues which whom I share the same projects and test cases made the jump from MacOS and are all liking it so far, I also like what I saw till now.
Because of hyprland. There aren't many alternatives with hyprland (or niri) preconfigured for you
It's not such a difficult task to set up hyprland. And niri doesn't even need to be configured, the default configuration performs all the required tasks.
From my understanding, to get something at the level of omarchy you need to setup multiple pieces of software. In the end it has to replace the whole "desktop"
It's just Arch Linux with hyprland pre-configured and bunch of pre-installed software.
People have been flocking to it for reasons like
1. They don't want to configure hyprland themselves.
2. They want to say they are running an "elite" distro like Arch.
3. They're part of DHH's weird following that is a mix of insufferable smugness and right-wing politics.
Utilities to circunvent the stupid original design. Even Microsoft is forced to use this pattern to correct itself. But hey, you know what they say: "Selling the disease and the cure is the best bizness plan ever".
Try EndeavourOS
> I liked the path windows was going in late 2010s.
Surely there's a typo there, and you meant late 2000s, e.g. 2009?
Late 2010s Windows was W10 with constant system-breaking bugs, mobile-first interface, more and more data mining and adware my MS, etc.
Windows 8/10 were more stable than XP/Vista.
Not sure what is bad with data mining / telemetry (as long it is anonymised and respects GDPR).
Adware is issue only on Windows 11.
macOS is in the worst state I’ve ever experienced since I started using it, but I’d go back to a shitty performing x86 laptop with Linux before living on windows again. Just using it on my gaming pc makes my skin crawl
The fact that, on expensive hardware, I can hit windows+r and start typing before the run box renders/loads is staggering, it beggars belief.
Im generally a microsoft shill, but theyre really on the down hill slope. windows 11 is truly a masterpiece of changes no one asked for or wants, Teams is the least reliable piece of business software I've ever seen. New outlook does not have feature parity with old outlook and has the same bargain bin apple ux stylings as w11.
Maybe ive finally crested the age gap and im officially a dinosaur, but God damn every microsoft product is worse than it used to be.
At work employees generally use okay machines, not great but still at least 3GHz i5 processor with 16GB of ram etc. and they only run an ERP client and a browser with a few tabs.
Sometimes, I click on the windows button and it legit takes 3-4 seconds for windows to render the start menu that only has the program list, nothing else, just the list of programs.
These machines with their 6/8 or so cores can do tasks at the scale of nanoseconds and it takes, 3 whole seconds to render a single window with a list of program names, that’s simply stupid.
Anyone who has ever touched a windows xp machine knows that the start menu can complete drawing before my brain can register that my fingers in fact touched the keys, which takes roughly 20ms or so if I remember correctly. What the hell is this system doing?
I have the computer they handed me 3 years ago still. As soon as it powers on the fans go into full gear. Almost nothing running, just Edge. If I have VS on the thing hate crashes. 64gb ram
I dug out my dad's Windows 98 era PC that he was running Windows 2000 on that we hadn't turned on since 2011, and it felt lightning-fast compared to W10 and W11. Double-click to open apps and they appear, ready to type in. It felt like I was on some kind of futuristic prototype.
Some of that is all the security apparatus in W10/11 which 2000 doesn't have. So many CVEs since 2000.
Yeah but how much faster is hardware since then? M.2 SSDs, lots more GHz + cores, fast GPUs, etc. Everything is way faster and should more than make up for those security checks IMO.
I had similar impressions with multiple setup:
in both cases there was something very odd, the crude os design (no parallel systemd etc), gui toolkit and desktop environment (no compositor, glitchy) wasn't an issue and the low amount of lag felt very good. it's the same feeling when driving 90s cars, the drive feels directly connected to the whole, it's cruder but it feels betterand saying this as a fan of recent linux kernel and systemd parallelism with the crazy cpu over ssd speed.. i was utterly surprised
The ads in the start menu and the notifications were the last straw for me.
I have yet to this day and Windows 10 or 11 ever to see an advertisement like people talk about.
It's more like shortcuts to install things like Candy Crush.
And I've seen that.
As a dinosaur, it might finally be time for the Linux desktop
Ironically MSFT is surviving off of dinosaurs. Legacy companies pumping it with Office 365 suite and Copilot subscriptions.
They’re toast without them.
"What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law
On a more serious note, I really only use Windows for games & I'm still always frustrated with how many updates (& restarts during updates) Windows needs. My fans are always constantly spinning on Windows too (laptop or desktop) whereas my Mac & Linux machines are generally silent outside of heavy load.
This is common for any self-updating software that you use infrequently.
A friend of mine complained that he hated how Firefox "always" wants to restart with an update. I couldn't understand what he was on about. Turned out I use Firefox daily and he uses it like once every 2 months to test something and yeah, Firefox has an update out every 2 months or so, so that fits.
It's the same with Windows (and, I assume, macOS). Use Windows more and the updater will disappear out of sight.
I update Linux maybe once a year. Sure, there are security vulnerabilities. But I'm behind a firewall. And meanwhile, I don't have to spend any time dealing with update issues.
But Windows is made for the big masses. It's definitely a good thing that Microsoft forces Auto-Updates, because otherwise 95% of people would run around with devices that have gaping security holes. And 90% of these people are not being a firewall 100% of their time.
Side effect unfortunately is that they are shoving ad- and bloatware down your throat through these updates.
But that is, because Microsoft does not care about the end user at all. It's not the fault of auto-updates.
My Mac doesn’t randomly reboot, doesn’t force updates on shutdown, doesn’t have weekly updates that require updates. IMO Apple handles updates much better than Windows.
Windows still reboots instead of shut down when you do update and shut down.
They fixed it recently: https://www.techpowerup.com/342538/windows-11-finally-fixes-...
It must have regressed again, just happened this morning.
> My fans are always constantly spinning on Windows too (laptop or desktop) whereas my Mac & Linux machines are generally silent outside of heavy load.
defender seemingly needs to check every 10ms that you still don't have a virus
I'm always amused by these occasional "you still don't have any viruses" popup notifications from Defender. Well, good to know, thank you very much, I guess.
Cannot even reliably permanently disable real time scanning...
I'm now even using wine & proton for it. Thanks to Valve only very few games don't work.
And it's not that i don't like windows, it is just too damn slow for me.
And no. I do not want to upgrade my gear every 2 years or so
I feel like I've been monkeys-pawed with the downfall of Windows for gaming. I.e. rather than being at the point where everything just works best/easiest in my Bazzite install it's a game of DRM, modding tool support, feature support, and random "this game runs better on Windows, this game runs better on Bazzite" discovery. Also Windows/Steam OS clone/"normal Linux" setups all have their own very awkward corners around the non-gaming portions. I've not found one that does not require substantial tweaking to get a usable all around experience unless you buy a device to use as more a dedicated gaming console (Xbox/Steam Deck type device).
I miss the ~mid Windows 7 era. Not that everything ran perfectly without issues on Windows 7 at the time, particularly old games, but at least there was an option good enough to assume to always go with first instead of "see if the games you play work best here".
All the games that "don't work" are the games that PEOPLE ACTUALLY PLAY!
It's always hardcore multiplayer games with the actual crowd. Using linux for gaming is a great way to continue down the path to becoming a recluse.
So if you don't play popular multiplayer games you're a recluse?
Plenty of people play single player games, and simply socialize outside of games...
It really depends on what you play. I've been playing online co-op regularly with a bunch of friends since Covid times. We're jumping to new (well, on sale) games regularly, and the only recent time I booted to Windows was because a 4-player mod for Remnant II _might_ not work on Linux. Can't remember the previous game that did not work on Linux. I'm so used to things working without major tinkering that I forget to check protondb most of the time.
I actually don't like to play with random people on the internet.
I prefer the comfort of knowing them, and usually do it in the old basement LAN party way.
In my young time we didn't have internet, and we were actually LESS recluse overall ;-)
I play Helldivers 2 on Linux, and there are TONS of people playing.
And yet the battery in your Linux laptop dies 2x faster...
If I could still be running Windows 2000, I would --- it simply flew on a Fujitsu Stylistic ST2300, and I was able to hack the Compaq TC1000 Finepoint digitizer driver for Windows NT to run on it --- w/ a CF--IDE adapter, no spinning rust to worry about, and I even had room for a full install of Encarta, my only worry until it died was buying AAAA batteries for the stylus, and the only thing I missed was pressure sensitivity (but my work computer had a Wacom Intuos, so the delicate stuff was done on that).
That said, my favourite Windows computer ever was the Fujitsu Stylistic ST4110 w/ transflective display and Wacom EMR digitizer --- put an SSD in it, carried a couple of spare batteries, added a USB GPS, and kept a pair of docking stations w/ power supplies at my desks at work and the office and a third power supply in my laptop bag and it just worked --- despair of really replacing it, the Samsung Galaxy Book 12 was close, but then Fall Creators Update came out and crippled styluses down to an 11th touch input so that they would scroll rather than select text... getting by w/ a Book 3 Pro 360, but Windows 11 has me looking at a Raspberry Pi paired w/ a Wacom One or Movink display....
It's not shocking they added even more bloatware to every microsoft program so even with the same OS kernel it would probably take longer. At this point it also got out of hand for Microsoft themselves if you have heard how they are going to speed up the explorer. Not by making it faster but by preloading it on startup so it feels snappier, there are 20 years of technical debt in I think you cannot save this anymore (but I am to inexperienced to know that for sure)
The last time this subject came up someone in the thread jumped up to explain to me how Windows 11 has all these great new features that make it worth being many times less performant.
Every feature they listed was some anti-consumer thing that only a corporate customer would ever care about or want. Every single one.
What I learned is that Windows 11 is great for the customer, I'm just not the customer. I'm just the dummy who paid for it.
Hm, I asked Copilot and it told me everything you said was a nasty, nasty lie.
Let's not even go there. Copilot is .. just bad. I'm not surprised though.
- TPM 2.0 requirement
- Secure Boot enforcement
- Microsoft account requirement
- BitLocker device encryption tied to MS account
- Hardware attestation
- Telemetry/Data Collection
- Extensive diagnostic data collection
- Advertising ID tracking
- Activity history syncing
- Bing integration everywhere
- Edge as persistent default (difficult to change) - OneDrive integration/nagging
- Microsoft 365 upselling
- Copilot integration
- Widgets panel with MSN content
- Start menu web search forcing Bing
- Centered taskbar (not moveable)
- Simplified right-click menu (hiding options)
- Removed taskbar features (no drag-to-taskbar, no ungrouping)
- Start menu ads/recommendations Update Control
- Forced automatic updates
- Limited update deferral for Home users
- Feature updates bundled with security updates
- Device Management (Enterprise)
- Intune/MDM integration
- Windows Autopilot
- Azure AD requirements
- Remote wipe capabilities
- Monetization
- Ads in Start menu
- Ads in File Explorer
- Suggested apps
- Pre-installed third-party apps (Candy Crush, etc.)
FYI, nearly all of that UI/app garbage can be removed (or re-enabled like the Start/context menu) in <5 minutes with:
https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat
It persists across updates, can be customized with extremely granular control over what is removed/re-enabled, or using the default mode which works fantastically for most users with minimal risk of disabling something many people might prefer to keep (e.g Xbox app).
I’ve been using it for years on every machine/VM with Windows 11 installed. The OS gets out of my way completely both in terms of functionality and distractions like ads.
I cannot recommend it enough, I am eternally grateful to the maintainers for making Windows 11 feel like a modernized Windows 7 experience.
Forcing OneDrive :/
you guys def have no idea about LTSC...
Where can I get the LTSC version of Windows 11 as a private customer?
You can't in a legit way, but if you find an ISO of it (like on massgrave) you can install it and activate it
let me read about it
Most of it are turned off or possible to turn off in LTSC IoT version, which is only Win version reasonable to use without beenig annoyed when using it.
This list really needs proofreading.
>- BitLocker device encryption tied to MS account
Unless something changed with 11, this is opt in, with a specific "save to your microsoft account option". I really don't see the issue here.
>- Hardware attestation
This is either a rehash of the "TPM 2.0 requirement" point above, or just outright false.
>- Telemetry/Data Collection
>- Extensive diagnostic data collection
This are the same thing restated
>- Forced automatic updates
>- Limited update deferral for Home users
Again, these are just the same thing.
>- Feature updates bundled with security updates
That's basically... every commercial OS out there? Good luck getting security updates on android (if your OEM even provides it) if you're not on the latest version. Some linux distros even have it as a selling point, aka. rolling release.
>- Device Management (Enterprise)
>- Intune/MDM integration
These are the same thing AND you have to jump through hoops to enable it. I really don't see the issue here.
>- Copilot integration
>- Windows Autopilot
You can just... not use it?
>- Azure AD requirements
???
Is this just restating the microsoft account requirement?
>Monetization
This is a restatement for half the other points.
>- Start menu ads/recommendations Update Control
>- Ads in Start menu
>- Suggested apps
>- Pre-installed third-party apps (Candy Crush, etc.)
All stating the same thing.
To be fair, while many of those are indeed optional or non-issues, the problem is that user experience has been degraded in w11 while there has been almost zero value-add for end users.
FYI you can change the taskbar alignment.
One random little thing to add on to the list of shitty things about Windows 11: the new default image-viewing program (Photos), is incapable of rendering multi-page TIFF files. No error message or anything, just displays the first page and acts like everything’s fine. The OLD image viewing program (Windows Photo Viewer), displays them no problem though…
These kinds of issues can be incredibly disruptive and distressing for non tech-savy users. You update your OS and suddenly it looks like a lot of your data are corrupted, with no explanation of how to get it back.
Forcing saving to OneDrive causes this issue a lot too. I was stunned to find that saving changes to an existing document will often try to save a new file in OneDrive instead. So if you don't notice this and go back to your original file, it will look like your changes weren't saved.
> there are 20 years of technical debt
The only part of windows that really matters in the long run is win32 which has been extremely stable. You could go back to XP and not lose that many features. The fact that modern windows runs like ass has very little to do with backwards compatibility.
Windows 2000 or Windows XP - with security updates and modern hardware support - is exactly what I want.
Zone94 is still releasing modern Windows XP distributions and OneCore API brings Windows 10-level app support to Windows XP.
https://github.com/shorthorn-project/One-Core-API-Binaries
the fuck
I don't necessarily disagree, but I do think there's an important distinction between technical debt and backwards compatibility. Yes The former can be caused by the latter, but I've worked in enough projects that didn't have to worry about backwards compatibility but were still riddled with technical debt to know that backwards compatibility is only one source of many.
>Not by making it faster but by preloading it on startup so it feels snappier,
The oldest, worst, and most over-used trick in the (windows) book.
Sluggishness is the price we pay for freedom*.
*Corporate surveillance.
I switched to Linux after Windows started showing me propaganda on the screen where you enter your password. To me, that's diabolical and forced me to make the switch. Sorry, I don't wish to "Learn more about Black-Owned Businesses" just to access my computer.
We updated my MIL's computer to Windows 11 and now it's giving her ads about Xbox something or other on the login screen. She is in her 80s and has no idea what an Xbox even is.
This is awful in many ways. Among other things what really gets my goat is that Xbox something or other ads can have cartoony sexuality, violence, and so on. Those things don’t bother me, but there are plenty of elderly, conservative, religious, etc. people who would be taken aback by it.
There’s plenty of that content in our media, but those people don’t consume that media. A computer is a critical general purpose tool. Everyone needs it. This is like putting scantily clad elves on every refrigerator.
Link to this fridge? Just so I know which one to avoid you know
Probably a Samsung, the company that replaced door handles with a microphone for "open fridge" voice command, and advertises to you based on the contents of your fridge.
Ads on the login screen, ads on my fucking start menu. No intuitive way to access all programs. . . Sorry. Apps from the start menu. Suggested apps instead of that. Hold screens to set a backup using one drive and to link my phone and set telemetry and whatever other bullshit once a week.
It's not great. Linux mint is what I install for older relatives now. It's close enough to windows feeling that they never even question it.
Non power users just want a desktop with a browser shortcut, and maybe office apps. I extended the life of a laptop many years for my aging non technical parents. I even encrypted the hard drive for them and since Microsoft basically committed security malpractice by not making encryption available to Home edition users it was significantly more secure. After a 5 minute explainer they never once asked me a single question about it.
I, too, am irrationally furious at microsoft for forcing me to look at nature scapes and offering a link to learn more if I wanted.
Those landscape photos are a crappy hypnotic effort meant to try and dissociate Microsoft from the feeling most people have when they have to login on a Monday Morning.
Still, complaining about something you can only possibly see when you're not using the computer is such a minor thing, whether you like it or not, I cant find myself to care in any amount.
What got me to angrily turn it off was a gigantic closeup of a moose face. It’s kind of funny now that I think about it but I have two 32” monitors and I really did not need 64” of moose lips and wet nostrils.
I was wondering what I want for my background but you've nailed it. Just random animals in nature.
This really made me laugh, thanks.
Honestly that sounds like something I would set as my work background just as a gag though.
Reading HN threads about Windows makes me wonder some times if I’m using a completely different version of Windows on my workstation. I guess I also haven’t seen any “propaganda” among my rotating selection of landscape scenery.
My last Windows PC shipped from the vendor with all the tiles and ads and live updates already disabled. I don't know why I see so many other people struggling with turning them off on here.
What propaganda? I only get a new background with some info related to it (like what's the place of the picture).
Regrettably, I have to use a windows machine for work. The other day I got one where the "fact" was an offer to help me pic out the right laptop or tablet to get the most out of copilot.
To stoke my rage into an incandescent fury, if you go to settings -> Lock Screen, there's no obvious way to disable it at first. You have to change the background image from "Microsoft Spotlight", the one where the image changes to a static background image, and THEN you get a checkbox. The checkbox you uncheck is "get tips, fun facts, and more". I guess trying to sell me shit is under "more".
It sucks because i agree that having the picture change is a nice feature. Microsoft has decided to hold that nice feature hostage to ads.
Back when people customized screensavers, you would put the .scr file (a regular exe) in the Windows directory, and it would populate the list of screen savers? I'm guessing that's no longer a thing in the name of security theater.
Not so much security theater as a large number of exploits were disguised as .scr files as it was easy to trick a user into downloading one and then it would run with full system access
I just reinstalled Windows, so I've had the joy of a bunch of stupid MS stuff (why did you make my /~ homedir the first five letters of my email? WHY?) but I have to admit, this, I have not encountered.
Yeah, it's one of the reasons I use a Microsoft account to collect the PC entitlements and then create a local user account that has a sane profile name and never touch the online account again.
A few days ago I got the nature scapes but with a, "This would make an awesome prompt huh?" as the tagline and a link to more AI shoe-horned in.
Slowest is unfortunately not even the worst problem of Win11.
I just want an OS that helps me control my computers and be productive, not one that "mines" me to sell me to be exploited.
While I have been using various Linux flavors for my servers, my desktop has been Windows for decades. Microsoft's charade with Win11 has me committed to moving to desktop Linux in 2026. There will be pain, but they crossed a line.
And every update makes it more difficult to disable web search on the start menu and using local only accounts.
Regarding the video benchmark on the page: what would be fair is testing against the hardware that was available when the operating system was released. Windows 11 is absolutely not meant to run against hard drives, and current notebook and desktop offerings for home and enterprise users reflect that: you can get a 256gb SSD for a pretty decent price nowadays, to the point there's absolutely no reason to put in an HDD. When Windows Vista was released, your computer would absolutely have an HDD, so that would be a fair comparison.
That said, I was restoring a notebook owned by my aunt recently and I decided to run Ubuntu on it so I could mess with gparted a little bit. I'm already a full-time Linux user (have been for about five years now, I guess), but I was still surprised to see that one of the most bloated Linux distributions ran lightning fast on my aunt's Pentium Gold + 4gb RAM + HDD while Windows took over four minutes to boot.
It's absolutely time to abandon Windows if you're still dependent on it. There are alternatives. Heck, I'm not a fan of Apple either but at this point I'd recommend a MacBook for anyone wanting to get away from Windows and not comfortable with Linux or a Chromebook.
MacOS is a buggy mess, and it's also pretty slow lately. If you need full Office for work, your best bet is probably still Windows.
As a software engineer who has developed on Macs (and Linux) for most of my career and has recently started a job that requires me to use Windows again, I can tell you from experience that Office on the Mac is far, far more stable, easy to use, and considerably faster than on Win11. Microsoft’s macOS team are really good at their jobs.
But then I don’t find macOS to be slow or a buggy mess, so mileage may vary.
I totally agree with you, just yesterday I edited a document in Microsoft word and opened the second document for comparison. Suddenly, the first document froze and when I closed the program, I did not see the changes that I had made before. After complaining about my life, I started anew, and only the next time I downloaded Word offered me a recovery option.
Man, I've been an Apple user for years, and the best rumor I've ever heard is that MacOS 27 is going to be a Snow Leopard (bug fix) release!
It's so buggy on 26, it drives me crazy. Just not nearly as crazy as Windows 11 drives me.
> Office on the Mac is far, far more stable, easy to use, and considerably faster than on Win11
I haven't had stability issues with any Office program in years, but everything you mentioned is moot because there are Office features (especially Power___ features in Excel) that don't have parity on MacOS. If I get a workbook from a client, I need it to run exactly the same on my machine as it does on theirs.
One would think multi-monitor support is the hardest thing in the universe to solve. My Linux desktop has very bad multi-monitor support, but hey, it's Linux. My $2K Macbook Pro has, somehow, even worse multi-monitor support, so bad that sometimes the productivity of an external display feels not worth the hassle of plugging it in and wrestling with it.
Besides that no problems with MacOS, it feels snappy to me and Office apps work mostly fine (except for all the missing features Microsoft refuses to add to Outlook).
I've had a good multi monitor experience in Pop!_OS with the COSMIC desktop. Not sure exactly how it compares to other desktop environments though.
The first time I’ve had my multi-monitor setup(s) “just work” on Linux is recently installing Fedora 43 on my Ideapad. (After becoming exhausted trying to tweak Linux Mint to get tolerable sizing across all the screens).
Wayland per-monitor fractional scaling is delightful and after a couple gsettings tweaks restoring minimize/bottom dock I’ve been loving the polish and snappiness of Gnome. I also had to switch the WiFi backend from wpa_supplicant to iwn due to connection problems on one specific WiFi network but now it’s totally stable.
macOS multi-monitor support and scaling is a constant thorn in my side that was marginally improved by paying for Better Display. Windows 11 really is the most solid option for various monitor combinations not in Apple's happy path of resolutions/sizes.
But I don’t really like the ergonomics of using even clean de-bloated Windows as my main dev machine, so was very pleased to have such a great out-of-the-box experience trying Fedora for the first time.
May not have been a fair test. Windows is running the kernel in a kinda VM which older computers have not been optimized for -- newer generations of CPU can smooth out the overhead.
For a fair test against Windows 10 and below, you'll have at least to do this: "Temporarily turn off your Memory Integrity and VMP" -- https://support.microsoft.com/en-US
Also, it's important to have all bits and pieces of Hyper-V/Windows Virtual Platform off (which the Menory Integrity relies on), thus cutting off WSL functionality.
We don't need flawed tests to tell us Windows 11 sucks -- yesterday my explorer bar didn't respond to clicks nor Windows key. In the past killing explorer.exe and restarting it, or logging off and back on, worked. Yesterday I had to reboot the machine to fix it.
You’re advocating for a flawed test.
Why is it, when ever someone points out that Microsoft shits the bed on something someone will come out with ludicrous ideas about changing the default environment.
The default environment is what you get, all this handwringing about whats potentially possible misses the point entirely; for decades we have, as a community, scoffed at linux for requiring you to understand deeply how your OS works in order for it to function. Now we’re in the situation where the out-of-the-box experience for gaming requires less esoteric knowledge on Linux than Windows, yet people defend Windows still.
Do you seriously think the exec running emails even knows what Hyper-V is? Do you think any IT department is going to disable memory integrity?
Would any Dev disable WSL? Do the vast majority of gamers want to do this? Should they have to?
You’re now arguing that overhead is ok because its mitigated by newer hardware, I don’t believe that to be true as I run W11 on A Threadripper 3970x and an i9-14900k and the fuckers feel leagues slower than my M1 Macbook, its a joke! Like 10x the power/thermal envelope- and sure, some of that is down to the M1 being great, but there’s no benchmark putting it above those CPUs.
Stop pretending that this is ok, and stop trying to spread uncertainty about a valid test.
I’d prefer newer hardware too, but this is the compromise if we want older OS’s to be included.
Valid point. However also note the exec you mentioned wouldn't have Windows 11 on his laptop -- he would be stuck on the out of date, faster, Windows 10.
No, they’ll be using a W11 on an old laptop provided by IT
Windows 11 makes me hate everyday computing. From the adverts in the start menu, to the sluggish performance on a computer orders of magnitude more powerful than any XP machine I used. It's just not fun anymore.
More evidence that Windows 11 is a hate crime.
Been using KDE on a secondary machine for 15 years now. However they were always lacking in hardware compared to my main desktop.
I recently installed CachyOS on a USB NVMe drive, so I can dual boot without the dual boot pain. And wow, that thing flies.
I've been a Windows user since 3.0, but Windows 11 is probably getting replaced soon. I've stopped competitive gaming so anti-cheats ain't an issue, and Linux gaming is good enough.
There are some things I'll miss, but the bloat and lack of care from MS I'll be glad to leave behind.
Windows 11 is fast enough if you... disable a million things on it that >99% of users wouldn't know when/how to, or wouldn't want to. Definitely depressing.
Can you expand on this? For example details on any tools to do this. I've been trying to disable features I know use resources and aren't needed but the native UIs to do it are hella confusing and feel purposely useless.
Sure thing. Probably the highest-RoI changes performance-wise (there may be negative implications for security or functionality, obviously proceed at your own risk) are to disable the various services and drivers that belong to either Windows Defender or the various filesystem filter drivers on your system. You can't disable everything (expect a freeze/crash if you disable the wrong ones) but you can disable most.
That, and switch back to the classic GUIs (like with OpenShell) so you don't have to deal with the laggy new UIs.
Google "windows 11 debloat reddit". There are several tools:
- https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat (recommended elsewhere in this thread)
- https://christitus.com/windows-tool/ (I used this one a couple weeks ago, seems to work well)
But seriously though, learn to fish. The answers aren't hard to find if you look, know what to search for, and are at least somewhat discriminating in your investigation.
The Chris Titus utility has worked very well for me. I used it to de-bloat Win 11 after I upgraded the OS last year.
I run Win 11 on an old tiny NUC PC that has Windows 10 before - now it does seem faster, is very stable and is not so annoying.
One thing: AFAIK you need to have the Windows 11 Pro version for the best de-bloating results.
I say go one step further and learn to fish harder and don't use any of these scripts. I can't even imagine trying to debug an issue on my machine after running one of these "makes arbitrary changes" scripts.
Do it all manually if for no other reason than you know all the changes you made and know where all the different settings actually are.
Indeed... I've made all the changes I want manually, and a lot of them aren't even things any of these scripts do anyway.
Having fished I have found the fish hard to catch so thought I would ask from another fisher.
Also friendlies for the record the person I was responding to mentioned millions of settings, which while hyperbolic, you and I know means just hard to find so please share all fishing tips and other notes.
For the record I am also with you that using WinDebloat is not the best way for the simplest reason that it all seems arbitrary.
> disable a million things on it
I simply stayed on Windows 10 and I don’t seem to miss any feature thus far lol
What's the point when they will be all silently re-enabled by the update application?
I mean, the point is to make it usable. You can set up scheduled tasks where needed. I haven't had to re-disable stuff after that, but I've jumped through a lot more initial hoops than most people are willing to.
I tried this when Win 7 was new, and it worked great. Then I tried it when Win 10 was new, and it was a complete useless waste of time. In a week it was too slow to use again.
I still haven't used Windows since Win 10 support ended, and have no idea how bad Windows 11 is for people to declare Win 10 "super fast" all over the internet. But I don't have any hope it will accept any setup I want. Win 10 already didn't.
Win 10 IOT LTSC is supported for 6 more years, so support didn't really "end".
That being said, W10 (or W11 for that matter) will never be as fast a Win 7 was on an SSD in the 2010-2020 era, even with all the hacks and debloat scripts available in many places on the Internet.
Just an anecdote from yesterday. I got an old Pentium 4 1,5Ghz from a friend, put a Terratec EWX 24/96 soundcard in, installed WinXP, turned automatic updates off and installed a software synth, Native Instruments FM7, connected a midi keyboard via the gameport. Literally 2ms latency and no midi jitter! With an 25 years old setup! And it just works, without any distractions. Really, I almost cried as I saw that. I feel somehow violated by today's Windows11/10/8.
I had a similar experience when helping a friend's parent with an absolutely ancient laptop from like 2007, which which had a crappy Celeron, 256 MB of RAM, and Widnoes Vista.
The damn thing was shockingly performant. We have been played for absolute fools.
I don't believe that. Can Vista even run with just 256MB of RAM?
Apparently Vista introduced a new audio stack with higher processing overhead and thus latency.
I used to boot up XP in a VM occasionally. It‘s amazing how streamlined everything felt, inviting you to be productive. This was before the Electron apocalypse. Almost all UI looked the same, behaved the same and was easy on the eyes (remember when widgets had depth?).
From the article: "The benchmarks were run on a Lenovo ThinkPad X220 — a model not officially compatible with Windows 11 — which could have affected some results."
Curious how MacOSX stacks up over the past 25 years. Tahoe feels like a massive regression on all fronts, from GUI to I/O.
MacOS seems to be going the way of Windows, with unnecessary and distracting notifications for things users don't care about. Then on top of that, the whole liquid glass redesign that hurts usability and information density.
Definitely moving in the direction of "what is good for a particular PM" and not "what is good for the user." I would have switched to linux years ago if it were not for the great hardware and I like having access to iMessages from the desktop.
Yeah and I think Apple know from their telemetry that too many users (including me) are sticking with macOS 15 Sequoia, which they need to address with macOS 27 this year (but given how they are, it'll just be Apple Intelligence)
The thing that really offends me about Windows 11 is that new right click menu that takes like 500 ms to appear each time you use it and is less useful than the old one.
Recently I've been experimenting with Atlas, Revi and Ghost Spectre, which are custom stripped versions of Windows, and it's such a breath of fresh air. It really makes me feel like if only they'd just ruthlessly pull out all the new garbage without regard for "but we just made and shipped this", Windows would actually be pretty good.
Say what you want about Apple and their slow descent into a fully walled garden where independent software development is slowly eroded and sabotaged, but even their most reviled update in years (macOS 26) is still miles ahead of Windows 11 in terms of cohesion and polish.
I see no reason to migrate to Win11 when Win10 hits hard EOL. I'm lucky, of course: I only have one game-oriented machine with Windows, and Steam / Proton is going to suffice.
Those beholden to MSO and the One True Excel, which of course is not guaranteed to work well (or at all) under Wine / Proton, are less lucky.
Out of the loop: Why is Windows 11 discussion trending over the past few months? It was released 4 years ago, and the most notable changes from the previous edition are a tabbed file browser, and the taskbar icons are now in the middle.
Probably because people are being forced out of their Windows 10 systems, and onto an unwanted Windows 11.
Also, you seem to skip other notable changes like enforced spam and enforced Copilot and enforced online registration.
I see a Copilot icon in the sys try I didn't put there and is unwelcome, but haven't clicked it. Worrying.
As the other commenter said win10 went out of support and only recently ~2 months ago the company I work for migrated to win11, I think now all the people that do not want to use win11 are forced to use it and complain
Ah thank you! That explains it.
Windows 10 just stopped getting security updates some weeks ago. So people that had been sticking with 10 are now considering 11.
You can still get security updated by enrolling in the Extended Support branch. Did it in a relative's computer and it seems it will get security updates for at least an extra year, with the advantage it won't get any feature updates too (a really nice bonus IMO).
Because Windows 10 is now end-of-life. Previously, everyone who cared simply stayed on Windows 10.
I assumed it was because windows 10 went out of support a few months ago
Windows 11 doesn't support Intel CPUs older than 8th gens. Linux is no longer an alternative, it's a lifeline for many old yet very capable machines.
What is Microsoft trying to do by ending Windows 10 support?
I believe it does, but only from a clean install, rather than an in-place upgrade; I ran into this a few years ago.
By default the official unmodified Windows 11 ISO enforces CPU, RAM, and TPM/Secure Boot checks. You can bypass these by customizing the installer, configuring some things at install runtime, installing on one machine and moving it over, etc and it may work but the resulting install is not officially supported unless the machine meets the requirements described under https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-11-specifica.... Some ISO-to-USB tools like Rufus can make doing this as easy as a checkbox.
I've run many machines this way without issue yet, but it's not officially supported. I'm hoping Microsoft will really just make "Windows 12" or something if they ever decide to make these true hard requirements to load at all instead of just be supported.
Multiple reasons : IA pushback, better gaming experience, Linux becoming more and more mainstream with distro like Bazzite and CachyOS.
Taskbar icons in the middle are a symbol of general direction Windows is going towards. It's the tipping point where we say enough is enough. We're tired of anti-consumer changes. It's different from Vista or 8 which failed despite MS believing in it. This time MS gives us shit and they know it and they don't care. Microsoft doesn't hold the entire PC OS market hostage like it was the case only ten years ago, and if your use case is development + video games + porn, then Linux is a viable option, which definitely wasn't the case ten years ago.
Not surprising given the amount of Webview2 and WinUI/WinRT that Windows 11 happens to contain.
Note that even though WinRT is largely written in C++, and the team brags about performance, due to the amount of COM/WinRT reference counting and the sandboxing model of application identity, it actually runs slower than .NET applications.
Quite ironic, given the Windows team sabotaged on Longhorn.
I recently had to pay the "Microsoft tax" to Lenovo. Which felt more like an unfair punishment rather than a tax since your taxes are meant to fund public services. I kept on thinking that this feels like it should be illegal. I don't use Windows for my work. My servers all run Linux, my clients servers all run Linux and I have no need for it so why am I being forced to pay?
I keep a Windows virtual machine for software that doesn't run on Linux but my use of that over the years has declined dramatically.
To me, the earlier versions of Windows 10 were somewhat OK when they're stripped down. But Windows 11 is bloated beyond belief. And shoving AI functionality in it is going to make things worse.
The computers they give us at work are pretty powerful. Mine has 64 gigs of ram. When I power it on the fans instantly go into full blast mode because the computer is heating up. why? I have no idea I just run Edge and Teams, if I try to use VS my computer will crash. At home I use Mac and Linux (kububtu) and will never have windows on my devices again
I don't think this benchmark is fair, since they clearly state the hardware they used wasn't compatible with the OS.
Running W11 on unsupported hardware aside.
I was surprised the other day when I used a W11 machine that the new context menu took a perceptible second to appear and it still didn't have everything the old had so you still have to call the old one, very dismaying.
Maybe some Microsoft Devs can publish a book about all the secret regedit hacks they use to make it function for themselves. I think Dave Plummer or another Msft vet mentioned you can remove hibernate & get 25GB back on your hard drive.
Isn't disabling hibernate "powercfg /hibernate off"? I'm not aware of a simple and obvious UI switch to do the same
I'm pretty sure hibernate has defaulted to off for quite a while and has to be turned on if desired (at least, the last several machines I've bought new that was the case.)
The UI switch is not particularly obvious, at Control Panel → Hardware and Sound → Power Options → System Settings
Well yeah it's basically Windows' version of a swap partition where they can dump the OS state when hibernating.
You can get even more of your hard drive back by limiting the size of Windows' page file.
I'm actually a big fan of hibernation on laptops and have mine set to suspend for 5 minutes then hibernate. My real life usage battery life has been noticeably longer with this setup.
JavaScript has taken over UI. Why operating systems do not embrace it and make it a first class citizen? Aka explicitly design the os to run and render fast and efficiently js code
This isn't true in the slightest.
With so many good OSes nowadays, why is anyone still on Windows? Seriously. Unless you need custom hardware or software worth thousands of dollars, I bet it's easier to switch to one of the 4+ other major platforms.
Counting Windows, macOS, and Linux, I reach up to 3. Which are the other two major desktop-ready OSs you have in mind?
Switched to Ubuntu almost a year ago and I am much happier now.
While not being a fan of Windows 11, I had the opposite experience for application launch times. They became shorter after the upgrade for some reason.
The changes to rework windows explorer in Windows 11, have IMO mostly resulted in a net poorer UX, and a net loss of performance.
Has anyone considered that maybe Microsoft is trying to help the Linux desktop adoption grow at a faster rate?
to be fair windows 11 is the most secure windows ever created, the amount of random checks it has is astonishing. Unfortunately it gets undermined by poor driver code from third-parties, much less of a problem with hyper-v based security, but still a huge problem.
Obviously all these security features cost performance and something that linux and macos can live without since they generally do not have closed source drivers that can't be fixed (except nvidia, but it seems to be changing as nvidia is giving up and starting to open up due to AI). Windows has to be proactive and that is one of the biggest performance hurdles it faces. It's actually incredible how comparatively safe windows is if you have all the security features enabled, there are obviously still one-offs due to having to maintain compatibility and what was effectively usermode code ported to kernelmode ruining it, thankfully that also seems to be changing since they're slowly rewriting it to be secure by design with Unstrusted<> guards making these issues significantly less common.
as for apple doesn't have third party code in the kernel at all so they can also fix it themselves.
side note, the restrictive linux license might seem like it is preventing adoption since for example the whole HDMI 2.1 spec is centered around proprietary code, but in reality they have this illusion that their 'proprietary' code can be protected and somehow linux undermines it when in reality people can reverse everything to sourcecode if they spend enough time on it - if anyone is curious you can just take one of the firmware dumps from any hdmi 2.1 capable TV dongle, extract the kernel module responsible handling the authentication for hdmi 2.1, extract the code, put it in your amdgpu opensource driver, now you have hdmi 2.1 on linux.
> be fair windows 11 is the most secure windows ever created
Every patch Tuesday they’re fixing more insecurities that previous Windows didn’t have.
Random checks?
patchguard, hyperguard, CET, retpoline, shadowing checks, you name it, look at any memory function and see if (rdtsc() % xxx) check_something.
For the random battery fires and explosions.
I don't see the same things as the commenters or the article.
I love Windows 11, and have zero complaints.
Win+R is instant.
Notepad is the best version so far, I use it as a todo list and it saves and loads in the same place on my third screen every reboot - fantastic.
I have no use for the AI being shoehorned into everything, but I use it every day via chatgpt in the browser, and genie and cp in vsc.
Windows is slower objectively if you use the same hardware.
Now you might say modern software needs modern hardware, but Windows as it is is stagnant in terms of functionality and features, so what justifies the requirement of newer hardware?
I call bullshit on these tests. The baseline doesn't make sense. Software defaults are never minimal (aka bloating) and are designed to scale with hardware. So as faster hardware reaches systems, the core OS still becomes faster but you will never see it when choosing defaults. You still receive baseline OS functioning in faster increments over time. If you tuned these OS installs for performance (no bloating, only core GUI and speed enhancing services) you would reach the opposite conclusion.
With which version did they enable/implement the CPU mitigations (Spectre etc.)?
Windows 7 SP2; Windows 8; Windows 10 and W11.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/update-to-disable-...
It is a lot slower than vista was back in the day, so yes, it is garbage.
I was actually OK with Win 8, I just only used it in traditional desktop mode
I’m curious is the windows org considered a dead end at Microsoft making it hard to recruit top engineering talent?
The people working on the windows kernel must be gutted to see their hard work destroyed by sub-standard devs elsewhere in MS.
Windows will continue to get slower and slower because being fast is not a priority for them.
The only care about AI so that’s what we’re gonna get.
I once had to remote into a Windows XP machine somehow running on an older Intel i5 (first or 2nd gen). Still overkill for XP.
It was CRAZY fast, over Teamviewer it felt better and faster than my local machine... Sad times.
Windows XP is the only one that could consistently go faster than me. Explorer.exe used to be a wonder of productivity.
Don't software products tend to get slower, not faster, with each release? I think Windows 7 vs Vista was the only time I remember things getting better.
IOS 26 is also terrible (on battery especially). New OS releases always have a ton of new services in them that bog them down.
They do, but that's really not necessary. In the linked video you can see Windows 8.1 is pretty well optimized compared to the other Windows versions.
A lot of this slowdown is just developers getting complacent and getting used to the new hardware capabilities. Windows has a lot of low hanging optimization fruit laying around. It's just Microsoft doesn't really care about that: it doesn't fit the business model at all.
It is crazy bad on low powered hardware like my work laptop. It has an Intel Ultra 7 Processor 155U. Wow! An i7!
Not so fast, the u there means ultrabook. Crammed into a too small chassis, this thing chokes even when using Edge or Chrome to work on Jira.
Windows 11 JS Web Start menu does not help...
Windows 11 is "fine" on my powerful desktop gaming CPU, but that is just brute-forcing it.
Complexity is to software what cancer is to living organisms.
Yes, but it will be the fastest version from now on.
And yet: https://www.phoronix.com/review/windows-beats-linux-arl-h
Ah, an opportunity to call upon Hacker News, tech support of last resort…
Someone please tell me if there’s a trick to making the Windows snipping tool faster. I press Win+Shift+S to activate the tool for capturing a region. It takes about 2 seconds to load. I draw the rectangle. Then it takes about 2 seconds to finish capturing.
That is 4 infuriating seconds for something that should be (and I’m sure used to be!) virtually instant.
Now that text is easily recognized in images, screenshots are an important interoperability tool for garbage apps like Teams.
Ditch the snipping tool, and try my favorite screen capture tool, FastStone Capture: https://www.faststone.org/FSCaptureDetail.htm
I am not associated with this software, just a very happy user. You get a lifetime license for $20, it's constantly updated with new features, and is a joy to use.
Win+PrtScr takes an instant screenshot. Win+Shift+PrtScr selects an area first.
Try flameshot
Vista was bad enough.
Vista was not bad, it's just that you tried running it on a 128MB computer from 2002. Vista was fantastic on so many levels but people were just not ready for it. People mocked Vista's permission prompts, something that every OS has now. That alone should tell you how misplaced your hate is.
Yeah, I needed >2gb of RAM at the time and ran Windows XP x64... 64-bit Vista was a significant improvement over the x64 version of XP.
Mine was a bit later than 2002, but it was dreadful. I practically moved over straight away to the new iteration.
I ran it on an 2005 computer in 2005. And I remember it was very slow. Win7 was good then, 3 years later.
Incredible you could run it in 2005 since it was released in late 2006. I ran windows vista beta that summer on my new 2GB computer, it was a great OS in my view.
Sorry, then it was 2006. Thanks for pointing that out. You know my brain is getting older...
Vista changed the Windows security upside down. It brought all the modern kernel features Windows embraced upon. But they went overboard with graphics that average consumer hardware was not ready for. Despite that I don't remember it came with any bloatware like Windows 10 and 11.
c'mon folks, stop being naive - this is bullshit test :D
"Windows 11 is running on unsupported hardware"
I've been using W10 and W11 Pro versions daily and I don't feel any difference except task bar search menu performance (especially this on corpo laptop, on PC this is fine)
Can we go back to Windows 7 yet?
If you have to use windows, 10 LTSC IOT version has support until 2032, and you can remove most of the bloat.
Iirc only businesses can buy that and you cannot upgrade hardware.
Form an LLC and present yourself as a small business interested in IoT.
or just buy a cd key from a wholesaler for $20 :)
probably won't be disconnected... been using such a cd key for months w/o issue and my win11 experience isn't that painful
If you're gonna pay 20 bucks to someone who isn't even allowed to sell you a key, why not just activate it with massgrave?
Indeed, but for all the cases where I’d want to use IoT Windows, such as small scale NVRs, I have opted for Debian/Ubuntu/RHEL.
When half the OS is dedicated to data and revenue collection along with protecting it, it should be unsurprising to see it slow.
Everyone has forgotten how unstable and insecure Windows was back then when it was “fast”. It was also fast to blue screen, freeze, and spread malware. IMO it’s much better now. If you don’t like it, then there are good viable alternatives today especially since everything is web based.
It spends so much CPU cycles collecting your data being an OS is just a side quest
The other day I got tired of using mRemoteNG for RDP it takes ages to start up.
So I went back to Microsoft's own RDP client - they deprecated it and now only support the new Windows App but you need to login with your corporate email and it does not even support RDP but Azure !!!!.
You need to go to the stone age and use the RDP client they shipped with Windows NT 4.0.
Say what you want about Balmer but Satya is now worse - he needs to go.
RDCMan works pretty well.
Try 1remote
we need to rewind to a timeline with 64-bit Windows 2000.
I would pray a premium for this.
ClearType is a winXP only feature, so let's say XP with the classic 2000 look and feel. hot damn.