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Comment by bartread | Hacker News Reader

This isn't meant to be an especially religious comment, but I regularly switch back and forth between OSX and Windows 10 and wanted to make mention of the differences. I also use Ubuntu fairly regularly but only over ssh so I'll discount it from this comparison.

Both OSX and Windows 10 do suffer from UI lag but, in my experience, it is far worse on Windows 10 to the point where I have come to absolutely detest Windows 10. It's particularly bad on the login/unlock screen, which often takes multiple seconds to even appear when you get back to your machine - frustrating when you're in a hurry.

With that said, some of it is certainly application specifically. Office 365 Outlook, for example, is particularly egregious in this regard: switching between windows, or between mail and calendar is awful. Microsoft Teams also regularly hangs for multiple seconds when switching between teams, or between chats. Extremely aggravating.

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One thing can't wrap my head around: if I receive a big (10Mb) email through a slow connection, Outlook completely freezes until the email has finished downloading. I'm talking, not even rendering correctly, and showing white rectangles instead of drawing components. How on earth can this not be a tested use case? Is there no separate thread to connect to the Internet?

Don't know for certain, but the issue might be that it's using the same thread to scan the attachment and hang, rather than download it and hang.

A brand new laptop I bought this year can't run Windows 10, the system is basically unusable. Not a cheap laptop, either, it was one of the more expensive ones. It runs Ubuntu no problem. All of Microsofts products seem to have latency issues, and I still can't figure out for the life of me why it takes longer to open a file in Visual Studio or in Word on my gaming desktop than it does to load a current year $60 video game. I wish designers focused what they call "gamefeel" in video games: how quickly, clearly, and satisfyingly does the program react to user input.

Edit: on the other hand, computers do start up a heck of a lot faster than they used to.

I'm typing this on a 5 year old netbook that had cost me $300 back then with 2GB, which I later upgraded to 4GB. It runs Windows 10 very smoothly, it's my living room TV computer for browsing, torrenting (up to 1080p) etc. At this time I'm running Firefox, Chrome, VLC and uTorrent seeding and performance is decent, certainly not "unusable".

Notably not running visual studio or MS office.

It is probably all the spying /s

OSX capturing and buffering the password input on the login overlay is definitely nice, compared to windows 10 dropping inputs until it is ‘ready’ for the last 2 characters of my password.

Thanks to PAM on Linux, "<hostname> login: " is printed by an entirely different set of processes than the "Password: " that follows it.

At least in Windows you aren't at a TTY that echos everything to the screen by default until PAM has hauled itself (and its umpteen libraries) off the disk (yes people still have 5400RPM HDDs :D), initialized, and put the terminal into no-echo mode...

> Thanks to PAM on Linux, "<hostname> login: " is printed by an entirely different set of processes than the "Password: " that follows it.

Ah! So that's what's going on :D.

On FreeBSD, at least, you can tinker with the sshd to switch between PAM, to get "Password: " and some other sshd-internal mechanism, which prints "<whatever login you just typed>'s password: " instead. Kind of cute.

And you can always run strace -f on whatever handles login (getty, logind, systemd, etc), drop to a TTY and login, to see all the stuff that gets loaded.

I wonder why so many are talking about SSD vs. HDD in this discussion. From my experience on Linux it doesn't really matter if you have enough RAM. Yes, booting from a SSD is faster, but once everything is loaded the system mostly works on top of the RAM (waiting for FS sync is rare).

I don't know much about the situation on Windows but at least on linux your HDD is hardly going to cause lags if you have a well configured hardware setup.

> Yes, booting from a SSD is faster

Laptop users are many, and they care about boot up times. Especially since Linux power management is still awful.

This is a blatant lie that needs to stop. I've been using linux exclusively on laptops for more than 10 years. The first 5 with the HP EliteBook like, currently with Lenovo X1 line.

On my current X1 Yoga 1st gen, I do regularly get almost 1.5x the uptime on battery compared to windows 10.

We got a batch of X1 Carbon 6th gen, which are "optimized for windows 10", where the S3 sleep state was replaced by the S0I3, which is OS-assisted. The X1 Yoga with S3 can both suspend and resume faster than windows 10, despite not having S0I3 (and has longer battery lifetime to booth).

And by fast I mean that by the time the lid is up, the OS is ready. By contrast, windows 10 seems to always shuffle for several seconds after resume, even on the carbon 6th gen.

So please...

Today on Linux Evangelism 101: using a single anecdotal experience as proof that something works right always.

Sure, however I really like to see what downvoters have to say. The "power management is bad" is pretty generic, isn't it?

High-end laptop lines (Dell, HP, Lenovo) have actually pretty good linux support, they are almost always intel i5+ cpus with integrated graphics which are all very similar. There is next to zero setup required in almost any case. This is known. The drivers are tried and tested. I've never experienced any random "power management issue". Suspend/resume/battery consumption/acpi is working perfectly fine. What else does qualify for "power managment"??

I've been supporting a team of 20+ people with these lines in a mixed environment, and linux since more than a decade was always basically plug and play.

There have been some quirks in some models, which generally required some tweaks in the kernel boot line, to fix issues with backlight tweaking.

> High-end laptop lines

Sure, but Linux really ought to shine on the low-end laptops.

Linux shines also on low-end laptops as long as you're still decent hardware. Nowdays it's still generally an intel core with integrated graphics, memory and I/O controller, so the result will be pretty much the same. Old, good laptops work even better than brand new editions of current laptop lines.

But this doesn't save you from crappy hardware, which is why this kind of argument is a non-starter for me. How well does current windows editions work on low-end crappy laptops that sell for the lowest tier? Not great. These laptops have plenty of little issues on windows as well.

Maybe better than linux, because the drivers have way more work-arounds than linux has.

Have you ever seen the internal linux quirks table to work around buggy and downright horrid hardware? That's what you get with those. If it works at all is thanks to the patience of people that put in the time to work those issues around. I frankly do not blame linux if it doesn't work well with such hardware.

My wife just got the Carbon 6th gen. There is an ACPI patch to restore S3. See https://delta-xi.net/#056. Once you've got the patched dsdt.aml, I highly recommend not following their directions, and just loading the file in grub by creating /boot/grub/custom.cfg with the line:

acpi patched_dsdt.aml

This has the advantage of not requiring any manual intervention every time your kernel is updated. The downside is that if you try to dual boot W10, it will BSOD on boot with an ACPI error. To overcome this, take the original dsdt.aml and load it in a custom (not auto-probed) menu entry for windows. You can just clone the auto-probed line, and add before the chainloader line:

acpi old_dsdt.aml

I already did it, and I'm really glad I can do that since I have no use for S0I3 and I'd rather have the extended battery lifetime. However on windows there's no way to disable this sleep mode, and the laptop has consequently lasts way less when put to sleep in Windows 10, even compared to the 3rd edition (which we also have so that I can compare). How does this put linux in power management, huh?

Sadly, the 6th edition of the Carbon also runs waaay hotter than the 3rd, and I did notice occasional coil whine which was previously absent. When running normally the kernel writes regularly about thermal warnings. It seems that power and heat management is not well managed in this edition, and I see similar reports for the x1 yoga 3rd gen.

I get 6-8 hours out of my Zenbook with ArchLinux. Nowhere near the touted 9 hours of the specs, or the 12+ of the Macbook.

My system is exceptionally lean. I run bspwm and the radios are always off except WiFi. Still, I feel like I could get a lot more from this laptop. I cannot (and I certainly wouldn't want to) install Windows on dual boot to make a comparison though.

What distribution do you use?

Have you tried looking for offending processes with powertop?

How can you compare two different laptops? I'm comparing windows and linux on the same laptop.

I personally use debian unstable with a tiling window manager (awesomewm) without a specific DE. However, I generally setup Mint for all my colleagues on the same laptop lines, and there's one colleague running Arch. We all have very similar battery lifetimes.

I am not sure if I would categorize it as a lie. I think it is unprecise and probably misleading. I have very little expertise on the subject but from my perspective, it is more like a driver/support problem. If everything is supported (e.g. some Laptops, but also Smartphones) Linux has quite a good energy footprint, but there seem to be many devices out there which do not have good support (at least out of the box).

One of the problems here is that power-draining can happen by different components. Quite popular are graphics chips, but other components can be part too. For example, a friend of mine has problems with his device waking up from s2idle during transport. That is not exactly what you would expect in such a discussion, but from a users perspective, he has less time to work with his device given his usage pattern.

For me, this isn't much of a problem as I prefer working on a desktop, but I wouldn't accuse someone of being a liar just because he had a bad experience with power consumption on Linux.

Really? It works for someone like this? Damn you Apple, not for me :(.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17786400

That's only if it doesn't come from suspended sleep. If it has to actually pseudo boot, it drops.

On Win10 you need to have enough swap space on an SSD; HDD I/O has totally kneecapped latency, seemingly due to blind usage of NCQ (AHCI driver got replaced from Win7), so it chokes out entirely when combined with the even more broken swap manager.

"Enough" meaning "infinite", because you're going to have something leaking all that memory. Task manager doesn't even show memory usage by default (add the "commit size" field), only the working set (and the swapping is insanely aggressive, so memory leaks just don't show up). Nobody seems to actually check that; even built-in stuff like Windows Update leaks pretty badly.

Oh and the memory accounting doesn't even work.

This is strange. I run a 6 year old PC with win 10 on it. It has 4GB of RAM. I use an SSD and an M.2 drive. The thing is snappy as hell. I face zero lags, jitters, or switching delays at all. I get the feeling that writing things to disk is causing delays.

I had a friend telling me "check out my new computer it's so snappy!" once and the darn thing was so slow it made my hands shake from the stress. Can't believe anyone on the internet telling they don't have any lag.

Every time we get snappier hardware, we just add more software bloat. I pretty much run two kinds of GUI apps (on Linux with a lightweight, tiling window manager): web browsers and terminals. My terminal apps are always very snappy, the web browsers not so much. I'm of the opinion that the computer should wait for me, not the other way around. Doesn't seem to work out that way with "modern UIs".

I run a 6 core desktop with 32G, and 1TB M2 SSD, and after an upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10 last Christmas, input lag in mintty terminals was dramatically worse. Even just holding down a key and observing the stream of characters at 15 per second or whatever my repeat rate is, it glitches and stutters.

Ubuntu w/Gnome is possibly the worst offender. I actually like Gnome a lot but anytime I leave my PC on for more than a day the UI gets incredibly sluggish. Just moving windows around gets choppy and there is a annoying pause whenever I click the application launcher (happens even without the animation).

I've also found macOS provides the smoothest experience. I haven't found W10 that bad, but I haven't used it that extensively. I really only boot into Windows to play games these days.

I have the same problem at home. Oddly, my computer at work doesn't have this problem. Both run Ubuntu with Gnome.

I'm running Gnome and for the most part it has been excellent; Linux in general, though, still has a lot of trouble maintaining good UI speed at the same time as I/O throughput. I'm on Fedora, and dnf/rpm is an excellent example - even though I'm on an SSD, I can tell when something is updating in the background because stuff will lag for a little while. It feels like this has been a problem forever, and while it has definitely improved over time it's still not really possible to say, in a simple way, "I care more about interactivity than other stuff, prioritise that" (as far as I know, anyway).

> while it has definitely improved over time it's still not really possible to say, in a simple way, "I care more about interactivity than other stuff, prioritise that

that's not what mainline kernel optimizes for, you have to use liquorix or another kernel (https://liquorix.net/)

You would assume that big guys like RedHat would already have done this for you.

RedHat's business is servers' support: it's quite logical that the desktop they provide is as much as possible similar to the server's configuration because developers will test on their workstation.. So no, I don't expect that RedHat will do this.

I've found alt-f2 then r (ie. restarting gnome) puts it back in as good a state as a fresh boot. Sometimes my extensions won't load and this also restarts those.

Just tried this and it works great. Much better solution than rebooting. Thanks!

This doesn’t work under Wayland. Is there a way to something similar on Wayland.

Using Fedora 27 with Wayland, I have not found a way to do this other than logging out and back in :/

You should try cinnamon. There's no accounting for taste, but after using gnome 3 for three years I tried cinnamon (version 3.6, older versions weren't good) and I found it better across the board.

Tried it with for my now very old netbooks (because 1024x600 is low-res now), kept it on my desktop machine because it's simple, out of the way and fast.

I love Cinnamon and run it on a few machines, and as soon as they sort out mixed DPI support I'll be switching back from Gnome on my main machine too. It's been a while since I've tested actually...

I've been very happy with Cinnamon for a while on Mint 18.x, and since I upgraded to Mint 19 last night, Cinnamon is even better. It's just a bunch of small improvements all over, that just make the overall experience that much better.

There's a bad memory leak in gnome-shell which was found & fixed back in March, but the Ubuntu devs still haven't merged the full fix into Bionic for some reason: https://bugs.launchpad.net/gnome-shell/+bug/1672297

Edit: Having tried in on my laptop, installing the gjs + libgjs0g version 1.53.3 debs from http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/g/gjs/ onto a bionic install seems to work fine. Worth trying if this bug is affecting you?

I just stayed with Mate with Compiz (Ubuntu Mate) and my desktop is still as snappy as it was during Gnome 2 days.

I've recently given KDE Plasma a try and was really impressed by it's speed and smoothness.

I think it shows when your desktop does not rely on interpreted langues so much.

KDE Plasma is written mostly in QML, so JavaScript.

Mostly? Nope, just the UI elements. Much of the heavy lifting is done by KDE framework and Qt libraries (C++).

AFAIK it gets compiled AOT to C++ code. Technically, should be pretty fast out of the box.

I should probably make a video of me opening an i7 2017 Macbook Pro with 16 GB RAM and waiting 3-5 seconds until the system allows me to type the password (also, I sometimes switch to Czech keyboard, and High Sierra has a bug where it randomly shows one input language as active in a top right but actually uses a different input language in a password field - this happens in about half of login attempts).

This isn’t how it used to be. Sigh.

Meanwhile my experience is opposite. I use Windows 7 at home and OSX for work. My personal machine is responsive, zippy, and most important of all, predictable

Meanwhile, my SSD filled work mac bogs down in completely unpredictable ways, with weird antivirus scans that I cannot control somehow destroying javascript performance, and needing to be rebooted more than weekly to stay functional in multiple ways. I was similarly dissatisfied with OSX in the mid 2000s when I used it at school. I just don't get it

At work we've recently moved from XP to Win7 and they seem to perform about the same for heavy office use.

I'm playing with a Win10 machine at home, the CPU and RAM is far in excess of our work machines but it is so slow to use. It seems to regularly become unresponsive, programs take ages to start, it seems to be continually working away in the background doing 'nothing'. It's a truly horrible experience.

i really like office 365 but the most productive thing i ever did was get rid of it on my work machine and install office 2010 again. it's just so much snappier there is no comparison. (although i also tried office 2003 for a day and boy it's blazingly fast. on a modern system you don't even see the startup screen, not to mention any input lag.)

Just curious, is that windows machine possibly not on an SSD? My windows 10 rig opens a profile faster than my MacBook

Ya, I just built a new windows 10 rig. I went for single core speed over more cores (i7 8086k) for the very reason of stamping out any UI lag.

It's buttery smooth and I get no noticeable lag. Exactly 7 seconds from power button to login screen on a cold boot too.

A fair question, but both SSDs so it's definitely not that. Since we're on hardware differences though the Macbook Pro is 3 years old and has a quad-core i7, whereas the Windows 10 laptop is 1 year old and has a dual-core i7. I'm not in love with having only dual cores but I don't think that's the issue either.

its not about opening the profile its about getting to enter your password from a locked screen - i love my w10 machine and its quite snappy when logged in but every unlock has this half-second or so lag until it lets me enter my password - i suspect the animation of the appearing login-form but who knows...

Windows 10 is really inconsistent. I have it running in a VM on a Fedora host and it's snappy as hell. Also on a pretty basic office-spec Celeron, but then running it on a new Ryzen 7 sometimes it lags. I don't think it's directly related to the performance of the hardware, there must be something else going on.

Windows 10 has all kids of debuggers enabled on millions of computers, MS calls this telemetry :) Go to Management and check out startup event trace sessions. Those are the source of mysterious >hundreds of megabytes of logs written to disk per day.

Virus and malware checks could be slowing things down

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