Their QA is nothing short of shitty at the moment therefore I suspect this is business as usual going forwards.
Windows 10 is literally death by a thousand paper cuts for me.
Windows 10 is literally death by a thousand paper cuts for me.
* explorer, and even in general file operations are dead slow for some reason. an expand of a zip from explorer with a couple of 10s of thousands of files can take an hour, while in WSL takes maybe a minute. explorer also takes its sweet time to load, including in open dialogs. This being on a near top-of-the-line 480s with 24GB Ram and 1TB SSD.
* windows don't remember their previous position on multi-screens.
* copying in terminal sometimes seems to work, sometimes not.
* terminal beeps at you on every tab with more than one option, always have to keep sound muted.
* bluetooth menu is glitchy and there's no standard quick way to connect to a previous device.
* no idea whether that's win10, spotify or thinkpad software, but hitting a media key produces a NON DISMISSIBLE big overlay for spotify that just hangs there for a good 10 seconds and blocks the stuff I want to click.
* solution for a full taskbar? just make it scroll with very small scroll buttons...
* some older Logitech mouse I connect has buggy assignment of forward/back keys - does a completely random operation instead. Windows doesn't seem to have a GUI-way to set this stuff up
* terminal has no tabs and crappy colors and I don't wanna go down the rabbit hole of trying to integrate WSL with a non-default terminal emulator. I've installed the spring update, won't touch october one for a while at least.
* there's no integration of WSL & windows GUI layer. Have to start an X-Server separately and have Linux GUI-tools instead. If I seriously need that I will simply switch to a Linux distro instead (which given the above I start to suspect I should have done from the beginning).
I assumed they pushed it to market before it was ready, allowing users to find the bugs to save on testing costs (helping justify why it was free). Only, now, years later, the start menu still lags, and things still open behind other things.
Combined with all the mysterious data it sends to various IP's, I think that when you press Start, those first 300 ms are spent as part of some sort of distributed computing effort.
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Search]
"ConnectedSearchUseWeb"=dword:00000000
"AllowCortana"=dword:00000000
There ought to be an unofficial Windows 10 Settings app that uncovers stuff like this. Somehow Microsoft isn't quite getting it right and they ship Windows 10 with two different ones...
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Search]You’ll find the slow file operations are entirely down to NTFS. Regardless of how you play around in fsutil it’s hopeless on lots of small files. This incidentally makes WSL unbearably slow. Hence why I still use VirtualBox and putty.
edit: fine example as I got a downvote.
SVN checkout on windows NTFS 8 minutes 30 seconds
SVN checkout on same kit on ext4 48 seconds.
This problem scales to git as well, so is not SVN related. Anything that does lots of small writes, so basically anything unixy, suffers like this.
I'm sure there are many metrics on which HFS is superior to NTFS; and probably many metrics where NTFS is superior. NT (and MS in general) has never philosophically worked well with more than N of X, wherever N is significantly larger than a consumer would deal with - whether it's processes, files, TCP connections, whatever. Their consumer heritage usually finds a way to shine through.
Didn't bother to check the numbers, but it was order of magnitude for sure. Way more than just noticeable.
To be honest, when NTFS was conceived it probably didn't have as a design goal that common Unix patterns should be fast. After all, Unix applications use the file system for lots of things where Windows has different mechanisms for that purpose.
SVN sadly has to traverse the complete working copy and lock every single directory individually because every directory is also a working copy on its own. Most of the time SVN spends on, e.g., update, is spent on locking and unlocking. Git/hg only need to do this in one place and avoid that problem.
This is because the small files are stored on the MFT which is global read/write locked.
Is Spotify, go to settings, display options and deselect "Show desktop overlay when using media keys". For some time I had to do that after every Spotify update, but seems to stick now
Windows has annoyances, but Linux is like building a car in a garage full of car parts. Yes, you can build a working car, but you better be a mechanic.
So... our choice now is between a great OS on laptops with next to no I/O and totally unacceptable keyboard, OR great hardware running on an OS that's put together with duct-tape and strings?
At this point, for me the best option is charge more and put up with windows being a dick periodically.
What do I use now?
A second hand i5 T440, because it's more productive.
However, the (sad?) truth is for most people, MacBooks works just fine, but they aren't vocal about that. Personally, I thought I'd hate the new ones, but was given one for work, and it's fine - to the point where I bought one for home, too
I've been running ubuntuMATE for years on my t450s. It is remarkably boring. The only things that don't work for me is the fingerprint reader and docking/undocking can be funny if done hot.
But for most people, the discrete graphics option is easier and more stable, but counter-intuitive - usually more power is better. So worth mentioning.
(Or you can't have them at all without an extension, yeah, that too...)
Windows has progressed by leaps and bounds since 2003. Linux, not so much. We have this fixation on building something, then deciding it's full of legacy code that doesn't allow us to build what we really want, so we throw it out and do it all over again.
The good news is that we've been on the "building" side of this pattern for a while. The bad news is that we've been on the "building" side of this pattern for a while so I expect there's not much time left until the next "revolution"...
Then something happened and Canonical went crazy with NIH and mobile obsession. Then they tried to monetize in a stupid way.
I am a KDE user and I watched this from the side sao I am not invested in any camp, what we see is that when a meinteiner with big ego controls a project (it happened with KDE Plasma too) you can't bring any improvement that the meinteiner does not agree with.
KDE has explicit settings to remember window position which works well. As for icons, I haven't had icons on my desktop besides a dock for years, so can't tell you.
How are things in XFCE land, do you have a sane "Open file" dialog, or do its (so, so few...) applications use the new and improved GTK 3 version? Speaking of which, has it moved to GTK 3 completely, or do only some of its tools work on hi-DPI screens, and only with a few themes?
You open whatever terminal you want and run the WSL command, by the way. So just 'wsl' or 'bash' or 'ubuntu', etc.
There's not actually a rabbit hole. You don't need to change the default launcher.
I like Windows 10 and generally have been happy with it -- but that particular behavior has been driving me nuts for a while. They really need to fix it.
"But think of the security!" they'll say... of course, it's always a tradeoff. I've experienced a similar problem with a large growing logfile --- appending becomes essentially quadratic, every time the process closes the log the AV opens and scans all of it.
I first noticed it when I would open my downloads folder (because I'm a heathen and never clean it out), and it would sit there and "process" for fifteen minutes. Just clicking realtime protection off fixed it instantly -- but it would seem there's no need to re-scan every file every time a folder is opened, scan them when I click on them, or scan them when I try to open them, or scan them in the background while I still can interact with the folder. Being unresponsive is a cardinal sin for any UX, and that's where Apple shines and MS still continues to drop the ball.
Like I said, I really like Windows 10 -- but it really falls short here.
Frankly I think the entire concept of AV is bankrupt as it always causes many more problems than it is worth. Both false positives and false negatives are common. You shouldn't be afraid of running without Defender because, like all AV, it isn't very good at catching real threats anyway. If you really want to feel safe there are much better ways of doing that, like running untrusted programs in sandboxes or VMs, or using Software Restriction Policies to whitelist what can and cannot run. I haven't played with it at all, but there's even Controlled Folder Access to limit FS rights by application, which isn't a terrible idea given the era of crypto-ransomware.
As you say, CFA is probably the most useful part of Windows Defender. I was very glad to see that included.
Don't underestimate Microsoft's willingness to keep their system as a minimum that gets enhanced by third parties.
I found the WSL console to be a at least a bit more reliable.
> * windows don't remember their previous position on multi-screens.
Not an OS concern. Most applications do remember, by the way.
> * terminal beeps at you on every tab with more than one option, always have to keep sound muted.
Windows terminal doesn’t have a bell. WSL does, as does macOS or anything Linux/UNIX really. You can disable it of course. Google "wsl disable bell".
Either way, nothing new or objectively bad.
> * no idea whether that's win10, spotify or thinkpad software, but hitting a media key produces a NON DISMISSIBLE big overlay for spotify that just hangs there for a good 10 seconds and blocks the stuff I want to click.
That’s mostly Spotify. It can be disabled in settings. Windows only shows the volume "slider", which is gone after 5 seconds
* some older Logitech mouse I connect has buggy assignment of forward/back keys - does a completely random operation instead. Windows doesn't seem to have a GUI-way to set this stuff up
Nothing is "random". Except perhaps when the device is broken. Mouse buttons 1-5 have been well-defined for 10+ years now.
> * terminal has no tabs and crappy colors and I don't wanna go down the rabbit hole of trying to integrate WSL with a non-default terminal emulator. I've installed the spring update, won't touch october one for a while at least.
Yes, it sucks. You can either enable SSH and SSH into WSL or just use wsltty (which offers bell options!).
> * there's no integration of WSL & windows GUI layer.
That’s a given. WSL is only for developers.
Actually that's a UWP / Windows Feature that music apps such as Spotify can hook into to display Now Playing info and media controls
Okay, the tabs thing we haven't been able to fix yet, but if you want to change the console colors real quick, you can use ColorTool:
https://github.com/Microsoft/console/tree/master/tools/Color...
Also, it you want a tab-like experience, you could always try tmux. It's a linux commandline tool that gives you tabs, panes, and all sorts of other goodies, and as of 1809 you can even use cmd.exe within it.
If you can get your hands on Windows Thin PC (Cut down Windows 7) you can eek out the support until November 2021.
Thinks work, OS doesn't get in my way anyhow, its fast and takes relatively little RAM (well not compared to XP but these days its OK).
Never tried Win10 because everything seemed worse, but I had hope they would polish things over the years. When I read comments here, it doesn't seem so. Sad story...
I require OS to just not get into my way, make hardware and software work flawlessly, take as little system resources as possible and ideally make me unaware of itself. I don't spend time in OS and what it provides, I spent time in software running on it.
Files-related operations done in Total commander, way more efficient tool than anything MS ever created in past 30 years (once you get used to it). Anything else is also 3rd party.
2. Windows 10 have Linux subsystem which is good enough replacement for my Linux VM I always used for some tasks.
3. Windows 10 have multiple desktop support, much better than macOS for my needs, for example (those desktops are actually separate, so I can have gaming setup on one desktop, work setup on another, hobby setup on another and they are like different computers).
4. Windows 10 have notification support which is nice to have.
5. Windows 10 have awesome improvements for good old cmd. It's really bad feeling when I have to use cmd with old Windows versions.
6. Search in Start menu is useful (I don't remember whether Windows 7 had that). Also Windows 10 had tons of tiny features which are not very noticeable until you don't have them. Win+X, for example.
It does not get into my way any more than other Windows versions (I'm always reading those scary stories about sudden updates but I don't really experience that, once a month my "power off" button replaced with "update and power off" and that's all I notice. I have enough system resources (16 GB RAM) so those are not really any concern for me (Google Chrome sometimes eats more resources). I don't spend any significant time with OS, I'm using Intellij Idea, I'm using Google Chrome, I'm playing some games, system just works.