And have you looked through the diagnostic data Windows sends? That cannot be turned off without hacks? They get live notifications when you add or remove hardware, software, when an application has crashed (even when error reporting is off), …. The data contains unique identifiers for your system and user. I don’t even want to know what’s sent when you select full diagnostics.
Windows is a privacy and performance nightmare. It’s good for two things only: corporate environments (manageability) and games.
---
Well, sorry about that. Just had to get this off my chest.
Have you tried running without antivirus? Some parts of Windosw are still slow eg the filesystem, but the main thing making everything slow is antivirus software IME, including Defender.
I don’t know what’s wrong with my work PC. Home PC also has Windows (because games) and is super fast (even with Defender, but without ATP).
You should have a serious talk with your IT department. Sometimes they are not aware how much garbage they are throwing at people through Active Directory.
In my experience, the best way around such issues is to force IT to dogfood their own system instead of having special laptops for IT employees.
Also, in my experience, many people just don’t care. I understand, too. It’s just easier this way. Not caring is great for your mental health.
If most of your colleagues feel the state of things is tolerable, nothing will change.
Or just BYOD :)
(or at least shut all the "windows 10" stuff and return to something that look like Windows 2000?)
https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-steer-clear-of-windows-...
They are less brazen about it, I had to look in my Applications list.
https://www.howtogeek.com/269331/how-to-disable-all-of-windo...
Pro runs just fine on a laptop.
When people talk about Candy Crush they mean they see it first thing when they start Windows Store as a recommendation. It is definitely not pre-installed on Pro, if it is I haven’t found it in 4 years...
It's unusable on spinning rust now. Basic UI interactions lag badly. I think they hit disk a ton and just rely on SSDs to hide it, but of course it's still harming performance, just less noticeably. Plus who knows what other bad resource-use patterns have crept in, if that has.
> And have you looked through the diagnostic data Windows sends? That cannot be turned off without hacks?
I've done the hacks and still don't feel confident it's not spying on me—which, why is my OS spyware now? WTF. Plus it still shows me ads on my lock screen. And, it's a small thing, but having to unlock my lock screen before I can start typing my password is incredibly stupid. No if I just start typing it doesn't go in the password box, it misses the first 2-3 characters. Yes I'm on an SSD and have a ton of RAM and all that.
1) it hardly matters since the point is that excessive disk access by an OS when, essentially, "nothing is happening" (opening the start menu, say) is a bad sign for generally giving-a-shit about performance and spinning rust just exposes the error,
2) they pushed Win10 upgrades on a bunch of well-performing spinning rust Win7 machines back in the middle of 2015, not 2020, immediately making them much worse,
3) most normal home users don't replace hard drives, don't replace their computer very often, buy the cheapest thing they can aside from that they think higher number = better and are often up-sold a large (=spinning rust) drive they don't need and can be up-sold because they buy them at real stores (yes, really), and only very recently did SSDs mostly displace magnetic platters on base configurations of cheap mass-market desktops. I guarantee a high percentage of home users are still booting off traditional HDDs, yes, even in 2020, and they're exactly the same sort not to have been able to figure out how to not upgrade to Win10.
I usually find the text less readable on Windows than it's on Linux or a Mac. Not sure it's an issue with Edge, my monitor's Gamma or what, but it just looks better on Linux (and perfect on a Mac).
- Windows 10 basically requires an SSD to get reasonable responsiveness. You could maybe get away with putting a disk image on an SSD, but for serious use it's best to dedicate a whole disk or partition to it.
- QEMU's default display adapter started "leaking" pending IO requests at one point, which grinds the VM from full speed to a halt over the course of an hour or so. I ended up disabling the display adapter and moving to just RDP, which is basically an even trade since the RDP client can do everything the SPICE client can.
You can preallocate the disk image for the VM. It's reasonable. YMMV and I don't do anything resembling heavy lifting on the Windows machines.
Running a Linux VM was pretty friction-free, and I could use all the company mandated tools that had to be run in Windows simultaneously without performance issues. WIth a windows guest, I wouldn't run it unless I needed one of those tools, but that required a fairly long spin-up time.
Like I said... almost a decade ago so they probably aren't problems now. I'm running Linux native right now, but again for the ease of corporate support, I may go with Windows + WSL2 for my next refresh.
Indeed. I used to keep a Windows box for the smartcard reader bureaucratic obligations with the Brazilian government that I never managed to accurately emulate on VMs.
I'm happy things are much better now.
So some awkwardness is to be expected.
Also WSL doesn't solve:
* forced Windows updates when you don't need them
* shitload of failed updates: bricked OS, deleted user data etc
* stupid non-uninstallable game icons in start menu, a lot of vendor-forever-locked garbage like cortana & one drive
* bad fs performance in general
You probably should be using a windows pro install and not one with crapware from the manufacturer
However some time the past months I realized I don't think about Windows much... which means it's no longer constantly annoying me.
There are still stupid things, like Apps display language not being tied to the OS display language setting (wtf?!), but I can live with that. On a day to day basis my machine stays on, is performant, and does what I ask it to.
The domain admin could too, but they're mostly just there to get their paycheck, not to improve your experience so they won't bother.
* forced Windows updates when you don't need them
* shitload of failed updates: bricked OS, deleted user data etc
* stupid non-uninstallable game icons in start menu, a lot of vendor-forever-locked garbage like cortana & one drive
* bad fs performance in general
I'll add a couple of my own (and be a more restrained in my opinions)
* Windows + WSL is a hybrid environment. Files are on different places depending on from where you are looking. It feels like developing within Docker containers, without the power and flexibility.
* Low observability: very few programs log things and, while there is excellent system wide plumbing for that, very few programs are using it.
* PowerShell makes some questionable choices. For instance, "curl" is a built-in command that has different switches from its Unix homonym. It'd cost absolutely nothing to have a different name for that.
I usually Win+Q or pin to taskbar to run program, almost never look at the default Live Tile.
PowerShell's syntax make me mad too, some Office 365 enterprise management tools is only available in Windows PowerShell only (You cannot run it in PowerShell of MacOS or Linux), so wired.
I was considering moving back to Windows since the new MBP lineup is so disappointing, but no TimeMachine, too many useless feature (Live Tile and so on) made me stick on MacOS.
That was, of course, a really terrible idea considering how differently they worked so fortunately they’ve killed that in the latest versions of PoSH.
It was always possible to change those aliases in the old version of PoSH as well though.
You can remove them now. At least I was able to in the Windows 10 v.2004 update. Why Candy Crush is included with Windows 10 Pro however is beyond me.
What's the deal with this sudden hatred towards nonsense that was installed 35 years ago as well and had a way bigger impact on system resources (in terms of disk space and screen real-estate) than Candy Crush?
Is it because it's a mobile port - too colourful and too in-your-face about it being a mindless pastime than a boomer-style virtual card game that even came with a "boss-key"?
Candy Crush is given prime real estate in the start menu, and is a highly commercial game with in-app-purchases. It's a straight-up advert.
I mean, everybody knows you’re supposed to sneak in a game or two in between spreadsheets.
I have never had a bricked OS from an windows update
You know you can unpin stuff from the start menu to get rid of clutter.
Remember when Windows 10 was released and there were reports that Windows 8 would literally automatically update to Windows 10 without user intervention [1]. My mother's laptop did that and it bricked her install.
The OS taking over control of updates is totally user-hostile. 'Core hours' is just giving a little bit of that control back, it's not a solution.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/15/windows-1...
If you do have some long task like rendering that takes hours, thats of-course trickier.
- You can disable updates
- I'm on the insider version and this has never happened to me, let alone for 'normal' users.
- You can uninstall all of that stuff
- It's not that bad, I work on a decentralised database and we have similar performance across Windows and Linux. Windows was a bit tougher to do but it got there :)
Two years ago Microsoft released an update that killed Windows on my brand new (at the time) desktop (i7-8700k, gtx 1080). I thought "no big deal, I'll boot up my old desktop and deal with it later" but when I turned on that machine (i5-2500k, rx480), it applied the same update and also killed the Windows install. At that point I gave up on using a desktop for the day and booted up Windows on my laptop (i7-7700HQ, gtx 1050m), only to have that also install the update and kill the install.
I'd had Windows updates break before that, but always on one machine so it was easy to write off as some driver quirk or something weird I had installed.
You seem to be assuming everyone else is frequently having a problem because you have had it. In reality, these events are rare, which the overwhelming majority of people not having any issue.
I’ve bricked windows by being dumb but I’ve also bricked Linux by being dumb. Sometimes I feel like it’s cool to hate Windows, like it’s cool to hate Java.
I am the first port of call for IT issues of the whole family, including grandma. Like 10 people, and the last time we had issue caused by windows update was like 5 years ago when a laptop was trying to update to W10 from W8. That required a bit of manual intervention.
Game icons certainly arent there for me any more.
Whats the issue with Onedrive? I mean, its preinstalled, but you dont have to run it.
TBF though, my 2013 desktop never gave me a single issue on Windows..
So your co-workers already use Linux (for free, I guess), but now you're trying to convince them to use a restricted Linux version that also costs money. How's that?
Upd: why downvotes? My Librem 15 and Lenovo T400 both work flawlessly for many years. They are designed for GNU/Linux.
The battery thing is really a killer for me.
All x86 servers, PCs, and laptops are designed to run Windows by adhering to a specification issued by Microsoft and certified by running a suite of compatibility tests provided by Microsoft (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/test/hlk/). The free OSes are piggybacking on that; there is no independent, neutral standard for the architecture of x86 PCs.
> "My Librem 15 and Lenovo T400 both work flawlessly for many years. They are designed for GNU/Linux."
Linux isn't even listed as a supported OS for the T400 on Lenovo's support site: https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/solutions/pd005598
The one thing that is annoying is when using multiple monitors of different resolutions, Wayland doesn't seem to scale resolution on a per-monitor basis. With the laptop being 4k this is an issue when working anywhere but at home, I tend to just use the laptop screen (which is excellent btw).
Stuff that worked without any extra config that in the past might not have been so smooth: wifi, fingerprint reader, thunderbolt dock with keyboard, mouse, monitor, external USB soundblaster and network cable plugged in), sleep, hibernate.
Any other laptop will boot linux, but you'll end up with a lot of rough edges...
For example, on the laptop I'm typing this on (latest Ubuntu, old Acer 511G):
* Random hangs every few days - some unpatched processor bug related to sleep states.
* Wifi diconnects randomly.
* Hotkeys don't work
* Screen sometimes dims itself to zero, and since the hotkeys don't work, it's rather tricky to fix.
* Bluetooth doesn't work
* Hibernate and sleep are disabled by default and you have to go into a config file to enable them. SD card doesn't work after sleeping more than 3 times.
* Fans don't work at all. System throttles almost immediately under any load.
* There must be some issue with the SSD losing writes because even journaled ext4 seems to get data corruption after an unclean poweroff.
* External monitors don't support hdmi audio.
* of the 3 USB ports, 2 don't work for anything more than charging devices.
* webcam LED state seems random, and does not correlate to webcam usage at all.
All on one device!
Linux on Thinkpad is great. Linux on any other hardware that core kernel devs don't use day to day is almost unusable due to these thousands of rough edges.
Running on 2 old Dells and an Asus with no problems (Ubuntu 18.04, upgraded in place from 16.04). Your statement is absurd on its face just based on its generality.
Of the things you've listed, I can't say anything about external HDMI audio because I don't have one, and the default hibernate thing I can confirm. Every other one I've never had, much less daily.
Fedora's compositor is Mutter/Gnome Shell, which the above critique seems to be about.
I just bought a Surface Laptop 3, and the machine is great. The hardware is nice, Windows on a laptop has improved tenfold since I've last used it. WSL2 means Linux isn't left out.
It's one machine/OS combo that does everything for me, including light gaming, whereas Linux and macOS both have significant compromises when using them.
WSL2 works fine and it also means that when I want to game I have a wider selection of games to play.
Anyhow, my target initiating Linux to wasn't precisely gamers either.
I run Ubuntu on my work Dell Latitude (i3wm), Debian on my personal System 76 (Mate) and both work more or less flawlessly, although I do agree with the guy who said Battery is not great.
I also have a Desktop with Windows and Linux dual booting, and while I agree Windows is quite polished when it works, I also find a million little annoyances.
e.g. I don't have working VNC server at all on latest Fedora, with either X11 or Wayland, and no sign of it being fixed anytime soon.
And that is just one of many irritations with desktop linux, that simply don't occur on Windows, mostly because of MS superior QA
You're comparing an OS that hasn't had a major release in almost 5 years to a bleeding edge Linux distribution. Install an older LTS version of Ubuntu or Debian and things will be quite stable.
Every single one of them has had various annoying bugs that would not have survived decent QA.
But your point is partially correct - at least the LTS releases had workarounds for the problems, whereas with Fedora I am SOL
- (fractional) scaling actually works quite well. - the shell works a big better. Feels like a good compromise between gnomes simplicity and KDEs over the top customisability to me. KDE has actually been the most stable out of the three though. - (Nvidia) driver support. Using Manjaro I had to reinstall the Nvidia driver every couple of months because a kernel update broke things. Again, not huge but annoying. - Working hardware video decoding in firefox. On Linux playing videos results in significantly higher CPU load, noise, slowed down browser, etc. Even on a fast machine.
With wsl2 I can now do all my development in that environment and don't need to live with windows slow file system, missing package manager, etc. The remote development features of VSCode with wsl (and other ssh hosts) are also simply amazing.
My experience shows WSL is passable, but it often feels "hacky" and incoherent. For professional work it just doesn't feel right to me. Plus the usability of Windows OS itself is just a complete mess... Honestly, I'd rather just run a regular VM with linux and full-screen that, rather than deal with Windows with Linux bolted on to the side.
If work is paying, I'm still going macbook, as I don't really care about the reliability aspect of the machine nor the insane cost of peripherals/the laptop itself. If I'm paying, I'll probably go for a Dell or Lenovo machine and install Linux. I just can't stand using windows any more.
My next machine will probably be windows, even though I dislike Microsoft and everything they're about.