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Comment by narag | Hacker News Reader

Where is the blame?

Not sure, but sound stopped working in VLC about one year ago and was restored this month at the same time that dropping files stopped working. Every time after a Windows update and with the same VLC version.

I don't think Windows is too bloated or memory-inefficient, but I do believe that they're abusing the AV and "monitoring" stuff. It's a cat & mouse game, with me trying to disable crap and they re-enabling it with every update or simply making impossible to disable annoyances.

Also I suspect they're trying to "fix" drivers that worked before the fixes.

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> I don't think Windows is too bloated or memory-inefficient.

You know I used to be on that boat up until very very recently. I have a 2019 HP Stream 10" with 32GB eMMC and soldered 4GB DDR4. Windows got it bricked on a botched update, so I installed Linux Mint to get it back up quickly.

Not only is Linux using a lot less storage (which was always and issue with Windows Update), but the RAM usage is about 700MB without any applications running, and well under 4GB for most common uses. Sure, Chrome(ium) will eat a hefty chunk of it when you run it, between zram-config and some extra swap space, it handles things a lot better than Windows ever did.

Antoher point of anecdata: shared libraries are actually shared a lot more between processes on Linux than on Windows. That tends to mean a lot less RAM usage on certain process. I know it's down to how they handle sharing things and that Windows takes the "safe" approach (pretty much what the article talks about!) but it ends up hitting memory a lot more than Linux and macOS.

The safe approach to me is exactly their answer to the tradeoff question.

Forcing the application developers to be cautious is just changing who needs to be safe, because reducing problems for your app while increasing overall system instability is still bumping up against the issue at hand.

It is sort of like how someone might be upset with speed limits, but the people who set the speed limits aren't thinking about your particular desire to get to work today, but the overall flow of traffic and public safety needs.

I realize linux still has out-of-memory handling and various safeguards in their memory management, but it is sort of like arguing whether to set the speed limit at 50 or 60. Nobody is actually right, it is just different preferences.

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