What I find so frustrating is that Windows, under the hood, is so solid.
It's just the UI with Bing/Ads/telemetrics/etc integration is so crap, like they've ruined a solid OS with crappy surface level stuff.
It's just the UI with Bing/Ads/telemetrics/etc integration is so crap, like they've ruined a solid OS with crappy surface level stuff.
Apple also, due to the hardware business, adheres to a release schedule where features must all be consolidated onto single branches (“convergence”), rather than letting individual teams ship incrementally.
What? I've never seen the taskbar clock ever move.
A quick google search doesn't bring my issue up (I'll try to take a screenshot next time it happens, but I'm usually too annoyed of having to use windows to think about it). But it did bring up a separate issue, where the right-hand side icons area (system tray?) and the clock are moved down so that only the top of the date is showing. I've never had that one.
I think these are lag-related, as in things move when something opens. But if the thing before didn't complete or something, the new thing happening doesn't get to remove the old one as expected.
The other day, on a PC that was doing whatever it is that windows does when the CPU fan goes full tilt while pretending to be asleep (complete with the blinking power light), after waking it up, I managed to have both the notification center and the quick settings displayed. I mistakenly clicked on the notification, then immediately on the settings. The notification panel took forever to show up, and it showed while the settings panel was still showing.
> ...the UI with Bing/Ads/telemetrics/etc integration is so crap...
That's the logic. Using Windows web components is similar to using Google products.
Where do you see MacOS ruining 30 year old binaries?
Apple has the benefit of controlling both hw and sw and still manage to mess it up.
Random crashes, slowdowns for long running sessions, crappy UI (eg those labels not checking their checkboxes in Settings), network weirdness (both USB ethernet dongles/hubs and internal WiFi), my USB audio interface picking up garbled audio which requires reselecting audio interface for it to fix itself...
Maybe I am doing something different, but it's even worse than Linux for the most part.
Random things on top of my head :
MacOS doesn't come with candy crush, Instagram, TikTok, Spotify etc. prepopulating your start menu. Phone home telemetry and ads in OS ? Yummy
Dealing with Windows dev environment is always a PITA eventually - unless you're doing stuff where Windows is first class citizen (like games). For backend stuff it's almost implicit that you're running on Linux in prod and macos is well supported because it's fairly similar. On Windows it's always some path issues, stuff randomly breaking between updates, missing/incompatible CLI, etc.
Brew is pretty good. Chocolatey is garbage.
MacOS is fairly visually consistent. Windows regularly has me in Windows XP era screens, reached through 3 inconsistent UX steps developed along the way. Even Linux is better in this regard.
I like Linux when it works. Mac works more often. Windows is just a dumpster fire at this point.
MacOS also has telemetry.
>For backend stuff it's almost implicit that you're running on Linux in prod and macos is well supported because it's fairly similar.
Then Windows would be better than MacOS in this regard because WSL2 is exactly Linux, not just "fairly similar" to Linux.
>stuff randomly breaking between updates
What stuff broke for you between updates? Our entire DS team develops in windows + WSL2 and nothing broke for them in ~5 years. Maybe they know how to use a computer.
Ultimately just use what you like and what makes you productive, no need to crusade for some big corporation. The OS is just a tool for your job, like a hammer.
Surely you aren't making the argument that Microsoft is generous enough to let you remove their bloatware?
You quoted what I said then turned it into this strawman for a snarky jab: "Surely you aren't making the argument that Microsoft is generous enough to let you remove their bloatware?"
>at least before you edited your comment to remove it.
I removed more points because the comment was getting huge.
Seems uncalled for.
And who do I trust more - company that bundles third party crap ware and openly talks about OS ads as monetization avenue. Or a company selling me xxxx$ machine and wanting to sell me a next one with the OS in the future. As much as I dislike Apple walled garden - their incentive structure is way more aligned with me than Microsoft desktop.
> Then Windows would be better than MacOS in this regard because WSL2 is exactly Linux, not just "fairly similar" to Linux.
Haven't seen that be better than a VM.
Doing anything WSL on Windows FS is dog slow and vice versa, split toolsets conflicts (different git config between host and guest, different SSH). Just SSH into a VM - it's a way better experience - the boundaries are clear and the editors know the implications of working on a remote machine.
Not saying you can't use Windows, but you can also eat from a trough - I just prefer not to.
You throw a lot of stones considering how fragile your glass house is. Apples is the same company that wanted to scan your phone, that you bought and own, for child porn and report you to the authorities if something was found.
How you or anyone can blindly trust them after that is beyond me. Trust no major corporation regardless of how shiny their products are is my life motto.
>Haven't seen that be better than a VM.
It is, that's why people use it. Look up tutorials online.
I take that as a feature and is the whole crux of this discussion. I don't need ODBC or many such archaic features but if someday I need to use it, I trust it will be working.
YMMV but my experience is the opposite. Windows is a perfectly usable dev environment. The only time I face issues is when developers don’t choose to use cross platform tools.
> Chocolatey is garbage.
I’ll give you this one, but that’s why anyone serious on Windows is using scoop.
Now have you tried uninstalling Apple Music ? or found a way to disable it from launching everytime you press the play button on your headset with no media player running ?
In the last few years I've looked at every macos updates with more an more dread of things that will stop working and generic enshitification. Windows stays more "in your face" on the cheap marketing stuff, but it also brought in a lot more improvements than macos did in the last 10 years, so I don't as much difference in experience as in the past.
With so many webtech-apps (Slack, Google calendar...) and non-native UI browsers (Firefox/Chrome), visual consistency is lost anyway, so I stopped caring (the best experience I had was with GNOME in 2.* early HIG/a11y days when I used Epiphany as the web browser) — oh yeah, I use Emacs too, so there's that :)
Still, most common Mac-as-Linux approach with Docker Desktop is an incompatible emulation layer (eg. local UIDs are transformed into root UID on Mac, whereas they are not on Linux, so you get weird permission errors if you develop on Mac and rebuild/redeploy on Linux).
I've been using Macs for a decade, and the only time I had this happen was on corporate laptops with antivirus software installed. Antivirus software are poorly written and they used to have constantly crashing kernel extensions. Apple has been deprecating kernel extensions in recent years, so the situation is improving. But the performance hit caused by antivirus crapware is unfortunately still a thing.
B2B Windows is the stuff you would see for enterprise buyers with strict IT policies. Your experience will be mostly unchanged from "classic Windows".
Neither approach is wrong, they are just very different approaches with very different performance trade-offs.
Also Windows' filesystem supports an entire plugin stack including user-space plugins, to support things like anti-virus scanners and virtual filesystems and all sorts of other things. Not all of Windows' "slow" filesystem is first-party problems, a lot of it can be third-party drivers and tools that are installed.
the CAP theorem simply does not apply
Windows IO subsystem was simply designed for extensibility over performance
B) The Windows filesystem (and to an extent the POSIX) isn't just "local", it also includes transparent and semi-transparent network file storage.
C) Windows and POSIX are both multi-user and multi-process. They operate over multiple cores and multiple I/O buses.
Even if it just one system API centralized in charge of all that, it still needs to be built on top of complex distributed dance of mutexes/locks/semaphores/other distributed control structures. Because of the nature of I/O control there are complex caches involved and transaction semantics of when data is actually pulled from/flushed to low level data stores. The transaction model in turn is reflected in what the files look like to other users or processes running at the same time.
Windows and NTFS combined have strong transaction guarantees that other users and processes must see a highly consistent view of the same files. It makes heavy uses of locks by default even for cached data. POSIX favors the "inode" approach that favors high availability and fewer locks at the cost of eventual consistency and the occasional partition (the "same" file can and will sometimes have multiple "inodes" between different processes/users, many common Linux tools rely heavily on that).
Those two different transaction models are most easily explained in analogy to CAP Theorem. They are very different transaction models with different trade-offs. Whether or not you see a single "local machine" or you see a distributed system of cores, processes, users, diverse I/O buses is partly a matter of perspective and will reflect how well you personally think CAP Theorem is a "perfect" analogy for a filesystem.
it is almost the definition of "not a distributed system"
the fact there might be nfs/smb/ceph/... volumes bolted into the same namespace that happens to include it does not make it one (and neither does requiring transactions)
> Windows and NTFS combined have strong transaction guarantees that other users and processes must see a highly consistent view of the same files. It makes heavy uses of locks by default even for cached data. POSIX favors the "inode" approach that favors high availability and fewer locks at the cost of eventual consistency and the occasional partition (the "same" file can and will sometimes have multiple "inodes" between different processes/users, many common Linux tools rely heavily on that).
this is literally is not true, they are different abstractions
and I suggest you observe the size of a large file being copied if you want to see how "strong" NTFS "highly consistent views" are
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20111226-00/?p=88...
I don't know if it was the views of the designers of NTFS taking a different set of priorities or if it's more that NTFS wasn't designed as well as some linux file systems were.
But also, Steam's allocation step seems an interesting relic of Windows 9X design patterns, smaller hard drives, worse cache/temp folder options, and (much) slower download speeds. It probably isn't necessary and they could maybe design something simpler and better from scratch today. (But it's probably a "not broke don't fix it" thing at this point.)
Using Windows 11 the answer is ReFS.
The “drive” part of dev drive is a clever hack to bypass corporate anti malware policy settings.
So, I'm not sure the perf increase can just be attributed to malware scanning. ReFS has some features that NTFS doesn't have like copy-on-write which might help in read-only I/O perf.
The bar is so vastly different for windows and Linux users and by and large I try to keep my mouth shut because I dual boot and I know DAMN WELL which OS needs more handholding and has required fuck-it-start-over handling. God forbid you ever try to login to Win11 with low disk space, you're totally FUBAR and there are countless reports online of this EXACT FKING SCENARIO. Imagine for one second if Linux became COMPLETELY BROKEN if you ran out of disk space, it would be A JOKE.
If manufacturer would consistently publish to LVFS, I would NEVER TOUCH WINDOWS AGAIN. And I play Halo every single day of my life. Sorry gaming on Linux is less of a complete pain in the ass than using windows. You paying attn MSFT? Your stock price is 80% of my life, so I sure hope so.
"Everything is constantly changing"?! Are you FUCKING kidding me? What has changed in Linux is the past 15 years other than Wayland, which, I've been running for 4+ years and know what is BS and what isn't (DM me and I'll screen share stream my desktop at arbitrary scale factors at 240hz). I can run Gnome2, I can run kde3 for gods sake. Meanwhile there's crapware discussed here weekly just trying to get a basic Start Menu back in Win11, or constant complaints about ads, or regressions or ON and ON; do y'all have ANY self respect?
Stockholm syndrome, laziness, take your pick, it's exhausting.
By the standard conversion rate, I think that means 4 people could knock it out in 6 weeks.
Using "no@thankyou.com" for your Microsoft account (and any made up value for the password) allows you to skip this requirement in any version of 10/11 as someone got that account banned and the Microsoft workflow bails out since they naturally don't want to force onboard a banned user to a new account. This still requires internet during install though, it just works around needing to make an actual account.
It's a shame how much of a dance the install process has become.
(This is just a vague recollection from last time I installed Windows, might be wrong)
https://www.windowscentral.com/how-set-windows-11-without-mi...