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Comment by progmetaldev | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, Windows really had the same type of issues going from the old Control Panel to Settings. I still get large delays for some of the screens in Windows Settings.

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I think it's pretty crazy how slow a lot of the newer things in Windows 11 are. Explorer is super slow, Settings are slow. Sometimes I think even if I wanted to make things that slow (without using sleep statements), I wouldn't know how do it.

Make opening a settings page require multiple queries to Microsoft servers. That way you get lag with a bonus of variability and in the case of broken wifi, extreme lag as it waits for the connections to time out.

I'm not saying this is what happens. But it's scarily plausible and it really shouldn't be.

If it was happening, they could at least spy us asynchronously.

You can certainly test the theory pretty easily with Wireshark

I was lazy that day. But today! I just used procmon, filtered to include "systemsettings.exe", turned off all the other guff and just saw network packet meta data (no content).

And yes, as you browse around system settings there are TCP connections to MS servers. I don't know that they are "blocking" though and have run out of care factor.

You see it in Windows 10, as well. Seeing the "working on it" when navigating folders, as if I'm using 5400 RPM hard disk drives.

using win 7 with 5400 RPM drives... it's still fast...

To be fair, NTFS is just slow and awful and we’ve all known about it for a while.

I’m sure the new UI piled on top doesn’t help, but as a consolation, the core software is shit too.

Windows 11 is insane to me now. Latest update pressing the button to bring up the power options (power off sleep etc) takes like 1-1.5 seconds from button press for the menu options to come up.

I’m just so done with Windows, it is complete garbage now and I don’t use that term loosely, I’ve been using it since Windows 3.1.

Chrome removed ublock origin for me today and I thought to myself why am I even on this OS anymore? What’s keeping me here? Decided to use the outrage over that to just make a clean break from Windows too.

I installed Ubuntu tonight, but this time I’m sticking with it. It already feels so good to have the software behave in a way that makes sense and isn’t some dark pattern meant to harm me and extract value somehow from me.

I already split time. I have an old Dell laptop running Ubuntu that I do a lot of types of dev on plus general browsing (I'm actually on it right now). I use Windows for games and gamedev, though as I use Godot for gamedev I could pretty easily do that on Linux as well.

Ubuntu isn't what it used to be, unfortunately. I'm pretty much in love with Aurora [1] nowadays. It's an immutable distro (for a smartphone-like upgrade experience) based on Fedora and KDE, rock solid, sane defaults, a good selection of dev tools, proper nvidia support if you want it, and it feels really snap!

[1] https://getaurora.dev/

Just curious, what do you think Aurora itself does better than regular fedora kde?

I haven't used plain Fedora much, but Aurora just 'feels' more coherent, polished and stable than other distro's I have used in recent years. I tend to notice bugs/rough edges in all of them, but Aurora somehow just works. Having a strictly fixed core allows it to be fine-tuned better, I guess? Or perhaps it's just in my head. :-)

All non-core software is provided by Flathub (through the Discover app) and Brew (for cli apps). Both have worked flawlessly for me as well.

It also pisses me off, but I am not paying for Apple prices on personal devices, and since Slackware 2.0 back in 1995, that there is always something that makes me waste weekends on GNU/Linux, so Windows it is.

Mint and/or Fedora, depending on how new your software needs to be.

Ubuntu pushing snaps like MS was the last straw.

You want to escape slow UI and bad corporate rulers... and you chose Ubuntu?!

Dude... Mint, Arch / Manjaro, Void, even Alpine is better. Plenty of good and very lean+mean options out there.

Ubuntu is the Windows of the Linux world. Has been for several years now.

Try looking up what Canonical did and still does with the Snap store.

It's not just the OS itself, where some of the slowness can at least be explained by the silo-ed nature of development and the large amount of moving parts. But even when MS gives a small-ish team free reign and a fresh start, the software is just agonizingly slow and buggy.

An example: new PowerToys https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/

The FancyZones "window snap" UI takes upwards of half a second to activate when dragging a window and the Zone Editor is at around 5s. All in all it is only very slightly less buggy than 3rd party tiling WMs like komorebic.

The PowerToysRun utility input is extremely variable, takes between 1 and 20(!) seconds. A lot of the plugins shipped with it simply don't work or have no suggestions/hints once you enter their prefix. The search relies on WindowsSearch, which is about 500x slower than https://github.com/sharkdp/fd and has not improved since Win7. Who cares, nobody ever searches for files, right? As a whole, PTRun is simply worse than https://github.com/Flow-Launcher/Flow.Launcher which uses the same UI kit as far as I can see. WTF?

The most frustrating thing with PowerToys is trying to remap keys (like caps lock to Ctrl). It feels like it's done by intercepting the keypress at runtime in the app rather than being configured at the system level, so if you happen to, say, hit your new Ctrl key when the CPU is pegged, it'll revert back to caps lock and then also get stuck. So you have to go into PowerToys to unbind the key, turn off caps lock, then rebind it.

There's another app that does this in the registry I think, but I keep forgetting the name of it.

The registry method is Ctrl2Cap by SysInternals.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/ctr...

It's the first thing I download whenever I'm setting up a new Windows machine.

I fix this by going into task manager and viciously force quitting any system process that has an enigmatic name or isn't plainly doing something I want to happen. Often it's updating Edge, or it might be indexing temp files for searching with the shitty search function that I don't use. Sometimes it's "Windows Problem Reporting" that's making things glitch and lag. Oh, sometimes there's a whole second copy of Explorer running invisibly, quitting that can help.

Is this always safe to do? I think I broke my PC once by killing some important system tasks

I don't know! It's a reckless thing to do, but satisfying. I tend to stick to killing the same relatively small set of processes, really, and have never noticed any ill effects in about a year. If I was less lazy, I'd research them all - but then I'd want to also research how to stop them running in the first place - and in some cases, like Edge, that threatens to be such a mission that I don't want to embark on it. (I have a script that's supposed to uninstall Edge, but I thought I should read and understand it before I run it, and that was months ago and I never did ... so I still have Edge.)

The answer to that is relatively easy, WinUI 3.0 being shoved into Windows, even though UWP has failed to get adoption, after so many reboots even those of us that were deep into it got pissed off and moved elsewhere, leaving the Windows team as the only group of folks still trying to push it.

Go have a tour on Github for the endless collection of issues, some of them 5 years old, when Project Reunion was announced.

The login screen and start menu both require a key press to start the process (enter pin or start typing search term) and both then drop all subsequent keystrokes for an indefinite period until they’ve finished initialising, displaying, and maybe phoning home and loading ads. It’s infuriating. It turns a simple open-loop “press win key, type search term, enter” into “press win key, wait for visual confirmation, type” which adds both computer latency and your own reaction time to the overall time taken.

To be actually fair, Mac Preferences has worked fine for decades.

Control panel has sucked since windows 2.0

But that's considered normal in the Windows world.

Unfortunately, to stay on top Apple doesn't have to do well for the customer. They only have to do better than wintel/android machines.

Presumably Windows machines with AMD processors, too.

I wouldn't qualify it as fair, both are pretty horrible.

At least the window settings app can be resized like normal apps

Tsk, copying ideas from Apple.

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