I learned this from a video where a guy was seeing how much of the Program Files folder you can delete before Windows breaks, and at some point it reverts to the Windows 10 UI.
Being technically correct doesn't make it any less annoying, unfortunately.
You might be correct but at this point your statement is as much a lie as the parent.
Not only OS pre-installed apps are much slower, but it broke shortcuts and common sense behaviors.
There is no universe in which I should see lag between a click and a menu appearing in File explorer, taskbar or anywhere in the OS. Not on a machine with 8 idling cores.
Irony is they're not cheap hires, either.
What MS really needs to do is create a really long checklist of all the UI defained configurations and options, along with a connected list of all the relevant API interfaces they connect to... then come up with a consistent, complete and competent component library to do a ground up re-implementation of all the things in a consistent way.
This would, of course mean stabilizing the released version of windows to mostly bug fixes for a couple years while frantically generating and dog-fooding the new UX... starting with a re-revamped task manager, and launcher/file-picker. Just a bare desktop and a hotkey that opens task manager as the first and only UI elements then working out from there.
You do have to wonder what the hell the people in charge of the Windows UI are thinking. They seem to have got it so badly wrong. But so has Apple in macos.
It doesn’t even look good.
I know taste is subjective, but a better comparison is the contemporaries of the time or at least taking a step back to consider the entire aesthetic.
If so, ironically, I think Vista should win.
The OS has a purpose to be efficient and pleasant - anything that interferes with either is not a matter of taste, but a matter of poor execution.
Sure we have preferences, but truly beautiful things are hard to consider they are only so due to a matter of preference, and not objectivity.
Pressing escape can sometimes cancel out of this overlay (in case you bumped print screen by accident). But sometimes it doesn’t, because the full screen overlay in front of everything has managed to lose keyboard focus, and you need to click on it before it can respond to keyboard input.
Godawful trash OS and I hate that I’m stuck working on it.
New Notepad had a broken typematic that took them 2 years to fix, but they added Copilot at the same patch. Resizing its window still rapidly still flickers and can max the CPU.
If you're using labels in the taskbar the buttons aren't fixed width, they resize to fit the window title - except that until recently they didnt, so if you cd from C:\ to a longer path you got the label "C...". That one is fixed, but not the one where I switch desktops with Ctrl+Alt+arrows and the entries have no icons.
If you have a folder with lots of audio files, sometimes explorer.exe will hang for 30 seconds while it dutifully extracts artist metadata (no way to disable). Possibly an old issue, but I've never hit it before.
Search is even worse than before, I have "alacrity.exe" both in PATH and as a shortcut on desktop, but when I type "alacr" I get a web suggestion until I fully type it out. "Visual..." toggles between VSCode and fat visual studio on every keypress.
I can't express my opinion on the Task Manager changes without using language inapropriate for this forum.
Those are my issues off the top of my head, if I record every single broken thing I see for a week this list would be way longer.
That's just the stuff that doesn't work, there's a similarly long list of things that work but are evil.
Just tested on my very anaemic 5 year old laptop, it loaded in about 2/3 seconds.
This is a setting in Snipping Tool (called "Use the Print screen key to open Snipping Tool").
When I encounter this bug, Win-Shift-S behaves identically (i.e. doesn't work).
My start menu doesn’t have ads, it really isn’t hard to manage that sort of thing.
OneDrive is fully uninstalled, Copilot is fully uninstalled, I find my system to be quite clean.
And if you don’t like the start menu, there are ways to replace the start menu entirely with something else. Good luck replacing entire major elements of the macOS UI.
In contrast, Apple puts advertisements at the same urgency level as critical system updates in the settings. There’s no setting to disable them and they sometimes come back with a new version release, you just have to know the magic actions to get them dismissed.
Haters dog on Windows 11 for various things but it really is the best version of the OS since 7. It has some of the best updates to traditional Windows tooling in years: tabs in notepad, git preinstalled, finally the settings pane is in a good place, brand new command line interface, and Microsoft has had a great habit of putting new features in separate apps that can be installed optionally. (E.g., you can’t uninstall Apple News on a Mac, but you can uninstall ClipChamp on Windows)
I don't care. It is completely unacceptable to have ads in a product I paid them for. It doesn't matter how easy it is to remove, that doesn't fly.
You act like people are hating on Win11 for no reason, but truthfully you're just ignoring the reasons to hate it.
It’s a commercial OS but people can’t get over it. There isn’t a single commercial OS out there that doesn’t try to sell you something at some point.
Maybe that is unacceptable to you and I respect you for that. But it’s a commercial OS and always has been.
What gets annoying is when these aspects conflate it to being a bad OS or some monstrously unethical system. Seeing some ads that are easily disabled is treated by a certain community like the Microsoft is selling blood diamonds. The ferver doesn’t match the magnitude of the crime.
Everyone would love it if the NFL had zero ads but most NFL fans wouldn’t pay $XXX/month to watch the games.
OEMs pay pennies on the dollar for Windows and in some cases $0, the retail license is $200 but you can buy a mini PC for the same cost with a legitimate Windows license.
I dislike ads as much as the next person and use Linux myself for my main machine, but I’m not completely lacking in pragmatism on this subject. Commercial operating systems fund their development through paid services and App Store revenue sharing.
I think the status quo is relatively reasonable and, again, I find the commercialization to be very easy to dismiss and disable.
We are spending more time debating this subject than it took me to disable all forms of advertising in Windows.
Settings > Accessibility > Animation Effects > Off
5-10 seconds to start a screenshot, yeah man now you’re just lying. You sure you didn’t leave the delay timer on?
Are we going to gloss over the fact that the screenshot interface in old windows versions basically didn’t exist? There was no keyboard shortcut to open snipping tool by default in Windows 7. You had to know to use your print screen key correctly and to paste the image into Paint, and there was no visual feedback. Of course that performed fast because there was no UI!
If you have to compare to a 20+ year old processor to look good, your system has problems. But since we are comparing old computers, Finder opens quicker on a 30 year old Macintosh 512k than Explorer opens in Windows 11.
> 5-10 seconds to start a screenshot, yeah man now you’re just lying.
Nope. I actually just updated that number up to 20 seconds after testing, because I thought my memory was exaggerating. This started in Windows 10 when they introduced "Snip & Sketch" to replace the old Snipping tool, but it was easier to go back to the old one in Windows 10.
Edit: Oh, and I just remembered another detail. Our library folders are mapped to network shares at work. Again, this has been the case for 15+ years now, and performance has just recently cratered. It would not surprise me if most Windows developers today assume everything is on SSD, and don't think about slapping low-importance file I/O in critical sections.
So even this base assumption that a slow heavy bloated experience is on offer is just hearsay. The only section that uses React is the allegedly recommended section, the one that can be disabled entirely with a single settings toggle.
Anyway, again, the 5-10 second screenshot thing, I’ve been testing it live and could never get it to be slower than 2 seconds between invoking the shortcut key to file on the disk. Keeping in mind that this includes me physically reacting as quickly as possible to click after the shortcut keys to initiate the capture. It’s about one second between clicking capture and observing the file appear in file explorer. My CPU is 5 years old, my RAM is DDR4, and I use an off brand nvme SSD, for your reference.
I will also add to this that the main competitor to Windows, macOS, adds an intentional delay to their screen capture where the screenshots aren’t added to disk until after the little preview disappears or is manually dismissed. In Windows the preview notification and file being written to disk happen simultaneously, and the system automatically copies the image to clipboard which Apple doesn’t do, saving further time.
Your network share issue could be something misconfigured at your work, I have no way to verify whether that’s something your IT department messed up. My personal Windows and Linux systems are both connected to my SMB shares at all times through their graphical file managers and I don’t notice any difference in performance.
Last rebuttal: your finder experience in Macintosh classic (System 3.0 when the 512k debuted) is fast because there’s no multitasking, when you are at the desktop of a Macintosh the only application open is Finder and it’s already in RAM. Open any other application and then close it. You’ll notice a relatively long delay (10 seconds in my testing, although I don’t have real hardware) after closing the application before the desktop and finder are responsive again. You can try this on your preferred Macintosh emulator online.
Stop justifying laziness and mediocrity. Microsoft does this just so they can hire cheap javascript monkeys out of colleges. AKA people who shouldn't be writing code and the reason a chat application now uses 1GB of RAM and nobody seems to care or understand why such waste is both bad and stupid.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44124688
It is supposedly still mostly Windows native XAML. Allegedly, even the components that use react are using react native for windows and are therefore not rendering any sort of resource-wasting web view.
I wrote my own react native phone app and it’s only a 30MB download. Your random comparison to a bulky chat app with an extensive feature list (the most popular culprits like Slack and Discord are not written in React Native, by the way) consuming a GB of RAM is irrelevant. Have you measured the start menu consuming 1GB of RAM? Unless you have, your argument is a whataboutism.
If you think it’s bad that Microsoft is using stuff that makes it easy for them to develop windows you should explain to me how it would be better for them to have extreme difficulty in making improvements like how the old control panel basically couldn’t be updated with any reasonable development cadence for decades while macOS ran circles around Windows for their clean settings experience, versus the new settings pane that Microsoft can actually iterate on and improve.
You can criticize the new settings panel for maybe not having 100% of what you want in it but you can’t criticize being a scary nightmare for novice users like the old version.
It is in the users’ benefit if Microsoft can actually hire people who are real humans and not just myths.
Task manager opens immediately. Windows Explorer the same.
Those applications and the OS were written by real humans, not by myths. With your terribly bad argument it seems those OSes never happened since it required "extreme difficulty". No, it didn't require Einsteins. It required non-monkey coders.
You say you wrote your own react native phone app and it only takes 30MBs. So what? You forgot the most important part: what does it do? If it's a basic text editor then yes it's extremely bloated garbage.