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Comment by kryogen1c | Hacker News Reader

The fact that, on expensive hardware, I can hit windows+r and start typing before the run box renders/loads is staggering, it beggars belief.

Im generally a microsoft shill, but theyre really on the down hill slope. windows 11 is truly a masterpiece of changes no one asked for or wants, Teams is the least reliable piece of business software I've ever seen. New outlook does not have feature parity with old outlook and has the same bargain bin apple ux stylings as w11.

Maybe ive finally crested the age gap and im officially a dinosaur, but God damn every microsoft product is worse than it used to be.

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At work employees generally use okay machines, not great but still at least 3GHz i5 processor with 16GB of ram etc. and they only run an ERP client and a browser with a few tabs.

Sometimes, I click on the windows button and it legit takes 3-4 seconds for windows to render the start menu that only has the program list, nothing else, just the list of programs.

These machines with their 6/8 or so cores can do tasks at the scale of nanoseconds and it takes, 3 whole seconds to render a single window with a list of program names, that’s simply stupid.

Anyone who has ever touched a windows xp machine knows that the start menu can complete drawing before my brain can register that my fingers in fact touched the keys, which takes roughly 20ms or so if I remember correctly. What the hell is this system doing?

I have the computer they handed me 3 years ago still. As soon as it powers on the fans go into full gear. Almost nothing running, just Edge. If I have VS on the thing hate crashes. 64gb ram

The most common issue anyone around were I work has when their computer is running slow is available memory. Windows 10 -> 11 has seen 16GB go from more than enough for anything other than power user tasks to barely enough to use the full array of standard office software, all with no actual improvement or meaningful change to the standard user experience. Going from 7 -> 10 at least made it so that you did not need to download your entire OneDrive and attached SharePoint libraries.

I dug out my dad's Windows 98 era PC that he was running Windows 2000 on that we hadn't turned on since 2011, and it felt lightning-fast compared to W10 and W11. Double-click to open apps and they appear, ready to type in. It felt like I was on some kind of futuristic prototype.

I had similar impressions with multiple setup:

    - dell p2 300 win95
    - early core duo era with linux 2.4 (some kali linux image)

in both cases there was something very odd, the crude os design (no parallel systemd etc), gui toolkit and desktop environment (no compositor, glitchy) wasn't an issue and the low amount of lag felt very good. it's the same feeling when driving 90s cars, the drive feels directly connected to the whole, it's cruder but it feels better

and saying this as a fan of recent linux kernel and systemd parallelism with the crazy cpu over ssd speed.. i was utterly surprised

Some of that is all the security apparatus in W10/11 which 2000 doesn't have. So many CVEs since 2000.

Yeah but how much faster is hardware since then? M.2 SSDs, lots more GHz + cores, fast GPUs, etc. Everything is way faster and should more than make up for those security checks IMO.

The ads in the start menu and the notifications were the last straw for me.

I have yet to this day and Windows 10 or 11 ever to see an advertisement like people talk about.

It's more like shortcuts to install things like Candy Crush.

And I've seen that.

For awhile I was getting a lot of system notifications advertising the latest version of CoD.

As a dinosaur, it might finally be time for the Linux desktop

Ironically MSFT is surviving off of dinosaurs. Legacy companies pumping it with Office 365 suite and Copilot subscriptions.

They’re toast without them.

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