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Comment by hu3 | Hacker News Reader

Sorry but neither Linux or Windows lag to resize windows in any of my 4 machines.

They range from old laptops to a Ryzen 7 9800X3D workstation.

Just yesterday a friend's father needed help setting up their second-hand old laptop with an old i5 processor. I slapped KDE and there was no lag to be seen.

Bonus point that Windows and some Linux distros have sane, intuitive window management. Whereas with macOS I keep seeing someone suggesting some arcane combination of steps to do some basic things with replies to the effect of "OMG thank you so much, this needs to be known by more people!!!"

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I see frame drops when opening the start menu on a clean Windows 11 install on my work laptop (Intel Quad with 32GB memory from two years ago). I have seen the same on 3D Vcache Ryzens on systems from people who claimed there was not lag or sluggishness. It was there and they saw it once pointed out, the standards for Windows users have simply gotten so low that they’ve gotten used to the status quo.

On MacOS, meanwhile, Finder refuses to update any major changes done via CLI operations without a full Finder restart and the search indexing is currently broken, after prior versions of Ventura where stable functionality wise. I am however firm that Liquid Glass is a misstep and more made by the Figma crowd then actual UX experts. It is supposed to look good in static screenshots rather than have any UX advantage or purpose compared to e.g skeuomorphism.

If I may be a bit snarky, I’d advise anyone who does not see the window corner inconsistencies on current MacOS or the appealing lag on Windows 11 to seek an Ophthalmologist right away…

KDE and Gnome are the only projects that are still purely UX focused, though preferences can make one far more appealing than the other.

If we're talking a simple "hello world" window then sure, you can resize that at 60fps on pretty much any system.

But most nontrivial apps can't re-layout at 60fps (or 30fps even).

They either solve it by (A) allowing the window to resize faster than the content, leaving coloured bars when enlarging [electron], or (B) stuttering or dropping frames when resizing.

A pleasant exception to this I've noticed is GTK4/Adwaita on GNOME. Nautilus, for me at least, resizes at 60fps, even when in a folder of thumbnails.

On the Mac side, AppKit, especially with manual `layoutSubviews` math easily hits 60fps too. Yes it was more complex, but you had to do it and it was FAST.

For all the grief they are getting GTK4/Adwaita/Gnome is doing a lot for performance and consistency of experience.

My GNOME desktop is more coherent than my Mac one at this point

My work laptop will stall on resize constantly, and I suspect it is due to the mess of security and backup software. Windows does have an ecosystem problem.

I am also baffled by the multiple control points. I can log in to mail in 3 places. Settings have 3 with different uis....it is gross.

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