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Comment by ieee2 | Hacker News Reader

I work with Windows 11 and don't see any major issue whatsoever. But note that 16GB RAM is "just" enough to run it smoothly. 32GB is better for serious (e.g development) work. I have run it even on Intel 4200U/4200M CPUs fine (CPU is from year 2014). I agree that new Outlook is buggy and not fully functional - that's why I still use old native MS Outlook.

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It's possible half of my problems are because I don't have admin rights, and the other half is because the machine is too weak.

Why do modern OSes need so much power and RAM anyway? I used to produce documents on an Amstrad PPC640. 640 stood for 640k of RAM (no hard disk). It was fine.

I understand the above makes me sound like an old fart (or fool), and we have moved on from DOS. But what does Windows 11 do that Windows 7 couldn't?

> Why do modern OSes need so much power and RAM anyway?

Because code writers are lazy and prefer to use 20 levels of abstraction or a 5MB library for a simple function.

Code writers are promoted for features and fired for not working fast enough.

Windows 11 can run many more different UI toolkits, all jumbled together. It has more graphical effects in there. It has so much telemetry and Microsoft Defender will never-ever give up and will inspect everything, all the time.

I honestly think this is a difficult and fascinating question. This is like the dark energy of software cosmology. Why is the natural state to get larger and more complex for un-proportionate pleasure of use?

Largely, I think, because devs are given too powerful computers. It's easier for companies to "fix" or preemptively had off performance bugs by giving developers high-end computers than to spend extra development time truly fixing them.

Because they’re a bunch of perverts and want to know every button you clicked.

My main issue with Windows 11 (and where I use it I do see quite a lot of issues) is that apparently it won't run on my personal PC at home - and no way am I going to buy a new PC just to run Windows 11. So installed Linux Mint and I'm perfectly happy!

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