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Comment by BLKNSLVR | Hacker News Reader

Calculator taking measurable seconds to load was the last straw for me for Windows 10. Exclusively Linux at home for a couple of years now, and there's a relatively steady stream of headlines to remind me of how good a decision it was to switch away.

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Luckily, one can still revert to the classic calculator: https://win7games.com/#calc

I use Windows exclusively for games, but I don't like playing the game of disabling upsells, dodging unkillable Edge, and restoring secret pre-AI versions of Windows components.

I don’t like it either, but as an easy solution it’s still the lesser evil for me. At least they do allow running 20-year old binaries.

Lots of games run just fine on Wine. Those that don't, usually work on Steam/Proton.

Anecdotal, but I've never had issues with any game outside of competitive shooters that require kernel-level anticheats. If you're not playing those, it could be worth a try.

Yeah, I've been exclusively on Linux at home since 2019. I have to do work on Windows though and it's a daily reminder that Windows is a piece of shit and gets worse with every update. WSL is the only thing that makes it bearable. It's like releasing a long relaxing breath when I can finally get on my home computer.

I switched in 2023 or so, I have not seen one headline per your example or anecdote or comment or tea leaves that have made me question moving away from windows.

Not one, not once. Even my worst day on Linux where something does work for seemingly no reason, still better than Windows.

Thankfully, that has improved, but there's still a weird bug where multiple instances of the calculator will spawn for no reason at all.

The calculator in Windows 11 still takes several seconds to load for me.

Instant for me but I have a beefy CPU Ryzen 9800X3D and some crazy nvme.

And most important: no corporate spyware disguised as anti-virus, in this machine.

Probably a cache thing. Win11 precaches a lot of stuff if you hover over it or have excess RAM. It's not as smart as SuperFetch and ReadyBoost (with an HDD) was but it's still doing similar things.

How big is the calculator app on Windows 11 that you need to cache it in RAM? On macOS, the calculator app is 6 MB. And that's containing both x64 and ARM code. How long does it take a modern SSD (6 GB/s?) to read that?

If it's the same as on Win10 it's a UWP App that needs a ton of dependencies like .net, WinUI2/XAML.

The appx is: Approximate size 21.8 MB according to https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9wzdncrfhvn5

Win7 calc.exe had 758KB for i686 and 897KB for amd64.

Reminds me of the early days of MacOS X when the Calculator app was written in Java as a demo of how fantastic and native their Java integration with Cocoa bindings was. This of course made it horribly slow to launch since initializing the JVM back then was a massive chore.

You shouldn't need to cache a calculator app to make it load quickly - it opened instantly on a machine running Windows 3.0 with 2MB RAM.

It seems that some Windows computers are generally laggy with no good reason. I could recommend installing Old Calculator.

https://winaero.com/get-calculator-from-windows-8-and-window...

It was a little difficult setting it up so that the calculator key on the keyboard pulls it up but aside from that it works well.

Isn't it way easier to just find a better calculator app (same for most other straws)?

But isn’t the point that Microsoft aggregate thinks it is acceptable to ship such a poorly performing product?

That's a different point? This one is about what you do about it

I had already done lots of things to make Windows less in the way of what I wanted to do. It was this Calculator app thing, plus the constant reconfiguring of settings (at install time and sometimes after updates) to turn off a whole swathe of Windows services that serve Microsoft, not the user.

Calculator was the final straw.

I actually use the old calculator on my work computer, and it's still not as fast to load as it was 20 years ago (but my work computer is also chock full of 'security' software, so runs like a pig).

The calculator app, whilst the straw that broke the candle back, wasn't the point for me, it was the pattern.

Which has continued apace.

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