Sorry, if this offends anyone, but Windows (non-Server editions) is a junk OS that I never ever want to see or use again.
For document editing or code it’s pretty awesome but a sluggish web is a deal breaker for many these days.
I agree that it's a dealbreaker, and the circumstances in which it can happen are opaque and difficult to troubleshoot.
Luckily these days with anything released since 2020- it's a lot better. Linux still struggles a lot with JS runtimes on Skylake.
While I am throwing Linux under the bus a bit here, I am still perplexed that we use an exceptionally inefficient language as the major application delivery system of the modern day. We complain that it uses a lot of RAM and is slow, but if you consider what javascript is compared to how CPUs think about things, it's a miracle we get what we get... we managed to get a marvel of engineering and the response has been to shove millions of lines of code through it... At some point, yeah, it's slow.
Unless it’s a post-Intel Mac, and that’s all of them these days.
You mean Linux, probably, but thats because Chrome doesn't enable hardware acceleration pn ARM, so smooth scroll is disabled. Pretty rough.
And by Linux, I mean there’s no distribution that runs on a Mac better than a 1990’s consumer HP laptop did in the 1990’s.
And that’s only for M1 and M2 silicon.
Linux doesn’t run on M3 silicon and later at all.
are serious? web is sluggish anywhere... and this is a common "trend"
SSD generally adds 3x to that speed due to access latency for small files.
I remember pressing power button and leaving my PC alone to get a tea or something when I was booting my Windows installation which I had around for gaming. Same with an SSD. Desktop arrives faster, CPU still choked to launch whatever services are needed, fans are doubling as hair dryers.
Both scenarios were on the same machine, BTW.
For instance there's a fair number of old laptops which exist now that can't play full screen 1080p content from youtube inside a browser without extensively dropping frames (way below a smooth 30 fps) because the cpu/video hardware has no support for hardware acceleration of the codecs in use. Even if the laptop has a 1920x1200 or 1920x1080 screen. Additionally they will struggle heavily with 100% CPU load doing something like running any video conference webRTC app (generally equivalent to google meet) in a browser tab.
Complexity of features and more computationally intensive things will still obsolete an old system even if it's running an 'optimal' non windows OS.
What’s inexcusable is just that every application out there, web or Electron, the only two kinds that seem to exist anymore, is written with increasingly bloated stacks and layers of JavaScript. I’m pretty sure the system requirements needed for applications to run smoothly are scaling exactly in sync with the spec of the average software engineer’s (or PM’s) computer. For some reason, in 2012 something like Slack or Outlook or an IDE was exactly as performant on a PC with 8GB and 2 cores, as the current versions are today on a modern high-end machine with 32GB of RAM and 10 cores. Yet they do the same tasks. There haven’t been any big innovations in the calendar, or chat, or email - none that inherently require more hardware resources, at least.
2. windows + ssd
3. linux + ssd
I know that Linux can greatly speed up startup, but more likely that ssd gave bigger impact.
Anything more than 3 seconds and less than 45 seconds is perceptibly the same, it's the same level of inconvenience unless you're in a rush.
.. but I can't honestly tell you the last time I booted my Macbook from cold.
Worthwhile suspend/resume is a much better goal for the modern computer user... Windows fucked us all with s2idle, including themselves.
At least in my experience it's not comparable to suspend + resume in terms of speed.
I was back to where I left when I had counted to eleven.
It’s about six years old, running W11, and was <$600 new. It has a touchscreen I never use.
> suspend/resume
Hard agree. Frustrating that I’ve still never had a non-Mac yet that I can just shut the lid and know that it won’t be blowing fans, apparently running, in my freaking backpack. Or wake up randomly in the middle of the night disturbing my sleep.
Nor can I be confident that when I open it, I’ll see the login screen already ready to go. How is this so hard? I would understand with Linux or with a home-built PC. But shouldn’t Lenovo and HP be able to make sleep work correctly?
1) Reduced telemetry and background services. 2) More efficient resource management.
Windows is super bloated when it comes to number of background task that transfer information to Microsoft and how much of the system resources their own applications need. Weather APP for example.
Windows telemetry can easily consume one CPU core after startup for 5 to 15 minutes depending on the age of the computer.
Windows updating system uses even more system resources than a Linux distro updating system. Linux is simple file copying-replace while Windows has to perform logical transactions because of how bad the bones of the OS are.
It can take _cleanmgr_ 15 minutes or more to clean up a system when selecting to remove old Windows update installers. Linux just has to mark the file as re-usable and move on. _cleanmgr_ does not even clean out all of the Temp files and requires manual interaction to do so.
Worst of all, Windows makes it a complete pain the ass to manage air gap system with updates. Linux just needs to create a HTTP server pointing to the packages on USB drive.
Some people realized this 25 years ago