Windows 11's "special" developer edition looks like another marketing misfire
neowin.net
neowin.net
Yes.
Like when a Porsche 911 trim strips out the AC and stereo to provide a "distraction free driver experience" that doesn't mean that those things are "needless" to everyone else.
(Though in truth Windows 11 is full of dumb crap, but that doesn't mean we have to try---and fail!---to play clever lawyerball word games to make the point.)
(And honestly, I don't think MS's idea of a good developer experience is going to be the same as mine or most of HN's. There are entire other worlds of 'development' out there.)
AC and radio don't turn themselves on every time yu start the car. The typically need to be turned on.
Distractions in Windows are turned ON BY DEFAULT, like MS store suggestions or MS edge forcing you through the first run wizard, etc etc
Your dream developer experience is already here; since I've switched to Linux, I feel like I'm experiencing Linux psychosis. It's such a breath of fresh air. I've reconfigured my entire workflow around terminal programs and every action feels instant, even with maxed out power saving settings. There's an upfront time investment, sure - a weekend or two to set things up and figure out how you want the basics configured - but I've found myself immediately productive, and after that it's all compound interest, baby. Over the next few months, I've pushed my muscle memory to a point that's completely unachievable on Windows.
Another big advantage of the platform is that some Linux distributions will come bundled absolutely no software, saving you from having to uninstall and disable annoying bloat you have no use for. Additionally, you don't even need to install WSL, because you've already got the L.
Linux and co generally work with magic bytes which is just another way of doing file formats. Is it better to signify your file format with a .ext or otherwise?
I find myself turning on file extensions if I have to use Windows and on Linux, I don't care and it just works.
I think the UIs for Linux are better. I think that MS are hung up on trying to suggest their stuff so it gets in the way a bit. On Linux, you just get the best option based on what is installed.
When antivirus weren’t widespread, having a person click on a virus was just so easy: create a program with the icon of an image file. God forbid people learn that .exe means executable program. Learning new stuff is scary!
I think Windows 95, although even selecting that option still hides some file name extensions (such as ".lnk"). However, I have found that it is possible to use the registry editor to force all file name extensions to be displayed.
The interesting, or more accurately neat thing about EXT family of filesystems is, the file header is always one pointer away from your inode structure for that file.
With NVMe disks or SSDs in general, this is a very cheap operation, even when done en-masse. Even when we were using HDDs, anti-fragmentation features of EXT3/4 kept that one seek pretty cheap.
As a test, I fed my whole documents folder (~3500 files) into "file" tool to see what it does (via "file -f $filelist"). It finished in ~1,5 seconds. I redirected the output to /dev/null to eliminate the overhead incurred by printing things over SSH, though.
While everything is fast for small n, the consideration of small for this operation goes a long way, AFAICS.
Oracle has a great write-up about EXT4 and its structure: https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/understanding-ext4-disk-layou...
How would webdev look like? At first the HTML goes into "document", the style into "style", and before you know it, you're re-inventing extensions as prefixes or suffixes anyway, and I prefer users.sqlite to users_db. I honestly don't even see a problem to solve, so even the "cheapest" solution seems needlessly costly to me.
I'm just happy to have the option around, I don't want to deprecate or against file extensions.
If you're interested, I can run some benchmarks on NFS and FTP as well, however.
That is one of the primary points in the list of advantages.
>File Explorer shows file extensions, hidden files, the full path in the title bar, and the details pane, with long-path support enabled.
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2026/09/04/announ...
If this is intended for developers who aren't that good at quickly setting these simple options by now though I don't know what to think :\
Devs might be bad at marketing to general public, but if the target market are devs, run the ads through them first. Even if they're in a building with no dev at all, surely one can be reached through an internal email.
A terrible phrase constantly used in defense of bloated, wasteful programs using gobs of memory to achieve nothing.
But the OS should be as lean as possible because the entire reason is to run other programs.
That's why there's no accurate 1:1 comparison between operating systems. Windows, MacOS, and LInux will treat physical memory very differently bot at idle, and during heavy use.
Sure, Win 11 has a lot of bloat and poorly coded Web apps that should be removed or rewritten in native, but the kernel is still top notch at managing even limited memory and handling OOM cases.
You have to remember the Win (and MacOS) kernel is tuned to consumer desktop user use cases, while Linux kernel is tuned to server/DC use-cases.
That's why ~15 years ago when I was in uni, you'd get audio stutter when playing music/movies of spinning rust on linux while torrenting file on the same HDD, and not on Windows/MacOS, due to different queuing algorithms used thet prioritised audio decoding tasks over everything else, which Linux kernel out of the box didn't, unless you tinkered and changed it.
I don’t mind the kernel doing kernel things. The issue is system services and other software that are either unnecessary or badly coded. You can’t disable them because of “reasons” and they’re just wasting your time and your electricity.
That depends on the distro / flavor of kernel; the Linux kernel is pretty flexible and you can cut it however you want. If you use a distro like CachyOS for example, you'll find that they use a kernel tuned for desktop use-case, so you don't need to tinker with anything.
In my mind Classic Mac OS (minus its design issues) is the ideal to strive for here.
It was barely even an OS and more like a substrate for GUI applications to run on top of. Even “essentials” like networking and USB support were implemented by way of extensions which could be disabled at will. If you disabled all extensions you’d get something resembling a full color version of the original 1985 System 1.0 that took almost no resources. This was great for squeezing out every last drop for things like games and emulators.
The surface area of stuff that an OS has to do today is absolutely massive, and the dependency graphs are poorly understood even by the engineers who work on those systems. Innocuous pieces of functionality have a way of becoming load-bearing over time.
If you ran around disabling random bits of functionality in Windows because you wanted to reclaim some resources for your games, you'd probably wedge the OS, cause random crashes, and prevent your games from even launching. Like you might think "Well my game doesn't need Bluetooth, I only use a wired controller!" but I would not be surprised at all if yanking out the Bluetooth stack from the OS caused random crashes and hangs.
Windows almost categorically can’t because it’s only ever been developed organically and is pathologically backwards compatible, which keeps it forever tied to past design decisions.
Linux could get a much closer but is hamstrung by monolithic kernel design which puts more functionality there.
You’d need a clean sheet design which positions most subsystems as discrete components.
The nice thing about classic Mac OS is that its modularity was more accessible. All one had to be capable of to pare down or customize their install was move files in or out of /System Folder/Extensions/ and /System Folder/Control Panels/. I'd like to see a Linux desktop distribution that works that way.
It’s not that huge. I use OpenBSD and the code is surprisingly approachable and readable. And even with no support for runtime modules, it’s pretty easy to customize and strip out whole features. Current complexity in something like linux is stretching the subsystems to support a huge array of use cases.
Why though? The OS should be the layer between hardware and applications/the user. Provide a GUI SDK+toolkit and a firewall. The OS should be responsible for a dozen different cloud sync bs things that I play whack-a-mole to disable anyway.
This applies to caches, and it applies to time versus memory tradeoffs in expensive algorithms. Win11 wastes a lot of memory on neither.
Please educate yourself on how this is exactly how you optimise RAM usage
I got a separate PC just for linux btw, so no biggie
Granted, catalogs vary - anti-cheat and DRM may not play nice, and EvE Online wasn't stable until I switched the renderer from D3D12 to D3D11 (and I haven't tried playing with multiple accounts) - but you might revisit Linux gaming if it's been awhile since you last have.
The enshittification of Windows has finally driven me to the point where Linux compatability is going to start affecting my Steam purchases.
My raw notes are here: https://github.com/MaulingMonkey/notes/blob/master/programmi...
There are far more penguins in my homelab
I wouldn't wish any developer to be forced to use W11 though. I'm already miserable enough at work, I just use a VM with Fedora and W11 is just a bootloader.