3 ms·

I can't help but start a rant about Windows upon reading this. One of my major complaints with Windows is that things just 'feel slow'. I have to wait very oft

by meuk 9y ago

I can't help but start a rant about Windows upon reading this. One of my major complaints with Windows is that things just 'feel slow'. I have to wait very often. Opening an FTP location? Wait for 5 seconds, (and it also opens in a new window, leaving the old window open in an unusable state - very confusing). Starting a GUI? Wait for 5 seconds. My laptop and raspberry pi at home both work a lot smoother than the hi-end (it's a brand new Dell XPS machine with 8 GB RAM - which I consider hi-end) laptop I have at work. I still find it hard to comprehend that people are buying ridiculously overpowered Windows computers for tasks like browsing and document editing. Developers are at fault too - if it runs smoothly on your $1000+ machine with 32GB RAM, that does not mean that the average user will be able to even use it. Everyone and their mother is jumping at the sustainability hype, but at the same time developers assume that everyone buys a new computer and phone every other year, for the same tasks we've been doing for decades. Once you realize this it's hard to use a Windows system and not cringe at the mess of laggy/unresponsive GUI's.

justin66 9y ago
> Starting a GUI? Wait for 5 seconds. You're holding it wrong. > My laptop and raspberry pi at home both work a lot smoother than the hi-end (it's a brand new Dell XPS machine with 8 GB RAM - which I consider hi-end) laptop I have at work. If your RPi is faster at comparable tasks than that Windows PC, your Windows PC has some extremely serious setup problems. (if your employer uses anything like the commercial security software mine does, that's one potential problem)
- meuk 9y ago
  I'd argue that it's more of a culture problem. I regularly have multiple instances of Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code open (together with many windows explorer, notepad, notepad++ and whatever). Visual Studio in itself is just slow, and often crashes, even if I just have one instance open. On Linux, I have several terminals open, which is just so much more lightweight. Of course, from a performance point-of-view, these are not comparable, but that is exactly my point. On windows, everything has a GUI, and everything seems to assume a much more hi-end machine. P.S. I admit that it was a bit misleading to post this rant under this article, since the article measures raw OS performance, while my point is that lower performance is usually sufficient too, if you use tools that have a single purpose instead of trying to be an OS in itself.
  - justin66 9y ago
    Some of it's culture and some is certainly bloat. VS has slowed down a lot in the last eight years, and VS Code was born slow. But the performance between the RPi and the Windows machine shouldn't be comparable at all, and if the RPi is coming out ahead for anything more trivial than opening a terminal window, I'd look at the setup of the Windows machine. There is plenty that can get effed up there.
- pjc50 9y ago
  > You're holding it wrong. OK, but .. how exactly? It's going to be Windows Defender, isn't it?
  - justin66 9y ago
    I have to admit that I immediately thought of the Symantec enterprise software that serves roughly the same purpose, but much more intrusively. That's the sort of thing that seems to kill performance on something with a lot of file opens and closes, like VS, in addition to slowing down app startup. It's popular with businesses. The oddball feature that causes Windows disk I/O to basically lock up on occasion, and I'm amazed that they haven't turned it off by default by now, is volume shadow copy and the automatic creation of restore points. It's bad on an SSD because it's very slow and uses a lot of space, and on a hard disk it's so slow that it ought to be criminal.
Zardoz84 9y ago
On the same computer (FX8370E, 16GiB DDR3, no SSD, RX580 gpu), Kubuntu 17.10 rans far fast that Windows 10. For example, time from boot to allow do something like browsing a web page. I don't did a precise measurement of time, but on Windows 10 I need to wait like 10 fucking minutes to allow to do something! And the hard disk doing a lot of horrible noises, so Windows must doing something. On linux, would take like a single minute or two, and I don't noticed any noticeable hard disk activity. I don't know that is messed with Windows (probably I messed something on Windows), but I really hate this.

by meuk 9y ago

justin66 9y ago

> Starting a GUI? Wait for 5 seconds. You're holding it wrong. > My laptop and raspberry pi at home both work a lot smoother than the hi-end (it's a brand new Dell XPS machine with 8 GB RAM - which I consider hi-end) laptop I have at work. If your RPi is faster at comparable tasks than that Windows PC, your Windows PC has some extremely serious setup problems. (if your employer uses anything like the commercial security software mine does, that's one potential problem)

meuk 9y ago
I'd argue that it's more of a culture problem. I regularly have multiple instances of Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code open (together with many windows explorer, notepad, notepad++ and whatever). Visual Studio in itself is just slow, and often crashes, even if I just have one instance open. On Linux, I have several terminals open, which is just so much more lightweight. Of course, from a performance point-of-view, these are not comparable, but that is exactly my point. On windows, everything has a GUI, and everything seems to assume a much more hi-end machine. P.S. I admit that it was a bit misleading to post this rant under this article, since the article measures raw OS performance, while my point is that lower performance is usually sufficient too, if you use tools that have a single purpose instead of trying to be an OS in itself.
- justin66 9y ago
  Some of it's culture and some is certainly bloat. VS has slowed down a lot in the last eight years, and VS Code was born slow. But the performance between the RPi and the Windows machine shouldn't be comparable at all, and if the RPi is coming out ahead for anything more trivial than opening a terminal window, I'd look at the setup of the Windows machine. There is plenty that can get effed up there.
pjc50 9y ago
> You're holding it wrong. OK, but .. how exactly? It's going to be Windows Defender, isn't it?
- justin66 9y ago
  I have to admit that I immediately thought of the Symantec enterprise software that serves roughly the same purpose, but much more intrusively. That's the sort of thing that seems to kill performance on something with a lot of file opens and closes, like VS, in addition to slowing down app startup. It's popular with businesses. The oddball feature that causes Windows disk I/O to basically lock up on occasion, and I'm amazed that they haven't turned it off by default by now, is volume shadow copy and the automatic creation of restore points. It's bad on an SSD because it's very slow and uses a lot of space, and on a hard disk it's so slow that it ought to be criminal.

Zardoz84 9y ago

On the same computer (FX8370E, 16GiB DDR3, no SSD, RX580 gpu), Kubuntu 17.10 rans far fast that Windows 10. For example, time from boot to allow do something like browsing a web page. I don't did a precise measurement of time, but on Windows 10 I need to wait like 10 fucking minutes to allow to do something! And the hard disk doing a lot of horrible noises, so Windows must doing something. On linux, would take like a single minute or two, and I don't noticed any noticeable hard disk activity. I don't know that is messed with Windows (probably I messed something on Windows), but I really hate this.