8 ms·

This isn't meant to be an especially religious comment, but I regularly switch back and forth between OSX and Windows 10 and wanted to make mention of the diffe

This isn't meant to be an especially religious comment, but I regularly switch back and forth between OSX and Windows 10 and wanted to make mention of the differences. I also use Ubuntu fairly regularly but only over ssh so I'll discount it from this comparison. Both OSX and Windows 10 do suffer from UI lag but, in my experience, it is far worse on Windows 10 to the point where I have come to absolutely detest Windows 10. It's particularly bad on the login/unlock screen, which often takes multiple seconds to even appear when you get back to your machine - frustrating when you're in a hurry. With that said, some of it is certainly application specifically. Office 365 Outlook, for example, is particularly egregious in this regard: switching between windows, or between mail and calendar is awful. Microsoft Teams also regularly hangs for multiple seconds when switching between teams, or between chats. Extremely aggravating.

coding123 8y ago
Just curious, is that windows machine possibly not on an SSD? My windows 10 rig opens a profile faster than my MacBook
- jjeaff 8y ago
  Ya, I just built a new windows 10 rig. I went for single core speed over more cores (i7 8086k) for the very reason of stamping out any UI lag. It's buttery smooth and I get no noticeable lag. Exactly 7 seconds from power button to login screen on a cold boot too.
- bartread 8y ago
  A fair question, but both SSDs so it's definitely not that. Since we're on hardware differences though the Macbook Pro is 3 years old and has a quad-core i7, whereas the Windows 10 laptop is 1 year old and has a dual-core i7. I'm not in love with having only dual cores but I don't think that's the issue either.
- awiesenhofer 8y ago
  its not about opening the profile its about getting to enter your password from a locked screen - i love my w10 machine and its quite snappy when logged in but every unlock has this half-second or so lag until it lets me enter my password - i suspect the animation of the appearing login-form but who knows...
cordite 8y ago
OSX capturing and buffering the password input on the login overlay is definitely nice, compared to windows 10 dropping inputs until it is ‘ready’ for the last 2 characters of my password.
- exikyut 8y ago
  Thanks to PAM on Linux, "<hostname> login: " is printed by an entirely different set of processes than the "Password: " that follows it. At least in Windows you aren't at a TTY that echos everything to the screen by default until PAM has hauled itself (and its umpteen libraries) off the disk (yes people still have 5400RPM HDDs :D), initialized, and put the terminal into no-echo mode...
  - johnchristopher 8y ago
    > Thanks to PAM on Linux, "<hostname> login: " is printed by an entirely different set of processes than the "Password: " that follows it. Ah! So that's what's going on :D.
    - exikyut 8y ago
      On FreeBSD, at least, you can tinker with the sshd to switch between PAM, to get "Password: " and some other sshd-internal mechanism, which prints "<whatever login you just typed>'s password: " instead. Kind of cute. And you can always run strace -f on whatever handles login (getty, logind, systemd, etc), drop to a TTY and login, to see all the stuff that gets loaded.
  - arendtio 8y ago
    I wonder why so many are talking about SSD vs. HDD in this discussion. From my experience on Linux it doesn't really matter if you have enough RAM. Yes, booting from a SSD is faster, but once everything is loaded the system mostly works on top of the RAM (waiting for FS sync is rare). I don't know much about the situation on Windows but at least on linux your HDD is hardly going to cause lags if you have a well configured hardware setup.
x3sphere 8y ago
Ubuntu w/Gnome is possibly the worst offender. I actually like Gnome a lot but anytime I leave my PC on for more than a day the UI gets incredibly sluggish. Just moving windows around gets choppy and there is a annoying pause whenever I click the application launcher (happens even without the animation). I've also found macOS provides the smoothest experience. I haven't found W10 that bad, but I haven't used it that extensively. I really only boot into Windows to play games these days.
- amelius 8y ago
  I have the same problem at home. Oddly, my computer at work doesn't have this problem. Both run Ubuntu with Gnome.
- ealexhudson 8y ago
  I'm running Gnome and for the most part it has been excellent; Linux in general, though, still has a lot of trouble maintaining good UI speed at the same time as I/O throughput. I'm on Fedora, and dnf/rpm is an excellent example - even though I'm on an SSD, I can tell when something is updating in the background because stuff will lag for a little while. It feels like this has been a problem forever, and while it has definitely improved over time it's still not really possible to say, in a simple way, "I care more about interactivity than other stuff, prioritise that" (as far as I know, anyway).
  - jcelerier 8y ago
    > while it has definitely improved over time it's still not really possible to say, in a simple way, "I care more about interactivity than other stuff, prioritise that that's not what mainline kernel optimizes for, you have to use liquorix or another kernel (https://liquorix.net/ https://liquorix.net/)
    - raarts 8y ago
      You would assume that big guys like RedHat would already have done this for you.
goombastic 8y ago
This is strange. I run a 6 year old PC with win 10 on it. It has 4GB of RAM. I use an SSD and an M.2 drive. The thing is snappy as hell. I face zero lags, jitters, or switching delays at all. I get the feeling that writing things to disk is causing delays.
- jcelerier 8y ago
  I had a friend telling me "check out my new computer it's so snappy!" once and the darn thing was so slow it made my hands shake from the stress. Can't believe anyone on the internet telling they don't have any lag.
  - herewulf 8y ago
    Every time we get snappier hardware, we just add more software bloat. I pretty much run two kinds of GUI apps (on Linux with a lightweight, tiling window manager): web browsers and terminals. My terminal apps are always very snappy, the web browsers not so much. I'm of the opinion that the computer should wait for me, not the other way around. Doesn't seem to work out that way with "modern UIs".
- barrkel 8y ago
  I run a 6 core desktop with 32G, and 1TB M2 SSD, and after an upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10 last Christmas, input lag in mintty terminals was dramatically worse. Even just holding down a key and observing the stream of characters at 15 per second or whatever my repeat rate is, it glitches and stutters.
mattip 8y ago
Virus and malware checks could be slowing things down
c3534l 8y ago
A brand new laptop I bought this year can't run Windows 10, the system is basically unusable. Not a cheap laptop, either, it was one of the more expensive ones. It runs Ubuntu no problem. All of Microsofts products seem to have latency issues, and I still can't figure out for the life of me why it takes longer to open a file in Visual Studio or in Word on my gaming desktop than it does to load a current year $60 video game. I wish designers focused what they call "gamefeel" in video games: how quickly, clearly, and satisfyingly does the program react to user input. Edit: on the other hand, computers do start up a heck of a lot faster than they used to.
- bumholio 8y ago
  I'm typing this on a 5 year old netbook that had cost me $300 back then with 2GB, which I later upgraded to 4GB. It runs Windows 10 very smoothly, it's my living room TV computer for browsing, torrenting (up to 1080p) etc. At this time I'm running Firefox, Chrome, VLC and uTorrent seeding and performance is decent, certainly not "unusable".
  - smolder 8y ago
    Notably not running visual studio or MS office.
- merinowool 8y ago
  It is probably all the spying /s
SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
Windows 10 is really inconsistent. I have it running in a VM on a Fedora host and it's snappy as hell. Also on a pretty basic office-spec Celeron, but then running it on a new Ryzen 7 sometimes it lags. I don't think it's directly related to the performance of the hardware, there must be something else going on.
- rasz 8y ago
  Windows 10 has all kids of debuggers enabled on millions of computers, MS calls this telemetry :) Go to Management and check out startup event trace sessions. Those are the source of mysterious >hundreds of megabytes of logs written to disk per day.
Steve44 8y ago
At work we've recently moved from XP to Win7 and they seem to perform about the same for heavy office use. I'm playing with a Win10 machine at home, the CPU and RAM is far in excess of our work machines but it is so slow to use. It seems to regularly become unresponsive, programs take ages to start, it seems to be continually working away in the background doing 'nothing'. It's a truly horrible experience.
awiesenhofer 8y ago
i really like office 365 but the most productive thing i ever did was get rid of it on my work machine and install office 2010 again. it's just so much snappier there is no comparison. (although i also tried office 2003 for a day and boy it's blazingly fast. on a modern system you don't even see the startup screen, not to mention any input lag.)
Tobba_ 8y ago
On Win10 you need to have enough swap space on an SSD; HDD I/O has totally kneecapped latency, seemingly due to blind usage of NCQ (AHCI driver got replaced from Win7), so it chokes out entirely when combined with the even more broken swap manager. "Enough" meaning "infinite", because you're going to have something leaking all that memory. Task manager doesn't even show memory usage by default (add the "commit size" field), only the working set (and the swapping is insanely aggressive, so memory leaks just don't show up). Nobody seems to actually check that; even built-in stuff like Windows Update leaks pretty badly. Oh and the memory accounting doesn't even work.
harperlee 8y ago
One thing can't wrap my head around: if I receive a big (10Mb) email through a slow connection, Outlook completely freezes until the email has finished downloading. I'm talking, not even rendering correctly, and showing white rectangles instead of drawing components. How on earth can this not be a tested use case? Is there no separate thread to connect to the Internet?
- samirm 8y ago
  Don't know for certain, but the issue might be that it's using the same thread to scan the attachment and hang, rather than download it and hang.
mrguyorama 8y ago
Meanwhile my experience is opposite. I use Windows 7 at home and OSX for work. My personal machine is responsive, zippy, and most important of all, predictable Meanwhile, my SSD filled work mac bogs down in completely unpredictable ways, with weird antivirus scans that I cannot control somehow destroying javascript performance, and needing to be rebooted more than weekly to stay functional in multiple ways. I was similarly dissatisfied with OSX in the mid 2000s when I used it at school. I just don't get it
tomaskafka 8y ago
I should probably make a video of me opening an i7 2017 Macbook Pro with 16 GB RAM and waiting 3-5 seconds until the system allows me to type the password (also, I sometimes switch to Czech keyboard, and High Sierra has a bug where it randomly shows one input language as active in a top right but actually uses a different input language in a password field - this happens in about half of login attempts). This isn’t how it used to be. Sigh.

coding123 8y ago

Just curious, is that windows machine possibly not on an SSD? My windows 10 rig opens a profile faster than my MacBook

jjeaff 8y ago
Ya, I just built a new windows 10 rig. I went for single core speed over more cores (i7 8086k) for the very reason of stamping out any UI lag. It's buttery smooth and I get no noticeable lag. Exactly 7 seconds from power button to login screen on a cold boot too.
bartread 8y ago
A fair question, but both SSDs so it's definitely not that. Since we're on hardware differences though the Macbook Pro is 3 years old and has a quad-core i7, whereas the Windows 10 laptop is 1 year old and has a dual-core i7. I'm not in love with having only dual cores but I don't think that's the issue either.
awiesenhofer 8y ago
its not about opening the profile its about getting to enter your password from a locked screen - i love my w10 machine and its quite snappy when logged in but every unlock has this half-second or so lag until it lets me enter my password - i suspect the animation of the appearing login-form but who knows...

cordite 8y ago

OSX capturing and buffering the password input on the login overlay is definitely nice, compared to windows 10 dropping inputs until it is ‘ready’ for the last 2 characters of my password.

exikyut 8y ago
Thanks to PAM on Linux, "<hostname> login: " is printed by an entirely different set of processes than the "Password: " that follows it. At least in Windows you aren't at a TTY that echos everything to the screen by default until PAM has hauled itself (and its umpteen libraries) off the disk (yes people still have 5400RPM HDDs :D), initialized, and put the terminal into no-echo mode...
- johnchristopher 8y ago
  > Thanks to PAM on Linux, "<hostname> login: " is printed by an entirely different set of processes than the "Password: " that follows it. Ah! So that's what's going on :D.
  - exikyut 8y ago
    On FreeBSD, at least, you can tinker with the sshd to switch between PAM, to get "Password: " and some other sshd-internal mechanism, which prints "<whatever login you just typed>'s password: " instead. Kind of cute. And you can always run strace -f on whatever handles login (getty, logind, systemd, etc), drop to a TTY and login, to see all the stuff that gets loaded.
- arendtio 8y ago
  I wonder why so many are talking about SSD vs. HDD in this discussion. From my experience on Linux it doesn't really matter if you have enough RAM. Yes, booting from a SSD is faster, but once everything is loaded the system mostly works on top of the RAM (waiting for FS sync is rare). I don't know much about the situation on Windows but at least on linux your HDD is hardly going to cause lags if you have a well configured hardware setup.

x3sphere 8y ago

Ubuntu w/Gnome is possibly the worst offender. I actually like Gnome a lot but anytime I leave my PC on for more than a day the UI gets incredibly sluggish. Just moving windows around gets choppy and there is a annoying pause whenever I click the application launcher (happens even without the animation). I've also found macOS provides the smoothest experience. I haven't found W10 that bad, but I haven't used it that extensively. I really only boot into Windows to play games these days.

amelius 8y ago
I have the same problem at home. Oddly, my computer at work doesn't have this problem. Both run Ubuntu with Gnome.
ealexhudson 8y ago
I'm running Gnome and for the most part it has been excellent; Linux in general, though, still has a lot of trouble maintaining good UI speed at the same time as I/O throughput. I'm on Fedora, and dnf/rpm is an excellent example - even though I'm on an SSD, I can tell when something is updating in the background because stuff will lag for a little while. It feels like this has been a problem forever, and while it has definitely improved over time it's still not really possible to say, in a simple way, "I care more about interactivity than other stuff, prioritise that" (as far as I know, anyway).
- jcelerier 8y ago
  > while it has definitely improved over time it's still not really possible to say, in a simple way, "I care more about interactivity than other stuff, prioritise that that's not what mainline kernel optimizes for, you have to use liquorix or another kernel (https://liquorix.net/ https://liquorix.net/)
  - raarts 8y ago
    You would assume that big guys like RedHat would already have done this for you.

goombastic 8y ago

This is strange. I run a 6 year old PC with win 10 on it. It has 4GB of RAM. I use an SSD and an M.2 drive. The thing is snappy as hell. I face zero lags, jitters, or switching delays at all. I get the feeling that writing things to disk is causing delays.

jcelerier 8y ago
I had a friend telling me "check out my new computer it's so snappy!" once and the darn thing was so slow it made my hands shake from the stress. Can't believe anyone on the internet telling they don't have any lag.
- herewulf 8y ago
  Every time we get snappier hardware, we just add more software bloat. I pretty much run two kinds of GUI apps (on Linux with a lightweight, tiling window manager): web browsers and terminals. My terminal apps are always very snappy, the web browsers not so much. I'm of the opinion that the computer should wait for me, not the other way around. Doesn't seem to work out that way with "modern UIs".
barrkel 8y ago
I run a 6 core desktop with 32G, and 1TB M2 SSD, and after an upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10 last Christmas, input lag in mintty terminals was dramatically worse. Even just holding down a key and observing the stream of characters at 15 per second or whatever my repeat rate is, it glitches and stutters.

mattip 8y ago

Virus and malware checks could be slowing things down

c3534l 8y ago

A brand new laptop I bought this year can't run Windows 10, the system is basically unusable. Not a cheap laptop, either, it was one of the more expensive ones. It runs Ubuntu no problem. All of Microsofts products seem to have latency issues, and I still can't figure out for the life of me why it takes longer to open a file in Visual Studio or in Word on my gaming desktop than it does to load a current year $60 video game. I wish designers focused what they call "gamefeel" in video games: how quickly, clearly, and satisfyingly does the program react to user input. Edit: on the other hand, computers do start up a heck of a lot faster than they used to.

bumholio 8y ago
I'm typing this on a 5 year old netbook that had cost me $300 back then with 2GB, which I later upgraded to 4GB. It runs Windows 10 very smoothly, it's my living room TV computer for browsing, torrenting (up to 1080p) etc. At this time I'm running Firefox, Chrome, VLC and uTorrent seeding and performance is decent, certainly not "unusable".
- smolder 8y ago
  Notably not running visual studio or MS office.
merinowool 8y ago
It is probably all the spying /s

SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago

Windows 10 is really inconsistent. I have it running in a VM on a Fedora host and it's snappy as hell. Also on a pretty basic office-spec Celeron, but then running it on a new Ryzen 7 sometimes it lags. I don't think it's directly related to the performance of the hardware, there must be something else going on.

rasz 8y ago
Windows 10 has all kids of debuggers enabled on millions of computers, MS calls this telemetry :) Go to Management and check out startup event trace sessions. Those are the source of mysterious >hundreds of megabytes of logs written to disk per day.

Steve44 8y ago

At work we've recently moved from XP to Win7 and they seem to perform about the same for heavy office use. I'm playing with a Win10 machine at home, the CPU and RAM is far in excess of our work machines but it is so slow to use. It seems to regularly become unresponsive, programs take ages to start, it seems to be continually working away in the background doing 'nothing'. It's a truly horrible experience.

awiesenhofer 8y ago

i really like office 365 but the most productive thing i ever did was get rid of it on my work machine and install office 2010 again. it's just so much snappier there is no comparison. (although i also tried office 2003 for a day and boy it's blazingly fast. on a modern system you don't even see the startup screen, not to mention any input lag.)

Tobba_ 8y ago

On Win10 you need to have enough swap space on an SSD; HDD I/O has totally kneecapped latency, seemingly due to blind usage of NCQ (AHCI driver got replaced from Win7), so it chokes out entirely when combined with the even more broken swap manager. "Enough" meaning "infinite", because you're going to have something leaking all that memory. Task manager doesn't even show memory usage by default (add the "commit size" field), only the working set (and the swapping is insanely aggressive, so memory leaks just don't show up). Nobody seems to actually check that; even built-in stuff like Windows Update leaks pretty badly. Oh and the memory accounting doesn't even work.

harperlee 8y ago

One thing can't wrap my head around: if I receive a big (10Mb) email through a slow connection, Outlook completely freezes until the email has finished downloading. I'm talking, not even rendering correctly, and showing white rectangles instead of drawing components. How on earth can this not be a tested use case? Is there no separate thread to connect to the Internet?

samirm 8y ago
Don't know for certain, but the issue might be that it's using the same thread to scan the attachment and hang, rather than download it and hang.

mrguyorama 8y ago

Meanwhile my experience is opposite. I use Windows 7 at home and OSX for work. My personal machine is responsive, zippy, and most important of all, predictable Meanwhile, my SSD filled work mac bogs down in completely unpredictable ways, with weird antivirus scans that I cannot control somehow destroying javascript performance, and needing to be rebooted more than weekly to stay functional in multiple ways. I was similarly dissatisfied with OSX in the mid 2000s when I used it at school. I just don't get it

tomaskafka 8y ago

I should probably make a video of me opening an i7 2017 Macbook Pro with 16 GB RAM and waiting 3-5 seconds until the system allows me to type the password (also, I sometimes switch to Czech keyboard, and High Sierra has a bug where it randomly shows one input language as active in a top right but actually uses a different input language in a password field - this happens in about half of login attempts). This isn’t how it used to be. Sigh.