4 ms·

My gosh this. I recently had Windows update on my sons laptop, a 2012 "hand me down" Thinkpad. We'd composed a song together in Ableton that used 4 soft-synths

My gosh this. I recently had Windows update on my sons laptop, a 2012 "hand me down" Thinkpad. We'd composed a song together in Ableton that used 4 soft-synths and after the update it could not play the song without pegging the CPU! I eventually tracked this down to Windows Defender sitting at 40% CPU! Disabling it entirely brought the performance of the laptop back to what it was pre-update. I find this behaviour extremely disappointing. This is a perfectly serviceable laptop that would have likely been replaced by someone who was less technically inclined had it happened to them and they did not have the wherewithal to track down the offending piece of software. Your original quote reminded me of a Cormac McCarthy quote which seems to apply to the Windows Defender engineers right now (I kid): > But when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.

seanw444 4y ago
It's crazy because even slightly heavier Linux distros run smooth as butter on laptops that Windows chugs resources on. There's nothing fancier about Windows. There's literally no reason for it to be as poorly optimized as it is, and yet it is. It's crazy to me.
- ticviking 4y ago
  The reason is simple. It doesn’t impact Microsoft’s bottom line. Poor Linux performance will eventually annoy someone enough to fix it, and being open source they actually can fix it
  - beachy 4y ago
    It actually negatively impacts Microsoft's bottom line. A slow machine means a new PC purchased which usually means a new Windows licence, so there are negative incentives on Microsoft to improve Windows performance.
    - tomschwiha 4y ago
      Or they switch to Apple and Microsoft is completely missing out on a customer.
- thejosh 4y ago
  Also the opposite end, with many CPU cores/threads such as the threadripper (2990wx, which is 32c/64 threads). It doesn't work under Windows 10 well at all, even with crazy hacks like coreprio https://bitsum.com/portfolio/coreprio/ https://bitsum.com/portfolio/coreprio/. I've found Windows 11 out of the box works just as well as Linux. I never really need to dualboot Windows (I don't play as many games these days), but W11 looks like a lot of hard work has gone into making the scheduler and other tools work well. It's just a shame their UI is absolute garbage.
  - iamevn 4y ago
    For me, W11 seems to have really messed things up with the scheduler. If I'm playing just about any game on my primary monitor, I can't leave a media player window or a browser window with youtube on the second monitor because Windows starves the (visible!) unfocused window if the focused one is using lots of resources. This makes the YouTube video I want to watch in the background stutter like crazy and often completely freeze until I refocus the window. With games that support a gamepad and accept input while not focused, I've started leaving a browser window focused so that it gets correctly scheduled with essentially no noticable impact on the game.
    - MonaroVXR 4y ago
      There's a setting called game mode, turn that off.
      - iamevn 4y ago
        That doesn't appear to help for me.
  - dotnet00 4y ago
    Even if you did play a lot more games, Steam's Proton has come a really long way, for most of my library playing Windows games under Linux is seamless now and almost seamless in VR too.

seanw444 4y ago

It's crazy because even slightly heavier Linux distros run smooth as butter on laptops that Windows chugs resources on. There's nothing fancier about Windows. There's literally no reason for it to be as poorly optimized as it is, and yet it is. It's crazy to me.

ticviking 4y ago
The reason is simple. It doesn’t impact Microsoft’s bottom line. Poor Linux performance will eventually annoy someone enough to fix it, and being open source they actually can fix it
- beachy 4y ago
  It actually negatively impacts Microsoft's bottom line. A slow machine means a new PC purchased which usually means a new Windows licence, so there are negative incentives on Microsoft to improve Windows performance.
  - tomschwiha 4y ago
    Or they switch to Apple and Microsoft is completely missing out on a customer.
thejosh 4y ago
Also the opposite end, with many CPU cores/threads such as the threadripper (2990wx, which is 32c/64 threads). It doesn't work under Windows 10 well at all, even with crazy hacks like coreprio https://bitsum.com/portfolio/coreprio/ https://bitsum.com/portfolio/coreprio/. I've found Windows 11 out of the box works just as well as Linux. I never really need to dualboot Windows (I don't play as many games these days), but W11 looks like a lot of hard work has gone into making the scheduler and other tools work well. It's just a shame their UI is absolute garbage.
- iamevn 4y ago
  For me, W11 seems to have really messed things up with the scheduler. If I'm playing just about any game on my primary monitor, I can't leave a media player window or a browser window with youtube on the second monitor because Windows starves the (visible!) unfocused window if the focused one is using lots of resources. This makes the YouTube video I want to watch in the background stutter like crazy and often completely freeze until I refocus the window. With games that support a gamepad and accept input while not focused, I've started leaving a browser window focused so that it gets correctly scheduled with essentially no noticable impact on the game.
  - MonaroVXR 4y ago
    There's a setting called game mode, turn that off.
    - iamevn 4y ago
      That doesn't appear to help for me.
- dotnet00 4y ago
  Even if you did play a lot more games, Steam's Proton has come a really long way, for most of my library playing Windows games under Linux is seamless now and almost seamless in VR too.