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This is one of the primary resaons I ditched Windows for Macos. The multitasking on Windows is ridiculously bad. Also, applications that freeze and can't be k
by andrewstuart 4y ago
This is one of the primary resaons I ditched Windows for Macos.
The multitasking on Windows is ridiculously bad.
Also, applications that freeze and can't be killed/restarted are simply part of life on Windows.
Add to all that, Window slows down over time - again, the periodic reformat and rebuild is part of life on Windows. After I switched to Mac I didn't need to rebuild the operating system essentially ever.
Also, the registry - I think the worst idea in all computing. Prior to the registry you plopped a windows application in a location and configured it with an INI file. After the registry the entire operating system and all applications turned into one big ball of chewing gum, glue and hair dredged out of the shower drain.
How can Windows have got it so wrong?
- kevmo314 4y agoDid they? My MacBook is much worse at multitasking. In fact the OS I've found to be best at multitasking is Debian/Ubuntu.
- andrewstuart 4y agoCan I ask what model and how much RAM?
- kevmo314 4y ago2019 13" MBP, 16GB. Pretty much anything I do will spin up the fan now. Compiling an app uses so much battery that I get less than an hour of battery life. I've resorted to remote development only, a la Chromebook. My previous laptop was a similar Lenovo X1 Carbon with Debian and wow do I miss it, but I don't have too much of a choice since I do mobile app development :(
- ab-dm 4y agoYeah, the 2019 MBPs were absolute abominations. I spent 5k AUD on a fully kitted out MBP and performance wise it’s one of the worst computers I’ve ever owned. I swore that would be the last Apple computer I ever bought, but then they released the M1s… and they are very good. Would recommend getting an M1 if at all possible. There’s still time to ask Santa for one.
- stavros 4y agoI recommend getting a Framework. It's probably not as good as an M1, but it'll last you more than two years, and if it doesn't, you can just change the CPU for a better one without having to throw all the other, perfectly good hardware away.
- CharlesW 4y ago> I recommend getting a Framework. It's probably not as good as an M1, but it'll last you more than two years… Macs have famously-long usable lives — my sister uses a 7-year-old iMac, for example. The latest macOS Ventura supports Macs made in 2017. I'd be very surprised to hear about people using 2021 Framework laptops as their daily driver in 2026.
- stavros 4y agoBut you're in a thread about how the GP's Mac didn't last two years. I'm fairly sure I will be using my Framework laptop as my daily driver in 2026, maybe with one motherboard replacement. I just switched from my 2017 XPS, and I do development work. I gave it to my dad, who loves it and will probably hold on to it for another few years. It's a bit odd to be saying this about pre-M1 Macs, as they were "just" Intel machines, same as everything else.
- deathanatos 4y ago… this literally doesn't mesh with reality. I've had 3 MBPs, every single one has had at least one issue, well before 7 years, usually around 1.5 to 2. The first two had battery recalls, the middle one had cable-gate, the middle one's display was also very temperature sensitive (it would have glitched lines artifact on the screen if the ambient temperature wasn't near 70F), the later MBP suffers from keyboard-gate and from constant thermal throttling. (Likely because the vents are choked with dust, but MBP's user hostile design prevents me from opening it up and pushing air through it, which is likely all it requires. They hate the user so much they used screws worse than Torx. I think they're Pentalobe, but don't quote me.) My current Magic Trackpad is also highly temperature sensitive. The "click" will lock up at high temp. (I.e., the trackpad will fight you, if you attempt to click, if the ambient temperature is warm.) > I'd be very surprised to hear about people using 2021 Framework laptops as their daily driver in 2026. I'm using a Lenovo Thinkpad at about that age. (It is a 2017 model, so, 5 years.) The biggest thing wrong with it at present is it requires AC power. (The battery connection is bad. It lived through two bike crashes, though, and I suspect that's a side effect of it. I should see if that's repairable, one of these days, but I've put up with that for the time, as with COVID, it doesn't really travel much anymore.) The TrackPoint™ is also wonky, but I think that's because sunlight has chemically hardened the nib like an old eraser. I have more nibs… somewhere. I should look for them or order more…
- fmajid 4y agoThe GUI is still essentially single-threaded. Only BeOS with its fully parallel UI had it right.
- yamtaddle 4y agoSwitching from FF to Chrome (this was like a decade ago, to be fair to FF) eliminated about 50% of my beachballs and other unresponsiveness system-wide, not just when using FF. Switching from Chrome to Safari got rid of almost all the rest, and also made my battery life match Apple's claims. [EDIT] And when I do still run into trouble, it's almost always Electron chat apps. Slack, Teams, and Discord. All terrible at being respectful of system resources. Closing the program and restarting it usually temporarily fixes the problem, but that shouldn't be necessary.
- PuffinBlue 4y agoA very unreasonable reason for me not switching to Safari is because the bookmarks dropdowns (when activating the bookmark bar) have two very annoying features. Firstly they only open when clicked, so if you click one and move your mouse to another, the other doesn't open, just the original stays there and you have to click off it to close it. Secondly there's some kind of delay to that click such that if you accidentally click the wrong folder of bookmarks, click off it to the correct folder and click again to open the correct folder, if you click too fast it'll do nothing - no opening the new folder, nothing. And it'll continue to do nothing if you continue to click 'inside' the timeout window. So you have this artifical delay built into bookmark navigation that just put me off. That and also ultra-wide tabs which change in size as you close them with a middle click, which is really annoying and you sometimes close the wrong tab. Close them with the cross and they stay the same size and neatly collapse, you can even then middle click to close the remainder and they stay the same size. Silly difference in behaviour IMO. It's the little things that put me off. Shame, as Passkey support is great.
- kitsunesoba 4y agoIt's frustrating that efficiency and being a good desktop citizen is such an afterthought for most browsers. Support for all the fancy web features imaginable is isn't worth much to me if means keeping my system pegged and destroying its battery life.
- nijave 4y agoAfaik browsers are highly efficient and a lot of work goes into optimization. On the other hand, they're expected to run arbitrary code (JavaScript, Web Assembly) which can do all matter of terrible things. A couple years ago, it used to be Gmail/Google Voice websites would take nearly 1GB of RAM alone per tab and crash if you left them running a few days. A website could just run <download big json blob and append to array> in a tight loop and the browser has to try to make decisions on not hosing website performance if the user wants to actually use the crappy website while simultaneously not hosing battery/machine performance.
- rbanffy 4y agoMy own personal experience (recent x86 based MBPs and similar) is that macOS degrades quickly when CPU and IO get stressed, but Windows 10 and 11 become unresponsive with much smaller loads. Of the big three, Linux is the one that can take more processes while still being responsive. Even a lowly old i3 can encode videos with ffmpeg while you browse the web provided you start ffmpeg with a `nice -n 19`. On a Mac, it seems to be ignored.
- jorvi 4y agoLinux UI actually becomes very unresponsive under load (on most distros) because the default kernel scheduler is tuned for throughput at the cost of responsiveness, instead of vice versa. Desktop distros switching to a more user-friendly scheduler, and loading a ‘small speaker’ EQ via Pulse on detecting internal speakers (= laptop) are two massive, low-hanging fruit improvements for Linux that just don’t seem to be done.
- rbanffy 4y agoI guess running the heavy lifting with high niceness does the trick for me.
- Waterluvian 4y agoA decade with Ubuntu and I get why it’s free. I have disastrous performance issues with it, for reasons that people usually respond, “oh well that’s not Ubuntu’s fault…” but that isn’t a great excuse as users do not care (unless you aren’t intending to attract general users). Most of the issue is that I have to fight with nvidia video drivers every month or two. Something happens and they stop operating and it grinds my entire system to a crawl when everything is software rendered. YouTube basically kills my computer. When I go with Mac or Windows, the main feature is that they have designers to make more than a Potemkin UI, and they care about the end to end UX. No, “oh go complain to some other vendor.” Ubuntu is very very impressive for free. I certainly acknowledge how great that is, and how important that is to the ecosystem. Anyways, sorry about the rant. I’m calming down.
- hutzlibu 4y ago"Potemkin UI" Thats a good description for many linux GUIs. They look like they can get the job done, but to really get the job done, you have to use what the developers of said UI likely themself use - the terminal.
- Waterluvian 4y agoA friend used the term when I said, “I used Additional Drivers to update to the latest recommended driver and it bricked my computer.” He said never to use that UI and to do it via a terminal. The terminal approach worked effortlessly and in half the time, once I Un-bricked my laptop. It feels like a lot of the UIs in Ubuntu are there just so they can claim it’s an OS that can take over for Windows or Mac.
- dm319 4y agoI used nvidia with linux >10 years ago. Never again. The FOSS philosophy doesn't mesh well with binary blobs and it never will.
- Waterluvian 4y agoThe wild thing is that using the Additional Drivers UI is what bricked my computer last week. It probably downloaded some binaries but it also spent 30 mins running gcc compiling something. And then forced a kernel headers update but didn’t update anything else. Rebooted and I have no wifi or bluetooth. The fix was a reversion and then CLI install of the nvidia 515 drivers.
- anikom15 4y agoHow long ago did you switch to Mac OS? This sounds like an argument from 2004, not 2022.
- andrewstuart 4y agoWhen the Intel Mac arrived, so maybe 14 years ago or more? Are you saying Windows has fixed all these problems? The registry is still there. I do actually have some Windows machines I use sometimes and recall thinking "still the same" but I can't say that as a hard core user, so I'd be interested to hear if Windows is now a sleek, reliable multitasker that instantly kills dead applications. Nothing will make me OK with the registry and the general mess of Windows though - it's like a house someone hasn't properly cleaned for 40 yeaes.
- rbanffy 4y ago> Are you saying Windows has fixed all these problems? From my own personal experience, no. My machines can become unusable from a simple Windows Update.
- trentnelson 4y agoI feel like if you're bothered simply by the existence of the registry, Windows isn't really for you. I get it, a little bit -- the OOM killer on Linux just boggles my mind, but once you view in context, you can appreciate how we ended with it, at a technical level. But if you think the registry could be replaced with .ini files like the good ol' days, that's a pretty extreme hot take. If you're open to changing your perspective on what the registry is for, how it is designed, and why it's necessary, read any of the Windows Internals books.
- jve 4y agoThe rants go both ways. Others see value with the registry (ideologically), others more like you https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32275078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32275078
- anikom15 4y agoI certainly get a lot less blue screens and lockups than I did in the past, and the OS shuts down locked-up apps more quickly. Group policies have replaced the registry for advanced configuration of the OS. The only time I’ve needed to change the registry is for dealing with poorly written, old drivers, which are becoming more rare as Microsoft’s standards for getting a driver signed are becoming more stringent.
- ChoGGi 4y ago> Add to all that, Window slows down over time - again, the periodic reformat and rebuild is part of life on Windows. My windows install is from 201*, it was an upgrade from win7, and switched from an i7 to a ryzen. I do clean out the registry/startup/task scheduler on occasion.
- Maursault 4y ago> My windows install is from 201* The early 3rd century was the best era for Microsoft with Windows Severan.
- andrewstuart 4y agoThe early 3rd century was an exciting time for computing. The big issue back then was Roman numerals were hard to convert to hex and binary.
- rbanffy 4y agoBack then mainframes had specialized hardware to deal with them. Note: the other day I read ICL mainframes had specialized instructions to deal with pre-decimal pounds.
- kens 4y agoOne of the IBM 1401 computers (1959) at the Computer History Museum has hardware support for pre-decimal pounds/shillings/pence, to perform arithmetic on these values and print them. Thus, the computer has three fundamental datatypes in hardware: arbitrary-length strings, arbitrary-length integers, and pounds/shillings/pence. Of course there were two competing standards for encoding pounds/shillings/pence, so the front panel has a knob to select the standard. (Before decimalization, there were 12 pence in a shilling and 20 shillings in a pound. Mathematical operations on currency were both difficult and extremely common, so IBM provided hardware support as an option. There were boards of transistors so you could add, subtract, multiply, or divide currency values with a single operation, rather than an inconvenient sequence of instructions.) Photos in my Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/kenshirriff/status/1364365985499602947 https://twitter.com/kenshirriff/status/1364365985499602947 To get back to the original topic, I'll mention that my MacBook Air would drop keystrokes if I visited a website with, say, a video ad. I find it kind of appalling that computers in the 1960s could handle input from hundreds of keyboards at once, while a 2017 computer can't manage a single keyboard.
- Dah00n 4y agoI have been where you are, posting the same thing, but I don't believe it is true today. Applications that hang and can't be killed is a much bigger problem to me in Linux than in Windows 10. I also don't reformat, at most i reset Windows or applications but it has been years. I agree with the rest but in everyday use the registry is not a problem in Windows. The difference to me is that I as a power user might be able to fix it myself in Linux but by only using the tools normal users know of I must say I cannot recognize that this is a weak point in Windows today. Clicking the X to close an app and getting stuck with a dead app is much worse in, say, Debian than in Windows. With that said.. I don't use Windows where I have a choice but that is mainly for philosophical reasons these days. Mac I don't touch. I feel it is the worst of both camps.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago> Applications that hang and can't be killed is a much bigger problem to me in Linux than in Windows 10. Have you seen anything in Linux that you can't kill with "kill -9"?
- wazoox 4y agoI have a nice shortcut : Windows+K calls "xkill" :)
- aaronmdjones 4y agoOn Linux, processes that are stuck in D state (waiting on I/O) cannot be signaled. More specifically, the signal will be queued until the task exits that state. This includes signal 9. The process may well never exit that state, for example if the I/O it's waiting for is actually over a networked filesystem and the NIC is misbehaving.
- kccqzy 4y agoFortunately we have TASK_KILLABLE to replace TASK_UNINTERRUPTIBLE. https://lwn.net/Articles/288056/ https://lwn.net/Articles/288056/
- nailer 4y agoI think all desktop OSs have it wrong. Allowing full APIs to backgrounded apps and no CPU reservation for control apps will ultimately end desktop computing - we’ll create on iPads because they work.
- rbanffy 4y agoI'm writing this on an old i3 and it feels perfectly fine. It would probably take days to compile a large project like Chrome or LibreOffice, but, as long as I run the make under a nice, I can continue using the computer and the only sign something big is happening will be the CPU fan kicking in.
- nailer 4y ago> as long as I run the make under a nice Regular users don't understand CPU quotas. It should be done by default. The current behavior on Windows/Mac/Linux of allowing a program to make the machine uncontrollable is poor.
- rbanffy 4y agoThis will probably change as we get more cores and performance/efficiency ones. Macs already run a lot of the low-priority tasks on their slow cores leaving the fast ones available for interactive activities. I don't disagree on the current approach though. If I start a, say, long build job from a terminal window, I have control over the resources it can take. If, OTOH, I start a program from the GUI, it's reasonable to assume I want it to have full control, at least while it has the focus. Now, letting the GUI dynamically renice non-focused processes would be very nice.
- nailer 4y agoMore cores won’t fix it. Some app will add more processes and use all available CPUs and there’s no reservations. You had it right with nice - phones and tablets and consoles and cars have it right with their techniques. Apps shouldn’t be able to make the system unusable by default.
- Chinjut 4y agoDon't MacOS and Unixes have the equivalent of registry hell with a million configuration files hidden away in /etc/ or /usr/ or wherever, and then having to check where environment variables are set and so on? Ideally, almost all of a program's configuration settings would be stored in the same folder as the program, readily discoverable, and you could just pick these things up and move them easily, but in practice, it seems to be a pain everywhere.
- _piif 4y agoNixOS and Guix come close to this with a central spot for declaring the entire system state, including program configuration and env vars. Now there is still the $HOME/.config mess, which home-manager[0] tries to tackle. [0] https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager
- andrewstuart 4y agoThe registry is uniquely crap because it puts all the configuration for everything into some single store - I don't know what devilish format lies beneath it, then it stores everything as binary keys. Things are not separated strictly by application so you end up with a giant pile of intermingled goo. In Linux, no doubt there's alot to get your head around, but I've never found things to be a giant pile of spaghetti. The challenge Linux has is there's a bajillion ways to do things so you have to be pretty experienced to feel confident crawling around the tunnels and ventilation ducts.
- satiric 4y agoThe disfigured nature of the registry is a real shame, I actually like the idea of centralizing all configuration in Windows. I wonder if there was a better solution in Cairo. To be honest (and I'm aware that I might be tarred and feathered for this) I kinda prefer the centralized Windows registry to the "random assortment of config files" approach that Linux has. I think both Windows and Linux give you that feeling of carefully crawling around in ventilation ducts once you get your hands dirty; I doubt it's possible to get rid of that without getting rid of the inherent flexibility that the systems provide. There's a reason Windows has both the registry and the Settings app.
- ufmace 4y agoAnecdotally, that's not my experience with Windows these days at all. I've never had the whole system freeze up on my Win10 desktop. Never noticed a slowdown or app that can't be killed, and never done a reformat or rebuild. Windows Update is mildly annoying when it decides to reboot your system for you, though usually when you're not using it. The registry seems fine to me too. Okay it's not perfect, but I don't think it's meaningfully worse than the MacOS or Linux system of configs in text files with various types of special formats all over the place, unless of course it's some kind of binary format that can only be modified with a special CLI program.
- seanw444 4y agoahem ahem gconf ahem ahem
- IshKebab 4y agoI agree. Windows is basically fine these days. It's even better than Mac and Linux in a big way from a desktop stability point of view because it has the Ctrl-alt-delete interface which works reliably and lets you kill the offending program. Linux has various useless options like sysreq shortcuts that you can't remember and kill random processes, and I don't think Mac has anything, though to be honest I don't recall ever bringing a Mac to its knees so much that I couldn't open a terminal and run `top`.
- int_19h 4y agoI wish Ctrl+Alt+Delete would be reliable enough to work with full-screen games. But, half the time, when you try to launch Task Manager that way to kill the offending process, it ends up under the game's output. I've learned to kill processes using keyboard navigation by looking at Task Manager's thumbnail in Alt-Tab process list, but it's ridiculous that we still need to do this kind of dance in 2023.
- scapp 4y agoThere's a way to make it always appear above other windows. Let me see if I can find that again... Ah, it's in the options menu on the task manager itself (alt + O to access the menu without a mouse).
- w1nst0nsm1th 4y ago> This is one of the primary resaons I ditched Windows for Macos. The raison I just ditched Fedora for ubuntu... The raison I ditched MacOS for Windows is that MacOS is slowly but surely becoming a magnified version of iOS... One day you will have to jailbreak if you want administrator rights on your ~~personal computer~~ Macbook.
- WillPostForFood 4y agoThis is also why I ditched Windows, about 15 year ago. But honestly, I get more ui freezes and beach balls today with Monterey than I do with Win 10. Windows has been getting better while MacOS has been slipping.
- jorvi 4y agoI wrote a long comment on my phone telling you how this is simply untrue. During the typing of the comment, Safari locked up and then hard-crashed, losing my comment. If that happens on something as tightly-controlled as iOS, how many bugs and crashes do you think macOS and it’s apps experience? The main difference between macOS and Windows or Linux, I’d say, is that bugs on macOS are more submarine. Windows also has much stronger recovery mechanisms, to the point where a GPU crash barely phases it. A GPU crash on macOS will hard-reboot the system and possibly show you a ‘:-)’.
- Merad 4y agoThis is a very outdated take on windows. I’m not sure what “multitasking is bad” means, but I do a heck of a lot of multitasking on windows every day with resource intensive developer tools with no problem, and have been doing so for over a decade. Apps can be killed via task manager without doing anything special. You might run into an occasional rare bug where explorer freezes so you can’t open task manager, but I can’t recall the last time it happened to me (and you can’t tell me with a straight face the Linux or MacOS are completely free from wild edge case bugs of that sort). I used to religiously reformat and reinstall windows. It’s been completely unnecessary since at least Windows 7. My personal desktop ran from 2014 to 2021 on the same install, including a Win7 -> Win10 upgrade. You certainly may not like the registry, but it’s hard to make a compelling argument that it’s been a source of problems since Win7. To be honest I think all of the registry problems I can recall seeing in the last decade were caused by people being sucked in by “registry cleaner” scamware/malware apps claiming to fix non-existent problems.
- winrid 4y agoTry to sort by name in task manager and wait as it locks up for seconds.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]