6 ms·

I recently had to install windows on 2 computers after some years without doing it. Had to spend an entire day debloating the thing. Had to use a handful of to

I recently had to install windows on 2 computers after some years without doing it. Had to spend an entire day debloating the thing. Had to use a handful of tools and powershell scripts to do it. I still can't imagine how they managed to make a context menu open in almost a full second. In Windows 9x on a 200Mhz it was instant. A useless one too, because all the options that matter are in the old one. The only thing holding me from Linux is ThrottleStop and MSI Afterburner, which are a must for gaming on my laptop

ta1243 2y ago
> The only thing holding me from Linux I've spent the last 25 years using linux and seeing this statement. There's always something.
- darkwater 2y ago
  And to give a more Linux-positive spin "there is always something that holds you... which is actually not that vital in the end once you lose it"
  - bishbosh 2y ago
    It really has come a long way. Obviously this is one users needs, and other folks will find other things that are missing or not 100%. But the fact that in this case the conversation as moved from gaming more generally, to vendor specific overclocking is quite a sign of the times.
- eptcyka 2y ago
  It might be different people saying that, and with time, some blockers are removed, some people migrate, and a new set of would be linux users get bumped up in the queue where they are now at their last obstacle to using linux.
  - account42 2y ago
    A lot of these "blockers" are, to put it bluntly, merely excuses. Like ggp here didn't mention why he thinks ThrottleStop and MSI Afterburner are a must for him but but I doubt that they are truly irreplacable. More likely they provide some non-essential utility which would make this more about tradeoffs, or about just taking the plunge to feel the grass on the other side of the fence with your own feet.
- baq 2y ago
  Let's be honest here, the something is 99% drivers. It was printers, then it was wifi, now it's gpus. DNNs and LLMs at least made the compute part of the gpu driver Linux-native (from the vendors' perspective), one would hope the graphics part of the graphics processor would come next, but alas making big iron do work is done from macos and windows laptops.
  - advael 2y ago
    Weird I haven't had a graphics issue since like the 8000 series of cards for like, the normal driving graphics right off the card use case. Optimus is definitely a little fucky with multiple GPUs and sometimes new CUDA versions break libs if you're keeping it bleeding edge updated, but most ML workflows use environment management to get around the clusterfuck that is the python ML ANN ecosystem anyway. Nvidia does a lot of work to make it hard to work with their cards but since GPGPU started taking off in the 2010s this sounds like a blast from the past, as a lot of the need for getting good performance out of cards on compute servers - which inevitably run linux because it has any kind of reasonable headless userspace and is easier to write reliable software for - has driven better driver support in general In discussions between people who don't use linux, their notions of what the pain points even are seem to lag by sometimes over a decade I find myself equally ill-informed on the pitfalls of windows ecosystems of late, except the ones that make the news for how insane they sound, but in my defense I also don't go around claiming I intermittently try to use it but just can't make the jump As microsoft continues to tighten the screws, I just hope all these reluctant users can get out before it's too late
    - baq 2y ago
      The GPU market forces are: - gaming: Windows with a sprinkle of Steam Deck (yay!) - compute: Linux - video decode: Windows (DRM on Linux... yeah) - video encode: mixed (Windows for consumers and smbs, Linux for cloud transcode) Of these, the Steam Deck is the closest to a laptop that we got to. This is actually great, but it didn't result in a noticeable shift in anything, because LLMs took it all.
      - 2y ago
- walteweiss 2y ago
  15 years ago, that was Photoshop that kept me back. I switched to macOS a couple of years later. Now, I switched to Linux, ditching Photoshop. So far so good. I can stand the life without Photoshop, but tolerating macOS or Windows is above me.
- djaychela 2y ago
  For me, the something is the DAW i use (Cubase). I know it intimately, I make a living with it, and despite trying other alternatives, there isn't a DAW which runs on Linux which would cut it for me, in terms of overall features. If Cubase ran on linux (and all my current plugins could work), then I'd drop it in a heartbeat. I've been running Linux in various guises and roles since (I think) 1998, but it's never made it to the 'daily use, I can do everything in it' stage, despite quite a few attempts on my part to make it happen.
  - vjulian 2y ago
    I’m curious, how did you settle on PC vs Mac? I’m a PC user (Cubase), but there are certain unique advantages to Mac as a platform of course when it comes to music. I’m not wedded to brand personally but use PC as I find it more versatile in non-music tasks (and in music I am more a hobbyist these days).
    - NikkiA 2y ago
      I suspect > and all my current plugins could work holds the key, there are an immense amount of plugins that are PC-only, as I'm sure you're aware. The list of mac-only plugins is pretty tiny.
    - djaychela 2y ago
      I actually use both, but my main DAW is on Windows because of cost of storage and processor at the time I built it. It's now due for replacement, and I'm still pretty confident I can build a more performant Windows system for less money than buying anything macOS based - even if I buy a mac Studio I'd need to go for 64GB RAM, and that would be £2500 for just the system unit with 512GB of storage. I can build a faster windows-based i9 system for that, complete with 64GB of RAM and probably 4TB of storage (if not more). I've got an M1 max macbook Pro as I've used macbooks for a few years now and despite trying Windows-based laptops out, I've not found any where the keyboard, trackpad, build quality and screen match up to a mac, and I (for the most part) like macOS more than Windows. As for some other replies about plug-ins and instruments, I used to find that Windows was far more popular and available, but now nearly everything I've bought is available cross platform, so it's nowhere near the issue it used to be.
- deaddodo 2y ago
  I've been using Linux for a similar time. To be fair to those people, there were massive roadblocks for ages. 802.11b (then G, A, N, etc) support, Flash while it ruled the roost, DRM-video playback, GPU-acceleration, Bluetooth device support, proper sleep, functional multihead, application support, etc, etc, etc. It's not fair to say "there's always something" in a sarcastic tone, when there legitimately has always been something holding people back. Especially on laptops. Is it easier than ever to use? Definitely. Does it support a significant chunk of hardware these days? Yup. Are there actual proprietary/commercial pieces of software on it? Yeah. Does it game now? Sure does. Are there still reasons people might not be able to use it? Definitely.
- M95D 2y ago
  How long does it take in linux for the context menu to open? In fact, is there a context menu at all?
  - veqz 2y ago
    Not sure if the question was asked with sarcasm or not, but, me being me, I actually tested it here as soon as I read it: It's instant. OnMouseDown event, if you will. Using KDE Plasma 6.
    - deaddodo 2y ago
      I don't even know what a "context menu" is in this context. Are we just talking about a general right-click menu? If so, it's instant in both Windows 11 and KDE6 for me (desktop, toolbars, etc). Or do we specifically mean a context-filled context menu, such as the ones used in the file managers? If so, Dolphin definitely performs better than Windows Explorer, but that's a pretty useless micro-benchmark. The thumbnail and live preview processes are far more processor intensive/laggy in Dolphin/KDE, does that mean KDE is overall worse? No.
    - soraminazuki 2y ago
      It's funny because it's the latest version of Windows that requires two clicks to get a non-broken context menu. It's either that or registry hacks that Microsoft hasn't disabled yet. https://superuser.com/questions/1674122/how-can-i-revert-to-the-old-context-menu-in-windows-11 https://superuser.com/questions/1674122/how-can-i-revert-to-...
  - bishbosh 2y ago
    It does have the advantage of context menus that contain all of the context, rather than a button to revert to an older version of the context menu that has what you actually want!
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y ago
  On the steam deck that statement is gone!
nicman23 2y ago
privacy.sexy is pretty good
jzxy 2y ago
>I still can't imagine how they managed to make a context menu open in almost a full second They did make everything slower than it used to be when it comes to new UI elements, but the context menu can also be slowed down by third parties. On my machine, the primary cause was the shortcut to AMD radeon settings. You can remove it with this powershell command : Get-AppxPackage -AllUsers AdvancedMicroDevicesInc-RSXCM | Remove-AppxPackage -AllUsers It was a major pain to find how to disable this thing. In fact, if you google "AdvancedMicroDevicesInc-RSXCM" (with the quotes, to get a verbatim search) you won't find more than a handful of results talking about its existence. It doesn't uninstall the settings panel itself, just the shortcut. Yes, the context menu shortcut is a standalone app package of its own. It's crazy. After uninstalling this AMD crap the context menu went from taking a second to being almost instantaneous. On other people's machines I've also remarked certain antivirus like Kaspersky causing major issues with 11's context menu performance. I thought the new context menu was all about fixing the mistakes of the previous ones when it came to the nasty things people can do in extending explorer.exe but seeing the behavior of those new third party additions to the menu, I guess not.
- philistine 2y ago
  It’s for these weird edge cases that I love macOS’ new Startup Items menu. It includes a list of everything that starts at boot, and everything running in the background that’s not the OS or Apple. I had been waiting for a feature like that all my life. Sure, put a weird little service hidden somewhere as a login item, but tell me so. I can now turn off Microsoft’s license validator !
  - karmakaze 2y ago
    The thing on the later macOS that opens so slowly is System Preferences. So annoying, and also how it always starts at Appearance (as if that's the most important) when I usually want the last thing I had opened before.
    - philistine 2y ago
      Look, the new Settings app is far from perfect, but one can like a new feature it has with reservations about its rewrite.
MrDresden 2y ago
This may not fulfill your needs in the way that MSI Afterburner and ThrottleStop do, however I would recommend checking out MangoHUD and cpufrequtils respectively for similar (but perhaps not identical) behaviour.
jorvi 2y ago
You don’t really need ThrottleStop if you go into your bios, turn off Turboboost and/or powerlimit your CPU. If your laptop bios doesn’t allow that, look for a “quiet” setting in the bios. This changes the PL1/PL2 to 35w/65w down from 85w/60w. With the NVK driver steadily improving, it feels like it is only a matter of time before something similar to Corectrl is written for Nvidia. I realize GreenWithEnvy exists, but it’s never worked well for me.
ano-ther 2y ago
> can't imagine how they managed to make a context menu open in almost a full second. In Windows 9x on a 200Mhz it was instant. A useless one too, because all the options that matter are in the old one. And the system sounds now take a few seconds to chime - often after I already dismissed the corresponding dialogue
wasteduniverse 2y ago
[dead]
williamvds 2y ago
> MSI Afterburner, which are a must for gaming on my laptop If you want some unsolicited software recommendation: CoreCtrl offers similar controls to MSI Afterburner, at least on my AMD GPU
chakintosh 2y ago
Use Chris Tutus' Debloat utility https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil
jinushaun 2y ago
> I still can't imagine how they managed to make a context menu open in almost a full second. It’s probably One Drive and Dropbox. The cloud storage providers have to run a check on every context menu execution. It’s slow because MS closed the loophole that was previously used to implement that and provided an official API that does the same thing but worse and slower
stanski 2y ago
So just use Windows for gaming only. That's what I do which means I'm in Linux 99.9% of the time.
branon 2y ago
There is nothing inherently special about ThrottleStop and MSI Afterburner, these are merely (proprietary) Windows-specific utilities for changing the behavior of your hardware. Running these programs on Linux would not make sense because their only purpose is to twist knobs in the Windows OS. Linux has different knobs so their functions do not apply. Thus your restriction is self-imposed more than anything, you are effectively saying "the only thing stopping me from switching to Linux is that it's not Windows." Between your BIOS settings and programs like cpufrequtils and CoreCtrl there are equivalents to those programs, but interacting with hardware is platform-specific. You may have to learn different programs because Linux abstracts access to your hardware differently, thus your preferred Windows-specific utilities will not have any use :D This is in contrast to productivity applications like Adobe which could reasonably work the exact same way across platforms... if only they were cross-platform at all :(
lencastre 2y ago
Next time install using English/World as locale. Then add your favorite language/region/keyboard after. Don’t know why, but it comes almost bloat free.

ta1243 2y ago

> The only thing holding me from Linux I've spent the last 25 years using linux and seeing this statement. There's always something.

darkwater 2y ago
And to give a more Linux-positive spin "there is always something that holds you... which is actually not that vital in the end once you lose it"
- bishbosh 2y ago
  It really has come a long way. Obviously this is one users needs, and other folks will find other things that are missing or not 100%. But the fact that in this case the conversation as moved from gaming more generally, to vendor specific overclocking is quite a sign of the times.
eptcyka 2y ago
It might be different people saying that, and with time, some blockers are removed, some people migrate, and a new set of would be linux users get bumped up in the queue where they are now at their last obstacle to using linux.
- account42 2y ago
  A lot of these "blockers" are, to put it bluntly, merely excuses. Like ggp here didn't mention why he thinks ThrottleStop and MSI Afterburner are a must for him but but I doubt that they are truly irreplacable. More likely they provide some non-essential utility which would make this more about tradeoffs, or about just taking the plunge to feel the grass on the other side of the fence with your own feet.
baq 2y ago
Let's be honest here, the something is 99% drivers. It was printers, then it was wifi, now it's gpus. DNNs and LLMs at least made the compute part of the gpu driver Linux-native (from the vendors' perspective), one would hope the graphics part of the graphics processor would come next, but alas making big iron do work is done from macos and windows laptops.
- advael 2y ago
  Weird I haven't had a graphics issue since like the 8000 series of cards for like, the normal driving graphics right off the card use case. Optimus is definitely a little fucky with multiple GPUs and sometimes new CUDA versions break libs if you're keeping it bleeding edge updated, but most ML workflows use environment management to get around the clusterfuck that is the python ML ANN ecosystem anyway. Nvidia does a lot of work to make it hard to work with their cards but since GPGPU started taking off in the 2010s this sounds like a blast from the past, as a lot of the need for getting good performance out of cards on compute servers - which inevitably run linux because it has any kind of reasonable headless userspace and is easier to write reliable software for - has driven better driver support in general In discussions between people who don't use linux, their notions of what the pain points even are seem to lag by sometimes over a decade I find myself equally ill-informed on the pitfalls of windows ecosystems of late, except the ones that make the news for how insane they sound, but in my defense I also don't go around claiming I intermittently try to use it but just can't make the jump As microsoft continues to tighten the screws, I just hope all these reluctant users can get out before it's too late
  - baq 2y ago
    The GPU market forces are: - gaming: Windows with a sprinkle of Steam Deck (yay!) - compute: Linux - video decode: Windows (DRM on Linux... yeah) - video encode: mixed (Windows for consumers and smbs, Linux for cloud transcode) Of these, the Steam Deck is the closest to a laptop that we got to. This is actually great, but it didn't result in a noticeable shift in anything, because LLMs took it all.
    - 2y ago
walteweiss 2y ago
15 years ago, that was Photoshop that kept me back. I switched to macOS a couple of years later. Now, I switched to Linux, ditching Photoshop. So far so good. I can stand the life without Photoshop, but tolerating macOS or Windows is above me.
djaychela 2y ago
For me, the something is the DAW i use (Cubase). I know it intimately, I make a living with it, and despite trying other alternatives, there isn't a DAW which runs on Linux which would cut it for me, in terms of overall features. If Cubase ran on linux (and all my current plugins could work), then I'd drop it in a heartbeat. I've been running Linux in various guises and roles since (I think) 1998, but it's never made it to the 'daily use, I can do everything in it' stage, despite quite a few attempts on my part to make it happen.
- vjulian 2y ago
  I’m curious, how did you settle on PC vs Mac? I’m a PC user (Cubase), but there are certain unique advantages to Mac as a platform of course when it comes to music. I’m not wedded to brand personally but use PC as I find it more versatile in non-music tasks (and in music I am more a hobbyist these days).
  - NikkiA 2y ago
    I suspect > and all my current plugins could work holds the key, there are an immense amount of plugins that are PC-only, as I'm sure you're aware. The list of mac-only plugins is pretty tiny.
  - djaychela 2y ago
    I actually use both, but my main DAW is on Windows because of cost of storage and processor at the time I built it. It's now due for replacement, and I'm still pretty confident I can build a more performant Windows system for less money than buying anything macOS based - even if I buy a mac Studio I'd need to go for 64GB RAM, and that would be £2500 for just the system unit with 512GB of storage. I can build a faster windows-based i9 system for that, complete with 64GB of RAM and probably 4TB of storage (if not more). I've got an M1 max macbook Pro as I've used macbooks for a few years now and despite trying Windows-based laptops out, I've not found any where the keyboard, trackpad, build quality and screen match up to a mac, and I (for the most part) like macOS more than Windows. As for some other replies about plug-ins and instruments, I used to find that Windows was far more popular and available, but now nearly everything I've bought is available cross platform, so it's nowhere near the issue it used to be.
deaddodo 2y ago
I've been using Linux for a similar time. To be fair to those people, there were massive roadblocks for ages. 802.11b (then G, A, N, etc) support, Flash while it ruled the roost, DRM-video playback, GPU-acceleration, Bluetooth device support, proper sleep, functional multihead, application support, etc, etc, etc. It's not fair to say "there's always something" in a sarcastic tone, when there legitimately has always been something holding people back. Especially on laptops. Is it easier than ever to use? Definitely. Does it support a significant chunk of hardware these days? Yup. Are there actual proprietary/commercial pieces of software on it? Yeah. Does it game now? Sure does. Are there still reasons people might not be able to use it? Definitely.
M95D 2y ago
How long does it take in linux for the context menu to open? In fact, is there a context menu at all?
- veqz 2y ago
  Not sure if the question was asked with sarcasm or not, but, me being me, I actually tested it here as soon as I read it: It's instant. OnMouseDown event, if you will. Using KDE Plasma 6.
  - deaddodo 2y ago
    I don't even know what a "context menu" is in this context. Are we just talking about a general right-click menu? If so, it's instant in both Windows 11 and KDE6 for me (desktop, toolbars, etc). Or do we specifically mean a context-filled context menu, such as the ones used in the file managers? If so, Dolphin definitely performs better than Windows Explorer, but that's a pretty useless micro-benchmark. The thumbnail and live preview processes are far more processor intensive/laggy in Dolphin/KDE, does that mean KDE is overall worse? No.
  - soraminazuki 2y ago
    It's funny because it's the latest version of Windows that requires two clicks to get a non-broken context menu. It's either that or registry hacks that Microsoft hasn't disabled yet. https://superuser.com/questions/1674122/how-can-i-revert-to-the-old-context-menu-in-windows-11 https://superuser.com/questions/1674122/how-can-i-revert-to-...
- bishbosh 2y ago
  It does have the advantage of context menus that contain all of the context, rather than a button to revert to an older version of the context menu that has what you actually want!
Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y ago
On the steam deck that statement is gone!

nicman23 2y ago

privacy.sexy is pretty good

jzxy 2y ago

>I still can't imagine how they managed to make a context menu open in almost a full second They did make everything slower than it used to be when it comes to new UI elements, but the context menu can also be slowed down by third parties. On my machine, the primary cause was the shortcut to AMD radeon settings. You can remove it with this powershell command : Get-AppxPackage -AllUsers AdvancedMicroDevicesInc-RSXCM | Remove-AppxPackage -AllUsers It was a major pain to find how to disable this thing. In fact, if you google "AdvancedMicroDevicesInc-RSXCM" (with the quotes, to get a verbatim search) you won't find more than a handful of results talking about its existence. It doesn't uninstall the settings panel itself, just the shortcut. Yes, the context menu shortcut is a standalone app package of its own. It's crazy. After uninstalling this AMD crap the context menu went from taking a second to being almost instantaneous. On other people's machines I've also remarked certain antivirus like Kaspersky causing major issues with 11's context menu performance. I thought the new context menu was all about fixing the mistakes of the previous ones when it came to the nasty things people can do in extending explorer.exe but seeing the behavior of those new third party additions to the menu, I guess not.

philistine 2y ago
It’s for these weird edge cases that I love macOS’ new Startup Items menu. It includes a list of everything that starts at boot, and everything running in the background that’s not the OS or Apple. I had been waiting for a feature like that all my life. Sure, put a weird little service hidden somewhere as a login item, but tell me so. I can now turn off Microsoft’s license validator !
- karmakaze 2y ago
  The thing on the later macOS that opens so slowly is System Preferences. So annoying, and also how it always starts at Appearance (as if that's the most important) when I usually want the last thing I had opened before.
  - philistine 2y ago
    Look, the new Settings app is far from perfect, but one can like a new feature it has with reservations about its rewrite.

MrDresden 2y ago

This may not fulfill your needs in the way that MSI Afterburner and ThrottleStop do, however I would recommend checking out MangoHUD and cpufrequtils respectively for similar (but perhaps not identical) behaviour.

jorvi 2y ago

You don’t really need ThrottleStop if you go into your bios, turn off Turboboost and/or powerlimit your CPU. If your laptop bios doesn’t allow that, look for a “quiet” setting in the bios. This changes the PL1/PL2 to 35w/65w down from 85w/60w. With the NVK driver steadily improving, it feels like it is only a matter of time before something similar to Corectrl is written for Nvidia. I realize GreenWithEnvy exists, but it’s never worked well for me.

ano-ther 2y ago

> can't imagine how they managed to make a context menu open in almost a full second. In Windows 9x on a 200Mhz it was instant. A useless one too, because all the options that matter are in the old one. And the system sounds now take a few seconds to chime - often after I already dismissed the corresponding dialogue

wasteduniverse 2y ago

[dead]

williamvds 2y ago

> MSI Afterburner, which are a must for gaming on my laptop If you want some unsolicited software recommendation: CoreCtrl offers similar controls to MSI Afterburner, at least on my AMD GPU

chakintosh 2y ago

Use Chris Tutus' Debloat utility https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil

jinushaun 2y ago

> I still can't imagine how they managed to make a context menu open in almost a full second. It’s probably One Drive and Dropbox. The cloud storage providers have to run a check on every context menu execution. It’s slow because MS closed the loophole that was previously used to implement that and provided an official API that does the same thing but worse and slower

stanski 2y ago

So just use Windows for gaming only. That's what I do which means I'm in Linux 99.9% of the time.

branon 2y ago

There is nothing inherently special about ThrottleStop and MSI Afterburner, these are merely (proprietary) Windows-specific utilities for changing the behavior of your hardware. Running these programs on Linux would not make sense because their only purpose is to twist knobs in the Windows OS. Linux has different knobs so their functions do not apply. Thus your restriction is self-imposed more than anything, you are effectively saying "the only thing stopping me from switching to Linux is that it's not Windows." Between your BIOS settings and programs like cpufrequtils and CoreCtrl there are equivalents to those programs, but interacting with hardware is platform-specific. You may have to learn different programs because Linux abstracts access to your hardware differently, thus your preferred Windows-specific utilities will not have any use :D This is in contrast to productivity applications like Adobe which could reasonably work the exact same way across platforms... if only they were cross-platform at all :(

lencastre 2y ago

Next time install using English/World as locale. Then add your favorite language/region/keyboard after. Don’t know why, but it comes almost bloat free.