8 ms·

I just started a new job where I'm subjected to Windows 11. They gave me a behemoth of a laptop. 64GB of RAM, absolute screamer of a CPU, big GPU, the whole dea

I just started a new job where I'm subjected to Windows 11. They gave me a behemoth of a laptop. 64GB of RAM, absolute screamer of a CPU, big GPU, the whole deal. Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all. Context menus take a noticeable amount of time to appear. I'm getting used to a new keyboard, so I keep hitting Print Screen by accident. Half the time I can smack Esc and Snipping Tool will go away. The other half of the time, I have to mouse over and click the X to close it. There is no pattern to when Esc does/doesn't work. If my computer goes to sleep, WSL becomes unresponsive. I have to save all my stuff and reboot to continue working. If Windows 11 struggles this badly on a brand new laptop that I'm certain would retail for $4000+, I can only imagine how miserable it is for everyone else. All my colleagues who have been here for a bit longer got last-generation laptops. oof. Edit... and besides, what does Windows 11 even do that KDE Plasma 5 wasn't doing a decade ago? How did it take this long to get a tabbed file browser?

willk 9mo ago
Your first gripe kind of sounds like DLP software is installed on the system and it is scanning files you're "accessing".
- AnonC 9mo ago
  On my company provided laptop with Windows 11 (previously Windows 10), the top three CPU usage was and is usually from Antimalware Executable, Microsoft Defender and MS Teams (or Crowdstrike). I don’t download files or get files from other sources often, yet these things keep doing busywork and slowing things down. Despite virus and threat protection running quick scans often and forcing a full disk scan every couple of weeks or so. It’s almost as if these programs are people who ought to show that they’re doing something even though they’re just heating the room and running the fan.
  - rahkiin 9mo ago
    Same here. ng install takes 2000x as long as on my similairly priced mac. Installing a package for any language locks up the laptop for indexing
- vladvasiliu 9mo ago
  I don't know, my personal windows install which I use for photoshop, lightroom, and the occasional game also has similar issues, and it only has the included windows defender. I've noticed on many computers that whenever there are a bunch of files in a directory, the explorer grinds to a halt. At work we use clownstrike for our driving-around-with-the-handbrake-on needs, which I have installed on both Linux and Windows, and the former flies while the latter lags all the time (I dual boot, so it's the same exact hardware). Doing something which is fully equivalent, like installing an IntelliJ update takes around a minute on Linux and many more on Windows. The fan also comes on much more often on Windows than Linux, even though most of my job is done on remote servers via SSH. Under Linux I only hear the fan when I compile something. This morning I booted windows and the fan was running constantly while I was just catching up with a few mails in outlook.
- zerd 9mo ago
  If it's DLP then using alternative file browsers should also be affected, right? Which at least in my case it isn't.
buckle8017 9mo ago
I swear windows is just full of sleeps and it doesn't matter how faster your system is.
- throwway120385 9mo ago
  It's more likely network calls that are taking a long time or timing out. A lot of developers insert function calls that under the hood hit HTTP servers, and it can take a few hundred milliseconds to stand up a new TLS connection and then however long it takes to send the request and get the response. It's also probable that the endpoints form an accidental microservice architecture in which case everyone is always hitting a different set of connections. This creates a perfect storm of having to reconnect to everything you hit occasionally which can create little slowdowns all over the place all without actually using CPU so it doesn't show up in any resource monitors. HTTPS calls should be treated as calls to sleep() with undefined timings.
  - pelotron 9mo ago
    Microsoft Windows: Accidental Microservice Architecture Edition
  - yoyohello13 9mo ago
    The real question is why is my file browser blocking on an http call? Oh right, tracking/telemetry/ads.
bambax 9mo ago
Same experience here, but I'm not sure it's just MS fault; companies have a way of installing a bunch of stupid software on top of one another, that you can't get rid of without admin rights, that continuously do things that slow the system down. (And, you can have a tabbed file browser on Win7. I still have a Win7 box at home that works perfectly well and that does have tabs in file explorer. I think it was an addon I installed a while ago; don't remember exactly, but it works perfectly.)
- bunderbunder 9mo ago
  It seems industry-wide these days. What I’ve seen as an older-than-average developer is that the Agile movement has made it increasingly difficult to make time for paying attention to some of the more subtle aspects of user experience such as performance. Because I can’t predict how much work it will be accurately enough to assign story points to the task, and that means that this kind of work frequently results in a black spot on our team performance metrics. CD makes it even harder because this kind of work really does need some time to bake. Fast iterations don’t leave much time to verify that performance-oriented changes have the intended effect and no adverse side effects prior to release.
  - 2muchcoffeeman 9mo ago
    That’s not agile’s fault. That’s the orgs fault. We used to have a few days set aside regularly to fix things that would never get prioritised.
    - bunderbunder 9mo ago
      I think this is another of those spots where the difference between agile with a little an and Agile with a big À comes to the forefront. Little a agile is about pushing back against dysfunctional business dynamics for the sake of humanistic goals like employees’ mental health and doing right by customers. Big À Agile co-opts that, and is more about squeezing as much money out of everyone as possible while wearing the trappings of agile values to make it seem more palatable.
- 9mo ago
chwtutha 9mo ago
I'm using it on a work-issued ThinkPad with 8 gigs of RAM and an Intel i3. It's fucking horrible
- g8oz 9mo ago
  An i3 is a damn near OSHA violation.
curiousmindz 9mo ago
Maybe investigate the background apps that are running on your laptop? By the way, I just opened a directory that I hadn't accessed in months. It contains 10945 log files, and Windows Explorer displayed them instantly.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
Romario77 9mo ago
I noticed significant slowdown on my home computer, so I did some optimization - namely turning off some services. AI related things, one drive (this could be one of the reasons file browser is slow), widgets on the screen like news and weather, some other optional/not needed things. They added a lot of not needed crap to File Manager. I think it's almost better to install a third party one.
- ryukoposting 9mo ago
  This is why I don't get so many of the "windows is fine" arguments here. It's always "Windows is fine if you run LTSC and dick around with the registry and disable these 37 specific services." If I'm going to have to futz with it constantly, why would I pay money for the privilege?
yoyohello13 9mo ago
My wife recently got a new laptop. She mostly just uses office and the browser so I gave her some specs to look for SSD, 16GB ram, Lenovo should be good (fatal mistake I didn't specify the CPU). She went out and bought a cheap Lenovo laptop with a Celeron dual core and 16GB ram, SSD. It can barely run windows 11. Everything slows to a crawl, she can't be on a video call, and have a google doc open at the same time. It's insane and frankly should be criminal to sell such a poorly performing piece of hardware. It's so bad that she actually switches to her old laptop from 10 years ago (still on windows 10, also a dual core) for video calls, and it performs way better. The engineers working on Windows should be embarrassed. I may just try to load ChromeOS on it. Would be nice to get Windows out of my house for good.
- Telaneo 9mo ago
  > a cheap Lenovo laptop with a Celeron dual core Yeah, those things are born e-waste. I'm surprised Intel even bothers. Even on Linux they would varely play an HD Youtube video if it weren't for the hardware acceleration. A dual core from several years ago, assuming it's a proper i5 or i7, will do a lot better. Windows 11 doesn't make things any better.
  - ryukoposting 9mo ago
    > Even on Linux they would varely play an HD Youtube video if it weren't for the hardware acceleration. Video decoding has always been a brutal workload, but that isn't Microsoft's fault. I had to replace my Thinkpad X220 with an X270 for no reason at all except h.265. It's a ULV i5 too, so the perf is almost identical to the old laptop's... until you watch video on it.
    - Telaneo 9mo ago
      h.265 can get annoyingly heavy, but the better compression isn't coming from nowhere. But for less powerful machines, H.264 works just fine and works back far enough that even I got surprised. Even LGA 775 machines will do that just fine, and h.264 is more or less a constant lowest common denominator. If it can't play a blu-ray off CPU, then it's either so old that DVDs were the media du jour, or it was never meant to be in a general-purpose computer. They'll do e-mail and Office in a pinch, and they'll play video within their limits, but venture outside for anything else, and it all comes crashing down.
b1temy 9mo ago
Similar story here. Started a new job about a year and a half ago and got a powerful laptop with a really top of the line CPU and GPU, 64 GB of RAM (Now upgraded to 96GB, needed for my work, even with these specs compile times are longer than I'd like...), and it was a terrible experience, coming from someone who's used to Linux having used it for a bit (started in 2013 with Ubuntu with a dual boot. Moved all-in to Arch in 2016, distro-hopped or played with different desktop enviroments/wms after that (Recently switched to niri), but all of which are leagues ahead of Windows 11 IMO. Only occasionally ran Windows on a spare device or a VM on the rare occasion I needed to, eg for work / school.) Tons of issues, slow in some operations, weird bugs (in the explorer like you, or with my Bluetooth headphones, or other issues), and even occasional blue screens! It's not just my setup too, my coworkers have similar issues. Plus, it just isn't a nice environment to use. At first, I tried to set up a nicer environment (as much as IT would allow). I installed PowerToys for QOL improvements, GlazeWM to emulate a tiling window manager setup, I tried debloating as much as I can, I installed Wezterm for my terminal (Why is Windows Terminal so hyped up? It seems like an extremely basic terminal emulator to me...), oh-my-posh theming for my shell, and several other things. But every convenience program I added just noticeably slowed down my laptop, to the point I just gave up some of the niceties and lived with it. Why is such basic functionality able to be run so smoothly on a much weaker device on Linux, but struggle on Windows on a much more powerful device? I can only think of one reason...
DrBazza 9mo ago
> Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all. There's a guy that has written their own version of explorer that's so fast in comparison to the built-in, that you'd think they were cheating somehow because of everyone's experience with explorer. And someone has written an IDE for C++ that opens while Visual Studio is on its splash screen. And another that has written a debugger with the same performance. And a video doing the rounds of Word ('97?) on spinning rust opening in just under 2 seconds. Basically, everything MS is doing is degrading performance. Opportunities for regular devs to go back to performant software, and MS is unlikely to fix theirs in the foreseeable future.
- benhurmarcel 9mo ago
  > version of explorer that's so fast https://filepilot.tech/ https://filepilot.tech/
  - iJohnDoe 9mo ago
    I've tried this a few times. Windows 10. Downloaded the 2MB file, double-clicked on it, and nothing happens. Same thing when I tried it a few months again. Put it in a command prompt and no output of an error. I'm starting to worry I just launched something malicious.
    - direwolf20 9mo ago
      The latter is normal on windows. Executables have a header flag which specifies they either use the terminal or not. If a terminal program is opened from outside a terminal, it opens a terminal window. If a nonterminal program is opened from a terminal, it instantly detaches.
    - smusamashah 9mo ago
      After downloading, did you open its properties and "unblock" it?
  - ZeWaka 9mo ago
n4bz0r 9mo ago
> If my computer goes to sleep, WSL becomes unresponsive. I have to save all my stuff and reboot to continue working. Try wsl --shutdown. Works for me when WSL hangs for no apparent reason. I've also noticed that, in my case, these hangs are somehow tied to Docker for Windows. Couldn't figure what triggers them so far, though. I just restart DFW and kill WSL when that happens.
- dole 9mo ago
  Restarting the vmcompute service sometimes helps. Doing so completely blue/blackscreened my machine this morning so it just makes me more confident in WSL's low level hooks.
varispeed 9mo ago
If it's Intel then it might not be fully down to Windows 11. The PC laptops are universally crap. I had a few latest ones, Ultra 9 and they are atrocious. Experience reminds me using a netbook in early 2010s. I would refuse to work anywhere without a Mac. If x86 then it would have to be linux, as that would be passable (apart from fan noise).
- pimeys 9mo ago
  The Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake platforms are finally really good again, comparable to AMD. Fast and power efficient. Before Lunar Lake they were pretty much crap, I agree.
- notenlish 9mo ago
  Panther Lake and Lunar Lake are pretty good I'd say. Intel has been improving.
Der_Einzige 9mo ago
KDE is bloated garbage too! Half of the OS didn't work. The only DE's that I haven't had poor experiences with are xfce, bspwm, i3/i3gaps, and xmonad. Note how 3 of these are tiling WMs.
- demilicious 9mo ago
  KDE has been great for me on Fedora. What problems have you encountered?
- jaimex2 9mo ago
  KDE is the best. Everything they make is awesome, Im a big fan. So much so I donate to them monthly.
jofla_net 9mo ago
> There is no pattern to when Esc does/doesn't work. Its non-deterministic, as if developed with LLMs....
- alamortsubite 9mo ago
  Possible but more likely it's an issue with focus, like the user's palm on those occasions coincidentally brushes the trackpad. To be clear, I have no doubt Windows 11 is just as awful as GP makes it out to be. I'm luckily free to choose my OS and at this point wouldn't touch Windows with a 10' pole.
doctorpangloss 9mo ago
> Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all. I've got bad news for you. Nautilus also lags when opening some directories.
Aurornis 9mo ago
> Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all. > Context menus take a noticeable amount of time to appear. I can almost guarantee this is from some endpoint management software your company installed. I have a Windows 11 workstation that I use all the time for some CAD software and the occasional game. Everything is fast. There's no lag with context menus or browsing directories with a lot of files. If I have to browse network CIFS shares with a lot of files, Windows does it better than my mac or Linux boxes by a mile. I've switched over just to Windows a time or two just to deal with high file count shares. > If Windows 11 struggles this badly on a brand new laptop that I'm certain would retail for $4000+, I can only imagine how miserable it is for everyone else. I put Windows 11 on an old low powered laptop for a family member. FYI you can easily circumvent some of the Windows 11 requirements and put it on old hardware. It's fast. It doesn't have any of the problems you're describing. I do wonder how many of the "Windows 11 is painfully slow" comments are coming from people with corporate laptops with extremely laggy endpoint management overhead.
- mft_ 9mo ago
  I have similar suspicions. I have a decent but not spectacular company Thinkpad. When I first got it, it was super-fast; it didn’t matter that sleep very quickly turned into an automatic shutdown, as it booted in mere seconds. Gradually, over the past 9 or so months, it’s just become progressively worse and worse in a range of ways. It might be Windows updates, but the magnitude makes me suspect it’s layer upon layer of corporate management and security nonsense.
  - CodesInChaos 9mo ago
    Could also be a temperature throttling problem caused by dust or a stuck fan. My old work Laptop suffered from that, and recovered after I cleaned it.
- dannersy 9mo ago
  I don't share his experience entirely, by even on my desktop built for gaming I can notice the right click menu is delayed in comparison to Windows 10. Even more heinous, before you remove it, the AI button would lazy load causing you to sometimes hit it by accident when you mean to hit something else. God forbid I'm not 80 years old and click my menus with any sort of speed. Also, if I'm going to have to adjust anything to use an operating system, I might as well use Linux. The only value prop for me to use Windows was gaming, but at this point I'm just completely ripping the band-aid off because it doesn't seem like Microsoft is going in a better direction.
zerd 9mo ago
Had the same issue with slow file explorer in Windows 10. A couple of things helped a bit, such as disabling "Show recently used files" and "Show frequently used folders". I also cleaned up the Quick access list. For some reason if you have a network share there it makes browsing local dirs slower, go figure. It's still not instant but a lot faster than the 3+ second delay. I tried OneCommander and they're super fast, so it's not something slowing down disk IO, it's purely File Explorer. Now I'm still struggling with closing chrome tabs being super slow sometimes.
dr-detroit 9mo ago
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leptons 9mo ago
Your work laptop might have an excessive amount of "security" software installed that causes it to lag far more than it would normally without such bloated software installed that runs in the background and slows down practically every process you do with the machine.
smusamashah 9mo ago
Please try https://filepilot.tech/ https://filepilot.tech/ Its like explorer but so much faster in every single way. I have it pinned on the taskbar, it launches quickly than a new explorer window. Main one is no-multiline support atm. Which means that the icon view does not show full file name, list view etc are perfectly fine though. Current problems I have with it are no native zip support, which means you must use 7-zip, winrar etc and set them as a defualt viewer for zips. Otherwise, double clicking zip opens the explorer.exe.
- ryukoposting 9mo ago
  I'll be trying this tomorrow, thanks.
sysworld 9mo ago
Corporate probably loaded up the laptop with work monitoring software, and some terrible AV software. Among other bloatware. A PC of your spec should run without noticeable delay, something else is going on there. Having said that, Windows has made a lot of the basic functionality way to resource heavy.
- jiggawatts 9mo ago
  Another common issue on corporate-issued workstation laptops is that they don’t install the proper GPU drivers. The basic ones that ship with the OS are awful, but work just well enough that people don’t notice that they’re missing something important.
pplonski86 9mo ago
I have dual boot on decent laptop, doing nothing, on windows fan is always on, computing something? On Linux it is just silent
koyote 9mo ago
I have the same specs in my work machine. Task manager takes 10 seconds to load the list of processes. Right-click on the desktop takes about 1.5-2 seconds to show the 'new' context menu. Start menu is actually fast to start drawing but has a stupid animation that takes about half a second to fully load. I sort of understand how the anti-consumer 'features' (ads) get added to a piece of software. But I have no idea how they manage to continuously degrade the experience of existing parts of the system for seemingly no one's benefit.
WheatMillington 9mo ago
Your experience is very far away from mine. I don't experience any of these issues on a standard 32gb office laptop, or my home gaming machine.
nickjj 9mo ago
I'm definitely not defending Windows but when I ran Windows 10 Pro for 11 years straight, I had no problem with performance. We're talking a 4 core i5-4460, with 16 GB of memory and an SSD running WSL 2, Docker Desktop, real work loads, video editing, etc.. It was very performant and never got in my way. I'd leave the computer on 24 / 7 and only the monitors turned off. It only got rebooted for forced Windows patches. With that said, my hardware can't run 11 and even if I did patch around that, I'm choosing not to run 11 so Windows for me was over near the end of 2025. I'm running Arch now on the same box and except for GPU memory leaks, it's quite snappy. CPU intensive tasks finish faster and disk I/O feels even faster than Windows. There's also unlimited flexibility to tweak things however I see fit. Gaming performance is substantially worse for the few games I play. No regrets, except for gaming.
- ryukoposting 9mo ago
  If you had 16 GB of RAM, yeah Windows 10 was mostly fine. The laptop I had in high school was rocking 4 GB and a first-gen i5. Windows 7 was rock solid on that machine, but 10 brought it to its knees. Sandy Bridge fared much, much better, to be fair, but the jump from "4GB is enough" to "8GB is pushing your luck" was not pleasant, as I recall it.
  - nickjj 9mo ago
    Oh yeah, 4 GB would be really rough on Windows 10. The machine I had before this one had 2 GB of RAM and I ran Windows 7 on it. It had a Core 2 Duo E6420 CPU and GeForce 9800 GTX+. I remember things being mostly ok for playing a bunch of games back then but struggled when I tried to run VMs which makes sense given 2 GB of RAM. It was that machine that taught me not to skimp on RAM. The last few years of that machine's life started to get pressured pretty hard with memory requirements and having 4 GB would have solved all of those problems. That's why when I built this machine I went with 16 GB, back in 2014 still running Windows 7.
upcoming-sesame 9mo ago
I am also subjected to Windows at work and I hate it. WSL is an okay experience until it just crashes and stops working. The only reason I was forced on Windows was because they couldn't find an edge management system for Linux
hadlock 9mo ago
I vibe-coded my own apple system-6 style shell in rust and use that. If I don't like a feature, I change it. It is lightning quick, in it's (emulated) 1-bit glory. There's no requirement for you to use the built-in explore.exe to launch things, even for games. The graphics are decoupled from the shell so I use it for windows and linux. If vibe coding your personal GUI utopia is too much, you can use something like Cairo - https://cairoshell.com/ https://cairoshell.com/
misiek08 9mo ago
More a reply to few fellow comments: I have few Win 11 hosts that I use. No management software other than just antivirus. 90% of them are super slow, on every hardware. The latest super-feature on one of them is empty Task Manager. It just doesn’t display a single process. Of course Process Explorer works, open faster and show all data without thinking how to display table with 500 rows for dozens of seconds.
maccard 9mo ago
Honestly - I think it must be a laptop thing. I have a similar spec laptop [0] for work, and it's... borderline unusable. I can ignore the upsells, always online, etc but the OS is just fundamentally falling apart more and more every other release. If I unplug the power cable, it throttles itself to the point of being neutered, and if I try to put it to sleep it _very regularly_ will just stay awake and drain its own battery. My work desktop on the other hand (i9, 64GB ram, 4080 GPU) is absolutely screaming and I have some of the same problems but they're nowhere near as bad. I don't think I could genuinely buy another windows laptop. [0] https://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/laptops-2-in-1-pcs/dell-xps-16-laptop/spd/xps-da16260-laptop https://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/laptops-2-in-1-pcs/dell-xps-...
- elektronika 9mo ago
  > if I try to put it to sleep it _very regularly_ will just stay awake and drain its own battery Sadly Linux isn't any better on this front because it's a hardware issue. Laptop vendors have gotten terrible at managing sleep states. S0 sleep is a joke. I changed my laptop to hibernate on lid close after the second time it nearly cooked itself in my bag.
  - maccard 9mo ago
    Indeed - it's why I use a mac unfortunately!
nialv7 9mo ago
iirc the cause of context menu delay was there is an invisible animation I think. The system is animating the menu opening, except there's no animation. So it just waits for a while doing nothing then the menu pops open.
embedding-shape 9mo ago
> If Windows 11 struggles this badly on a brand new laptop that I'm certain would retail for $4000+, I can only imagine how miserable it is for everyone else. I purchased a Surface Pro at one point, with the intention of using it for sketches and using Windows on it, thinking it'll be better because the hardware and OS is from the same organization. Nope! Slow out of the box, horrible thermal management and software bugs galore. Installed Arch with Gnome on it, ran better in most aspects. However, pen usage and touchscreen even after I tried my best to adjust it was worse than Windows, I guess they won there. I didn't use to hate Windows, because at least it wasn't utterly broken, just stupid, but they're really in a deep decline lately. Maybe it's time for one of those "stop the press" type of moments where they have to stop, take a serious look and fix what they have as it currently feels impossible to use reliably.
avadodin 9mo ago
Windows does allow you to enter Chinese characters when you say your language is Chinese. I have moved to Bazzite at home but it is ridiculous that you can't just use your language right away. A normal person would just bail out. If you choose Chinese, all of the content is localized but you have to enable an input method and that doesn't even actually allow you to input Chinese characters! It shows you a scrolling(!) pop-up that tells you you have to enable a different option in order to type in the language that you chose at the very beginning. Hope you didn't choose the wrong one out of ibus, fcitx and fcitx(wayland experimental) – whatever happened to scim, and xim, I miss editing environment variables. Even the cheapest Android gadget can do this out of the box.
khana 9mo ago
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donkeylazy456 9mo ago
Explorer file browser is just disaster. I am forced to use third-party browsing app when the directory contains hundreds of media. It has happened since win7 or older but still not fixed.
lunar_rover 9mo ago
> what does Windows 11 even do that KDE Plasma 5 wasn't doing a decade ago? How did it take this long to get a tabbed file browser? Management features like application based firewall. Dedicated views in explorer tailored for common file types, automatic view type based on content, plus tile view. Proper title bar customisation. Contextual Ribbon toolbars and to be honest, good menus in general. Have a professional UI designer try KDE and I'm pretty sure they'll have a migraine. Also Win32 in general, Wayland still has a loooong way ahead of it.
nwellinghoff 9mo ago
A lot of these accounts seem anecdotal. I have a clean copy of win 11 iot ltsc running on my laptop and it runs well. The desktop management, included hyper V, wsl2 and awesome RDP make it a great platform to get work done. Most problems people encounter with Windows have to do with driver maturity. And in the case of a mega corp managed machine its all the “security” bs the put on there that slows you down to a crawl.Once you get stable drivers; I find Windows 11,with wsl as my shell, to be quite nice.
- ryukoposting 9mo ago
  Well yes, it is anecdotal. After all, it's my personal experience, which is, by definition, an anecdote. At what point did I suggest the exact types of bullshit Win11 exposes me to are exactly the same as everyone else experiences?
Sverigevader 9mo ago
About hitting the print screen button by accident. I have the same issue and like you I can sometimes get out of it by hitting ESC. I think this sometimes fails because the snipping app isn't in focus (even though it's covering the entire screen). The trick I found to get out of it is to hit ALT+TAB. It ironically puts another app into focus and when that happens, the snipping tool exits. Snipping tool is pretty great though. I wish macOS had the same.
- opan 9mo ago
  What's snipping tool have over macOS's super-shift-5 (or 4 or 3)? I would usually put Greenshot on any Windows box I'm gonna have to use a while, and that seems to pretty much have feature parity with all my slurp+grim Sway keybinds on GNU/Linux.
  - Sverigevader 9mo ago
    It's very minor but, with the Snipping Tool, the screenshot automatically ends up in the clipboard after dragging the box. As far as I know with macos I have to open the preview and copy it from there. There may be an option in macos to get the same behavior but I don't know about it.
    - opan 9mo ago
      Ah, I believe Greenclip has that feature. Personally I hate when people copy/paste images as it often results in bad filenames like "image.jpg" (as in literally the word image) and then requires me to rename them when saving them when the file probably had a perfectly good default filename. I make sure to save images and reupload them, and I have a one-liner to check my pictures dir for bad filenames in case I saved one without noticing (worst case I run my routine rsync and am repeatedly replacing some image.jpg with a different picture). I also made a short script to put the current unix time on my clipboard in case I need to rename some of these bad files in a pinch. I tend to think less of people contributing to this bad filename problem, although chat programs and such could likely detect and "fix" it on their end also. My screenshot workflow saves an image with the dimensions and date/time in it to my ~/scrot directory and then I can quickly post it somewhere by just sorting that dir by mtime with newest files on top.
EasyMark 9mo ago
My work laptop does the same thing. Pretty maxed out for a Dell but still can be slow, especially right click context menu. Someone else said it could be endpoint software (executable scanning?) which makes sense. things improved a bit after a I turned off the eye candy under appearance settings other than font rendering and shadowing. Might be worth a try.
MonkeyClub 9mo ago
> when opening directories with more than 100-ish files 99 files should be enough for everyone.
Friedduck 9mo ago
You can disable windows folder type detection to speed the laggy file explorer navigation. It’s a registry hack and so limited for corporate machines.
hiccuphippo 9mo ago
I'd recommend Chris Titus' winutil to remove most of the crap. I use the recommended settings and also remove copilot and onedrive. Then from there you can open O&O Shutup10 and disable a few more "features". It's just a band-aid not a solution, and you'll have to run it again after Windows updates and helpfully undoes your settings, but at least makes it usable. https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil
bratwurst3000 9mo ago
Had similar issu. Windows 11 installed two gpu driver that run parallel. Cpu etc was on low but everything was lacking. did go to safe mode and deinstalled drivers and reinstalled them. Windows installed them again even with me doing everything it didnt... whatever now i have mac and it sucks also but doesnt lag that hard. maybe it helps
the_lucifer 9mo ago
> Half the time I can smack Esc and Snipping Tool will go away. The other half of the time, I have to mouse over and click the X to close it. There is no pattern to when Esc does/doesn't work. What I have noticed is to let it load the snipping UI first and start listening for your keystrokes. If you hit escape really quickly, right after you accidentally hit print screen, it will not go away and require you to manually mouse over and hit the X. But if you wait for a second and then hit escape, it almost always registers my keystroke. It's almost like hitting escape really quickly just quits the keyboard listener instead of the actual snipping tool.

willk 9mo ago

Your first gripe kind of sounds like DLP software is installed on the system and it is scanning files you're "accessing".

AnonC 9mo ago
On my company provided laptop with Windows 11 (previously Windows 10), the top three CPU usage was and is usually from Antimalware Executable, Microsoft Defender and MS Teams (or Crowdstrike). I don’t download files or get files from other sources often, yet these things keep doing busywork and slowing things down. Despite virus and threat protection running quick scans often and forcing a full disk scan every couple of weeks or so. It’s almost as if these programs are people who ought to show that they’re doing something even though they’re just heating the room and running the fan.
- rahkiin 9mo ago
  Same here. ng install takes 2000x as long as on my similairly priced mac. Installing a package for any language locks up the laptop for indexing
vladvasiliu 9mo ago
I don't know, my personal windows install which I use for photoshop, lightroom, and the occasional game also has similar issues, and it only has the included windows defender. I've noticed on many computers that whenever there are a bunch of files in a directory, the explorer grinds to a halt. At work we use clownstrike for our driving-around-with-the-handbrake-on needs, which I have installed on both Linux and Windows, and the former flies while the latter lags all the time (I dual boot, so it's the same exact hardware). Doing something which is fully equivalent, like installing an IntelliJ update takes around a minute on Linux and many more on Windows. The fan also comes on much more often on Windows than Linux, even though most of my job is done on remote servers via SSH. Under Linux I only hear the fan when I compile something. This morning I booted windows and the fan was running constantly while I was just catching up with a few mails in outlook.
zerd 9mo ago
If it's DLP then using alternative file browsers should also be affected, right? Which at least in my case it isn't.

buckle8017 9mo ago

I swear windows is just full of sleeps and it doesn't matter how faster your system is.

throwway120385 9mo ago
It's more likely network calls that are taking a long time or timing out. A lot of developers insert function calls that under the hood hit HTTP servers, and it can take a few hundred milliseconds to stand up a new TLS connection and then however long it takes to send the request and get the response. It's also probable that the endpoints form an accidental microservice architecture in which case everyone is always hitting a different set of connections. This creates a perfect storm of having to reconnect to everything you hit occasionally which can create little slowdowns all over the place all without actually using CPU so it doesn't show up in any resource monitors. HTTPS calls should be treated as calls to sleep() with undefined timings.
- pelotron 9mo ago
  Microsoft Windows: Accidental Microservice Architecture Edition
- yoyohello13 9mo ago
  The real question is why is my file browser blocking on an http call? Oh right, tracking/telemetry/ads.

bambax 9mo ago

Same experience here, but I'm not sure it's just MS fault; companies have a way of installing a bunch of stupid software on top of one another, that you can't get rid of without admin rights, that continuously do things that slow the system down. (And, you can have a tabbed file browser on Win7. I still have a Win7 box at home that works perfectly well and that does have tabs in file explorer. I think it was an addon I installed a while ago; don't remember exactly, but it works perfectly.)

bunderbunder 9mo ago
It seems industry-wide these days. What I’ve seen as an older-than-average developer is that the Agile movement has made it increasingly difficult to make time for paying attention to some of the more subtle aspects of user experience such as performance. Because I can’t predict how much work it will be accurately enough to assign story points to the task, and that means that this kind of work frequently results in a black spot on our team performance metrics. CD makes it even harder because this kind of work really does need some time to bake. Fast iterations don’t leave much time to verify that performance-oriented changes have the intended effect and no adverse side effects prior to release.
- 2muchcoffeeman 9mo ago
  That’s not agile’s fault. That’s the orgs fault. We used to have a few days set aside regularly to fix things that would never get prioritised.
  - bunderbunder 9mo ago
    I think this is another of those spots where the difference between agile with a little an and Agile with a big À comes to the forefront. Little a agile is about pushing back against dysfunctional business dynamics for the sake of humanistic goals like employees’ mental health and doing right by customers. Big À Agile co-opts that, and is more about squeezing as much money out of everyone as possible while wearing the trappings of agile values to make it seem more palatable.
9mo ago

chwtutha 9mo ago

I'm using it on a work-issued ThinkPad with 8 gigs of RAM and an Intel i3. It's fucking horrible

g8oz 9mo ago
An i3 is a damn near OSHA violation.

curiousmindz 9mo ago

Maybe investigate the background apps that are running on your laptop? By the way, I just opened a directory that I hadn't accessed in months. It contains 10945 log files, and Windows Explorer displayed them instantly.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

Romario77 9mo ago

I noticed significant slowdown on my home computer, so I did some optimization - namely turning off some services. AI related things, one drive (this could be one of the reasons file browser is slow), widgets on the screen like news and weather, some other optional/not needed things. They added a lot of not needed crap to File Manager. I think it's almost better to install a third party one.

ryukoposting 9mo ago
This is why I don't get so many of the "windows is fine" arguments here. It's always "Windows is fine if you run LTSC and dick around with the registry and disable these 37 specific services." If I'm going to have to futz with it constantly, why would I pay money for the privilege?

yoyohello13 9mo ago

My wife recently got a new laptop. She mostly just uses office and the browser so I gave her some specs to look for SSD, 16GB ram, Lenovo should be good (fatal mistake I didn't specify the CPU). She went out and bought a cheap Lenovo laptop with a Celeron dual core and 16GB ram, SSD. It can barely run windows 11. Everything slows to a crawl, she can't be on a video call, and have a google doc open at the same time. It's insane and frankly should be criminal to sell such a poorly performing piece of hardware. It's so bad that she actually switches to her old laptop from 10 years ago (still on windows 10, also a dual core) for video calls, and it performs way better. The engineers working on Windows should be embarrassed. I may just try to load ChromeOS on it. Would be nice to get Windows out of my house for good.

Telaneo 9mo ago
> a cheap Lenovo laptop with a Celeron dual core Yeah, those things are born e-waste. I'm surprised Intel even bothers. Even on Linux they would varely play an HD Youtube video if it weren't for the hardware acceleration. A dual core from several years ago, assuming it's a proper i5 or i7, will do a lot better. Windows 11 doesn't make things any better.
- ryukoposting 9mo ago
  > Even on Linux they would varely play an HD Youtube video if it weren't for the hardware acceleration. Video decoding has always been a brutal workload, but that isn't Microsoft's fault. I had to replace my Thinkpad X220 with an X270 for no reason at all except h.265. It's a ULV i5 too, so the perf is almost identical to the old laptop's... until you watch video on it.
  - Telaneo 9mo ago
    h.265 can get annoyingly heavy, but the better compression isn't coming from nowhere. But for less powerful machines, H.264 works just fine and works back far enough that even I got surprised. Even LGA 775 machines will do that just fine, and h.264 is more or less a constant lowest common denominator. If it can't play a blu-ray off CPU, then it's either so old that DVDs were the media du jour, or it was never meant to be in a general-purpose computer. They'll do e-mail and Office in a pinch, and they'll play video within their limits, but venture outside for anything else, and it all comes crashing down.

b1temy 9mo ago

Similar story here. Started a new job about a year and a half ago and got a powerful laptop with a really top of the line CPU and GPU, 64 GB of RAM (Now upgraded to 96GB, needed for my work, even with these specs compile times are longer than I'd like...), and it was a terrible experience, coming from someone who's used to Linux having used it for a bit (started in 2013 with Ubuntu with a dual boot. Moved all-in to Arch in 2016, distro-hopped or played with different desktop enviroments/wms after that (Recently switched to niri), but all of which are leagues ahead of Windows 11 IMO. Only occasionally ran Windows on a spare device or a VM on the rare occasion I needed to, eg for work / school.) Tons of issues, slow in some operations, weird bugs (in the explorer like you, or with my Bluetooth headphones, or other issues), and even occasional blue screens! It's not just my setup too, my coworkers have similar issues. Plus, it just isn't a nice environment to use. At first, I tried to set up a nicer environment (as much as IT would allow). I installed PowerToys for QOL improvements, GlazeWM to emulate a tiling window manager setup, I tried debloating as much as I can, I installed Wezterm for my terminal (Why is Windows Terminal so hyped up? It seems like an extremely basic terminal emulator to me...), oh-my-posh theming for my shell, and several other things. But every convenience program I added just noticeably slowed down my laptop, to the point I just gave up some of the niceties and lived with it. Why is such basic functionality able to be run so smoothly on a much weaker device on Linux, but struggle on Windows on a much more powerful device? I can only think of one reason...

DrBazza 9mo ago

> Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all. There's a guy that has written their own version of explorer that's so fast in comparison to the built-in, that you'd think they were cheating somehow because of everyone's experience with explorer. And someone has written an IDE for C++ that opens while Visual Studio is on its splash screen. And another that has written a debugger with the same performance. And a video doing the rounds of Word ('97?) on spinning rust opening in just under 2 seconds. Basically, everything MS is doing is degrading performance. Opportunities for regular devs to go back to performant software, and MS is unlikely to fix theirs in the foreseeable future.

benhurmarcel 9mo ago
> version of explorer that's so fast https://filepilot.tech/ https://filepilot.tech/
- iJohnDoe 9mo ago
  I've tried this a few times. Windows 10. Downloaded the 2MB file, double-clicked on it, and nothing happens. Same thing when I tried it a few months again. Put it in a command prompt and no output of an error. I'm starting to worry I just launched something malicious.
  - direwolf20 9mo ago
    The latter is normal on windows. Executables have a header flag which specifies they either use the terminal or not. If a terminal program is opened from outside a terminal, it opens a terminal window. If a nonterminal program is opened from a terminal, it instantly detaches.
  - smusamashah 9mo ago
    After downloading, did you open its properties and "unblock" it?
- ZeWaka 9mo ago

n4bz0r 9mo ago

> If my computer goes to sleep, WSL becomes unresponsive. I have to save all my stuff and reboot to continue working. Try wsl --shutdown. Works for me when WSL hangs for no apparent reason. I've also noticed that, in my case, these hangs are somehow tied to Docker for Windows. Couldn't figure what triggers them so far, though. I just restart DFW and kill WSL when that happens.

dole 9mo ago
Restarting the vmcompute service sometimes helps. Doing so completely blue/blackscreened my machine this morning so it just makes me more confident in WSL's low level hooks.

varispeed 9mo ago

If it's Intel then it might not be fully down to Windows 11. The PC laptops are universally crap. I had a few latest ones, Ultra 9 and they are atrocious. Experience reminds me using a netbook in early 2010s. I would refuse to work anywhere without a Mac. If x86 then it would have to be linux, as that would be passable (apart from fan noise).

pimeys 9mo ago
The Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake platforms are finally really good again, comparable to AMD. Fast and power efficient. Before Lunar Lake they were pretty much crap, I agree.
notenlish 9mo ago
Panther Lake and Lunar Lake are pretty good I'd say. Intel has been improving.

Der_Einzige 9mo ago

KDE is bloated garbage too! Half of the OS didn't work. The only DE's that I haven't had poor experiences with are xfce, bspwm, i3/i3gaps, and xmonad. Note how 3 of these are tiling WMs.

demilicious 9mo ago
KDE has been great for me on Fedora. What problems have you encountered?
jaimex2 9mo ago
KDE is the best. Everything they make is awesome, Im a big fan. So much so I donate to them monthly.

jofla_net 9mo ago

> There is no pattern to when Esc does/doesn't work. Its non-deterministic, as if developed with LLMs....

alamortsubite 9mo ago
Possible but more likely it's an issue with focus, like the user's palm on those occasions coincidentally brushes the trackpad. To be clear, I have no doubt Windows 11 is just as awful as GP makes it out to be. I'm luckily free to choose my OS and at this point wouldn't touch Windows with a 10' pole.

doctorpangloss 9mo ago

> Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all. I've got bad news for you. Nautilus also lags when opening some directories.

Aurornis 9mo ago

> Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all. > Context menus take a noticeable amount of time to appear. I can almost guarantee this is from some endpoint management software your company installed. I have a Windows 11 workstation that I use all the time for some CAD software and the occasional game. Everything is fast. There's no lag with context menus or browsing directories with a lot of files. If I have to browse network CIFS shares with a lot of files, Windows does it better than my mac or Linux boxes by a mile. I've switched over just to Windows a time or two just to deal with high file count shares. > If Windows 11 struggles this badly on a brand new laptop that I'm certain would retail for $4000+, I can only imagine how miserable it is for everyone else. I put Windows 11 on an old low powered laptop for a family member. FYI you can easily circumvent some of the Windows 11 requirements and put it on old hardware. It's fast. It doesn't have any of the problems you're describing. I do wonder how many of the "Windows 11 is painfully slow" comments are coming from people with corporate laptops with extremely laggy endpoint management overhead.

mft_ 9mo ago
I have similar suspicions. I have a decent but not spectacular company Thinkpad. When I first got it, it was super-fast; it didn’t matter that sleep very quickly turned into an automatic shutdown, as it booted in mere seconds. Gradually, over the past 9 or so months, it’s just become progressively worse and worse in a range of ways. It might be Windows updates, but the magnitude makes me suspect it’s layer upon layer of corporate management and security nonsense.
- CodesInChaos 9mo ago
  Could also be a temperature throttling problem caused by dust or a stuck fan. My old work Laptop suffered from that, and recovered after I cleaned it.
dannersy 9mo ago
I don't share his experience entirely, by even on my desktop built for gaming I can notice the right click menu is delayed in comparison to Windows 10. Even more heinous, before you remove it, the AI button would lazy load causing you to sometimes hit it by accident when you mean to hit something else. God forbid I'm not 80 years old and click my menus with any sort of speed. Also, if I'm going to have to adjust anything to use an operating system, I might as well use Linux. The only value prop for me to use Windows was gaming, but at this point I'm just completely ripping the band-aid off because it doesn't seem like Microsoft is going in a better direction.

zerd 9mo ago

Had the same issue with slow file explorer in Windows 10. A couple of things helped a bit, such as disabling "Show recently used files" and "Show frequently used folders". I also cleaned up the Quick access list. For some reason if you have a network share there it makes browsing local dirs slower, go figure. It's still not instant but a lot faster than the 3+ second delay. I tried OneCommander and they're super fast, so it's not something slowing down disk IO, it's purely File Explorer. Now I'm still struggling with closing chrome tabs being super slow sometimes.

dr-detroit 9mo ago

[dead]

leptons 9mo ago

Your work laptop might have an excessive amount of "security" software installed that causes it to lag far more than it would normally without such bloated software installed that runs in the background and slows down practically every process you do with the machine.

smusamashah 9mo ago

Please try https://filepilot.tech/ https://filepilot.tech/ Its like explorer but so much faster in every single way. I have it pinned on the taskbar, it launches quickly than a new explorer window. Main one is no-multiline support atm. Which means that the icon view does not show full file name, list view etc are perfectly fine though. Current problems I have with it are no native zip support, which means you must use 7-zip, winrar etc and set them as a defualt viewer for zips. Otherwise, double clicking zip opens the explorer.exe.

ryukoposting 9mo ago
I'll be trying this tomorrow, thanks.

sysworld 9mo ago

Corporate probably loaded up the laptop with work monitoring software, and some terrible AV software. Among other bloatware. A PC of your spec should run without noticeable delay, something else is going on there. Having said that, Windows has made a lot of the basic functionality way to resource heavy.

jiggawatts 9mo ago
Another common issue on corporate-issued workstation laptops is that they don’t install the proper GPU drivers. The basic ones that ship with the OS are awful, but work just well enough that people don’t notice that they’re missing something important.

pplonski86 9mo ago

I have dual boot on decent laptop, doing nothing, on windows fan is always on, computing something? On Linux it is just silent

koyote 9mo ago

I have the same specs in my work machine. Task manager takes 10 seconds to load the list of processes. Right-click on the desktop takes about 1.5-2 seconds to show the 'new' context menu. Start menu is actually fast to start drawing but has a stupid animation that takes about half a second to fully load. I sort of understand how the anti-consumer 'features' (ads) get added to a piece of software. But I have no idea how they manage to continuously degrade the experience of existing parts of the system for seemingly no one's benefit.

WheatMillington 9mo ago

Your experience is very far away from mine. I don't experience any of these issues on a standard 32gb office laptop, or my home gaming machine.

nickjj 9mo ago

I'm definitely not defending Windows but when I ran Windows 10 Pro for 11 years straight, I had no problem with performance. We're talking a 4 core i5-4460, with 16 GB of memory and an SSD running WSL 2, Docker Desktop, real work loads, video editing, etc.. It was very performant and never got in my way. I'd leave the computer on 24 / 7 and only the monitors turned off. It only got rebooted for forced Windows patches. With that said, my hardware can't run 11 and even if I did patch around that, I'm choosing not to run 11 so Windows for me was over near the end of 2025. I'm running Arch now on the same box and except for GPU memory leaks, it's quite snappy. CPU intensive tasks finish faster and disk I/O feels even faster than Windows. There's also unlimited flexibility to tweak things however I see fit. Gaming performance is substantially worse for the few games I play. No regrets, except for gaming.

ryukoposting 9mo ago
If you had 16 GB of RAM, yeah Windows 10 was mostly fine. The laptop I had in high school was rocking 4 GB and a first-gen i5. Windows 7 was rock solid on that machine, but 10 brought it to its knees. Sandy Bridge fared much, much better, to be fair, but the jump from "4GB is enough" to "8GB is pushing your luck" was not pleasant, as I recall it.
- nickjj 9mo ago
  Oh yeah, 4 GB would be really rough on Windows 10. The machine I had before this one had 2 GB of RAM and I ran Windows 7 on it. It had a Core 2 Duo E6420 CPU and GeForce 9800 GTX+. I remember things being mostly ok for playing a bunch of games back then but struggled when I tried to run VMs which makes sense given 2 GB of RAM. It was that machine that taught me not to skimp on RAM. The last few years of that machine's life started to get pressured pretty hard with memory requirements and having 4 GB would have solved all of those problems. That's why when I built this machine I went with 16 GB, back in 2014 still running Windows 7.

upcoming-sesame 9mo ago

I am also subjected to Windows at work and I hate it. WSL is an okay experience until it just crashes and stops working. The only reason I was forced on Windows was because they couldn't find an edge management system for Linux

hadlock 9mo ago

I vibe-coded my own apple system-6 style shell in rust and use that. If I don't like a feature, I change it. It is lightning quick, in it's (emulated) 1-bit glory. There's no requirement for you to use the built-in explore.exe to launch things, even for games. The graphics are decoupled from the shell so I use it for windows and linux. If vibe coding your personal GUI utopia is too much, you can use something like Cairo - https://cairoshell.com/ https://cairoshell.com/

misiek08 9mo ago

More a reply to few fellow comments: I have few Win 11 hosts that I use. No management software other than just antivirus. 90% of them are super slow, on every hardware. The latest super-feature on one of them is empty Task Manager. It just doesn’t display a single process. Of course Process Explorer works, open faster and show all data without thinking how to display table with 500 rows for dozens of seconds.

maccard 9mo ago

Honestly - I think it must be a laptop thing. I have a similar spec laptop [0] for work, and it's... borderline unusable. I can ignore the upsells, always online, etc but the OS is just fundamentally falling apart more and more every other release. If I unplug the power cable, it throttles itself to the point of being neutered, and if I try to put it to sleep it _very regularly_ will just stay awake and drain its own battery. My work desktop on the other hand (i9, 64GB ram, 4080 GPU) is absolutely screaming and I have some of the same problems but they're nowhere near as bad. I don't think I could genuinely buy another windows laptop. [0] https://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/laptops-2-in-1-pcs/dell-xps-16-laptop/spd/xps-da16260-laptop https://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/laptops-2-in-1-pcs/dell-xps-...

elektronika 9mo ago
> if I try to put it to sleep it _very regularly_ will just stay awake and drain its own battery Sadly Linux isn't any better on this front because it's a hardware issue. Laptop vendors have gotten terrible at managing sleep states. S0 sleep is a joke. I changed my laptop to hibernate on lid close after the second time it nearly cooked itself in my bag.
- maccard 9mo ago
  Indeed - it's why I use a mac unfortunately!

nialv7 9mo ago

iirc the cause of context menu delay was there is an invisible animation I think. The system is animating the menu opening, except there's no animation. So it just waits for a while doing nothing then the menu pops open.

embedding-shape 9mo ago

> If Windows 11 struggles this badly on a brand new laptop that I'm certain would retail for $4000+, I can only imagine how miserable it is for everyone else. I purchased a Surface Pro at one point, with the intention of using it for sketches and using Windows on it, thinking it'll be better because the hardware and OS is from the same organization. Nope! Slow out of the box, horrible thermal management and software bugs galore. Installed Arch with Gnome on it, ran better in most aspects. However, pen usage and touchscreen even after I tried my best to adjust it was worse than Windows, I guess they won there. I didn't use to hate Windows, because at least it wasn't utterly broken, just stupid, but they're really in a deep decline lately. Maybe it's time for one of those "stop the press" type of moments where they have to stop, take a serious look and fix what they have as it currently feels impossible to use reliably.

avadodin 9mo ago

Windows does allow you to enter Chinese characters when you say your language is Chinese. I have moved to Bazzite at home but it is ridiculous that you can't just use your language right away. A normal person would just bail out. If you choose Chinese, all of the content is localized but you have to enable an input method and that doesn't even actually allow you to input Chinese characters! It shows you a scrolling(!) pop-up that tells you you have to enable a different option in order to type in the language that you chose at the very beginning. Hope you didn't choose the wrong one out of ibus, fcitx and fcitx(wayland experimental) – whatever happened to scim, and xim, I miss editing environment variables. Even the cheapest Android gadget can do this out of the box.

khana 9mo ago

[dead]

donkeylazy456 9mo ago

Explorer file browser is just disaster. I am forced to use third-party browsing app when the directory contains hundreds of media. It has happened since win7 or older but still not fixed.

lunar_rover 9mo ago

> what does Windows 11 even do that KDE Plasma 5 wasn't doing a decade ago? How did it take this long to get a tabbed file browser? Management features like application based firewall. Dedicated views in explorer tailored for common file types, automatic view type based on content, plus tile view. Proper title bar customisation. Contextual Ribbon toolbars and to be honest, good menus in general. Have a professional UI designer try KDE and I'm pretty sure they'll have a migraine. Also Win32 in general, Wayland still has a loooong way ahead of it.

nwellinghoff 9mo ago

A lot of these accounts seem anecdotal. I have a clean copy of win 11 iot ltsc running on my laptop and it runs well. The desktop management, included hyper V, wsl2 and awesome RDP make it a great platform to get work done. Most problems people encounter with Windows have to do with driver maturity. And in the case of a mega corp managed machine its all the “security” bs the put on there that slows you down to a crawl.Once you get stable drivers; I find Windows 11,with wsl as my shell, to be quite nice.

ryukoposting 9mo ago
Well yes, it is anecdotal. After all, it's my personal experience, which is, by definition, an anecdote. At what point did I suggest the exact types of bullshit Win11 exposes me to are exactly the same as everyone else experiences?

Sverigevader 9mo ago

About hitting the print screen button by accident. I have the same issue and like you I can sometimes get out of it by hitting ESC. I think this sometimes fails because the snipping app isn't in focus (even though it's covering the entire screen). The trick I found to get out of it is to hit ALT+TAB. It ironically puts another app into focus and when that happens, the snipping tool exits. Snipping tool is pretty great though. I wish macOS had the same.

opan 9mo ago
What's snipping tool have over macOS's super-shift-5 (or 4 or 3)? I would usually put Greenshot on any Windows box I'm gonna have to use a while, and that seems to pretty much have feature parity with all my slurp+grim Sway keybinds on GNU/Linux.
- Sverigevader 9mo ago
  It's very minor but, with the Snipping Tool, the screenshot automatically ends up in the clipboard after dragging the box. As far as I know with macos I have to open the preview and copy it from there. There may be an option in macos to get the same behavior but I don't know about it.
  - opan 9mo ago
    Ah, I believe Greenclip has that feature. Personally I hate when people copy/paste images as it often results in bad filenames like "image.jpg" (as in literally the word image) and then requires me to rename them when saving them when the file probably had a perfectly good default filename. I make sure to save images and reupload them, and I have a one-liner to check my pictures dir for bad filenames in case I saved one without noticing (worst case I run my routine rsync and am repeatedly replacing some image.jpg with a different picture). I also made a short script to put the current unix time on my clipboard in case I need to rename some of these bad files in a pinch. I tend to think less of people contributing to this bad filename problem, although chat programs and such could likely detect and "fix" it on their end also. My screenshot workflow saves an image with the dimensions and date/time in it to my ~/scrot directory and then I can quickly post it somewhere by just sorting that dir by mtime with newest files on top.

EasyMark 9mo ago

My work laptop does the same thing. Pretty maxed out for a Dell but still can be slow, especially right click context menu. Someone else said it could be endpoint software (executable scanning?) which makes sense. things improved a bit after a I turned off the eye candy under appearance settings other than font rendering and shadowing. Might be worth a try.

MonkeyClub 9mo ago

> when opening directories with more than 100-ish files 99 files should be enough for everyone.

Friedduck 9mo ago

You can disable windows folder type detection to speed the laggy file explorer navigation. It’s a registry hack and so limited for corporate machines.

hiccuphippo 9mo ago

I'd recommend Chris Titus' winutil to remove most of the crap. I use the recommended settings and also remove copilot and onedrive. Then from there you can open O&O Shutup10 and disable a few more "features". It's just a band-aid not a solution, and you'll have to run it again after Windows updates and helpfully undoes your settings, but at least makes it usable. https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil

bratwurst3000 9mo ago

Had similar issu. Windows 11 installed two gpu driver that run parallel. Cpu etc was on low but everything was lacking. did go to safe mode and deinstalled drivers and reinstalled them. Windows installed them again even with me doing everything it didnt... whatever now i have mac and it sucks also but doesnt lag that hard. maybe it helps

the_lucifer 9mo ago

> Half the time I can smack Esc and Snipping Tool will go away. The other half of the time, I have to mouse over and click the X to close it. There is no pattern to when Esc does/doesn't work. What I have noticed is to let it load the snipping UI first and start listening for your keystrokes. If you hit escape really quickly, right after you accidentally hit print screen, it will not go away and require you to manually mouse over and hit the X. But if you wait for a second and then hit escape, it almost always registers my keystroke. It's almost like hitting escape really quickly just quits the keyboard listener instead of the actual snipping tool.