Former Microsoft developer says Windows 11's performance is "comically bad," even with monster PC
Former Microsoft developer says Windows 11's performance is "comically bad," even with monster PC
Andy Young, an ex-Microsoft senior software engineer, posted a message on X/Twitter bemoaning that even with his $1,600 Core i9 CPU and 128 GB of RAM, Windows...
Should just use Linux, tbh.
None of you read the article. His complaint pertains to the Start Menu, which I agree is atrocious. Mine never indexes Steam. If you wanted to compare this to alternatives you'd have to look at Mac's Spotlight, or the Linux tools dmenu or rofi. Dmenu and rofi kick the shit out of Window's Start Menu for my use cases. I want you to find my applications, that's it. The Start Menu consistently jumbles settings, web searches, and shit I don't want (why does searching User Accounts not bring up User Accounts to the fucken top?) It is comically bad, but its not talking about fucken gaming performance.
The CPU speed and ram size is irrelevant in this case, it's slow because it needs to load ads and sponsored results from internet first
Windows 11 exists for the sole purpose of requiring tpm 2.0 in order to boost new PC sales. 10+ year old hardware worked perfectly fine running win 10 and PC manufacturers were steadily losing sales as there was little or no need for organizations to replace what they had. The decision to make that requirement will result in millions of PCs going in the trash.
When all the innovations are just ads and telemetry, shit is going to slow down.
This 16-bit looking shit ad that I didn't ask for and can't remove unless I choose yes or no was the last straw for me. Baking Language Model AI (Copilot) is nothing I want, just like I didn't want Cortana, or Edge. Or the dark pattern requests to consider edge. Nor the new Windows setup screen that sometimes occurs after an update which is just a sly way of shoving another option to make Edge my default browser again.
I've moved my laptop to Linux around December. Now I'm going to move my gaming PC over to Linux. I'm just done.
Start menu is kinda useless, I mostly use it for my pinned items.
Try to switch desktops with 2 different hi res wallpapers, peak Windows performance.
Allegedly, the windows kernel scheduler was superior to Linux's CFS scheduler in certain select metrics.
Except it didn't matter anyway because all of the UWP apps were so crappily made and Microsoft forgot to hire actual devs for their UI so everything lagged and loaded slow.
Oh and it turns out the windows scheduler also handled multi core pretty poorly so people with new hardware suffered performance losses.
And Linux upgraded to the EEVDF scheduler which AFAIK makes it even better than before.
This is what I've been saying for years. Windows 11 is a big step backwards for performance.
I have a beefy laptop with W11 and a Ryzen 9 5900HX and 32GB RAM and a high end SSD, but the start menu takes up to a full second to open, the File manager takes 2-3 seconds to open and 1 second to "work on" the directory I entered, task manager takes like 5 seconds now, and sometimes my CPU randomly spikes to 80+ degrees C while the desktop is idle.
On Ubuntu (not known for being lightweight, quite the contrary in the Linux world), there is extremely minimal lag and basic system functions are near instant. I'd use it more if the WiFi was more reliable (my average packet loss is 39% in some frequently visited areas where Windows doesn't struggle at all)
Also, for work I used a W10 desktop with a i7-8700K CPU and random SSD, and nothing in the OS lagged or was unresponsive. File manager was nearly instant, even when the system was hit with significant load elsewhere.
I would love to swap to Linux if I could play all my games without having to dual boot etc. Steam have done wonders with the proton compatability on steamdeck so there is hope but a lot of my hardware also requires software that is windows only too.
It might be a stupid comment I'm no Linux expert, but looking forward to the steamOS coming out for PC.
Don't worry, while you are waiting for Windows to react to your input, you can enjoy watching some ads in the near future! :-)
I guess I'm biased because I've been using Windows since when it was TRULY awful. (386/3.1/3.11)
This looks like a normal corporate video, but it goes OFF THE RAILS at the 7 minute mark.
https://youtu.be/noEHHB6rnMI#t=7m
Win 11 hasn't really given me problems.
Looks more like a bug than performance problem. Anyways start menu search has felt worse ever since Windows 8. For the most part it works, but occasionally you get random issues like these.
Things like PowerToys Run offer a much better search experience.
Normal news from Microsoft
My biggest productivity issue with windows 11 is using the shortcuts WIN + NUM (1-4 generally) I have my browser set as 1 and often use it to get to it. Unfortunately there is a bug in 11 where it can do 2 things.
- Display the windows but won't let you select one
- Lock me out of everything until I use the mouse
It has been an active bug for at least over a year.
Yawn.
I had my first UNIX class in about 1990. I wrote my first Fortran program on a Sperry Rand Univac (punched cards) in about 1985. Cobol was immediately after Fortran (wish I'd stuck with Cobol).
I run a Mint laptop. Power management is a joke. Configured it as best as possible, walked in the other day and it was dead. Windows would never do this, unless you went out of your way to config power management to kill the battery.
There no way even possible via the GUI to config power management for things like low/critical battery conditions /actions.
There are many reasons why Linux doesn't compete with Windows on the desktop - this is just one glaring one.
Now let's look at Office. Open an Excel spreadsheet with tables in any app other than excel. Tables are something that's just a given in excel, takes 10 seconds to setup, and you get automatic sorting and filtering, with near-zero effort. No, I'm not setting up a DB in an open-source competitor to Access. That's just too much effort for simple sorting and filtering tasks, and isn't realistically shareable with other people.
Now there's that print monitor that's on by default, and can only be shut up by using a command line. Wtf? In the 21st century?
Networking... Yea, samba works, but how do you clear creds you used one time to connect to a share, even though you didn't say "save creds"? Oh, yea, command line again or go download an app to clear them for for you. Smh.
Someone else said it better than me:
Every time I've installed Linux as my main OS (many, many times since I was younger), it gets to an eventual point where every single thing I want to do requires googling around to figure out problems. While it's gotten much better, I always ended up reinstalling Windows or using my work Mac. Like one day I turn it on and the monitor doesn't look right. So I installed twenty things, run some arbitrary collection of commands, and it works.... only it doesn't save my preferences.
So then I need to dig into .bashrc or .bash_profile (is bashrc even running? Hey let me investigate that first for 45 minutes) and get the command to run automatically.. but that doesn't work, so now I can't boot.. so I have to research (on my phone now, since the machine deathscreens me once the OS tries to load) how to fix that... then I am writing config lines for my specific monitor so it can access the native resolution... wait, does the config delimit by spaces, or by tabs?? anyway, it's been four hours, it's 3:00am and I'm like Bryan Cranston in that clip from Malcolm in the Middle where he has a car engine up in the air all because he tried to change a lightbulb.
And then I get a new monitor, and it happens all damn over again. Oh shit, I got a new mouse too, and the drivers aren't supported - great! I finally made it to Friday night and now that I have 12 minutes away from my insane 16 month old, I can't wait to search for some drivers so I can get the cursor acceleration disabled. Or enabled. Or configured? What was I even trying to do again? What led me to this?
I just can't do it anymore. People who understand it more than I will downvote and call me an idiot, but you can all kiss my ass because I refuse to do the computing equivalent of building a radio out of coconuts on a deserted island of ancient Linux forum posts because I want to have Spotify open on startup EVERY time and not just one time. I have tried to get into Linux as a main dev environment since 1997 and I've loved/liked/loathed it, in that order, every single time.
I respect the shit out of the many people who are far, far smarter than me who a) built this stuff, and 2) spend their free time making Windows/Mac stuff work on a Linux environment, but the part of me who liked to experiment with Linux has been shot and killed and left to rot in a ditch along the interstate.
Now I love Linux for my services: Proxmox, UnRAID, TrueNAS, containers for Syncthing, PiHole, Owncloud/NextCloud, CasaOS/Yuno, etc, etc. I even run a few Windows VM's on Linux (Proxmox) because that's better than running Linux VM's of a Windows server.
Linux is brilliant for this stuff. Just not brilliant for a desktop, let alone in a business environment (or really for the average user).
If it were 40 years ago, maybe Linux would've had a chance to beat MS, even then it would've required settling on a single GUI (which is arguably half of why Windows became a standard, the other half being a common API), a common build (so the same tools/utilities are always available), and a commitment to put usability for the inexperienced user first.
These are what MS did in the 1980's to make Windows attractive to the 3 groups who contend with desktops: developers, business management, end users.
I recently wiped my Nitro5 of Windows 11 and now I'm currently using Kubuntu while waiting for the Fedora 40 release. I think I'm going to try the Plasma spin, (Fedora always seems to end badly for me though).
I was reasonably satisfied with Win11 when I first upgraded to it. It ran smoothly and was easy to setup the way I wanted it. It basically stayed pretty much out of my way. But the last "upgrade" put an end to that. I wrestled with the last service pack, and got pissed and wiped it.
Now I'm just waiting for Fedora 40 to drop along with Ubuntu 24.04LS. I will pick a KDE spin that seems to run the best.
I didn't see any difference on my 2in1 ThinkPad, performance was about the same, although Windows 11 UI felt snappier.
In the follow-up post, Young emphasized that he loves Windows
lol
Windows 11 ams for the Dutch.