[roytries]

I find this an extremely weird set of argument.

Opening the task manager or explorer takes less time than I can measure on both Windows and Linux... what kind of metric is this?

As for background services, of course they spend (at that moment unused resources). But you completely forego that they have an actual usefulness. Indexing files makes searching later faster. Prefetching makes loading commonly used programs faster. Virus scanning keeps your computer safe. Telemetry helps developers recognize issues and prioritize bugs, even stop hackers in time. The article you mentioned wants you to disable the firewall (bad advice) but also a lot of services that are not even consuming resources unless you have the necessary policies/hardware, like the bluetooth service or touch screen service.

Not that Windows these days runs from high-end server to low powered ARM devices, while still looking generally the same. This is not the same Windows from 20 years ago where you could easily tweak the system to get some more performance out of it. These days Windows comes out of the box running as fast as it can, while giving a reasonable user experience.

As for software, on Windows you're free to install all the software you want (just as on Linux), some software is not so nice, just as on Linux. I find it hard to blame Windows itself for that. Microsoft does not curate all the software you can install it, and a user is free to install what they want. The only OSes where this is really different are mobile OSes.

[ubercow13]

Opening software takes a lot of time on Windows. It's mainly due to the antivirus. I recently tested it myself; I forget the numbers but basically having Microsoft's AV enabled adds a good fraction of a second, or maybe more, to every program launch.

[modo_mario]

>Opening the task manager or explorer takes less time than I can measure on both Windows and Linux... what kind of metric is this?

I feel like a lot of people here are devs running reasonably modern computers but as someone running dualboots at home (manjaro KDE) and at work from time to time dealing with the kind of desktops most people use in their day to day life.... (As in they're not actually that old but weren't top of the line when bought either) ....this is actually one of my biggest gripes with it.

Windows really is slow as fuck. Sometimes it's really noticeable on the somewhat older hardware but on the other stuff it doesn't really annoy you until you compare because we're talking very short delays, little bits of lags....the thing is...It's there for just about everything. There's not a whole lot that feels instantaneous which makes it all perfectly usable but feel off at the same time.

I didn't even think about it till I switched to Linux at home and noticed just how snappy stuff feels. MacOS has felt similarly snappy the few times i've used it but I don't use it enough to really comment.

>As for software, on Windows you're free to install all the software you want (just as on Linux), some software is not so nice, just as on Linux. I find it hard to blame Windows itself for that. Microsoft does not curate all the software you can install it, and a user is free to install what they want. The only OSes where this is really different are mobile OSes.

Tbh I thought similar (and mostly it'll still be true) until I tried to use a playstation 3 controller (a very common item at least at the time) for a windows only game. It worked out of the box on Linux and I believe an xbox controller would have worked like that and on windows as well but to get the ps3 one I had working on windows i had to jump trough hoops, change some stuff so i could then disable driver signature enforcement and tweak a few other things only to give up in the end when it still didn't work after I had managed. Even if it worked it wouldn't work every time because the ways of getting around permanently disabling signed drivers constantly keep being patched by Windows.

[cycomanic]

The slowness is something I particularly notice with python. I'm a linux user, but many of my students work on windows. Every time they show me something on linux and import numpy or scipy it takes like 10s for the import. While on my linux system it's typically instantaneous. Can anyone elaborate on where this is coming from?

[yakubin]

> Indexing files makes searching later faster.

It's been my experience that Windows search is anything but fast. On Linux on the other hand, the speed of find(1) was never an issue. There is really nothing to speed up (and in so doing increase median load).