[tuetuopay]

Considering I found the win10 start menu too slow, the w11 one does not stand a chance. But I'm hopeful from your comment, it shows that w11 is not the complete shitshow people make it to be, though the few times I used it on relatives computers I found it not responsive enough.

I'm testing daily-drive on my main rig (high-end from a few years ago, 5900x + 3090), and honestly I'm rediscovering my computer. A combination of less fluff, less animations, better fs performance (NTFS on NVMe is suboptimal), etc. I was getting fed up by a few windows quirks: weird updates breaking stuff, weird audio issues (e.g. the audio subsystem getting ~10s latency for any interaction like playing a new media file or opening the output switcher), weird display issues (computer locking up when powering on/off my 4k tv), and whatnot. I'm still keeping the w10 install around, as having an unsupported OS is less of a problem for the occasional game, especially since I mostly play offline games.

As for the dev env, you're not limited to bazzite, I run Arch. Well, I've been running it for two weeks on the rig. But you really get the best devex with linux.

[user34283]

The start menu seems to respond instantly for me.

That's on a 7950X3D with 64 GB RAM and a Samsung 990 Pro SSD. Maybe it performs worse on slower hardware.

I have 14 TB of SSDs connected, so it's not like there is no content on my PC.

Notably I don't have any HDDs connected, maybe that plays a role here.

[tuetuopay]

The few win11 I've touched were all on NVMe drives, but I'm pretty sure they're fast enough for a start menu. I mean, your gear should not be needed to get a responsive start menu.

I'm curious, did you clean up what's by default in the start menu? Stuff like "recommended", "candy crush", and the likes? On the win11 I tested, those parts loaded slower than the rest, I wonder if the start menu has a timeout of "load then open".

Had I switched to win11 I'd have slapped Classic Shell on it, as I did on win10. It's a reimplementation of the win7 start menu with windows-version-appropriate design, but with win7 reactivity (opens literally the next frame, in no small parts thanks to the absence of animation).

[user34283]

After checking the responsiveness of the start menu earlier, I uninstalled or unpinned the useless stuff in Pinned.

I don't think it made a difference, it was already lag free before.

It's annoying they put Office Copilot and Instagram there, but it uninstalled with just two clicks per item, taking a minute or so to get rid of everything.