[Aurornis]

Every thread about Windows on Hacker News includes claims about apps taking 30 seconds to launch, web pages taking 20 seconds to load, simple applications being unusable, and other extreme performance problems. These are puzzling for anyone (like me) who uses Windows at home without all of these extreme performance problems.

That was until I realized how many reports are coming from people talking about their work laptops loaded with endpoint management and security software. Some of those endpoint control solutions are so heavy that the laptop feels like you've traveled back in time 15 years and you're using a mechanical hard drive.

[everdrive]

There's an unspoken rule in corporate America, colleges, etc. Laptops MUST be loaded down with terrible software, no exceptions. My last corporate laptop actually had the paid version of winzip in 2025, and it ran with a little tray icon that I couldn't disable or remove. That was in addition to all the other corporate crap I couldn't remove.

Some of this is not _just_ a corporate problem. Why would Winzip have an auto run application and tray application in the first place? Every single app seems to think they need one, and it's a classical tragedy of the commons. Perhaps on a virgin Windows install, your app with autorun and a tray icon will be more responsive. But when 20 other apps pull that same trick, no one wins.

This is actually one of the reasons I'm not excited at the idea of Linux defeating Windows. If it did, corporations would just start crapping up Linux the way they've crapped up Windows.

[simulator5g]

The reason every developer makes their app open at startup, is because the Windows ecosystem doesn't have a good package manager. So every app needs to be its own package manager and check for updates on a timer. So they need to run all the time so they can run that timer.

[axus]

In theory the Windows Store will handle updates. In practice, I avoid the Windows Store version of applications. Also, you can't turn off app updating, only pause them for a time.

[simulator5g]

Windows Store could be great but it sucks. I haven't looked into winget yet but hopefully that takes off and doesn't suck.

[simondotau]

IT department: If security software isn’t slowing the computer down, it’s probably not doing anything. Our security software is reassuringly bloated.

[capitainenemo]

Our corporate linux machines have exactly the same monitoring software as Windows - even the servers. The performance is still not even remotely comparable. Could be the hooks are more performant on linux, could be the filesystem, maybe the tools are written more sanely... But loading apps, filesystem operations... Everything is still far faster on the linux dev instance. And I have half the ram allocated to that one.

[p_ing]

If your benchmark is file systems, this is due to the file system filter model that NT implements, not the file system itself.

[kryptiskt]

> If it did, corporations would just start crapping up Linux the way they've crapped up Windows.

They do already, my work laptop runs the corporate spin of Ubuntu, complete with Crowdstrike, which goes absolutely crazy and chews all the CPU whenever I do a Yocto build.

[roywiggins]

I used to be able to reliably BSOD a work computer by doing a largish git pull inside WSL2, with the culprit seemingly being the McAfee realtime scanner. VirtualBox VMs were fine though. Not confidence-inspiring!

[icwtyjj]

I think there’s a pretty big difference though. Linux is open while windows almost certainly will remain closed so even if corporates start bloating up Linux users can rely on the gpl to give them choice while windows users are stuck

[zbentley]

I once worked on a computer for the US Government that felt slow. I counted nine (9) directly competitive and redundant endpoint protection products on it.

Not nine different/only somewhat overlapping pieces of software from companies that were competitors. Nine equivalent products. I guess defender made ten.

[MBCook]

In college I remember one room had some kind of all-in-one PCs built into the desks. It would have been useful.

Except they were unusably slow. Literally.

Log in when class starts, you may get control after 10+ minutes. Opening a web browser was a mistake you may not live to regret.

The network there was not fast. The various security stuff slowed every computer down a lot.

I suspect they were already older and maybe underspec. Probably had 4200 RPM disks or something.

But the combination meant they were 100% worthless.

[ASalazarMX]

Ten protection layers! This is the reverse of the seven proxies meme.

[mounram]

Can you elaborate?

[zbentley]

How? I’m not going to name agencies or security products if that’s what you mean.

It was a US government owned/issued computer. It had 9 fully overlapping/redundant endpoint security products running. Opening websites took ages. Using specialized apps like IDEs was unlikely to fully or consistently work. As I understand it, this situation is not unusual in government/heavily regulated workstation environments elsewhere.

[ASalazarMX]

I like videogames, maybe more than I should at my age, and I prefer to play them from Steam in Linux through Proton. A couple of months ago I caved in and bought a proper Windows gaming miniPC because a game I want is not stable in Proton.

I use a corporate Windows VDI at work, so the experience is understandably subpar there, but it is still horrible on high.end hardware. Took me half a day just to herd it through update after update, while avoiding linking it to a Microsoft account despite its protests.

It's literally used to run only Steam and Firefox, and it still sucks compared to the ease of install/management of Linux. Ubuntu LTS took me about an hour to set up dual boot, apply updates, install Steam, and every other software and tool I use daily.

Why is Windows 11 still so clunky in 2026? It doesn't feel like the flagship product that many bright minds have improved for three decades. Why are hobbyists and small companies outperforming Microsoft's OS management?

[SpecialistK]

Because Windows isn't really an OS anymore, but a "platform" to deliver advertisements and lock you into Microsoft services. The OS core itself is fairly solid (and has been since Vista/7) but it's all of the crud shoved on top which really ruins everything.

The LTSC IoT releases are easy to find (wink-wink) and don't have 80% of the annoyances, including constant "feature upgrades" - still not Linux, but better than consumer Windows.

[simulator5g]

No this is not just an enterprise issue. I waited 10 seconds (I counted.) for a Windows Explorer context menu to open the other day. This is on a fully decked out system with an Ultra 9 cpu and a 4090 and 32gb of memory, and basically no apps running. I think I had 2 tabs in Edge? Windows is a shitshow these days.

[gamblor956]

I just tried to open the context menu in Windows Explorer. It showed up almost as soon as I released the mouse button, and I have a much slower CPU, older video card, and way less RAM then you do. I was also running 12 windows of Firefox with collectively 1000+ tabs (though only about 36 or loaded), Steam, a Unity game, and Microsoft Teams, plus a number of background programs.

If your Explorer context menu is taking more than a split second to load, there's something wrong with your hardware.

[thebruce87m]

There must be something wrong with quite a lot of hardware then. My windows laptop at work took > 20 seconds to open the right-click menu on the desktop.

During the wait the entire desktop background went black along with the icons then it came back. I was actually trying to get to a setting to set the background to a fixed colour instead of an image in the hope of speeding the machine up.

From a UX experience there was zero indication that it was trying to do anything during this time.

[Rohansi]

Other than hardware it could also be some third-party software hooking into Explorer to do who knows what.

[simulator5g]

Microsoft is responsible for the UX of the ecosystem they create. Things that extend the OS are part of that responsibility. It shouldn't be possible for such a thing to happen. The OS could just show the damn menu after 500ms even if some extension hasn't responded.

[Rohansi]

The extensions are native code loaded directly into the Explorer process and called from the UI thread. There is no async option they can time out.

It's not the recommended way to hook into the context menu. They have had declarative options for a long time which do not cause issues like this.

[p_ing]

The reason the Windows 11 menu changed was to solve for this exact issue.

[simulator5g]

I don't have anything that hooks into the Windows 11-style menu though. The only additional options in the "Show more options" / Windows 10-style menu are Nvidia stuff which comes with the PC, and Visual Studio, which is Microsoft. This is not caused by some crappy 3rd party app.

The new menu is faster, it takes about .5 to 1 second to appear. Pretty great compared to 10 seconds for the old style menu. Still a very noticeable lag for a simple task on a top-shelf Windows laptop.

To be fair the delays get better when you repeatedly open the context menu. It seems to get everything cached and then it loads in ~0.5 second. But it loses this speed when you don't open the menu for a while.

[dwedge]

A bank I worked at had one so bad that at 9am when everyone was logging in or forcing updates it could take 15 minutes to be usable. And every couple of weeks they'd force update just to change everyone's lock screen to something like "I support pride month"

[toast0]

Corporate spyware is pretty nasty, regardless of platform. When I was at FB, they had something that forced a kernel module that was incompatible with the next big OS release; and I had accidentally disabled the FB spyware scripts. I set /etc/hosts to immutable because I was tired of them fucking with it ... didn't realize that's why things were better for the next 3 months, until I did the major update and I had to fix things from safe mode ... where everything only barely works.

Microsoft also puts a lot of crap into a default install that you may want to disable. Windows 11 with some judicious policy editor settings isn't so awful.

[nirava]

Outside corporate setting, it is also the fact that most windows systems you encounter are installed on cheap machines by people who just care that their word processor works a few times a month. And you were probably forced to fix it.

At the same time, as someone with a well maintained Windows gaming rig, I don't like spending time in the OS these days. Something about transparently doing stuff that puts money in their pocket while inconveniencing me gives me the ick.

[MBCook]

And Windows laptops are such a commodity business that prices are incredibly low. So PC makers load ‘em up with junk because they get paid for those deals.

They are more incentivized by that than the few lost sales from people who know better to look for low crud machines.

And on more expensive machines they’d just be leaving money on the table. So they still often ship bundled crud.

Similar to spyware on TVs. Margins are razor thin. They’re going to make them up somewhere.

[QuercusMax]

I've said for decades that from a user perspective, malware scanners and prevention tools are fundamentally indistinguishable from actual malware. They intercept file accesses, block you from doing what you want to do, pop things up all over the place, and make your machine slow aand unreliable.

[ezfe]

This has always been my experience even just this past week. The system feels so unresponsive.

Like, the UI shows my hovers and interactions live but clicking things just takes time to do the corresponding result.

[bfrog]

Oh yeah no... its still terrible even without all the spyware.

First experience of Windows 11, trying to download a file through firefox caused my 18 core 10980xe to have the entire UI freeze for the full time the download was going.

Reverted back to windows 10 immediately and the problem went away.

Windows 11 is full of spyware from the Mothership