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.
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Pretty much everything related to the explorer.exe
process is needlessly slow on Windows 11. On my work machine, the file explorer will take 2-3 seconds to load after I open it, and that's with only a C:/ drive (i.e. no network shares to slow it down or anything else).
Start menu was separated from explorer.exe since 8 or 10, it's called StartMenuExperienceHost.exe nowadays. Taskbar is also a separate process since 11. It also means that they can freeze separately
It also means that they can freeze separately
Pretty good summary of Microsoft's "innovations" the last decade or so
The worst part is that it worked fine on Windows 7. You could hit start > type the first 3-4 letters > enter and be able to open any program or OS setting in under a second. They somehow fucked it up with 8 and still haven't fixed it over a decade later.
Seriously, searching for anything on your PC is completely useless.
An FYI for Windows users, check out Everything for searching your harddrive. It is insanely fast. Like, search your entire harddrive in real time as you press the letters fast. Compared to the crap Windows has built in, it feels like magic, until you realize that searching a database at fast speeds has been a solved problem for decades and yet Microsoft still continues to struggle because they want to throw in every possible piece of metadata and contents every time you search when most people just want to type a name in.
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
The way I search on all my Windows devices is:
Install PowerToys.
Install Everything
Install Everything extension for PowerToys Search
Change PowerToys Search to open with Windows key and spacebar
Best search experience I’ve ever had on my Windows machines.
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.
Interesting, considering I haven't noticed... and gaming benchmarks have shown a minimal if any difference in gaming performance between Windows, stripped down Windows, and Linux. You'd have to split hairs to find it.
You notice it on old hardware. On my Latitude e6220 (i3 2nd gen) there is a night and day performance difference between windows 10 and Linux.
Idk man. I have a brand new laptop my work got me and I notice it. Windows is just plain bad now. It’s like I go to save a file and the file browser window opens and I’m stuck sitting there waiting for minutes. It’s like I’m suddenly 10 again when you’d turn on your pc, go make breakfast, come back and hope your PC finished booting. Does it both on my work laptop running 11 and my PC at home running 10.
Yeah, I'm currently upgrading our fleet of Windows 10 PCs at work to 11. I haven't noticed a significant difference either. Nor at home on my desktop or laptop. I think this guy might be affected by a driver bug or something.
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.
It's amazing Microsoft has mismanaged their OS so badly that even gaming increasingly makes little sense on the platform. Why spend extra money on hardware just to have your performance stripped away by a bloated Windows?
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.
I have a 7950X, a pile of RAM, and an unfairly expensive RTX 4000-series GPU. The cursor occasionally hitches for ~400ms whenever doing things like opening task manager or resuming from the lock screen, so that checks out unfortunately.
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.
For me I just gave up the games that don't work on Linux. I didn't have any windows only software I was bound to tho
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.
At work I have your standard corporate Dell laptop running Microsoft 365. I run Linux in a VM to do my work and it’s pretty funny how responsive it is compared with the host OS running on the actual hardware. Funny in a sad way, really.
And this is still on windows 10, not even updated to 11 yet.
It's incredible how the startup performance of EventViewer is as bad as it was 15 years ago.....
Yeah. When your software is as slow as it was fifteen years ago, on modern hardware, there is no defense.
Don't worry, while you are waiting for Windows to react to your input, you can enjoy watching some ads in the near future! :-)
one user noted, going to Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop and changing MenuShowDelay from the default 400 to 0.
If that variable means what I think it means, how on earth was it ever approved?
Because that reg key controls how long you have to hover over a menu object in ms before the tooltip appears. Try set it to zero and reboot if you’d like, but it’s going to be a shit experience I’d wager. Cause you have tooltips appearing all the time and they’ll end up getting in the way and covering other ui elements.
There are many flaws with windows, but that ain’t one of them.
It's really not... I use Windows 11 for work (dev) and gaming and it's fine.
in the time it takes my work windows laptop to get from a login screen to a usable desktop, with the cpu idle, I rebooted and signed in to my linux desktop, and performed a restart. Several times.
Well, your anecdote is certainly more influential to me than listening to a core developer. Plus I want to believe you are right because it feels bad to believe otherwise, so you are obviously correct.
Hmm, guess it sounds silly when I say it that way. I'll work on it.
Joking, I don't use Windows, but I hope you are right.
Yes Windows 11 is small enough that this one dude knows all there is to know about it. It is impossible this (former) core developer is wrong, lying or has an axe to grind.
The trend continues. 11 trash, 10 decent (with a little work tbh), 8 trash, 7 decent, vista trash, xp decent...
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.
I'm impressed at the balanced conversations in this submission. People who are both for and against Windows and Linux. As I remember, it felt like everyone was heavily biased towards Linux and hated everything about Windows 6 months ago.
Funny enough I bounce between both sides. I mostly work in Linux, and up until Steam Deck, I only gamed on Windows.
So you'll absolutely see my comments bashing Microsoft and championing the superiority of open-source Linux. Then the next day mock the Linux nerds about how "easy" Linux is when Windows just works for the average user.
I'm complicated.
The plan for me is to go full-time Linux once I'm forced to move off Win10. I already use it a lot but I'm waiting on a few holdouts.
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.