Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux
(himthe.dev)1859 points by bobsterlobster 4 days ago
1859 points by bobsterlobster 4 days ago
> Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all.
> Context menus take a noticeable amount of time to appear.
I can almost guarantee this is from some endpoint management software your company installed.
I have a Windows 11 workstation that I use all the time for some CAD software and the occasional game. Everything is fast. There's no lag with context menus or browsing directories with a lot of files.
If I have to browse network CIFS shares with a lot of files, Windows does it better than my mac or Linux boxes by a mile. I've switched over just to Windows a time or two just to deal with high file count shares.
> If Windows 11 struggles this badly on a brand new laptop that I'm certain would retail for $4000+, I can only imagine how miserable it is for everyone else.
I put Windows 11 on an old low powered laptop for a family member. FYI you can easily circumvent some of the Windows 11 requirements and put it on old hardware.
It's fast. It doesn't have any of the problems you're describing.
I do wonder how many of the "Windows 11 is painfully slow" comments are coming from people with corporate laptops with extremely laggy endpoint management overhead.
>> Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all
> I can almost guarantee this is from some endpoint management software your company installed.
You can repro this on demo Surface laptops at Costco. It’s not a good look when expensive laptops render their darn File Explorer slowly.
Also re endpoint management, corporate Macs also have endpoint management and still provide better experience vs corporate Windows PCs.
Microsoft isn’t a mute participant in the corporate device market. Their recommendations and best practices carry enormous weight. Windows division can work with security vendors and customers to improve UX. But they maybe haven’t done enough. Maybe because Windows is an increasingly small fraction of Microsoft’s bottom line? Who knows.
But today you’ll see increasing numbers of Macs in even super-Windows-heavy workplaces, especially in digital/cyber/AI/leadership roles. That’s not a one-company quirk.
> Microsoft isn’t a mute participant in the corporate device market.
This is 100% on point! For the past three years all of my in-office work was done on a ChromeBox running ChromeOS, I work in a contact center, but my specific project does not focus on customers but other stuff.
At first I thought they did this because Chrome-anything is usually cheap, but the devices they give us are all around or above $1000, so now I think we use them only because the client wants us to use them, since on some other projects they do use Windows, but with this client we have A LOT of project and A LOT of work, so it's not like we're the exception.
I think with the advent of SteamOS, ChromeOS and Android merging, we could legit see a serious move away from Windows, even in corporate worlds, but who knows, my vision could just be clouded, I'm not a genius or some smart person like a bunch of people here on HN, I work for basically a minimum salary (Portugal), live in a room, that the company that hires me, rents to me, and read HN mostly for entertainment.
A few years ago my laptop died while I was travelling. I was going to back to back tech conferences - and not having a computer would be a disaster. So, I went to best buy and picked up a brand new $500 HP laptop. It was running windows 11 or 10 or something - whatever was current at the time. And a recent enough intel CPU and 4gb of ram. It was way faster than my desktop machine from 10 years earlier. I figured it'd be plenty fast enough.
Nope. The experience was just rubbish. Out of the box, the machine was incredibly slow. It would get warm to the touch while sitting idle, and the battery would die in about 45 minutes. I quickly figured out there was some HP audio process running all the time to do noise cancellation on input from the microphone. For some reason it was active all the time, and it needed about 30% of a core to do its thing. So I got rid of that. But windows explorer was still slow... of course, it was some HP antivirus rootkit program preinstalled doing who knows what. I spent hours clearing crap off that machine. Anything with HP in the name, to start. It probably would have been faster to reinstall windows completely, but I didn't want to do that from a hotel room over wifi.
By the time I was done, it was ... ok. The machine still lagged when you opened programs for some reason. But the battery life went up to 3-4 hours, and it was fast enough I could get work done.
I think about that laptop a lot. Imagine all the people who buy those laptops. What % will spend the hours it took to clear the crapware off them? I can easily imagine my mother buying a laptop like that and just assuming that's how fast computers are.
I think this might be the #1 benefit for regular people to buying a mac. When you buy a computer from apple, there's no 3rd party who installed a bunch of crap on the computer before you got your hands on it. The only people who install crap software are Apple. And as much as I hate apple's greedy background processes, they tend to pause while you're running on battery.
> You can repro this on demo Surface laptops at Costco.
Never underestimate how much bloatware is running on that costco laptop. Open up task manager. You'll see.
I don't share his experience entirely, by even on my desktop built for gaming I can notice the right click menu is delayed in comparison to Windows 10. Even more heinous, before you remove it, the AI button would lazy load causing you to sometimes hit it by accident when you mean to hit something else. God forbid I'm not 80 years old and click my menus with any sort of speed.
Also, if I'm going to have to adjust anything to use an operating system, I might as well use Linux. The only value prop for me to use Windows was gaming, but at this point I'm just completely ripping the band-aid off because it doesn't seem like Microsoft is going in a better direction.
> Even more heinous, before you remove it, the AI button would lazy load causing you to sometimes hit it by accident when you mean to hit something else.
Yup, definitely intended
I had a comment a few days ago about my freshly installing, configuring, and A/B testing W10 and W11 on a not-too-old HP laptop, using both HDD and NVMe:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750358
That was then.
Now last night my partner comes back from the dumpster with a Toshiba laptop that's in great shape, its 20 full years old, came with Windows Vista, had been upgraded to Windows 7, has 1GB of memory, 120GB SATA2 HDD (slower than modern SATA), dual-core 1.73GHz CPU.
Seems to work perfectly and With W7 it's snappier than the 2019 HP booted to old or new Windows 10 or Windows 11 even more. All comparisons at baseline without the internet.
When you try W11 on a HDD it really emphasizes the difference from W10 on the same hardware.
But when this kind of W7 thing just falls in your lap, it really hits you how much better performance could have been available by now from Windows if they really tried.
Or didn't drop the ball every time they were at bat, depending on the general manager ;)
> I can almost guarantee this is from some endpoint management software your company installed.
I disagree. I've got windows defender as the only endpoint software on both my daily driver machines, and I see the same issues.
In 2019, I was working for a place that installed Carbon Black on my desktop and it went from fast to unusable overnight. I've since changed jobs, and I've seen a decay in the baseline of the OS over the last 6 years.
> I can almost guarantee this is from some endpoint management software your company installed.
I know you're getting hammered on this, but this is also an indicting statement. If your brand-new OS requires you to have endpoint management that locks it down so much that it affects how long it takes to open files, that's on the OS, not the endpoint management.
Okay, it's on both... endpoint management as a rule is horribly written software, which is shocking knowing how intrusive it is into the system. But, if the OS has so many vulnerabilities that you're required to have endpoint management, that's not a good look on the OS.
My current and former $JOB both required endpoint management on Macs (and a limited amount for folks who used Linux), so it's not a blanket statement. But the impact of the endpoint software on Mac and Linux were still much lower. That is, once I figured out that a certain (redundant) enterprise firewall was crashing my work Mac anytime I plugged in a USB network adapter.
>>> Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all.
>>> Context menus take a noticeable amount of time to appear.
> I can almost guarantee this is from some endpoint management software your company installed.
This can also be due to OneDrive / Sharepoint / Teams etc. Which I suspect supports your point.
A hard lesson I learned was that cloning a git repository into a directory managed by OneDrive is a recipe for interesting behavior.
Windows seemingly hate many tiny files, even in sharded directories, many ecosystems suffered because of this; node_modules, .git, the examples are many.
If I were an assuming feller I'd "almost guarantee" that you haven't been blessed/cursed with anything besides Windows 11.
A lot of my beef, personally, can be chalked up to Windows' aggressively long animation times. It's serviceable with them turned off. But even with animations turned off on an aggressively debloated consumer PC there is either a notable delay or a perception thereof in context menus and file explorer that did not exist with Windows 10, or on my Linux machines.
Speaking of animations, it’s shocking to me how bad they are.
I turned on hiding the taskbar the other day. I don’t think they’ve changed it since Windows 95. I have a modern gaming laptop, and the animation is purely linear, no acceleration. It feels so weirdly unnatural. Even worse, it’s not smoothly animated! I have a 120Hz monitor but it seems to be animated at 5fps.
Nobody on the Windows team seems to give a single shit at all.
From the comment you're replying to: "Windows does it better than my mac or Linux boxes by a mile"
So I wouldn't assume they've only used Windows. FWIW I also primarily use Windows 11 currently, but have also used other OS'es. I've experienced frustrations with all of them. Just because it's fast for you doesn't mean it's fast for everyone, and vice-versa. I could certainly buy that more people are having problems with 11 than they did with 10, though it hasn't been my personal experience. Just saying we shouldn't assume our own experiences are universal.
"I have a Windows 11 workstation ... There's no lag with context menus or browsing directories with a lot of files."
You have the same Windows updates as everyone else and it will be painful. Also you should be keeping those CAD and games up to date and that will be very painful. Updates often happen at unfortunate times.
The Win 11 start menu has managed to be worse than the Win 10 effort and jumped to the middle of the task bar because ... reasons. Search on it is ever so slow. For some reason Win server 2025 has decided that I want to use a welsh keyboard (I'm english and tend to en_GB) when I RDP to one. Cymraeg (soz if I got "welsh" wrong) is alphabetically first in the en_GB list of keyboard mappings and I didn't even know there is a welsh keyboard! I suppose they must have some accents and diacritics not found in english. Its all just a bit weird that a bug like that surfaces after well over two decades of me using RDP from a Linux box to a Windows server.
You wag your finger at endpoint management in the same way that most software vendors used to do at AV back in the 90s and 00s (and 10s and 20s!) Its nothing new and basically bollocks! Modern AV is very good at being mostly asynchronous these days and besides, we have unimaginably faster machines these days and very fast CPU, gobs of RAM and SSDs. Copy a multi GB file and yes AV will take a while but at least you might be saved from nasties.
There is a good reason that corp devices have to run things like inventory agents, log shippers and the rest too - its about security. You doing your own IT security is fine and I'm sure you'll be fine.
You can get Win 11 to work on an old machine for now but as you say, you have to circumvent things. When you do that, I think you are storing up issues for later. Perhaps you will be lucky but perhaps not. My dad will soon be rocking Linux instead of blowing a grand+ on a new PC. He will get a secure booting Ubuntu based effort that looks quite similar to Win 11 that is fully supported by the vendor ... and me. I managed to "port" my wife some years ago and she is a much tougher proposition than my dad!
> Also you should be keeping those CAD and games up to date
Not OP, but why? I have a perpetual license and a 12-year-old copy of a corpo CAD package and it works fine. I see no reason to compulsively update something that's feature-complete and functional.
Updates break shit or make shit worse for me all the time. See: Windows 11, macOS Tahoe, and KDE next year when they drop my working X11 session and expect me to use busted-ass Wayland that's missing functionality I use daily.
Why do I need updates? "Security?" I'm not exactly a nation-state hacking target. I don't run random pirated software. I'm firewalled to hell, and behind CGNAT on Starlink. I'll keep my browser up to date, fine, but I'm still running -esr.
> I can almost guarantee this is from some endpoint management software your company installed.
Not necessarily. Every little or not so little utility deems it necessary to install a context menu item on Windows. Corporate or not. Just like every little or not so little utility deems it necessary to send you notifications on mobile.
On Windows the solution is Total Commander, on mobile the solution is to turn all notifications off :)
The Windows 11-way is to just plaster another, worse, context menu over the working existing one. Now every right click was actually two clicks. You can disable it, but what the hell...
How about a right click on the desktop? I have a very fast computer with no bloatware on, yet it takes half a second for the desktop context menu to appear. When I do this repeatedly. The first time takes 1 second or more.
Compare with a right click menu in a browser which is instant.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop > MenuShowDelay set to 100 (ms) close regedit, reboot.
Corporate, “security software” is almost always to blame for Windows being slow on new machines. There is no reason for Windows 11 to be that slow. On my personal machine Windows runs great. My last Windows work laptop was, despite being brand new, unusable. 100 % CPU and memory usage with not a single application open was the norm.
The endpoint stuff kills laptop performance. I left my previous job and they let me keep my X1 Nano (1st gen; 16GB memory) which was performing abysmally towards the end.
Deleted all the partitions and did a 100% clean install (multi boot Win11/Fedora), and it's suddenly what feels like 2-4x as fast. Made sure to disable some of the Copilot and Internet content in search menu rubbish etc with a few registry tweaks (yay for having admin access to get rid of the bloat/junk).
Fedora/Wayland/Plasma still feels faster though - I just had some issues getting my video to work properly across all of Teams and Zoom.
Back in the times of Windows 95 and Windows XP, reinstalling the OS at least once per year made Windows noticeably faster. Then it degraded month by month. And yet I still remember how incredibly faster the same laptop was with Ubuntu 8.04. Faster than a newly installed Windows.
>> Context menus take a noticeable amount of time to appear.
>I can almost guarantee this is from some endpoint management software your company installed.
It seems to be a common complaint online, dating back to the launch of 11. I see some of the blame being put on extensions but what changed in the extensions between 10 and 11 to cause this?
I know on my work computer I was experiencing this plus I almost always have to click show more and wait for that lag to finish.
I was able to edit the registry to show all at the cost of 1 lag...so I guess a step forward?
I have similar suspicions. I have a decent but not spectacular company Thinkpad. When I first got it, it was super-fast; it didn’t matter that sleep very quickly turned into an automatic shutdown, as it booted in mere seconds.
Gradually, over the past 9 or so months, it’s just become progressively worse and worse in a range of ways. It might be Windows updates, but the magnitude makes me suspect it’s layer upon layer of corporate management and security nonsense.
Could also be a temperature throttling problem caused by dust or a stuck fan. My old work Laptop suffered from that, and recovered after I cleaned it.
Are you sure it's the corporate tracker? Maybe it's the copilot tracker, or maybe the Recall video recording? Maybe it's the Windows anti-virus, or even the corporate anti-virus. What about the Advertisement stuff and the web search?
It's hard to tell what makes a non-stock Windows install slow.
> I can almost guarantee this is from some endpoint management software your company installed.
I had the same issue with a loan machine from a client, super responsive onsite, but once I connected through a VPN from an external network, all the basic functionality in the file manager was brought to a halt. Even something as simple as right click on a folder to show a context menu would take several seconds.
The files were all local (also with Onedrive sync disabled) so I am almost positive it was whatever they were using for endpoint protection (Can't recall 100% but probably something from CrowdStrike).
Often the software itself is fine but it makes it possible for the IT department to configure performance killing behaviours. SHA hash every file you open, execute specific actions if the a opened file or process matches specific heuristics, log everything.
I guessed the same thing. Probably the fault of employer-mandated software gumming things up. But since the only reason to run Windows is because my employer mandates it, almost all of my Windows experiences involve enterprise-managed lag in the extreme.
It may not exactly be Microsoft's fault, but it piles nicely onto a pre-disposition against them and all pro-MS IT departments who can't seem to tie their own shoelaces. It takes a maturity that is sometimes lacking in moments of frustration not to blame all the world's problems on MS.
on my corporate laptop as well as my own private surface laptop as well as my gaming rig does file explorer lag doing pretty much anything and the context menu can sometimes take like 10 seconds to open. this is a pretty wide spread issue you can see people mention this everywhere
> Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all.
There's a guy that has written their own version of explorer that's so fast in comparison to the built-in, that you'd think they were cheating somehow because of everyone's experience with explorer.
And someone has written an IDE for C++ that opens while Visual Studio is on its splash screen.
And another that has written a debugger with the same performance.
And a video doing the rounds of Word ('97?) on spinning rust opening in just under 2 seconds.
Basically, everything MS is doing is degrading performance. Opportunities for regular devs to go back to performant software, and MS is unlikely to fix theirs in the foreseeable future.
> version of explorer that's so fast
I've tried this a few times. Windows 10. Downloaded the 2MB file, double-clicked on it, and nothing happens. Same thing when I tried it a few months again. Put it in a command prompt and no output of an error.
I'm starting to worry I just launched something malicious.
I found chrome was putting itself into "eco mode" on my Lenovo (work) laptop all of a sudden. Meant that waking up took FOREVER, and accessing a web page (required as part of a daily login) took 15+ seconds to load when first logging in, as opposed to a few seconds, which caused our password app to timeout at times, etc. Who the heck comes up with these ideas? "Eco mode" by default? And no way to disable it easily? I had to add an obscure switch to the chrome startup to make it run normally again.
On newer laptops, and I’ve seen this specifically on thinkpads) if the power supply you are using is not the correct wattage, the system will throttle down significantly. I started noticing this by looking at windows task manager and noticing the CPU would not scale above 0.8 GHz. Not sure if Chrome responds in the same way, but it’s worth looking into. Fix was easy, just get a proper wattage power supply (i went with oem)
A similar example: Microsoft's Windows Search function is so pathetic and slow, yet there's another little company who gives a blazing fast file search tool, that's available as (portable) freeware since 15+ years.
Everything Search: https://www.voidtools.com/
Everything Search uses the NTFS indexes to do blazing fast file or folder searches. It has a neat and clean interface, and no nagging ads (unlike.. cough, cough.. Windows 11). Everything Search is one of the first tools I install on any new Windows PC.
Amazing, perfect app! I use it frequently, and I love the response I get from customers or friends whom I turn onto it (or install it for). I also encourage others to donate to this developer. The sad thing is casual users would not even think of donating as they assume this type of feature should be (properly) built into the OS; so I’ve made sure to donate on behalf of users I’ve turned on to Everything. Great app!
I was overjoyed when I saw that Microsoft had bought out the small Winternals team (Winternals Software LP, founded by Cogswell and Russinovich, who exposed the 2005 Sony BMG CD copy-protection DRM) that gave awesome freeware "power tools" to tweak and monitor MS-Windows. Microsoft renamed it as SysInternals, and Microsoft has since maintained it well and still kept it all free.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/
Fun trivia: Mark Russinovich went on to greater heights, and he's CTO of Microsoft Azure.
I wish Microsoft would do the same for another amazing freeware "power tools" suite: Nirsoft Utilities. https://www.nirsoft.net/
I really don't know how Voidtools has survived all these years, by giving away their primary product (Everything Search) for free.
Everything Search is free, powerful and fast, and thankfully, unlike some other famous tools (CCleaner), it is not adware, spyware or malware. The only caveat, is that Everything Search's background indexing of drives requires administrative access, but user can run it without admin access, it's just that it would need to manually reindex (to add latest files/folders to its index database) on every run then.
https://www.voidtools.com/faq/
For years, I have wished that Microsoft would acquire Voidtools (give them a good chunk of money for all the years of service they gave to the world in the form of this awesome freeware Everything Search), and integrated it into Microsoft Windows Search (to make it a rival to MacOS's Spotlight search) to make it blazing fast and finally useful.
(Remember, Microsoft acquired Skype and integrated its capabilities into MS Teams, which is available free for personal use, with some limitations (60mins session limit, 100 participants).)
It was VERY common in the spinning rust era to already open (office, etc) applications in the background. I think the launch operation only allocated window resources and finished the job; all the hit the disk work was already precached in memory while the OS was doing the slow computer starting up / logging into the network steps and the user was off getting a coffee or something.
Same experience here, but I'm not sure it's just MS fault; companies have a way of installing a bunch of stupid software on top of one another, that you can't get rid of without admin rights, that continuously do things that slow the system down.
(And, you can have a tabbed file browser on Win7. I still have a Win7 box at home that works perfectly well and that does have tabs in file explorer. I think it was an addon I installed a while ago; don't remember exactly, but it works perfectly.)
It seems industry-wide these days.
What I’ve seen as an older-than-average developer is that the Agile movement has made it increasingly difficult to make time for paying attention to some of the more subtle aspects of user experience such as performance. Because I can’t predict how much work it will be accurately enough to assign story points to the task, and that means that this kind of work frequently results in a black spot on our team performance metrics.
CD makes it even harder because this kind of work really does need some time to bake. Fast iterations don’t leave much time to verify that performance-oriented changes have the intended effect and no adverse side effects prior to release.
That’s not agile’s fault. That’s the orgs fault.
We used to have a few days set aside regularly to fix things that would never get prioritised.
I think this is another of those spots where the difference between agile with a little an and Agile with a big À comes to the forefront.
Little a agile is about pushing back against dysfunctional business dynamics for the sake of humanistic goals like employees’ mental health and doing right by customers.
Big À Agile co-opts that, and is more about squeezing as much money out of everyone as possible while wearing the trappings of agile values to make it seem more palatable.
Microsoft is progressively making everything an instance of Chrome. They've seemingly altogether given up the notion of native platform rendering. The win32 api for native ui elements hasn't been touched in two decades. There have been a few failed attempts to move on from it like Siverlight, WinForms, UWP, LightSwitch, etc, but they never bothered to revisit their native UI library. So now everything is a Chrome instance.
Similar story here.
Started a new job about a year and a half ago and got a powerful laptop with a really top of the line CPU and GPU, 64 GB of RAM (Now upgraded to 96GB, needed for my work, even with these specs compile times are longer than I'd like...), and it was a terrible experience, coming from someone who's used to Linux having used it for a bit (started in 2013 with Ubuntu with a dual boot. Moved all-in to Arch in 2016, distro-hopped or played with different desktop enviroments/wms after that (Recently switched to niri), but all of which are leagues ahead of Windows 11 IMO. Only occasionally ran Windows on a spare device or a VM on the rare occasion I needed to, eg for work / school.)
Tons of issues, slow in some operations, weird bugs (in the explorer like you, or with my Bluetooth headphones, or other issues), and even occasional blue screens! It's not just my setup too, my coworkers have similar issues. Plus, it just isn't a nice environment to use.
At first, I tried to set up a nicer environment (as much as IT would allow). I installed PowerToys for QOL improvements, GlazeWM to emulate a tiling window manager setup, I tried debloating as much as I can, I installed Wezterm for my terminal (Why is Windows Terminal so hyped up? It seems like an extremely basic terminal emulator to me...), oh-my-posh theming for my shell, and several other things.
But every convenience program I added just noticeably slowed down my laptop, to the point I just gave up some of the niceties and lived with it. Why is such basic functionality able to be run so smoothly on a much weaker device on Linux, but struggle on Windows on a much more powerful device? I can only think of one reason...
More a reply to few fellow comments: I have few Win 11 hosts that I use. No management software other than just antivirus. 90% of them are super slow, on every hardware. The latest super-feature on one of them is empty Task Manager. It just doesn’t display a single process. Of course Process Explorer works, open faster and show all data without thinking how to display table with 500 rows for dozens of seconds.
I don't know, my personal windows install which I use for photoshop, lightroom, and the occasional game also has similar issues, and it only has the included windows defender. I've noticed on many computers that whenever there are a bunch of files in a directory, the explorer grinds to a halt.
At work we use clownstrike for our driving-around-with-the-handbrake-on needs, which I have installed on both Linux and Windows, and the former flies while the latter lags all the time (I dual boot, so it's the same exact hardware). Doing something which is fully equivalent, like installing an IntelliJ update takes around a minute on Linux and many more on Windows.
The fan also comes on much more often on Windows than Linux, even though most of my job is done on remote servers via SSH. Under Linux I only hear the fan when I compile something. This morning I booted windows and the fan was running constantly while I was just catching up with a few mails in outlook.
On my company provided laptop with Windows 11 (previously Windows 10), the top three CPU usage was and is usually from Antimalware Executable, Microsoft Defender and MS Teams (or Crowdstrike). I don’t download files or get files from other sources often, yet these things keep doing busywork and slowing things down. Despite virus and threat protection running quick scans often and forcing a full disk scan every couple of weeks or so.
It’s almost as if these programs are people who ought to show that they’re doing something even though they’re just heating the room and running the fan.
My wife recently got a new laptop. She mostly just uses office and the browser so I gave her some specs to look for SSD, 16GB ram, Lenovo should be good (fatal mistake I didn't specify the CPU). She went out and bought a cheap Lenovo laptop with a Celeron dual core and 16GB ram, SSD. It can barely run windows 11. Everything slows to a crawl, she can't be on a video call, and have a google doc open at the same time. It's insane and frankly should be criminal to sell such a poorly performing piece of hardware.
It's so bad that she actually switches to her old laptop from 10 years ago (still on windows 10, also a dual core) for video calls, and it performs way better.
The engineers working on Windows should be embarrassed. I may just try to load ChromeOS on it. Would be nice to get Windows out of my house for good.
> a cheap Lenovo laptop with a Celeron dual core
Yeah, those things are born e-waste. I'm surprised Intel even bothers. Even on Linux they would varely play an HD Youtube video if it weren't for the hardware acceleration. A dual core from several years ago, assuming it's a proper i5 or i7, will do a lot better.
Windows 11 doesn't make things any better.
> Even on Linux they would varely play an HD Youtube video if it weren't for the hardware acceleration.
Video decoding has always been a brutal workload, but that isn't Microsoft's fault. I had to replace my Thinkpad X220 with an X270 for no reason at all except h.265. It's a ULV i5 too, so the perf is almost identical to the old laptop's... until you watch video on it.
h.265 can get annoyingly heavy, but the better compression isn't coming from nowhere. But for less powerful machines, H.264 works just fine and works back far enough that even I got surprised. Even LGA 775 machines will do that just fine, and h.264 is more or less a constant lowest common denominator.
If it can't play a blu-ray off CPU, then it's either so old that DVDs were the media du jour, or it was never meant to be in a general-purpose computer. They'll do e-mail and Office in a pinch, and they'll play video within their limits, but venture outside for anything else, and it all comes crashing down.
Me and my fiancé both bought Lenovo laptops with 16GB RAM and 5000-series Ryzen, 500 GB SSD. They were on sale, and the price seemed nice.
Some of the Windows 11 features are laughably, hilariously slow. If I enter anything in the taskbar search, it will take a solid 6-7 seconds for the app to appear in the result. The result window will just be blank. If I press enter after having typed in, the app will start - but still, it is so, so laggy.
And some weird flicker when running certain applications. It was like that out of the box, and I feared I had gotten a defective screen - nope, only certain apps.
> I may just try to load ChromeOS on it.
If you wife would be OK with ChromeOS, basically all she needs is a browser. I just installed Linux on the computer my wife is using. For a while she was on Ubuntu and then once she got used to it, I replaced Ubuntu with Debian (because I use Debian everywhere: NUCs, laptop, dekstops, servers, hypervisor (Proxmox, which is debian), etc.). It's easier for me to just slap Debian everywhere but YMMV.
People have no idea the amount of people who nowadays only need a browser (and working sound/microphone: but that nowadays Just Works [TM] on Linux).
It's never been easier to switch people to Linux than it is today.
I have the same specs in my work machine.
Task manager takes 10 seconds to load the list of processes. Right-click on the desktop takes about 1.5-2 seconds to show the 'new' context menu. Start menu is actually fast to start drawing but has a stupid animation that takes about half a second to fully load.
I sort of understand how the anti-consumer 'features' (ads) get added to a piece of software. But I have no idea how they manage to continuously degrade the experience of existing parts of the system for seemingly no one's benefit.
> If my computer goes to sleep, WSL becomes unresponsive. I have to save all my stuff and reboot to continue working.
Try wsl --shutdown. Works for me when WSL hangs for no apparent reason.
I've also noticed that, in my case, these hangs are somehow tied to Docker for Windows. Couldn't figure what triggers them so far, though. I just restart DFW and kill WSL when that happens.
I vibe-coded my own apple system-6 style shell in rust and use that. If I don't like a feature, I change it. It is lightning quick, in it's (emulated) 1-bit glory. There's no requirement for you to use the built-in explore.exe to launch things, even for games. The graphics are decoupled from the shell so I use it for windows and linux.
If vibe coding your personal GUI utopia is too much, you can use something like Cairo - https://cairoshell.com/
I'd recommend Chris Titus' winutil to remove most of the crap. I use the recommended settings and also remove copilot and onedrive. Then from there you can open O&O Shutup10 and disable a few more "features".
It's just a band-aid not a solution, and you'll have to run it again after Windows updates and helpfully undoes your settings, but at least makes it usable.
> Half the time I can smack Esc and Snipping Tool will go away. The other half of the time, I have to mouse over and click the X to close it. There is no pattern to when Esc does/doesn't work.
What I have noticed is to let it load the snipping UI first and start listening for your keystrokes. If you hit escape really quickly, right after you accidentally hit print screen, it will not go away and require you to manually mouse over and hit the X. But if you wait for a second and then hit escape, it almost always registers my keystroke. It's almost like hitting escape really quickly just quits the keyboard listener instead of the actual snipping tool.
I noticed significant slowdown on my home computer, so I did some optimization - namely turning off some services.
AI related things, one drive (this could be one of the reasons file browser is slow), widgets on the screen like news and weather, some other optional/not needed things.
They added a lot of not needed crap to File Manager. I think it's almost better to install a third party one.
This is why I don't get so many of the "windows is fine" arguments here. It's always "Windows is fine if you run LTSC and dick around with the registry and disable these 37 specific services." If I'm going to have to futz with it constantly, why would I pay money for the privilege?
I'm definitely not defending Windows but when I ran Windows 10 Pro for 11 years straight, I had no problem with performance.
We're talking a 4 core i5-4460, with 16 GB of memory and an SSD running WSL 2, Docker Desktop, real work loads, video editing, etc..
It was very performant and never got in my way. I'd leave the computer on 24 / 7 and only the monitors turned off. It only got rebooted for forced Windows patches.
With that said, my hardware can't run 11 and even if I did patch around that, I'm choosing not to run 11 so Windows for me was over near the end of 2025.
I'm running Arch now on the same box and except for GPU memory leaks, it's quite snappy. CPU intensive tasks finish faster and disk I/O feels even faster than Windows. There's also unlimited flexibility to tweak things however I see fit. Gaming performance is substantially worse for the few games I play. No regrets, except for gaming.
If you had 16 GB of RAM, yeah Windows 10 was mostly fine. The laptop I had in high school was rocking 4 GB and a first-gen i5. Windows 7 was rock solid on that machine, but 10 brought it to its knees. Sandy Bridge fared much, much better, to be fair, but the jump from "4GB is enough" to "8GB is pushing your luck" was not pleasant, as I recall it.
Oh yeah, 4 GB would be really rough on Windows 10.
The machine I had before this one had 2 GB of RAM and I ran Windows 7 on it. It had a Core 2 Duo E6420 CPU and GeForce 9800 GTX+. I remember things being mostly ok for playing a bunch of games back then but struggled when I tried to run VMs which makes sense given 2 GB of RAM.
It was that machine that taught me not to skimp on RAM. The last few years of that machine's life started to get pressured pretty hard with memory requirements and having 4 GB would have solved all of those problems. That's why when I built this machine I went with 16 GB, back in 2014 still running Windows 7.
Windows does allow you to enter Chinese characters when you say your language is Chinese.
I have moved to Bazzite at home but it is ridiculous that you can't just use your language right away. A normal person would just bail out.
If you choose Chinese, all of the content is localized but you have to enable an input method and that doesn't even actually allow you to input Chinese characters!
It shows you a scrolling(!) pop-up that tells you you have to enable a different option in order to type in the language that you chose at the very beginning. Hope you didn't choose the wrong one out of ibus, fcitx and fcitx(wayland experimental) – whatever happened to scim, and xim, I miss editing environment variables.
Even the cheapest Android gadget can do this out of the box.
Your work laptop might have an excessive amount of "security" software installed that causes it to lag far more than it would normally without such bloated software installed that runs in the background and slows down practically every process you do with the machine.
Had similar issu. Windows 11 installed two gpu driver that run parallel. Cpu etc was on low but everything was lacking. did go to safe mode and deinstalled drivers and reinstalled them. Windows installed them again even with me doing everything it didnt... whatever now i have mac and it sucks also but doesnt lag that hard.
maybe it helps
> what does Windows 11 even do that KDE Plasma 5 wasn't doing a decade ago? How did it take this long to get a tabbed file browser?
Management features like application based firewall. Dedicated views in explorer tailored for common file types, automatic view type based on content, plus tile view. Proper title bar customisation. Contextual Ribbon toolbars and to be honest, good menus in general. Have a professional UI designer try KDE and I'm pretty sure they'll have a migraine. Also Win32 in general, Wayland still has a loooong way ahead of it.
A lot of these accounts seem anecdotal. I have a clean copy of win 11 iot ltsc running on my laptop and it runs well. The desktop management, included hyper V, wsl2 and awesome RDP make it a great platform to get work done. Most problems people encounter with Windows have to do with driver maturity. And in the case of a mega corp managed machine its all the “security” bs the put on there that slows you down to a crawl.Once you get stable drivers; I find Windows 11,with wsl as my shell, to be quite nice.
Well yes, it is anecdotal. After all, it's my personal experience, which is, by definition, an anecdote. At what point did I suggest the exact types of bullshit Win11 exposes me to are exactly the same as everyone else experiences?
Had the same issue with slow file explorer in Windows 10. A couple of things helped a bit, such as disabling "Show recently used files" and "Show frequently used folders". I also cleaned up the Quick access list. For some reason if you have a network share there it makes browsing local dirs slower, go figure. It's still not instant but a lot faster than the 3+ second delay.
I tried OneCommander and they're super fast, so it's not something slowing down disk IO, it's purely File Explorer.
Now I'm still struggling with closing chrome tabs being super slow sometimes.
Please try https://filepilot.tech/ Its like explorer but so much faster in every single way. I have it pinned on the taskbar, it launches quickly than a new explorer window.
Main one is no-multiline support atm. Which means that the icon view does not show full file name, list view etc are perfectly fine though.
Current problems I have with it are no native zip support, which means you must use 7-zip, winrar etc and set them as a defualt viewer for zips. Otherwise, double clicking zip opens the explorer.exe.
About hitting the print screen button by accident. I have the same issue and like you I can sometimes get out of it by hitting ESC. I think this sometimes fails because the snipping app isn't in focus (even though it's covering the entire screen).
The trick I found to get out of it is to hit ALT+TAB. It ironically puts another app into focus and when that happens, the snipping tool exits. Snipping tool is pretty great though. I wish macOS had the same.
It's very minor but, with the Snipping Tool, the screenshot automatically ends up in the clipboard after dragging the box. As far as I know with macos I have to open the preview and copy it from there. There may be an option in macos to get the same behavior but I don't know about it.
My work laptop does the same thing. Pretty maxed out for a Dell but still can be slow, especially right click context menu. Someone else said it could be endpoint software (executable scanning?) which makes sense. things improved a bit after a I turned off the eye candy under appearance settings other than font rendering and shadowing. Might be worth a try.
I swear windows is just full of sleeps and it doesn't matter how faster your system is.
It's more likely network calls that are taking a long time or timing out. A lot of developers insert function calls that under the hood hit HTTP servers, and it can take a few hundred milliseconds to stand up a new TLS connection and then however long it takes to send the request and get the response. It's also probable that the endpoints form an accidental microservice architecture in which case everyone is always hitting a different set of connections. This creates a perfect storm of having to reconnect to everything you hit occasionally which can create little slowdowns all over the place all without actually using CPU so it doesn't show up in any resource monitors.
HTTPS calls should be treated as calls to sleep() with undefined timings.
> Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all.
I've got bad news for you. Nautilus also lags when opening some directories.
Maybe investigate the background apps that are running on your laptop?
By the way, I just opened a directory that I hadn't accessed in months. It contains 10945 log files, and Windows Explorer displayed them instantly.
Explorer file browser is just disaster. I am forced to use third-party browsing app when the directory contains hundreds of media.
It has happened since win7 or older but still not fixed.
> If Windows 11 struggles this badly on a brand new laptop that I'm certain would retail for $4000+, I can only imagine how miserable it is for everyone else.
I purchased a Surface Pro at one point, with the intention of using it for sketches and using Windows on it, thinking it'll be better because the hardware and OS is from the same organization. Nope! Slow out of the box, horrible thermal management and software bugs galore. Installed Arch with Gnome on it, ran better in most aspects. However, pen usage and touchscreen even after I tried my best to adjust it was worse than Windows, I guess they won there.
I didn't use to hate Windows, because at least it wasn't utterly broken, just stupid, but they're really in a deep decline lately. Maybe it's time for one of those "stop the press" type of moments where they have to stop, take a serious look and fix what they have as it currently feels impossible to use reliably.
Your experience is very far away from mine. I don't experience any of these issues on a standard 32gb office laptop, or my home gaming machine.
I have dual boot on decent laptop, doing nothing, on windows fan is always on, computing something? On Linux it is just silent
Honestly - I think it must be a laptop thing. I have a similar spec laptop [0] for work, and it's... borderline unusable. I can ignore the upsells, always online, etc but the OS is just fundamentally falling apart more and more every other release. If I unplug the power cable, it throttles itself to the point of being neutered, and if I try to put it to sleep it _very regularly_ will just stay awake and drain its own battery.
My work desktop on the other hand (i9, 64GB ram, 4080 GPU) is absolutely screaming and I have some of the same problems but they're nowhere near as bad.
I don't think I could genuinely buy another windows laptop.
[0] https://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/laptops-2-in-1-pcs/dell-xps-...
> if I try to put it to sleep it _very regularly_ will just stay awake and drain its own battery
Sadly Linux isn't any better on this front because it's a hardware issue. Laptop vendors have gotten terrible at managing sleep states. S0 sleep is a joke. I changed my laptop to hibernate on lid close after the second time it nearly cooked itself in my bag.
> when opening directories with more than 100-ish files
99 files should be enough for everyone.
Possible but more likely it's an issue with focus, like the user's palm on those occasions coincidentally brushes the trackpad.
To be clear, I have no doubt Windows 11 is just as awful as GP makes it out to be. I'm luckily free to choose my OS and at this point wouldn't touch Windows with a 10' pole.
If it's Intel then it might not be fully down to Windows 11. The PC laptops are universally crap. I had a few latest ones, Ultra 9 and they are atrocious. Experience reminds me using a netbook in early 2010s.
I would refuse to work anywhere without a Mac. If x86 then it would have to be linux, as that would be passable (apart from fan noise).
I am also subjected to Windows at work and I hate it. WSL is an okay experience until it just crashes and stops working.
The only reason I was forced on Windows was because they couldn't find an edge management system for Linux
Corporate probably loaded up the laptop with work monitoring software, and some terrible AV software. Among other bloatware. A PC of your spec should run without noticeable delay, something else is going on there.
Having said that, Windows has made a lot of the basic functionality way to resource heavy.
Another common issue on corporate-issued workstation laptops is that they don’t install the proper GPU drivers. The basic ones that ship with the OS are awful, but work just well enough that people don’t notice that they’re missing something important.
KDE is bloated garbage too! Half of the OS didn't work. The only DE's that I haven't had poor experiences with are xfce, bspwm, i3/i3gaps, and xmonad. Note how 3 of these are tiling WMs.
I just started a new job where I'm subjected to Windows 11. They gave me a behemoth of a laptop. 64GB of RAM, absolute screamer of a CPU, big GPU, the whole deal.
Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all.
Context menus take a noticeable amount of time to appear.
I'm getting used to a new keyboard, so I keep hitting Print Screen by accident. Half the time I can smack Esc and Snipping Tool will go away. The other half of the time, I have to mouse over and click the X to close it. There is no pattern to when Esc does/doesn't work.
If my computer goes to sleep, WSL becomes unresponsive. I have to save all my stuff and reboot to continue working.
If Windows 11 struggles this badly on a brand new laptop that I'm certain would retail for $4000+, I can only imagine how miserable it is for everyone else. All my colleagues who have been here for a bit longer got last-generation laptops. oof.
Edit... and besides, what does Windows 11 even do that KDE Plasma 5 wasn't doing a decade ago? How did it take this long to get a tabbed file browser?