Comment by ryukoposting

>> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

"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!

> 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 :)

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.

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.

>> 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.

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).

Endpoint software is a blight. My company's M2 pro should have flown through the things i subject it to. But simple things like linting on many files is slower than my 8y old pc on a sata-SSD.

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.

Either you haven't been when context menus / explorer was blazingly fast or something odd happens there, since I can confirm that on brand new PC (128GB RAM, 9950X3D, 5090) with vanilla Windows 11 it still lags and annoys a lot after some linux distro.

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

> version of explorer that's so fast

https://filepilot.tech/

The problem is on windows you're competing directly against the guys who own the operating system. So even when there is a gap for a better file manager the one that microsoft makes is so entrenched and microsoft can make sure they always win. It sucks.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If it's DLP then using alternative file browsers should also be affected, right? Which at least in my case it isn't.

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.

> 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.

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.

Restarting the vmcompute service sometimes helps. Doing so completely blue/blackscreened my machine this morning so it just makes me more confident in WSL's low level hooks.

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?

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.

An i3 is a damn near OSHA violation.

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?

I'll be trying this tomorrow, thanks.

What's snipping tool have over macOS's super-shift-5 (or 4 or 3)? I would usually put Greenshot on any Windows box I'm gonna have to use a while, and that seems to pretty much have feature parity with all my slurp+grim Sway keybinds on GNU/Linux.

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.

> 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.

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.

Panther Lake and Lunar Lake are pretty good I'd say. Intel has been improving.

The Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake platforms are finally really good again, comparable to AMD. Fast and power efficient. Before Lunar Lake they were pretty much crap, I agree.

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 has been great for me on Fedora. What problems have you encountered?

KDE is the best. Everything they make is awesome, Im a big fan.

So much so I donate to them monthly.