Comment by nickjj

Comment by nickjj 4 days ago

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.

ryukoposting 4 days ago

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.

Reply View 1 reply

nickjj 4 days ago

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.

Reply View | 0 replies