Windows 2000 was, with a few beneficial tweaks since. Mostly been downhill though, as it has been industry-wide.

Does Linux have the equivalent of WinNT's i/o completion ports to prevent heavy I/O from freezing the user interface?

It has io and CPU schedulers which solved this issue around 5 years ago.

The asynchronous io API has nothing to do with this.

When I do bluray rips I run it with nice and ionice, works great. Been so long however, can’t remember if still necessary.

What about asynchronous I/O calls? Or using separate threads for I/O vs UI?

>What about asynchronous I/O calls?

random google result: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11866076

>Or using separate threads for I/O vs UI?

not the target use for completion ports, which is handling thousands of outstanding IO requests with a few threads.

You mean an IO scheduler, eventually with a plugable architecture ?

https://lwn.net/Articles/720675/

epoll

My biggest complaints with Windows are the spying on users, the forced updates on users, the registry still existing, and the NTFS file system still being the primary file system.

The kernel is actually likable but would benefit from being open source and the GUI is a horrible blend of touch screen and legacy input hybridness that I wish never existed.

> the registry still existing

You know that GNOME also has a registry, right? https://wiki.gnome.org/action/show/Projects/dconf

Based on multiple config files which makes it easier to manage.

Really? It does not seem so. Yesterday I wanted to filter some chkdsk logs on the Event Viewer [1] and I could not do so because the dropdown does not appear if the display DPI was set in 150%

See the rants at:

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/415943c7-7...

https://www.tenforums.com/windows-updates-activation/111890-...

I'd love to be able to submit this bug on the issue tracker, if you could tell me where to find it.

And we are talking here about an OS and GUI made by the same vendor. Hugely different from the Linux+GUI situation.

[1] which is another example of a awful legacy interface where by default you can only peek at the first 2 unrelated lines of every log mesage (and even worse: without a standardized format)

I disagree, I find both Gnome 2 and 3 vastly superior to Windows UX

Genuinely wondering which Linux distros/desktop environments you've tried. I think Elementary and Gnome 3 Ubuntu are both incredibly well-polished, so much more so than Windows. And all the Windows fans I work with complain that Office 2016 crippled their workflow in some way and hid features.

Windows UX is really polished? Are you on Win7 by any chance?

Windows 10 has a ton of neat shortcuts for pro users that Windows 7 users miss out on (besides all the security and performance improvements). The right-click menu on the Start button alone is life-changing. (It was introduced in Windows 8.) Over the last few years, Windows 10 has seen much overdue updates to Command Prompt, Notepad, etc. The default Calculator app is now pretty awesome even.

Let's see, other Windows 8/10 UI blessings I'd point out is revamped Wi-Fi connection management in the system tray, the quick notification tray access to switching secondary monitors between extend and duplicate modes, easy access to airplane mode, proper official UI for Bluetooth devices and cellular cards. Don't forget having a proper notification tray to begin with, so that fifty dozen system tray icons aren't each presenting their own popup bubbles.

While the start screen and charms bar were definitely missteps in Windows 8, I would cautiously be willing to almost entertain the claim that Windows 8 had a better UI than 7, just due to all the handy shortcuts they added. But 10 definitely brought back some of the strengths of the 7 UI, while keeping all of the improvements that 8 launched.

Right-click on Start has always been a thing.

I strongly suggest you compare the two. It's not even remotely the same thing. On Windows 7, right-click on start offers two options: "Properties" and "Open Windows Explorer". On the current version of Windows 10, it has eighteen options, including handy options to launch PowerShell with or without admin rights, access admin tools like Event Viewer and Device Manager, etc.

Meh, I suppose that's somewhat convenient. Those have been available on the Start Menu however if you clicked a radio button in its preferences and enabled Admin tools. You can also right click the MyComputer and pick manage.

I don't use those so often that I need a dozen shortcuts.

While the UI isn't bad, I'd argue that the UX is absolutely awful out of the box.

- Notifications are non-stop until you turn them off. And, even when you turn everything off, there's system notifications that you can never turn off.

- The start menu is god awful. Why they decided to replace the easy-to-use Windows start menu with this animated abomination is beyond my understanding. Our office puts classic menu on all new pc's because of past complaints.

- The settings are all needlessly verbose. This isn't exactly new to this version of Windows, but they could really take a page out of Apple's book when it comes to changing system settings.

- And, they've went the extra step to make sure you don't change Edge as the default browser. Not exactly user friendly.

True, windows is more polished. However with a dozen of devs and Microsoft's q&a facilities, it would not take more than 2 years for linux to get the same level of polish on the GUI side of things. It has come such a long way in 15 years.

> Windows ux is better out of the box than on any Linux so far, it's really polished.

Windows UX might look more polished, but I find GNOME 3 to be the most usable one. Because I feel completely in control of the entire system with just a keyboard.

> Windows ux is better out of the box than on any Linux so far, it's really polished.

I strongly disagree. See how opinions work?

> and super winrar.

Winrar the compression utility, or is this some meme?