Not to mention the applications. A slow operating system that uses so much resources merely idling plus Applications-That-Are-Actually-Web-Browsers make day to day usage almost innavigable for someone with quick reflexes used to a Linux CLI.
My few short years with Windows 3.1+ spoiled me for all future versions of windows. Instant closing, instant alt-tabbing, double-clicking the top-left corner icon to close, (nearly) instant opening of simple apps like File Manager and Notepad... not to mention the instant crashes.
Linux got close but still always felt clunky, while future versions of Windows and MacOS just kept abstracting themselves from my tactile sensation farther and farther away...
Sometimes I look at macOS, Windows 10. Apart from some UI facelift I dont even remember a single user feature that was relevant or important in the past 5 years. Apart from latency added cause of feature bloat
The beauty of Gaming is that there are finally some incentives for people to work on the issue.
And a video from Microsoft Research on 1ms Latency
The user "feature" that comes quickest to mind for Windows 10 was the first run of calc.exe showing a popup notification begging for a 5-star rating in the Microsoft Store.
The fucking CALCULATOR. Literally the first and most basic function any computer ever had, which has had NO ui changes in the million software and hardware permutations for 70 years, because it's already perfect. Something has gone unfathomably, fundamentally wrong with how Microsoft works internally.
It used to be that GPU drivers would queue up to ~10 frames just to get slightly higher FPS in benchmarks (while adding basically a quarter of a second input lag)... naturally, this is an extremely bad trade-off for gaming, but made them look a few percent (at most) better on paper.
3.1 was before my time, but I can imagine.
Aaaanyway: Give me a "chrooted/jailed" environment where I have all my "dumb", "no internet" connection apps (Jails are 2000 technology, chroot is older), and be done with it, so that if anyone hacks my machine or if I quadruple-click on that virus it is only going to affect the chroot environment and doesn't see anything else.
Truth is, a lot of contemporary commercial OS sluggishness comes from ""features"" that are either some kind of telemetry, or just "security" preventing me (the user) from doing things the the company does not want me to do (like the asinine OSX "feature" of disabling write access to certain parts of MY hard disk by default)
This is faster than W10 on bare metal with SSD and the same physical amount of RAM.
Can one still benchmark Windows? Most proprietary software requires explicit authorization from the seller nowadays. (I'm quite certain those clauses are illegal here, it's not because of it that I didn't benchmark, but I expect to find none on the web because of it.)
Yes, you can still find Windows benchmarks, they're all over the web in fact. The Phoronix test suite supports Windows for example, and Phoronix have a whole series comparing performance between Windows and various Linux distributions: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=search&q=Windows%20vs.
They've also tested NTFS vs. other file systems before, although this was using the Linux NTFS driver: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-4....
More recently they did at least one I/O bound test with Windows vs Linux, a SQLite insertion test: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=windows-... Linux + EXT4 crushed Windows + NTFS, but obviously I'd like to see a more well-rounded test. And of course none of these cover the question of whether Windows performance would improve running in a Linux VM.
Well, of course not. It's completely absurd that Windows runs better in a VM. When I tried it, I expected my work "computer" at home to be impossible to use, so I would go and fetch some hardware at work. I was very surprised that it actually performed better than the work hardware (on anything that isn't CPU bound). (And yeah, as much as Windows lags behind on those benchmarks, it's not nearly enough to explain what I've seen.)
There is some other comment hinting at the VM ignoring some fsync barrier. I've seen the VM caching a lot of disk IO, but there is probably some very stupid application level choice involved there too. But on Windows, it doesn't have to be fsync, as there is locking too to ruin your day.
Anyway, if you do that, you better keep those ~3GB free. If you don't have enough cache things break down really fast.
1 - It is for cortana, file indexing, telemetry, and etc. If you take the time to disable them, your computer will get much faster... for about a week, until it updates again.
And, you know, organizational failure to have this issue lingering.
Back in 2020, after one update, windows 10 was taking about 5min to boot on a thinkpad, if not more. Had to install a SSD, changed everything.
Pretty curious to hear what kernel developer or filesystem developers have to say about this, because it doesn't really make sense to me.
I can understand why something would stop working, but not to just become slow. In what world does a system change result in worse performance in certain cases?
Maybe deep inside, w10 stopped using any optimization that allowed it to be fast on HDD, considering SSD should be the norm, but I fail to understand if this is choice that implies a difficult compromise, or if it's just laziness and negligence.
Any linux dev could chime in?
Whatever they're doing is probably fine, for very liberal values of "fine" (i.e. it's not actually fine and is probably harming system-wide performance and UX in more subtle ways, even on SSDs) for SSD-equipped systems, but made it practically unusable on an HDD.
It's really odd, because the first couple releases of Windows 10 were fast enough on HDDs, but post 1703 is when I started to really notice it.
> We know when the underlying storage is solid state - there's a "non-rotational" field in the block device config that tells us the storage doesn't need physical seek optimisation. We should make use of that.
In other words, the changes under consideration should only apply when they know they're using solid state storage. Is there information elsewhere which contradicts that?
Indeed, it seems very surprising that XFS might consider removing optimizations for slower drives. It's a very popular file system in the enterprise, and anyone still storing large amounts of data is very likely to still be using rotational drives because of the massive cost difference.
Are these Windows-specific modifications, or tuning Firefox settings that might be beneficial on other platforms? (I'm not saying that I'm looking at the insane UI changes for the upcoming Safari release on the Mac and investigating other options, but I'm not not saying that.)
You and everyone else. I'm just taking a wait-and-see approach, on the off chance the new tab categorization stuff makes the new design usable. Otherwise, I'll have to trade a couple hours of battery life and some overall system performance and switch to... something else. Probably FF or a light alternative Webkit browser. Hell, there's hardly a task I do that doesn't put me at at least 10 open tabs, which is already too many for the new design, then if someone comes along and says "hey can you take a look at X real quick", well, now I might be at or over 20 (I find multi-window browsing horribly obtuse unless I have 3+ monitors). And you know what? I'm not always great about closing all my tabs the second I finish a task, and I don't really want to have to do that.
We'll see how it works, but I'm not optimistic. It looks batshit crazy. I can imagine something involving a highly-capable quick-search-to-find-tab system making it better than what we have now, or at least not-worse, but dunno whether they'll be including anything like that.
I don't want to save tabs, I just need them to be separated in arbitrary and temporary visual groups. Makes management so much easier when i can just switch to another group and hide the 25 tabs i had open while researching a problem.
I can't even think to work without this thing.
EDIT: "increase" in the sense of "make better". Whoops.
They upgraded all the developer grade laptops with 32GB of RAM and SSD's. Still take a good 5-8 mins to boot, but compared to where they were? Light years better!
It seems so odd to me to install programs that still need an internet connection anyway to work.
Most of my users, some even over 70 with little computer experience, are doing fine on Linux, but I "converted" them before they had to experience that awful mess, so it has been relatively easy: from XP or Win7 to a customized XFCE (its defaults are ugly and unpractical) has been a breeze.
Correction: Its defaults are ugly and unpractical on Debian. It looks a lot nicer on Manjaro for example.
There's a program that I can't recall the name of that can trace registry queries in the program it's attached to. You can attach to basically any process in Windows and see a monstrous number of registry queries.
The program you're thinking of is procmon which is a part of the Sysinternals suite of tools.
I know a lot of cheap machines have 5400rpm hard drives, I wonder if 7200rpm+ drives will offer a better experience. Also what role RAM plays in user experience.
SMR is also only used in fairly high capacity drives. A 1/2/4 TB drive wouldn't be SMR.
I thought so too, until I bought a 2TB and discovered it's SMR. It turns out there are quite a few 4TB SMRs, and also 2TB and even 1TB SMRs. e.g.
https://www.truenas.com/community/resources/list-of-known-sm...
insanely fast NVMe M2 disks are cheap, let alone normal SSDs.
Besides, if everyone bought faster storage, would that get people to write more efficient software?
The "choice" I made was back in 2009 when I installed 7 to an HDD, which seems like a reasonable choice.
My go-to for a low level copy between two different drives is Clonezilla.
GParted is also another live OS with good tools to manage partitions.
I uninstalled the nvidia drivers then installed the ATI ones and it seems to work fine. No activation complaints.
It's actually been very easy to keep this thing running. Pretty much just plug in new parts when old ones fail. I think my spinning rust HDD is about to die though so I should take the suggestions in this thread and go through the process of moving the OS to the SSD.
At some point in the distant past I might have replaced a Core 2 Duo for a Core 2 Quad. Or I may have built it this way, not sure.
Then deinstall all your cpu's (if the number of cores changed), thats no joke...deinstall your cpu's (all of them), then reboot.
Update all the drivers...that's it.
That machine, with dual e5405’s is still in service for gaming at my kid’s place.
Physical install media for 10 is a matter of downloading an .exe and selecting the option for making a thumb drive as the installation disk and then booting from it.
It’s relatively straight forward but there are a few moving parts for sure. Typically f12 to select boot device.
2009 was a long time ago in tech terms.
The same was true for the old Precision workstation a couple of years ago when I gave it to my kid.
And several other machines including a Win7 Thinkpad off eBay.
My advice is download the installation tool and give it a try.
Backup first as needed of course.
Think of all the complaints Microsoft avoids by keeping Windows 10 available without a bunch of time, money, and rigmarole.
Run old technology with old software. It is ridiculous that consumer hardware is still being sold with crappy 5400 RPM disks in 2021. No, I have no interest in optimising my software for speeds that are 1/10th of my broadband.
Unless we're talking archival or huge storage necessities, stop complaining about modern OS or games running slow on a technology that hasn't realistically been updated in 20 years.
Do you expect Windows 10 to run on a Pentium II with 512MB RAM as well, because some version of Linux does?
Modern software usually doesn't run at incredible speeds on an nvme drive with top of the line hardware. Modern software is often just slow. What can I do on a modern operating system today that I couldn't do on a predecessor released 20 years ago? What justifies that Windows 10 feels slower to use then Windows XP while Windows 10 runs on hardware that is tens of thousands of times faster?
Under this lens, what really defines modern software is slowness. Take away the advantage of orders of magnitude of hardware improvements and you would be left with something unusably slow.
Nowadays I have a NAS that stores both the raw media and installation scripts for those games, and I have wine/dosbox/mame/mess startup scripts for many of them. Can't say that my inner child is disappointed about that, but building and curating that system took a lot more effort than I'd like to admit.
I don't buy games that require online activation, because I can't store and play them the same way. My inner child is very disappointed about that.
None of the figures shown in the article have any relevance if one has a slight knowledge of their operating system and are not running on decades old technology.
Even your example of 2 whole seconds seems wayyy too slow to me. I don't even tolerate that sort of delay when working on my 10+ year old commodity hardware --- I've already tweaked my tools to be totally instantaneous so I can continue typing as soon as I release the short-cut key.
Even if you don't go so far back as to require swapping disks, dist-upgrading a desktop Ubuntu or Debian system still took several hours ~10 years ago. Booting the system (again Linux, because that's what I had) took at least a minute, probably more. My laptop that's not bleeding edge by any standard is not booting instantly to the desktop, but it's definitely faster than that.
It is in some sense eye-opening to think that pure desktop latency might not have improved over the years. It makes you wonder if things could be much faster still, and being limited to old enough hardware might also change one's perspective. But to me, having a reasonably snappy desktop experience on a laptop from ~7 years ago without having to resort to lightweight desktop environments or older software is something that would have been outlandish for most of the history of PCs.
What the heck does it matter if 5400 RPM disks are old technology or not?? Do you have any actual reason that your program runs slowly on such hardware?
It's very arrogant to assume that since you can afford to upgrade to the latest technologies, then everyone who can't should be left behind. There are probably billions of people using spinning rust in their machines. If your software does not run with acceptable performance then that's a problem with your software, not their hardware.
The issue is that the speed -characteristics- are so very different between HDDs and SSDs. Not just the raw speed. Decent performance of anything with IO on an HDD requires that the IO is specifically structured to minimize seeks and maximize sequential access. That takes time and skill. If very few modern machines don’t have an SSD then it is understandable to simply skip this difficulty. That time and effort is often better spent elsewhere, and this is a valid tradeoff to make.
It sounds like it's justifying planned obsolescence.
My desktop products are made in Delphi (compiles to native code) and are very responsive and frugal on resources. Run fine on very old hardware. Desktop products done in C++ would be even better but I am not masochistic enough to develop GUI in C++. At least for now.
I do use VS code as for some tasks there is no viable alternative for me and since my development workstation is a monster it runs fine. My own desktop apps however are native and I test them on really shitty hardware where one would not dream of running VS Code / Slack / whatever.
For fun I've compiled my main desktop product to 32 bit and it runs on a friggin old netbook just fine. Also from my point of view speed of development is not any slower when developing native applications. So unless client specifically requires it or I am doing some front end in browser my desktop apps are all native and coded in Delphi/Lazarus and my backends are C++.
The only time i saw a difference when i made a raytracer benchmark[0] explicitly to benchmark the codegen where the Free Pascal codegen at its best was at 177% of the speed of the Clang 8 at its best. In my experience this is not a realistic metric though (according to the benchmark my C 3D engine should be five times slower if compiled in BC++ than Clang but in practice since it does a variety more stuff than just a single thing the performance difference is barely perceptible).
Should I be surprised that my turn of the millennium PC can't even run Slack? Yes, in absolute terms it's a bit ridiculous, but we're not talking philosophy here, Moore's law is a thing and software has been getting more complex as hardware got faster. Deal with it.
How is this news?
Uhh, care to share? Asking for a friend....
People are expected to run modern software for reasons of security, to retain interoperability with the latest standards, or to reduce support costs for the vendor. It is not very surprising that people don't want to upgrade their hardware for reasons that are outside of their control.
If you quote Moore's law, let me quote Wirth's law:
As a C & C++ dev that has always cared that my software works on machines and networks that are a fraction of what I use for testing, I get so tired of careless programs that have clearly been designed for the latest beefiest machines that the devs had at that time.
Same for the web. It should be mandatory by Law to verify websites with the baseline of a 2G connection. (just... half kidding)
...Yes? What is it doing that wouldn't fit in those constraints?
It is not my place to justify why modern software is so inefficient, pointing the finger to Windows 10 in particular as if it's an outlier.
Why are YOU using inefficient languages, heavyweight virtual machines, GB sized binaries, Electron and Javascript to write your applications? Why is your boss asking to add feature upon feature upon feature? There is a reason we're in this place, but until then, my point is, stop complaining everything is slow on your old PC. You know exactly why that is, and it is your fault as much as mine.
It's because of us, software engineers, that everything is slow, so it is completely hypocritical that on HN of all places one has to explain that sadly to run modern software one needs modern hardware.
We've put ourselves in this situation and now there's a lot of surprised Pikachu faces around, complaining about Windows getting slower and alt-tabbing to their day job writing yet another crappy Javascript abstraction layer on their shiny M1 MBP.
C++ still does need more resources to compile programs than AAA games and keep running for 20min / 1h / 2h / 4h?
What were they teaching those compilers engineers and language designers back in the day? nothing about writing performant code, performance tests, regressions and yada yada?
C++'s main speed issue is of course that it's the most text-based language ever and many entire libraries are implemented as headers due to the fragile base class issue.
I don't care on software "engineers" if you are a bunch of engineer wannabes where in my country in order to be an enginner you should be able to write your own OS from scratch and learn lots of linear algebra.
That argument would be more convincing if Microsoft hadn't systematically pushed the owners of older PCs to update them to run Windows 10. How many millions of PCs dating from the early to mid 2010s are now stuck with the results despite their hardware still working normally?
The trouble with 7 in that situation is that either 8.1 or 10 needed to be the next good version, but they weren't. Do you know anyone who actually wants their system to change its UI every six months? Or to install updates whether they agree with them or not, even though those updates can have serious consequences if they go wrong and cause inconvenience even if they work? Or who likes having their own computer phoning home without their consent? Or having ads inserted into their daily user experience?
If Microsoft was producing an operating system people actually wanted, they wouldn't need to push dodgy updates to get people to use it.
> Run old technology with old software. It is ridiculous that consumer hardware is still being sold with crappy 5400 RPM disks in 2021.
You pretty much answered your own question. Whether you like it or not, people are still using hard drives because hard drives are still being sold. Just because those people prioritize capacity over performance, for a given price point, doesn't mean they want performance to be ignored altogether.
As I mentioned down thread, you can get 1TB Samsung SSDs right now for $80. Not the best one, still faster than a hard disk. NVMe are a little more expensive than that, and even faster. The price is not really a valid excuse.
Yes, my 2TB NVMe is $300, and does sequential read/writes of 3,000 MB/s, which is close to 100x faster than an HDD. It's not space age technology, solid state storage has been consumer technology for 2 decades already.
You ever think about the college kid who can't afford that price? What about the family of five living on food stamps who can't just pony up the money for better hardware? What about large swaths of the population who are on fixed incomes?
The way software companies are going and your general attitude is, "Eh, this is old technology, anybody should be able to afford it, what's the big deal?"
Totally tone deaf to the poor and people living on the edge and others living on a fixed income. My mother in law is pushing 80 and I had to build her a new PC since she couldn't afford to purchase a new desktop to do her taxes on since now our state requires you to file electronically and shockingly, her tax software no longer runs on her 8 year old desktop.
It makes sense when you want to help someone to use the software they already paid for, instead of pointing an elderly person to the web and saying, "See? They have FREE versions, go grab one and figure it on your own!"
Sorry, but that to me is kind of a callous solution compared to what I did.
You're exaggerating. The first really plausible SSDs to appear in consumer PCs appeared in around 2006 or 2007, so maybe 15 years tops. For instance, Dell offered a computer with 32 GB of SSD storage in mid-2007. This was already not much storage at the time, and the drive alone cost over $500. This was arguably not a consumer affordable product at that price, and the laptops involved were actually the Latitude series (targeted to businesses) anyway. Apple followed this up in 2008 with a 64 GB SSD, but this was a $1000 upgrade.
Suffice it to say that a vast majority of people were only buying (and could probably only afford to buy) computers with rotational drives well into the 2010s. Many of the computers they bought are still running today. Many affordable computers that shipped with Windows 10 still had rotational drives. It's absurd to overlook a whole class of people who can't, unlike the wealthy, upgrade their MacBooks every 2 or 3 years. They probably don't have MacBooks to begin with. Parents are passing old hardware between children like hand-me-downs. That's before you even leave the United States.
I think your comment misses the point at a deeper level, which is that most people in this thread already have SSDs (I certainly do), but are disappointed that performance matters so little to many developers that they are fine with seeing software run at the same speed on today's insanely fast hardware that its predecessor did 20 years ago. Software is much more powerful than it was in the days of floppy disks, but it's not much more powerful than it was 15 years ago. We've seen a generational increase in performance, but we've wasted it. I think that's worth some disappointment.
I'd highlight IOPS. A $300 SSD is about 3000× faster than an HDD.
UNIX priorities don't handle this situation well because a low priority process is still technically immediately runnable and can cause priority inversions by clearing out all kinds of system caches that your foreground app was using.
And has more adware!
Void Linux, Debian, Slackware... just fine. Maybe with 720p video with a good Radeon 9800 video card for the AGP bus. But a Pentium III with SSE would run much better.
One would associate modern to something that is improved, better, faster. But that’s not the case with current state of software.
Why in the world would a modern operating system not optimize for SSDs?
I can’t think of a single reason to use a spinning drive on my computer. Almost every conceivable use case is better relegated to a separate NAS box.
You can get a 1TB PCIe nvme SSD rated at 3100Mbps read speeds for $125. Why would I chip off an order of magnitude of performance to save $40?
Sure, things have gotten more advanced, but it feels like the speed improvements of hardware are being used for bloat, rather than making computers even faster.
It seems computer performance stabilizes at a level that's acceptable to most people, I guess because beyond that there's no incentive to spend resources improving something that's acceptable.
By the way, 10 seconds clocked on a stopwatch is a ridiculously long time. Almost no apps open that slowly, in 2009 or 2021.
Storing the same data on a hard drive can be had for about $140. Now the SSD is much safer for your data, performs far better, and you absolutely ought to want the SSD but its not a small difference once you start talking about storing more than your OS. Spinning hard drives as OS drives ought to be completely dead by now but vendors are absolutely selling machines configured with them new in box all day every day. Seemingly more so on desktop or all in one models.