Every time I have installed Ubuntu for someone, I have come back years later and it’s still on the same version.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AutomaticSecurityUpdates

I am not sure about major release upgrades. But if you are on an LTS release, this should cover it for five years. And as much as I dislike snaps, they do auto updates too, so in 22.04 Firefox at least keeps up-to-date too.

It's probable the old Windows 7 install was 32-bit while your fresh install of 10 would have defaulted to 64-bit. That combined with 10's naturally higher memory requirements means the system has less overhead to work with.

It doesn't and never will. I've used them side by side for a few years and went back to W7 for productivity.

Interestingly enough, Lubuntu LXQt feels snappier than either system.

I'm not sure if this is because Windows memory usage is a lot more efficient now, or if the newer processors' performances can cancel out the RAM capacity bottleneck, or if PC4-25600 + NVMe pagefiles are simply fast enough, or if manufacturers are spreading thinly during the chip shortage. but it's certainly an ongoing trend

Mother I law bought a machine with 4GB of ram, which was fine before windows 10. Now it spends all day doing page/sysfile swap from its mechanical hard drive. Basically unusable.

So here in my pocket is an 8GB stick of DDR3 sodimm for later.

And 4GB is enough for a blank windows 10 install doing some OS things and browsing. I don't think more memory helps that scenario.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension#Mic...

I mean, everyone uses a browser, even if they use nothing else, and browsers gobble up RAM like crazy.

This should involve absolutely zero disk reads or anything of the sort, it's a window that runs a command. And it used to work reliably in past years. It feels like keyboard input simply isn't buffered like it used to be. Calculator it even worse as it loses input if you start typing the formula too soon. It used to be very easy for casual calculations now I have to wait for the computer.

This is very visible in any app that no longer maintains "local state" but instead is just a web browser to some online state (think: Electron, teams, etc). Disconnect the web or slow it down and it all goes to hell.

A lot of things remained slow though.

This hurts performance a ton on SSDs, too, it's just less noticeable. Something that should happen so fast you can hardly measure how long it takes, takes... just long enough to notice, which may amount to 100x as long as it should take, but 100x a small number is still pretty small.

I'm talking about Windows 10 on 4G C2Q or Phenom/Phenom II machines - they aren't fast but they're very usable with a SSD and GPU in place.

Is it loading 2000 plugins?

But if any parts of 10 are sufficiently badly coded compared to 7, that will overcome the drive. And some parts definitely are, especially in the start menu code.