As someone who was forced to start using Windows again after ten years after ten years of exclusively running Linux: Why is it like this? Everything is so crappy and slow!
this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2025
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Its logging half your shit, and trying to advertise to you anywhere it can! Get used to it...
And ontop of that, they have no incentive to work on performance, if they made it better you'd have less of a reason to upgrade your machine, they want to slowly make performance worse and worse to maximize this effect
If you upgrade your machine it becomes easier to sell you AI, since AI will work faster on an upgraded machine. Hence it's a win-win for Microsoft.
It's always been like this. Those 10 years ruined you as a Windows user.
It's definitely gotten more wasteful lately in particularly. You could run 8.1 on any computer that supported Vista, and IME it was even a little snappier, but 10 and 11 have each been significantly worse.
i3wm on a 32bit IBM thinkpad is still instantaneous-response-fast
i only recently moved my main home pc from 8.1. there's configs and software on it that would be difficult or impossible to recreate on a new install or pc. i even have a spare identical mb and cpu in case it's needed. 1st gen. mechanical disks (several, sata ssd wasn't that much of an improvement with the old controller for everyday use so i opted to keep the higher capacity) 32gb ram and pascal gpu. i skipped all the way to a rufus'd 11 and it's actually running well (with all the crud ripped out, though). it dual boots with endless on a loop device. the upgrade didn't even mess that up.
Partially because Defender does a lot of unnecessary work. Partially because Explorer now has Chromium under the hood of many elements.
Also Copilot. Not even joking. Having so many copilot buttons in apps is not an issue. The issue is to actually try using it. Even a light conversion crashes both the desktop an Android clients too often. At this point I would rather have those resources consumed by actual AI running locally than on a crappy frontend. Pathetic.
Linux aint perfect either. Look at the memory usage of most modern "fully featured" distros. They're using damn near as much at idle as windows is. Same thing going back 10 years in time.
The key is with windows you get one windows, and maybe some tweaks. With linux you could go with a hyper minimal DE with not much in the way of shiny features and go a whole lot further.
Linux also uses a lot of ram for disk caching, it's flagged as a form of available memory so there's no performance overheard for this.
Disk caching is almost never included in the ram usage numbers. Or if it is it's specified as caching, but still not factored into the number.
Huh TIL, had a look through my system and it sits at about ~5GB not including disk cache. Been on Fedora KDE since 39 and have put it through its paces so I'm pretty happy with that
I would've reformatted windows twice in that time because of bloat accumulation, and like you said there's always room for improvement with hyper minimalist packages.
God I love Linux.
I've never seen a distro take more than 2gb RAM ootb (ubuntu gnome and kde are probably the "heavy" contenders), excluding precached files. In either case, Windows or Linux, you lose big time the moment you launch a web browser.
The fresh install of Manjaro KDE on my laptop is using 2.6gb on a fresh boot right out of the box.
I forget what distro it was (maybe neon?) that was using like 3.X gigs of ram on a fresh install. That was the point that I realized this wasn't the Linux of old.
It's nearly the same for me, except it's been nine years, and I've been using both Linux and Mac. It's not bad enough to look for a new job, but oh man, I hate it so much.
Why use a mac when you can emulate it in linux? (heck, even with GPU passthrough!)
My company gave it to me for work, and I used it, just as I do now with the Windows machine.
Realtime antivirus scanning is a big culprit. I'm sure all the advertising/telemetry junk doesn't help either.
updates. the constant barrage of updates. the cpu, ram, and disk time needed just to 'check' for updates is horrible (it used to be a lot worse, too). and if you are still on an old-school mechanical hdd, those 'cumulative' updates are absolutely brutal every month with win10 or 11.
last week i booted-up a silverblue that hasn't been run in a couple months. 8gb, mechanical disk, not a speed demon either--3rd or 4th gen. i didn't even notice the updates were coming in until the notification popped up saying they were done.
windows 11 straight up requires 16gb of ram now.
it idles at almost 8 (!!!) fucking gigabytes for some stupid reason.
Im so old, but 8 gb still seems like such a large amount of ram when I think of it briefly. And peeps out there with 100 gb lol. But yeah my win11 laptop that has 64 gb, it's slower than my 10 year old amd fx desktop mint with 20 gb. By a lot.
it is! its just windows 11 that's very ram hungry.
Well, Windows as such don't need more RAM as some Linux distros, What is wasting the most RAM is all the telemetries, services not needed, trials, adware and other crap which Windows has by default when you buy it with a new PC. Windows need average users because of this capables to fix it, not needed in Linux. That is the difference. A gutted Windows is pretty fast, without all the trash which is loaded on boot. Eg,only diseable the hybernation service reduce a big part of the RAM, because it make duplicates of all open apps as temporary files, to load these on the next startup. same with the index service to find files somewhat faster, which waste memory to write any change to the index, not really needed in mdern PC and less with an SSD. Only diseabling this 2 services can increase the speed and respond more than 50%.
But the normal user don't do it and only claimes that Windows becomes slower and slower, because it is more and more filled with temp and trash files. That is the problem with Windows, because MS sells you a car, but by default with a huge caravan which you don't need, that must tow.
Not if you have Firefox open. Three YouTube tabs and my 4GB Pi5 is swapping so hard it takes forever to move the mouse anywhere.
Well, to be honest, I went a little overboard and installed Cinnamon on Arch. My girly setup with 4gb can no longer do push-ups with one finger.
Well... Not exactly, Linux doesn't handle low RAM very well. Usually the system just crashes if you open too much stuff
what is this? If something, it is low RAM that Linux handles extremely well ?!?
I mean
If you try to open modern JS bloated websites that reinvent scrolling in multiple tabs dont expect to have good performance
it doesnt crash ime, but it does choke up a lot when ram is full.
much harder to get to that point on linux tho.