I really don't understand what is different about my installs of Windows 11 compared to what I read in all these types of articles.
I have zero issues with the platform day in and day out with heavy workloads like Pro Tools and Unreal Engine devkit. Games run without stutter and issue, all my features are snappy, Explorer loads instantly, etc. Even search is performant and gives decent results. I have tweaked a few settings but nothing you can't find in settings menus.
I'm not sure a lot of people having issues with pretty damn stable platform are going to have a better experience in something they have zero familiarity with and isn't exactly going to be intuitive when things go sideways, as they most undoubtedly will.
> Explorer loads instantly, etc. Even search is performant and gives decent results.
There is likely too big of a gap in "terminology".
For example, the file explorer startup is so "Instant" that even Microsoft officially added an option to preload the app to fix the delay. But if you don't notice / don't appreciate real instant, then sure, you won't understand the complaints. (or maybe your hardware masks it well enough)
Similarly, if you've never used Everything or better file manager for search, you might get used to the bad search results and call them "decent" since you're not aware how awesome it can be
I have the same confusion as you do. Note, I am not ignorant about Linux or MacOS. I ran Linux as my main OS from 2001 - 2015, still run it on a server. MacOS from 2015 - 2021. Since 2021 I am on Windows for my main machine (a laptop) and my gaming desktop.
Win 11 seems fine to me. I do see Copilot appearing everywhere. I don't see ads from MS at all, though- sometimes my vendor driver-management software asks me if I was to extend my warranty. Not Win11 fault, though. Start menu seems fine, phone integration is nice, OS runs very stable (in the very early days of using Linux 20y ago I marveled at how much more stable it was than Win98! That gap is gone now as far as I can tell).
My suspicion: I am paying for M365 (or whatever they call it now) and so they don't advertise it (or anything?) to me. I don't see CandyCrush or other random things added to my machine. All seems OK.
I've read that Win12 will be subscription-based. Maybe I am personally already there. For now, M365 offers me good value- I use MS Office and OneDrive. But if this changes I can see the equation balance shifting and I will then change platforms again.
TMI, I left MacOS because of Gatekeeper and the inability to repair hardware. Before that I left Linux for work interoperability and regressions I saw on my personal mobile hardware. Neither were "bad", really, I have experienced different trade-offs among the three choices I have used. For now, Win 11 is working just fine for me, with no fuss.
I suspect these articles are targeted at techies and tinkerers, where being able to do things their way is very important to them. This is reflected in the many mentions of tinkering with registry keys, which I never have nor felt the need to.
I personally run win11 for gaming, android for media consumption and proxmox for homelab and I think all of these systems are fine as is. They serve their purpose well enough.
My prediction is that steamOS (when it is released) will end up being the only mainstream Linux desktop because of its corporate backing. It would be interesting to see desktop Linux mimicking the android ecosystem, where different vendors provide a different skin on top of SteamOS.
> will end up being the only mainstream Linux desktop because of its corporate backing
Ubuntu, Fedora, SUSE, Pop!, Deepin (and the list goes on) all have corporate backing. Steam is a well-known consumer brand though, so that might make a difference.
I don't think the usual distros care about the desktop experience as holistically as a long-term consumer company that Valve is. Otherwise one would expect Linux distros would be much better than what they were even 10 years ago.
I had to edit windows registry to fix the worst misfeatures of start & context menu. I never found solution to random wake up after suspend or missing icons after wake up - MS support was useless. Linux desktop even with non-zero amount of issues can't frustrate me nearly as much as Windows. All games I ran so far on Linux worked as good or better as/than on Windows. I keep Windows installed just in case some game really won't work, but combination of SteamDeck (Proton) and Vulkan did wonders for Linux compatibility kudos to Steam/Valve. And I would not want to do software development on Windows, that is number one reason I am using Linux (not that I am using Unreal Engine). Recent MS fever dream with LLMs only adds to general frustration with Windows.
Windows can be a good desktop OS. It just takes a lot of work to get it there. And you have to keep putting in a little more work with each update.
I set up a lot of PCs and what has astounded me is how much less work it takes. Unlike with Windows, most of the defaults are fine. I don't have to scour through all the settings after a fresh install. I only need to install half as many apps. I don't have to run powershell scripts to debloat everything. And I don't have to worry about updates undoing all the changes I've made in the future.
I have pro edition on multiple home systems, definitely have had more issues with my corporate issued Win11 laptop, but it's also many major versions behind what I have at home.
It is a FOSS, complaining about proprietary APIs, because there is this dissonance between communities.
Game developers care about IP, how to make it go beyond games, getting a publisher deal, gameplay, the proprietary APIs is a set of plugins on a middleware engines in-house or external, and done it is.
Also there is a whole set of companies whose main business is porting games, where is where several studios got their foot into the door before coming up with their own ideas, as a means to get experience and recognition in the industry, they are thankful each platform is something else.
Finally anyone claiming Khronos APIs are portable never had the pleasure to use extensions or deal with drivers and shader compiler bugs.
Personally for me I wouldn't be able to reconcile the fact that these generated stems are basically the same as generated AI images--built from the digital bits of existing tracks/music/recording that someone else spent the time and hard work making and then sharing only to have it unexpectedly hoovered up by these corporations as part of their giant data training set.
>While established developers debate whether AI will replace them, these kids are shipping. Developers who learned their craft in the age of pull requests and sprint planning sneer at their security failures, not realizing that 'best practices' are about to flip again. The barbarians aren't at the gate. They're deploying to production.
Shipping where? What production? What kids? I've yet to see this. I see the tools everywhere, but not anything built with them. You'd think it would be getting yelled about from the mountaintops, but I'm still waiting.
A whole bunch of folks got into management thinking coding is beneath them, they are now wielding the power - let the code-monkeys do the typing. Then, turns out, coders are continuing to call the shots, and the management folks have coder-envy.
Now, with LLMs, coding is again not only within management's reach, but they think it is trivial, and it can be outsourced to the LLM code-monkeys, and management has regained power from the pesky coder-class.
So, you have management of all stripes "shipping" things, and dictating what coders should do - not realizing that they should stay in their lanes, and let coders decide for themselves what works best in their craft.
This is a really interesting point. Managers are the _only_ people I've heard say things like "it's only a matter of time till all coding interviews are just 'write a prompt to...'" or "soon all coding will just be LLMs writing machine code directly."
It's struck me as odd that managers of software engineers would seek to negate the field of software development almost completely. But maybe you're onto something.
What would qualify as proof? If somebody builds a good product and ships it it will just look like a good product. People will call it vibe coded slop when it fails spectacularly.
If there isn't a strong uptick in the general quality and usefulness of software within the next couple of years, then it's not clear what AI coding/design is actually buying us. Other than possibly some cost reduction, but it would be optimistic to assume that the savings go to the users and not to big tech. Regardless, the proof will be in the pudding.
I mean they would provide it--you would think this is something the AI coding businesses would be highlighting. "Here's an app tends of thousands use every day built with our AI tools!"
Heck they did it with languages for the longest time. Here's twitter, we built it on Rails, everyone use Rails! Facebook, built on PHP, everyone use PHP! Feels weird that if these AI tools are doing all this work that no one is showing it off.
The quote assumes that "good looking" wood is inherently "good" which is not always the case. You could have a very ugly piece of wood facing the wall but it could be the most structurally sound and durable wood ever. Value isn't always in appearance.
You always want latency or jitter as low as possible. Latency adds up in the chain. Instrument/Sequencer (2ms) -> Some digital effect (3ms) -> Digital Mixer (3ms) -> In-Ear monitor bridges an air gap with processing (6ms)
Suddenly you have 14ms latency. Bad, but reality. So, every ms less is better.
Regarding jitter, this is the worst, because the brain cannot adapt to the changes, whereas constant latency can be regulated somehow by the brain.
The Windows MIDI/USB stack adds considerable amount of jitter to the MIDI clock, compared to the much superior ones in MacOS. I will fully admit that "unusable" is a personal opinion based on my experience. Of course performers also use Windows, but I heavily doubt you are able to see which device in their rack acts as a master clock, and how they sync their devices, apart from the fact that most performers nowadays don't use MIDI at all.
Midi is used heavily for guitar patch and lighting automation as well as triggering backing tracks in a DAW running on stage. The use of MIDI (over USB) has only increased on stages.
This is getting ridiculous, we are talking about making music, so triggering notes from different devices in sync. You know, what MIDI was originally designed for, not triggering some lights, guitar patches or a background track. You are exactly proving my point: MIDI nowadays is pretty much reduced to SysEx for doing simple automations. None of that is seriously affected by jitter in the ms range. You sound like you have no idea how electronic music was done before VSTs were a thing.
I have zero issues with the platform day in and day out with heavy workloads like Pro Tools and Unreal Engine devkit. Games run without stutter and issue, all my features are snappy, Explorer loads instantly, etc. Even search is performant and gives decent results. I have tweaked a few settings but nothing you can't find in settings menus.
I'm not sure a lot of people having issues with pretty damn stable platform are going to have a better experience in something they have zero familiarity with and isn't exactly going to be intuitive when things go sideways, as they most undoubtedly will.