> If Project Zenith is a "distraction-free Windows experience," does that imply that everyone else is using nerfed experiences with needless distractions?
When I read the headline of the announcement article, I thought it would be in the spirit of https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-drive/, instead it's just advertising a series of device that most devs won't ever buy.
Devs might be bad at marketing to general public, but if the target market are devs, run the ads through them first. Even if they're in a building with no dev at all, surely one can be reached through an internal email.
Meanwhile my steam library of 900+ works pretty much flawlessly on linux. Yes the odd esoteric game needs a workaround or two, but honestly if you browse the pcgamingwiki then you'd notice you also need to tweak them on windows too, such is the problem with older games.
I shelled out for a Steam Machine (SteamOS ≈ Arch Linux.) I do gamedev, and I figured having a test machine was a decent enough excuse for a purchase. It's working suprisingly well for the games I'm actually playing. They're playing better than on my last Windows desktop tower, even, presumably due to a better GPU.
Granted, catalogs vary - anti-cheat and DRM may not play nice, and EvE Online wasn't stable until I switched the renderer from D3D12 to D3D11 (and I haven't tried playing with multiple accounts) - but you might revisit Linux gaming if it's been awhile since you last have.
The enshittification of Windows has finally driven me to the point where Linux compatability is going to start affecting my Steam purchases.
Whenever I used windows for games I just installed it on a partition and solely used it for steam. Nothing else installed but steam and games. Usually with the free unregistered version of windows because I could not care less about setting a desktop background. Too insufferable for any other use.
Indeed. They can’t know what other applications you need to run. So they more frugal the OS and application, the more available for other software apps.
It’s true unused it wasted but unfortunately what it’s used for is decided by corporate flavor of the month so garbage one drive, teams and Gemini builds eat all the ram that would be better used by other applications people actually like
> But the OS should be as lean as possible because the entire reason is to run other programs.
In my mind Classic Mac OS (minus its design issues) is the ideal to strive for here.
It was barely even an OS and more like a substrate for GUI applications to run on top of. Even “essentials” like networking and USB support were implemented by way of extensions which could be disabled at will. If you disabled all extensions you’d get something resembling a full color version of the original 1985 System 1.0 that took almost no resources. This was great for squeezing out every last drop for things like games and emulators.
The windows kernel is smart enough to free RAM for the highest demanding app like rendering or video editing, even if the idle is high.
That's why there's no accurate 1:1 comparison between operating systems. Windows, MacOS, and LInux will treat physical memory very differently bot at idle, and during heavy use.
Sure, Win 11 has a lot of bloat and poorly coded Web apps that should be removed or rewritten in native, but the kernel is still top notch at managing even limited memory.
The thing with windows is that there is no idle state, something is always busy with the CPU/hogging ram. With Linux I can have like 98% idle and the system taking 2Gb out of my 8gb of ram, but with windows, the system is more like 30% cpu and more than 4GB of currently being used ram.
If idle on Win 11 already pre-caches most-used apps like Chrome/FF and not on Linux, how can you accurately measure what true idle is?
You have to remember the Win kernel is tuned to consumer desktop user use cases, while Linux kernel is tuned to server/DC use-cases.
That's why ~15 years ago when I was in uni, you'd have audio stutter when playing music/movies of spinning rust on linux while torrenting on the HDD, and not on Windows/MacOS, due to different queuing algorithms used thet prioritised audio decoding tasks, which Linux kernel out of the box didn't unless you tinkered.
> If Project Zenith is a "distraction-free Windows experience," does that imply that everyone else is using nerfed experiences with needless distractions?
Yes.
Do they mean like, a version of Windows where I don't have to go into folder options and click "show file extensions"?
When I read the headline of the announcement article, I thought it would be in the spirit of https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-drive/, instead it's just advertising a series of device that most devs won't ever buy.
Devs might be bad at marketing to general public, but if the target market are devs, run the ads through them first. Even if they're in a building with no dev at all, surely one can be reached through an internal email.
It's just cover to justify the future claim: "See? Nobody wants a distraction-free, decrappified Windows. Nobody bought it..."
I refuse to use windows at home. I'll use it at work, but it's either Xubuntu or MacOS at home. I couldn't be happier.
I have no choice but to use Windows at home due to 200+ Steam games I own. Many work only on Windows only. Emulation don't work for most on Linux.
I got a separate PC just for linux btw, so no biggie
Meanwhile my steam library of 900+ works pretty much flawlessly on linux. Yes the odd esoteric game needs a workaround or two, but honestly if you browse the pcgamingwiki then you'd notice you also need to tweak them on windows too, such is the problem with older games.
I shelled out for a Steam Machine (SteamOS ≈ Arch Linux.) I do gamedev, and I figured having a test machine was a decent enough excuse for a purchase. It's working suprisingly well for the games I'm actually playing. They're playing better than on my last Windows desktop tower, even, presumably due to a better GPU.
Granted, catalogs vary - anti-cheat and DRM may not play nice, and EvE Online wasn't stable until I switched the renderer from D3D12 to D3D11 (and I haven't tried playing with multiple accounts) - but you might revisit Linux gaming if it's been awhile since you last have.
The enshittification of Windows has finally driven me to the point where Linux compatability is going to start affecting my Steam purchases.
Whenever I used windows for games I just installed it on a partition and solely used it for steam. Nothing else installed but steam and games. Usually with the free unregistered version of windows because I could not care less about setting a desktop background. Too insufferable for any other use.
Same. ArchLinux and macOS for me.
They could stop hogging so much memory. My work laptop was fine on Win 10 and on Win 11 it began swapping to disk.
Unused RAM is wasted RAM. And swap usage is not an issue either unless there's a lot of swap in/out happening.
> Unused RAM is wasted RAM
A terrible phrase constantly used in defense of bloated, wasteful programs using gobs of memory to achieve nothing.
Indeed. They can’t know what other applications you need to run. So they more frugal the OS and application, the more available for other software apps.
It’s true unused it wasted but unfortunately what it’s used for is decided by corporate flavor of the month so garbage one drive, teams and Gemini builds eat all the ram that would be better used by other applications people actually like
> Unused RAM is wasted RAM
This applies to caches, and it applies to time versus memory tradeoffs in expensive algorithms. Win11 wastes a lot of memory on neither.
Until you open something else
If I’m encoding video or running a database, sure.
But the OS should be as lean as possible because the entire reason is to run other programs.
> But the OS should be as lean as possible because the entire reason is to run other programs.
In my mind Classic Mac OS (minus its design issues) is the ideal to strive for here.
It was barely even an OS and more like a substrate for GUI applications to run on top of. Even “essentials” like networking and USB support were implemented by way of extensions which could be disabled at will. If you disabled all extensions you’d get something resembling a full color version of the original 1985 System 1.0 that took almost no resources. This was great for squeezing out every last drop for things like games and emulators.
The windows kernel is smart enough to free RAM for the highest demanding app like rendering or video editing, even if the idle is high.
That's why there's no accurate 1:1 comparison between operating systems. Windows, MacOS, and LInux will treat physical memory very differently bot at idle, and during heavy use.
Sure, Win 11 has a lot of bloat and poorly coded Web apps that should be removed or rewritten in native, but the kernel is still top notch at managing even limited memory.
The thing with windows is that there is no idle state, something is always busy with the CPU/hogging ram. With Linux I can have like 98% idle and the system taking 2Gb out of my 8gb of ram, but with windows, the system is more like 30% cpu and more than 4GB of currently being used ram.
If idle on Win 11 already pre-caches most-used apps like Chrome/FF and not on Linux, how can you accurately measure what true idle is?
You have to remember the Win kernel is tuned to consumer desktop user use cases, while Linux kernel is tuned to server/DC use-cases.
That's why ~15 years ago when I was in uni, you'd have audio stutter when playing music/movies of spinning rust on linux while torrenting on the HDD, and not on Windows/MacOS, due to different queuing algorithms used thet prioritised audio decoding tasks, which Linux kernel out of the box didn't unless you tinkered.