OS rant

[chowder]

Not to cast a negative light on any particular PC OS (narrowed eyed stare at Windows), but why the hell are they so bloated these days?  I read a very good analogy once that a computer operating system acted like the serving staff in one of those grand English houses of old, providing services in an unobtrusive fashion to facilitate the running of the place.  I'm sure I butchered that, but you get the idea.

Just look at the recommended specs for Windows 10:

Processor:
1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster processor or SoC

RAM:
1 gigabyte (GB) for 32-bit or 2 GB for 64-bit

Hard disk space:
16 GB for 32-bit OS 20 GB for 64-bit OS

IMO, an operating system should provide a thin a layer as possible to the underlying hardware, without sucking up obscene amounts of system resources that the user's applications should be have available to them 

I should qualify this by saying that Debian Jessie with XFCE is my main OS, but I'm far from a Linux zealot just trying to MS-bash

[UglyJoe]

I think the "bloat" is what most people are expecting from an OS.  They want a web browser and a video player and they want it all to just work.  It's hard to make things "just work" if you have to go and retrieve all of the components separately (for example, every Linux distro I've ever used).  Windows is an OS, but it is also a lot of things that are not an OS.

I hear you, though.  I love that Linux doesn't even give you a window manager out of the box.  I've got a laptop from 2006 that I still use on a regular basis because I can keep everything lightweight and customizable (Arch Linux + MATE + Compiz Fusion).

Windows 10 has been legit terrible for me, though.  And also for the majority of people that I know who upgraded. 

I'm not just bashing it, either.  I defend Windows all the time.  Need proof? Vista wasn't a bad OS.  Windows 8 is not a bad OS.  There. 

However, bad software is bad software and Windows 10 has just been miserable.  Why does my Start Menu take, at its best, 1.5 seconds to appear?  Why does Cortana simply stop working (I type to search and nothing happens).  Why does my task bar keep deciding to stop hiding itself even though I told it to hide?  It's just buggy.  I had to install an alternate launcher (Wox) just to maintain sanity.

What it reminds me of is a Linux window manager, in that it is initially really buggy.  However, it is very frustrating because, unlike Linux, I can't configure it or swap it out in order to fix the issues.

[famifan]

+1 for any customized GNU/Linux distro which servers well for you.

the most important thing is that if anything went wrong you just could poke devs in a hope that they'll fix it. Bug/issue trackers, IRC, mailing lists, etc... Windows completely disallows you to do that.

well, is it only me noticing that on the boards here we have very high % of non-windows users?

shall we start a flame thread about the text editor everybody likes? vim 

[HVC-Man]

I think the "bloat" is what most people are expecting from an OS.  They want a web browser and a video player and they want it all to just work.  It's hard to make things "just work" if you have to go and retrieve all of the components separately (for example, every Linux distro I've ever used).  Windows is an OS, but it is also a lot of things that are not an OS.

Yeah, except an OS like Windows XP runs the same things .exe programs as Windows 10 (like a web browser and video player) with a fraction of the overhead. Heck, you can even do that on Windows 98SE and it needs a minimum of 32MB RAM and a Pentium 1.

Bloat in modern Windows is a real thing and a real concern. I do not plan on upgrading any of my machines to Windows 10, it offers nothing I need and all it does is erode the legacy support I require.

[P]

Exactly! And Windows XP was also considered bloated when it came out.

I feel like everyone else here. Seems the more powerful the computers get, the more they want to make use of it in the latest OS, whether it's useful features or not.

I also feel the OS should be more minimal so that you can run heavy programs on top of it without slowing down. It can be nice looking and all, but they started be nice looking around Windows 95/XP (Windows 3.11 and earlier was really hard on the eyes! yuk!).

[famifan]

Seems the more powerful the computers get, the more they want to make use of it in the latest OS, whether it's useful features or not.

well, it's just a product life cycle. Every thing has en end, therefore it should have an end too. You can't offer better support for 10yo or so product. You can't introduce new and major features to old product (sometimes it's just technical difficulties and design flaws/limitations of current implementation and so on.). Well, ok, even if you can, but you can't do that constantly. As everything is changing so fast, you will be very limited in available dev resources when accepting every single feature request to a product. The Product is not just a bunch of features, it's more about the support that you could offer and accepting the feature requests (even and mostly in the near future, so, it's really long term thing, not just fire and forget). The faster you address the real issues and the quicker you respond to the requested changes and real world challenges, the better the product is gonna be.

so, only extremely critical vulnerability fixes and major bug fixes are what you could offer for a 10yo product. Meanwhile developing a bunch of new products :-)

the thing is that software development goes really fast when compared to another real life products. So, even a couple of years could totally change the everything. Often those changes are so internal and will never be exposed to end user, that is why end user every time gets confused by growing specs and doesn't feel the real differences in UX. Eg.: windows start button is still here, file menu is still here too. Only the buttons/window decorations get smoother and come in different shapes. So, from end user point of view, the changes are just disappointing sometimes. But, requirements for program that end user runs are still constantly growing over the time and more even faster than OS requirements.

the OS is still the tiniest, extremely fast, fine grained and intensively polished piece of software that you have even run on your h/w.

I agree that one OS could require more powerful and fast h/w than another, but it's not that bloated as you thought :-)

I also feel the OS should be more minimal so that you can run heavy programs on top of it without slowing down.

OS is still minimal and the most perfect and extremely fast program :-)

it's not the OS who is slowing down. Obviously you run heavy programs such as browser (yep, it's like the heaviest thing among the common set of programs for everyday needs), 3d games which render photo-realistic or quite similar graphics in real-time (you must be very thankfull that almost 99.9% of that job is offloaded to 3d graphic card), and so on.

for proofs just run any program manager you like to take a look at how much the OS consumes itself (CPU time and amount of used RAM). The results will probably shock you as well.
Post Merge: February 25, 2016, 04:22:51 am

It can be nice looking and all, but they started be nice looking around Windows 95/XP (Windows 3.11 and earlier was really hard on the eyes! yuk!).

guess why?

cheap, affordable and relatively fast graphic card comes to a market around these period of years. Hardware resources have become more cheaper and widely common in general over the time. So, MS just reflected/responded to this change in their products.

That is, almost every single user has got graphic card. Why should OS stay away of it and totally ignore its present? A user paid for it, so probably the user wanted to get it utilized by the maximum.

Nice looking windows decorations, buttons with shadows, smooth animation, clear and anti-aliased fonts - make UX a way better and bring additional convenience in everyday needs. Why? just because we can as we're not limited to 640k of RAM anymore 

[chowder]

it's not the OS who is slowing down. Obviously you run heavy programs such as browser (yep, it's like the heaviest thing among the common set of programs for everyday needs), 3d games which render photo-realistic or quite similar graphics in real-time (you must be very thankfull that almost 99.9% of that job is offloaded to 3d graphic card), and so on.

for proofs just run any program manager you like to take a look at how much the OS consumes itself (CPU time and amount of used RAM). The results will probably shock you as well.

Windows uses significantly more RAM at idle than Linux distros.  It is the OS slowing the system down if it's using all the RAM and forcing programs to use the pagefile

That is, almost every single user has got graphic card. Why should OS stay away of it and totally ignore its present? A user paid for it, so probably the user wanted to get it utilized by the maximum.

Nice looking windows decorations, buttons with shadows, smooth animation, clear and anti-aliased fonts - make UX a way better and bring additional convenience in everyday needs. Why? just because we can as we're not limited to 640k of RAM anymore 

Surely those users bought the fancy card to play games, not to make the OS look "pretty".  The won't be looking at window decorations and buttons with shadows anyway when they're playing a game, will they?