> Here's the real kicker: it's fast. It's smooth. It renders at 60FPS unless you have a lot going on. It's unequivocally better than performance on OS X, further leading me to believe that Apple really needs to overhaul how animations are done. Even when I turn Transparency off in OS X, Mission Control isn't completely smooth. Here, even after some Aero Glass transparency has been added in, everything is smooth. It's remarkable, and it makes me believe in the 12-inch MacBook more than ever before.
So much this. I really admire how performance of Windows desktop is optimized. I can't compare it with OS X, but when compared to modern Linux DE's (Plasma, Gnome Shell, Cinnamon etc.), Windows desktop still has all the same modern bells and whistles (hw acceleration, effects etc.) yet it blows them out of water when it cames to both smoothness and resource consumption.
I say I admire the effort on optimization, because things weren't that good even on Windows 7. I remember constantly having slight stuttering here and there on Windows 7 but Windows 8+ is completely smooth on the very same machine (which is now getting close to its 6th year), and this anectode shows that they must have taken the optimization seriously.
P.S: I'm not complaining on Linux DE's, they just have different priorities, and they're good deals considering their price.
And guess what... We're using the same tools available to third party app developers, in an effort to ensure the dev platform is rock solid. The Start menu is just a universal XAML app. We don't have to do any special optimization on top of what the framework offers.
Disclaimer: Microsoft employee working on the Windows 10 Start menu.
You guys have knocked it out of the park with the start menu. It's wonderful. Besides occasionally having to kill explorer because it becomes non-responsive it's been an absolute pleasure to use. I really like that you guys have downgraded the size a bit since earlier builds; really sleek and useful now.
What's happening with search? Is using Cortana mandatory? What's up with always using web search? Why can't I turn this web search off? Do I absolutely must block off bing and all Microsoft services at the network level to stop this?
Well it does help that you can just email the perf people in devdiv and have the single largest concentration of low level windows performance experts available for free
The start menu is great code but mom and pop dev shop doesn't have hundreds of top devs available :)
Have you tried the propietary graphics drivers in Linux? They improve things a lot. I'm using the Nvidia ones because Nouveau performance was very poor (not their fault, Nvidia is not very open to release specifications or code so they have to reverse engineer them) and everything is very smooth. And the battery life much better than Windows.
I'm already using proprietary Nvidia drivers but it doesn't seem to positively affect desktop performance that much on my machine (it's an old 2xxm card). I must say I'm happy with Kwin performance, it's just that Windows is much more smooth and uses somewhat less resources while doing that.
Yeah the OS X UI smoothness is great if the GPU is up to the task, like on my iMac it's flawless but in the case of this Macbook it's Intel Integrated graphics on a Retina display, and in my experience that can be less than flawlessly smooth in operations like Mission Control/Expose for sure, so it seems Apple has some catching up to do now. I also find Windows runs very well on low specced computers.
Safari on Mac OS is extremely smooth, from the looks of this blog it seems Microsoft has replicated that in Edge browser. Look forward to trying it.
I have to confess as well. My 8.1 machine is the first windows in 10 years I haven't either completely wiped or dual booted. I live in linux, but now use virtualbox on this machine. I bought it to be a travel rig- my main development is still done on a dual-boot (that now never boots into windows), but I'm liking it. I wish the virtualization was a bit smoother but it serves my purposes for now. I just like the win 8.1 experience enough that I don't want to deny myself easy access to it.
I know what you mean and the amusing thing is that it used to be the other way around. Back then in the older days of Gnome2 and KDE3 it was possible to use them with other window managers like Beryl and Compiz. These again also provided a 3D desktop experience and in their later development stage they were well optimized and stable. They were the one who blew windows vista out of the water when it came to smoothness, resource consumption and hardware support.
I agree and I'll leverage your comment to rant a bit so please forgive me :)
It's the old CADT [0] monster still at work. Windows desktop is the same old explorer shell which has been there since 1995? Only addition is dwm, which provides the modern graphical facilities. And Windows team has been constantly improving this same codebase for 20 years now.
While on the FOSS side, desktop developers are busy with the sisyphean task of rewriting or porting desktop shells and base applications again and again. OH, they've released a new version of graphics toolkit and the old one is deprecated. We must port the desktop now. Oh we also have to port all the applications now. Some applications were so hard to port that we've abondoned them and rewrite them instead. Actually, why don't we also rewrite the desktop shell while we're at it? Promise it'll worth it. We ported old apps but they're not consistent with the new ux paradigms of the new desktop so we'll rewrite them also... And just few years later when things start to calm down, there's a new release of graphic toolkit which will eventually deprecate the old version, ... oh not again.
Notice that I'm not talking about fragmentation or lack of resources. I'm glad we have more than one major DE, and I don't think more resources or less fragmentation would change anything regarding the situation above. Even with lack of resources, linux desktops had long long time to create really high quality products but they can't, because the ground below them is always shaking. Windows team on the other hand has been vetting, fixing, improving the same codebase for 20 years. They don't change the underlying toolkit every 5 year. They don't rewrite basic applications or port them to new libraries over and over (except new metro things, but they're seperate so my point still stands). Imagine what we would have now, if Gnome devs continued to polish and improve Gnome 2 and KDE devs continued to polish and improve KDE 3, just by using the same resources they've poured into Gnome 3 and KDE 4/Plasma 5 and their applications, respectively.
Again I'll emphasize, I'm grateful for the efforts that went into linux DE's, and I don't blame their developers for shit they have to deal with (although some are partly responsible for it)
>> I don't think more resources or less fragmentation would change anything regarding the situation above
Well, as far as I can tell, lots of Linux people are hipstery special little snowflakes and fork things because some small thing isn't exactly as they want it, and that's where most of the fragmentation comes from.
Assuming that's largely accurate, why would it not be a problem?
What if we had, say, three major Linux distros instead of dozens of half-assed ones? How many tinkerer-distros does the world need? -As many as it takes to prevent Linux from ever conquering the desktop, it seems.
I totally agree with you with respect to distribution fragmentation. Fragmentation there is much worse and definitely harmful at this point.
My above statement was specifically about the desktop environments, and DEs actually fit into your scenario. There are only 2 major DEs which have most mindshare, followed by handful of smaller ones. So there is not a bad fragmentation in that area (at least historically, there is now more diversity compared to 5 years ago), and the major ones have been with us for many years, AFAIK since late 90's? That's not only plenty of time to turn both of them into kick ass desktops, but also create wonderful ecosystems around them with high quality applications. Yet all we see is rewriting or porting everything every few years.
Not clear it is the number of distributions that is the problem as they tend to package the same libraries, desktop environments and applications. I agree with grandparent post that it is the churn in underlying libraries and the downstream re-work for no increase in functionality that causes that is the problem.
PS: Linux is widely used everywhere except traditional 'desktops'. Existing mainstream DEs are pretty good (KDE5/Gnome 3.16/MATE 1.8) and provide a range of choice.
>They were the one who blew windows vista out of the water when it came to smoothness, resource consumption and hardware support.
Beryl and Compiz? I beg to differ. Besides a bitch to get running, and get running well, they were not at all comparable to Vista with regards to "resource consumption" and "hardware support".
This is just an anecdote, but I share the parent's experience, too. I bought a low-end HP laptop around when Vista came out (2006/07?). It ran with Aero Glass, but not very smoothly. But first compiz-quinn and then beryl worked perfectly, also with the same blurred transparency effect that was slow on Windows. Even when I enabled the crazier effects like wobbly windows, it remained smooth, and used not noticably more resources. The only place a slowness was noticable was when quickly scrolling (webpages, for instance). However, this is still a problem on any non-Windows compositing DE in my experience.
At some point, "they" started to rewrite compiz, and it went downhill, until it was so slow I could not use compositing anymore.
On the Windows side, there was a lot of tense discussion between Intel and Microsoft regarding Intel's popular integrated-graphics chipset being shipped at the time of Vista's release. The chipset didn't have hardware DirectX support and shouldn't have been certified, but Intel had promised their customers (like HP) the chipsets were fine and they were not anywhere near the end of the product lifecycles for either the chipset or the PCs. So Microsoft fudged the rules and a bunch of consumer-grade hardware ran like crap on Vista.
Hmm.. what do I have to do to experience those performance problems? I use Mint and Debian on my machines and I never have any problems. Nothing ever stutters or lags or whatever.
I mainly use Firefox, the Terminal, Gimp and Libre Office. No performance problems whatsoever. And I have pretty old machines. An over 5 years old lenovo laptop and a similarely old desktop machine.
Why would you ever want to experience performance problems?
The obvious answer to experience those problems is to setup your system the same way as the people experiencing the problems, same h/w, s/w config, etc. You can look at the configs of people reporting problems on forums, in bug reports, etc.
Well, I'm using Ubuntu/Gnome 3 on both my 6 year old gaming desktop and 4 years old i3/basic discrete AMD GPU laptop and I have to say everything runs extremely smooth and consumes a pittance less than 1GB RAM used with some stuff in the background
Gnome shell is CPU hungry and I can tell I'm not alone with that because I did a lot of google search on it. Even when dragging windows around, CPU usage skyrockets to 40-60% and it's not even smooth. And that's with gpu acceleration, I can't even imagine what would've happened if it were on software rendering. Not to mention memory usage of gnome shell only increases with time.
They are all known issues but shell developers blame proprietary Nvidia driver, maybe that's why you are more happy with gnome shell than I am :) (Though I still can't get how cpu usage skyrockets when dragging windows.)
I'm using Gnome shell and just tested what happens to the CPU usage when I drag around windows. The dragging itself was buttery smooth and gnome-shell never used more than 12.6% of one core. I'm using the libre radeonsi driver.
Totally unscientific: On my ancient Thinkpad T61p with nvidia graphics of some vintage and the proprietary drivers installed on Debian Jessie, I get around 12 to 20% on one of the two cores with vigourous mouse assisted window movement of an Iceweasel window. MATE desktop, compiz is not available in Jessie repos so using marco.
The overall user experience is smooth and pleasant. I doubt if Windows 8/10 would install on this machine (although it came with Windows 7). I have several Thinkpads of this vintage for the keyboards, not needing super powerful processors.
It's because of either different drivers, or your one core is faster than my poor little c2d core, or you're not moving it crazy enough :) Did you compare it with kwin? For example, on my machine gnome shell uses sth. like 40-60% while kwin is 10% at most.
So much this. I really admire how performance of Windows desktop is optimized. I can't compare it with OS X, but when compared to modern Linux DE's (Plasma, Gnome Shell, Cinnamon etc.), Windows desktop still has all the same modern bells and whistles (hw acceleration, effects etc.) yet it blows them out of water when it cames to both smoothness and resource consumption.
I say I admire the effort on optimization, because things weren't that good even on Windows 7. I remember constantly having slight stuttering here and there on Windows 7 but Windows 8+ is completely smooth on the very same machine (which is now getting close to its 6th year), and this anectode shows that they must have taken the optimization seriously.
P.S: I'm not complaining on Linux DE's, they just have different priorities, and they're good deals considering their price.