But that is squandered by piss-poor programming and stupid visual gimmicks.
I had to return to Windows as a daily work platform after a long time away (on Macs). I already knew that it had devolved into a grotesquely defective, regressive parade of UI blunders and deleted functionality... but its actual performance is TERRIBLE. I'm waiting for simple operations that I wouldn't have expected to wait for 20 years ago, even on bog-standard office desktop machines.
Yes, occasionally using old systems from decades ago can drive this home.
Copying a tiny file at 1.1 MB/s should feel instantaneous. But on Win 10 and Win 11 with an SSD, you can get a multisecond progressbar. And if you dare to cancel this tiny operation (because you chose the wrong destînation or wrong file), you get another progressbar.
Opening a folder window for a local directory with only a few items in it should never trigger a "Working on it…" message. It should be instantaneous.
Searching for filenames with a substring "foo", when an item "foobar" was already visible on the screen, should never result in failing to find "foobar", nor in a long delays before showing any items. VoidTools Everything displays live results as you type. Windows 10/11 often fails on both counts even when searching "indexed" locations; Outook also seems to also suffer from this inability to reliably include in search results items that were already on display. Something is deeply wrong with search.
Devs should be required test against machines hobbled to run at most 10% of rated speed, and to make it buttery smooth.
Would also be nice to have all my screenspace back by being able to turn off what appears to be Simply Enormous Margins & Padding mode…
I had to return to Windows as a daily work platform after a long time away (on Macs). I already knew that it had devolved into a grotesquely defective, regressive parade of UI blunders and deleted functionality... but its actual performance is TERRIBLE. I'm waiting for simple operations that I wouldn't have expected to wait for 20 years ago, even on bog-standard office desktop machines.