9 ms·

XP and 7 were only good because it was based off of 2000/NT.

buran77 2mo ago
Literally everything that came after Windows Me both in the consumer and server space is based on NT, to this day. So I'm not sure this argument weighs much. P.S. My personal opinion is that Windows could be a great OS but MS keeps intentionally saddling it with more and more shit in the name of getting more from the user, instead of giving more to the user.
- aeyes 2mo ago
  The kernel is solid, its all the userspace software where they are fumbling hard.
  - VorpalWay 2mo ago
    The kernel is okish. But compared to Linux it is surprisingly bad at a number of things. Handling lots of tiny files in huge directory trees is much slower on Windows than Linux for example. I dont know if that is due to NTFS vs ext4/btrfs/xfs, or if it is some broader issue in the NT kernel. Some other things have been baffling over the years (but I belive they are now at least somewhat solved). For example in Windows 7 and older Windows would spend tens of seconds on "installing drivers" for a USB stick every time a new stick was inserted (or even an old stick inserted into a new port). I don't remember seeing this on Windows 10 (or 11), but I barely used those. But yes, compared to the userspace the kernel is way less jank. (Like how Windows Updates takes minutes to run to conclude that there are updates, and dozens of minutes to install them, while pacman -Syu on Arch can be done in second if there are no updates, and maybe 2-4 minutes in the worst case of a kernel update with dkms modules being rebuilt.)
    - inigyou 2mo ago
      At least it has async I/O, unlike Linux.
      - bigfishrunning 2mo ago
        not sure if I'm missing something, `select` seems to work just fine on my machine
        inigyou 2mo ago
        but `select` is not async I/O
    - cyberax 2mo ago
      Windows NT kernel is a marvel of engineering. It's incredibly flexible, you can build crazy stuff on top of it without having access to its source code. As an example, Parallels had a version of Docker-like containers on WINDOWS in 2006! They implemented it as a wrapper on top of the native Windows NT kernel API. But the downside of this flexibility is relatively slow filesystem operations. It was a conscious trade-off from Windows kernel developers, they thought that flexibility was more important.

Literally everything that came after Windows Me both in the consumer and server space is based on NT, to this day. So I'm not sure this argument weighs much. P.S. My personal opinion is that Windows could be a great OS but MS keeps intentionally saddling it with more and more shit in the name of getting more from the user, instead of giving more to the user.

aeyes 2mo ago
The kernel is solid, its all the userspace software where they are fumbling hard.
- VorpalWay 2mo ago
  The kernel is okish. But compared to Linux it is surprisingly bad at a number of things. Handling lots of tiny files in huge directory trees is much slower on Windows than Linux for example. I dont know if that is due to NTFS vs ext4/btrfs/xfs, or if it is some broader issue in the NT kernel. Some other things have been baffling over the years (but I belive they are now at least somewhat solved). For example in Windows 7 and older Windows would spend tens of seconds on "installing drivers" for a USB stick every time a new stick was inserted (or even an old stick inserted into a new port). I don't remember seeing this on Windows 10 (or 11), but I barely used those. But yes, compared to the userspace the kernel is way less jank. (Like how Windows Updates takes minutes to run to conclude that there are updates, and dozens of minutes to install them, while pacman -Syu on Arch can be done in second if there are no updates, and maybe 2-4 minutes in the worst case of a kernel update with dkms modules being rebuilt.)
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    At least it has async I/O, unlike Linux.
    - bigfishrunning 2mo ago
      not sure if I'm missing something, `select` seems to work just fine on my machine
      - inigyou 2mo ago
        but `select` is not async I/O
  - cyberax 2mo ago
    Windows NT kernel is a marvel of engineering. It's incredibly flexible, you can build crazy stuff on top of it without having access to its source code. As an example, Parallels had a version of Docker-like containers on WINDOWS in 2006! They implemented it as a wrapper on top of the native Windows NT kernel API. But the downside of this flexibility is relatively slow filesystem operations. It was a conscious trade-off from Windows kernel developers, they thought that flexibility was more important.