I thought UWP/Metro was Win8/10. Win11 is “Fluent”. Perhaps there were 4 phases, not just 3, but my post was already getting too long and the WinForms phase has been pretty much fully conquered by today’s fast hardware.

I think both the Windows NT Kernel and the Linux Kernel are solid speedy parts of the OS. The main bloat is what’s on top.

Windows seems to have progressively more bloated phases. Newer stock Windows programs are built from much heavier components.

1. There’s the Win32 phase, which is super fast and lightweight. Few programs are still alive using this phase, WordPad (RIP) is one of them.

2. Then there’s the broad Win64 phase, comprised of mostly Win Vista/7/8/10 parts. Word, Excel, and the old Outlook are examples of these programs. Slow upon their inception, they have become considerably faster due to better hardware, but still aren’t very snappy.

3. And finally there’s the new phase, Windows 11. Horribly bloated and laughably slow when pushed beyond the absolute basics. Examples include File Explorer, Notepad, Teams, and the new Outlook. Notepad is mostly fine, but even File Explorer takes multiple seconds to load basic things on midrange hardware. We all know how bad Teams is, and the new Outlook takes 30 seconds to launch and open an email even on high end hardware.

Much of the modern bloat comes from this latest phase, but somehow other parts of the system have seriously bloated as well, like all of the disk processes on startup and even the Windowing system, which used to be near instant on crappy hardware back in the Win2000 era, now takes up to a second on modern midrange hardware on 11.

Linux has fared better against the onset of bloat than Windows, which is the main reason why it feels much snappier and uses less memory. Despite this, you can still see Linux getting significantly heavier over the years, from the super lightweight Trinity Desktop to what we have now. But, web browsers powering many greedy tabs can easily out-bloat GNOME, to the point where Linux only feels slightly faster than Windows because everything is in a browser.

True, plus the bloated websites I see are using hundreds of thousands of lines of JavaScript. Why would you possibly need that much code? My full fledged web games use under 10,000.

A couple years ago YouTube decided to F up their search. It used to be mostly things you are searching for, now it’s:

20% thing you searched for,

20% Shorts,

10% people also watched,

10% related [extremely tangentially]

10% For You

and 30% ads.

I don’t blame anyone for wanting someone to suggest a link after YT’s search became hot garbage.

Pretty much any color is better than that ugly gray.

Is OpenRecall secure as well? One of my biggest problems with MS recall is that it stores all your personal info in plain text.

This is why I don’t use Adobe.

I’m so glad I saw the red flags from earlier and decided to stay far away from anything Adobe.

Anyways, this is the new business tactic. Start stealing confidential information by somehow forcing a new ToS change or update.

I make sure my own web game can run smoothly on crappy hardware. It runs well on my gaming laptop downclocked to 400MHz with a 4x slowdown set by Chrome. It also loads in a couple seconds with a typical crappy Internet connection of 200kbps and >10% packet loss. However, it doesn’t run smoothly on my Snapdragon 425 phone or my old Core 2 Duo laptop. Is this my game or just browser overhead?

Unfortunately, XOS has already been taken by Infinix, a budget phone brand that primarily sells in Africa, for its own ad-riddled bloated Android skin.

From my experience, while LXQt uses ~20-25% less RAM than XFCE, it runs way faster and uses less CPU than XFCE.

I wish I could semi-whitelist (graylist?) many websites, like allowing only “acceptable ads” so that the website can pay for costs and make a small profit while not blowing up my screen with ads. At the same time, many websites (Reddit, most recipe sites, and any text site with an autoplaying video) absolutely deserves a full ad blacklist for disrespecting their users so much. Still other websites deserve a full whitelist.

I’d still trust my local LLM more with sharing explicit sexual desires than some cloud service

This is one of the areas I see this whole “AI” thing being super useful. It could probably transcribe the video, separate the text into coherent sections and paragraphs, and take stills from the video as pictures. If the AI is smart enough, it could selectively pick out the right stills.

I can’t wait to see this technology in motorcycles and micro mobility vehicles. It will be a mushroom in Mario Kart IRL. And imagine this tech on drag bikes/cars

One long meandering 6 lane road that makes up the entire city. I’m not even kidding, that’s pretty much the optimal solution in the game.

Quick correction: Canva is web based so you can use it on Linux no problem.

For me, the Windows software I use are:

1. Musicbee
2. Davinci Resolve

That’s pretty much it. I could definitely switch to Linux full time, but Musicbee is soooo good that it feels like a sacrifice.

I don’t think Olive is a good alternative to davinci resolve. First, nothing is good if it crashes a lot. Second, Davinci Resolve is feature rich and super powerful, while Olive is not. The closest FOSS alternative is Kdenlive, but I’d recommend finding a distro that can run Davinci itself, as Davinci does have a native Linux client for some distros.

More UI customizations? A few simple settings could go a long way.

It’s hosted on GitHub, but I really want to self host one day.

What other features are missing? I’m still pretty much a beginner so it can be very tricky to implement things.

It’s not about paying for Windows, usually it’s included in the device you buy. The real reason why Linux helps broke people is because bloated Windows can’t run on the budget PCs they have (and they can’t just buy a faster computer)