Microsoft keeps releasing new versions of Windows.
They say each version is better than the previous one.
Is there some truth to this ? Or is this mostly marketing bullshit to push people to spend money?
Once upon a time it was true that each new version of windows was more performant than the one before.
This hasn’t been literally true for quite awhile. Windows 11 doesn’t have any net performance benefit over windows 10, and neither was 10 a raw-performance improvement over 8.1.
There is some userland code changes in system provided apps like terminal, explorer, and the task manager, but these have tended to be more “better LLM hooks” and “why didn’t we do this sooner” fixed than actual performance bits.
On the plus side, it’s not really a money grab. MS gets more from Xbox and Office subs than windows licenses, which have been non-transferable all-OS licenses going back to the windows 8 era. The version switches are still really dumb, though, and EOLing windows 10 is just penny-pinching BS.
Personal Opinion
Windows 10 and 11 are the worst so far, though I didn’t fall on the Win 8 dagger.
Windows 10: Forced OneDrive, always running-but beyond useless Cortana
Windows 11: See above, plus we did everything we could to hide interface options (right-click copy/paste is now hidden behind another click)
I switched to Bazzite a few months ago, and so far the only game I’ve had issues with is Fallout 4, single digit frame rate, but ymmv.
You may need to use mods to fix Fallout 4, but I believe Nexus already ported their vortex modloader over when you’re ready for that.
Vortex works through wine, but not natively. Nexus Mods made a new mod loader that was Linux native, but they actually just cancelled it to focus on vortex.
I just learned about Limo which is a Linux native mod loader, and it seems to be a great option.
Nexus Mods is actively developing the linux native port - check their website.
They were (with the “Nexus Mods App”), but they cancelled it literally a few days ago. As part of the announcement about shutting it down, they said they would maybe consider Linux support for vortex.
Ah, thanks for the correction.
For fallout 4 you might need to disable vsync (IPresentFrameInterval) or some similarly named setting in config file. Also you’ll need to cap the frame rate after that
I’ve never seen OneDrive forced on Win10.
It’s an option, it’s there by default, but you don’t have to use it. I never have (used the default stuff), and I use OneNote heavily with my PC, iOS, and Android, which requires sync to OneDrive - which I setup later with a user account unrelated to the account on my PC.
I haven’t had forced OneDrive on Windows 10, or Cortana.
It comes with shit installed that it shouldn’t, but every thing I have uninstalled, has stayed that way.
Other than the shitty settings menu, Windows 10 ended up okay. You just had to tweak and work around some things, which you will be doing with Linux too.
Windows 11, on the other hand, is a complete pile of shit. I dual boot Linux now and use Windows less and less.
yes, the underlying OS has improved in a few areas and kept up with standards development.
It’s too bad they made it a user monetization platform.
the underlying OS has improved in a few areas
Which ones are those?
I mean that’s a Google away. Microsoft documents it at every new version.
Here’s some non-MS stuff to read.
https://www.howtogeek.com/219098/heres-whats-different-about-windows-10-for-windows-8-users
https://www.pcworld.com/article/428654/10-things-windows-10-does-better-than-windows-8.html
https://www.techadvisor.com/article/715244/windows-8-vs-windows-10.html
https://www.techadvisor.com/article/715244/windows-8-vs-windows-10.html
https://windows101tricks.com/new-features-improvements-windows-10-compared-windows-8-1
https://www.pcgamer.com/windows-10-vs-windows-81-the-major-differences
https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/windows-8-vs-windows-10
https://www.php.cn/en/faq/642952.html
https://www.digitalcitizen.life/top-12-lesser-known-features-and-improvements-windows-10
https://www.howtogeek.com/219098/heres-whats-different-about-windows-10-for-windows-8-users
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Windows_10
Yes there is (especially in terms of feature support from Win 7 to Win 10), but it is true that there are a lot of functions mandated for Windows 11 that could definitely run on prior windows versions. While there are significant rewrites in the codebase from each major version, a lot of the base stuff stays the same for backwards compatibility’s sake, so a lot of features could totally be backported to say, Windows 10 or with enough effort, even Windows 7 or 8.1.
With that being said, if Windows is getting better for the user with each version is up for debate, but I think it’s fair to say that there’s a lot of bullshit features in Windows 11 that aren’t exactly compelling for Windows 10 users. The hardware restrictions especially are totally arbitrary, they do not need to exist whatsoever.
Microslop also isn’t exactly winning people over with their premonitions of what they want Windows to become (a cloud-base subscription where you own nothing and have perpetual data scraping), leading to some people looking at Linux distros or cracked Windows 10 IOT Enterprise LTSC as better options.
If you worked with Windows NT you’d see that there hasn’t been a lot of change. Probably the biggest code changes include control panel and start menu.
Insider, there’s been massive change along the way.
Yea, fundamental paradigm hasn’t changed from a UI perspective, but that’s just to keep people from having to re-learn too much at once.
Under the hood, the change from NT3.51 to 4 was noticeable from a stability standpoint, then from NT4 to Win2k was massive - true plug-n-play, dynamic event capability, performance and stability were significantly improved. XP was a small increase over that.
I had to reboot NT4 every day, often multiple times if I changed hardware, like using a vendor dock even.
Then Win7x64, another massive increase in performance and stability.
Win8 can die in a fire, because it wasn’t any better than 7, with some dumb stuff in the UI and the beginning of MS really scewing up control panel.
Win7 is the high water mark to me, though Win10 is virtually identical to server, it even runs exactly the same Hypervisor framework. The differences from 10/11 to server are mostly tuning, how updates are managed, and server lacks some user-focused services.
I’ve run Server Core and Win10 (for Hyper-V) on the same hardware and the performance difference wasn’t visible. It would take running a large server and heavy VM workloads (eg databases, regular VM migrations, etc), to see the difference.
I don’t see a major performance increase going to Win10 as a single-user machine, but virtualization is much faster than if I were running even Win10 with VMware workstation (naturally).
Heterogenous scheduler support for big.LITTLE CPUs seems like a big deal to me, especially with the Advent of P+E core Intels.
Is there really a technology difference between Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10 and Windows 11 ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_8
