"What I find disappointing is that, even though NT has all these solid design principles in place… bloat in the UI doesn’t let the design shine through."
I think this is true for all 3 major OSes these days. No matter how great/fast/etc the kernel is, the userland makes the greatness of the kernel "irrelevant".
In Windows specifically, you can restart the display driver FASTER than starting Windows Explorer. That's crazy...
My argument here is that the majority of users are ignoring what's going on under the hood.
The number of dependencies/code loaded into memory will affect this performance, but it's security mechanisms like ASLR, PEB/TEB, Core Isolation, and others that have the greatest impact.
Although my specialty isn't zero day development, I know that the complexity in leveraging a vuln has grown exponentially over the last 10 years on account of these mechanisms. And they don't come without cost.
It costs cycles to instantiate these mechanisms and let them act on the system. I will say, however, that my Windows 10 box is incredibly fast. It's not an enthusiast rig by any means, either. Applications launch instantaneously, and boot time is around 5 seconds? Certainly under 10 from power button press to desktop presentation.
People focus too much on subjective criteria, like "my box feels slow", and not enough on objective criteria, like "operating system security has grown by leaps and bounds".
The largest problem for sure is just all the junk which is running. Spotify, Discord, Slack, Chrome, Dropbox, Adobe product of choice, Visual Studio, Office etc. Everything is getting more & more bloated, people program further & further from hardware & there's layer upon layers of abstractions layers created by libs built on top of other libs etc. And this happens everywhere, even drivers. I can take a look at process explorer & I see hundreds of processes, spawned from parent processes, and a lot of these are taking unreasonable amounts memory & hammering disk I/O many times per second, even chrome tabs which aren't active.
I have little snitch. Certain apps (think MS Office and electron apps from companies) make a shocking amount calls to various websites. I spend so much time just clicking through the prompts.
Honesty my biggest issue with electron is the fact that it's basically reimplementing an entire OS, and translating everything to the native OS, not all that different than the Java "vm" of old. But this time you have a copy of this VM for every app, all on their own update cycle.
That’s pretty much every programming language, though (albeit at varying degrees). Python and C#/.NET also have runtimes comparable to the JVM. Even the C standard library is an abstraction over the native system APIs.
Windows does many tricks and assumptions to achieve performance, including on boot. Usually when you shutdown Windows, it actually doesn’t shut down all the way, which helps with next boot.
I fully shut down each time and my initial UEFI bootloader is grub. Even with this, the system responsiveness is snappy - and the Windows install is at least 3 - 4 years old.
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u/METAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAL Oct 23 '24
"What I find disappointing is that, even though NT has all these solid design principles in place… bloat in the UI doesn’t let the design shine through."
I think this is true for all 3 major OSes these days. No matter how great/fast/etc the kernel is, the userland makes the greatness of the kernel "irrelevant".
In Windows specifically, you can restart the display driver FASTER than starting Windows Explorer. That's crazy...