WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else
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@Parody said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
I think the solid colors/square corners/monochrome icons were supposed to help battery life which was taken by animations, and background updates and malware checks.
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Hmm...
Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said that Meteor Lake would be the first Intel product made using Intel 4 and that prototypes had already successfully booted Windows 12 and Linux.
Has the journalist who wrote this made a typo in the article, or has Pat Gelsinger outed that Windows 12 is far enough in development that they have test versions already?
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@Atazhaia said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
Hmm...
Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said that Meteor Lake would be the first Intel product made using Intel 4 and that prototypes had already successfully booted Windows 12 and Linux.
Has the journalist who wrote this made a typo in the article, or has Pat Gelsinger outed that Windows 12 is far enough in development that they have test versions already?
Microsoft has already written off the Windows 11 brand as a skipped "bad" version, so they're preparing the next feature update as Windows 12
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@Atazhaia Gotta beat Android and iOS! Higher version = betterer.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
@Atazhaia Gotta beat Android and iOS! Higher version = betterer.
"The last Windows" was an empty promise. Unfortunately, they keep making it.
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@topspin said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
It was funnier in my head to have David Lynch as a general icon of “what the fuck do these movies mean?”, c.f. Mulholland Drive.
Dude, we are Germans. Show some patriotic pride and reference Kafka!
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@Rhywden said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
@topspin said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
It was funnier in my head to have David Lynch as a general icon of “what the fuck do these movies mean?”, c.f. Mulholland Drive.
Dude, we are Germans.
Show some patriotic pride and reference KafkaIt wasn't funnier in your head!
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@HardwareGeek said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
@Rhywden said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
@topspin said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
It was funnier in my head to have David Lynch as a general icon of “what the fuck do these movies mean?”, c.f. Mulholland Drive.
Dude, we are Germans.
Show some patriotic pride and reference KafkaIt wasn't funnier in your head!Humorverdacht is not something you even want to think about over here.
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@Rhywden language, ffs, it's bad enough with the Flemes...
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We're getting folders back!
The Shit just keeps churning...
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
We're getting folders back!
The Shit just keeps churning...
Perhaps Microsoft is playing some sort of bizarre 4D chess and this was the plan all along — everyone loves a good redemption story — or maybe it is simply trying to address the complaints holding back Windows 11 adoption.
@boomzilla called that one.
The settings app also got some love — more control panel options are moving to settings
It’s been, what, ten years now?
And they still haven’t finished moving the 3 remaining configuration options into their ugly everything-is-a-phone list?Commenter oldschool said:
Bring back ungrouping of taskbar buttons you hacks
Hah!
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@topspin said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
"The last Windows" was an empty promise. Unfortunately, they keep making it.
They probably mean "The last Windows you'll want to install"
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: People can't refuse to install newer versions of Windows if they install by themselves
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@TimeBandit said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
@topspin said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
"The last Windows" was an empty promise. Unfortunately, they keep making it.
They probably mean "The last Windows you'll want to install"
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For once, I'd agree with @Zenith. It's a pity the Extended updates only last till the end of the year
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@Zerosquare said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
For once, I'd agree with @Zenith.
7 was good at the time, but it's not now.
It's a pity the Extended updates only last till the end of the year
It really isn't.
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@loopback0 said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
7 was good at the time, but it's not now.
You know what? It works fine. And more importantly, it keeps working. I can install updates at a moment when it's convenient for me. And those updates don't randomly break things. Or override my settings. Or move things around randomly, just because "designers" try to justify their salary. Or shove advertising in my face.
Yes, Windows 10/11 has some technical improvements over 7. But I'd rather have an OS I can reasonably trust. When I have work to do, I have no time to play "what's not working today?". And when I want to relax, I definitely don't want to deal with the annoyances.
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@Zerosquare I would suggest taking off the rose-tinted glasses. 7 is just as annoying as the versions preceding and succeeding it. It's just what parts to get annoyed about that changes. Windows Update on 7 was just as much of a broken shitpile that could randomly reboot your computer as it was in XP.
Feels more like 7 is extra well regarded because the versions around it has an extra bad reputation as far as Windowses goes, with Vista being a buggy beta version and 8 doing a lot of bad choices on UX.
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@Atazhaia I never had any problems with Vista.
I also never had any problems with 8, but that's because I avoided it like the plague.
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@Zerosquare said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
And those updates don't randomly break things. Or override my settings.
Windows 7 had plenty of updates that broke things over the years.
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@loopback0 said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
@Zerosquare said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
And those updates don't randomly break things. Or override my settings.
Windows 7 had plenty of updates that broke things over the years.
But did it break things out of incompetence only or out of malice like 10/11 do?
(INB4 yes)When I disable telemetry I want it to stay disabled. And when I set a default browser of my choice, I want it to stay set like that, even if they released a new version of ChrEdge and their "we pinky-promise to behave for the next X years" pledge to the EU has run out.
The real answer is probably that Microsoft has always been shitty and will continue to be so, no matter how much people pretend they stopped being anti-competitive.
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@topspin said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
But did it break things out of incompetence only or out of malice like 10/11 do?
Both just like XP and all the others.
@topspin said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
When I disable telemetry I want it to stay disabled. And when I set a default browser of my choice, I want it to stay set like that, even if they released a new version of ChrEdge and their "we pinky-promise to behave for the next X years" pledge to the EU has run out.
Which is how W10 and (so far) W11 have worked for me.
They all work fine for some people and terribly for others.
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I feel like I had fewer problems in the Win7 era than I ever did in the Win10 era.
Every single update feels like it’s a roll of the dice if it’ll break something, I never had that feeling in the Win7 era.
I was almost more frustrated then by “you want to do an update, fine, get on it with so I can get back to shooting space aliens” and the fact it was a chore. An unexciting brainless chore.
Win10 on the other hand feels like an emotional rollercoaster. And it’s not like I’m fighting vendor-crapware, since Windows 1809 wouldn’t upgrade on my machine for never-adequately-explained reasons - it shat itself and refused to upgrade cleanly, would figure it out after 3 failed reboots and revert until it tried it again the following week. Something about drives (this was a small C SSD and a larger D spinny rust drive) and it got confused even though it was perfectly able to figure out how to revert itself and reboot.
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@Arantor yeah, it's stuff like that where I appreciate always being a couple of years behind in those major updates. Though honestly I spend basically all my time on a Windows host (which, once again forgot how to use the laptop's screen) using a linux guest VM.
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I was salty they've announced Windows 11 a few days after I finally upgraded to the "final version of Windows". I don't know why. Past experience should have informed me I wouldn't be missing anything good.
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@boomzilla said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
yeah, it's stuff like that where I appreciate always being a couple of years behind in those major updates.
Yeah. I used to follow the bleeding edge before, but these days ... let things settle for a bit, and only upgrade when the dust has settled. If things go well, skip a generation or so.
It's not exactly like Windows 11 has any super pressing reasons for upgrading anyway. (E.g., DirectStorage seemed like something that could have been worth experimenting with, but v1.0 turned out to be quite lame. I don't even remember any other features that they've mentioned off the top of my head -- at least not ones that I would count as a "feature".)
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@cvi said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
DirectStorage seemed like something that could have been worth experimenting with
I've heard this name talked about a bit but cannot imagine what it is or why it should be interesting to me.
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@boomzilla Optimized loading of game assets from harddrive. Requires an NVMe SSD, but can technically work on anything including floppy drives apparently.
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@Atazhaia said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
7 is just as annoying as the versions preceding and succeeding it.
It's been a rock-solid OS for me.
@Atazhaia said in [WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else](/post
Windows Update on 7 was just as much of a broken shitpile that could randomly reboot your computer as it was in XP.
I've never experienced it on 7. If you configure it not to reboot automatically, it actually doesn't. And it doesn't "forget" that setting randomly (unlike 1x).
(Don't get me wrong: Windows Update is still a piece of crap that's slow as molasses.)@loopback0 said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
Windows 7 had plenty of updates that broke things over the years.
Again, in all of my years using Windows 7, I experienced an update breaking things once. And it was just a matter of uninstalling the update. Meanwhile, Windows 1x updates are like playing Russian roulette.
@loopback0 said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
Both just like XP and all the others.
No. MS had a pretty big change of strategy regarding QA starting with Windows 8. They fired a large part of their testing team and switched to a "move fast and break things" model.
I'm not saying they never made mistakes before, but things are significantly worse than they used to be.
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@Atazhaia said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
can technically work on anything including floppy drives apparently.
I guess I know what @Tsaukpaetra is going to do next.
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@Zerosquare Move fast and break things was a mistake. Feels like MS went "other vendors are doing a 6-month release cycle, so we should too". And then that fell apart when they couldn't make content worthy of such an upgrade cycle, judging by how the version naming went...
Why is it so hard to only make a major release when there is something worthy of a major release? Why must it all come on predefined times instead of naturally?
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@Zecc said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
@Atazhaia I never had any problems with Vista.
I also never had any problems with 8, but that's because I avoided it like the plague.
And I've not had problems on 10 or 11.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
And I've not had problems on 10 or 11.
Except 11 won't let me put the task bar where it belongs. (I only run 11 in a VM for testing purposes. Staying on 10 for now)
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@Atazhaia said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
Why is it so hard to only make a major release when there is something worthy of a major release? Why must it all come on predefined times instead of naturally?
Because software methodologies are fashion/religion and they spread irregardless of their results.
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@Atazhaia said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
@boomzilla Optimized loading of game assets from harddrive. Requires an NVMe SSD, but can technically work on anything including floppy drives apparently.
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@Zerosquare said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
switched to a "move fast and break things" model.
That move was a success
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@Atazhaia said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
@boomzilla Optimized loading of game assets from harddrive. Requires an NVMe SSD, but can technically work on anything including floppy drives apparently.
I've only read about it very tangentially, so I know just as much about it as that one sentence of yours: Some games-stuff for faster IO, basically.
But that still leaves me confused what it's actually supposed to be doing differently. The implementation of disk IO is completely under the control of OS, and you can already do async IO with the current API. So if there's any new magic they use to make IO faster, why do they need a new API for it? Your program hands over a buffer to the OS, the OS schedules async IO and immediately returns. Why not use whatever "DirectStorage" does internally there?
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@Arantor said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
Something about drives
Probably your EFI partition was 100MB instead of 250MB or your recovery partition was 10GB instead of 20GB, so it couldn't quite hold all the old files (for roll back) and all the new files (for roll forward) at the same time. Which was Microsoft's fault when they created those partitions.
@Atazhaia said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
Why must it all come on predefined times instead of naturally?
Management at their enterprise customers loved having a predictable release cadence. Besides keeping units of change smaller, it allowed them to specifically schedule around it (pilot rollout three months afterward, general rollout nine months afterward, documentation updates
twenty four months afterwardnever) instead of having to deal with prior commitments being overridden. Theoretically.@topspin said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
Why not use whatever "DirectStorage" does internally there?
It has several preconditions that not all I/O will meet. Things like "must be a multiple of
$clusterSize
/$pageSize
/$somethingElse
", "must follow these lifetime rules, which are stricter than the normal non-blocking I/O lifetime rules", "must be to a device that supports Native Command Queuing"...
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@TwelveBaud said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
@topspin said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
Why not use whatever "DirectStorage" does internally there?
It has several preconditions that not all I/O will meet. Things like "must be a multiple of
$clusterSize
/$pageSize
/$somethingElse
", "must follow these lifetime rules, which are stricter than the normal non-blocking I/O lifetime rules", "must be to a device that supports Native Command Queuing"...But the calling program, even if it's aware of the new fancy DirectStorage API, can't change the hardware's capabilities anyway. So, basically, the normal API could just detect if hardware supports it and the IO request meets the size/alignment/whatever requirements and then automatically pick the new vs. the old path.
Which just leaves the "lifetime rules". I guess you mean the new API requires the buffer to stick around unmodified for the duration of IO, so it can do a zero-copy operation, whereas the old one required a copy, or something like that? In that case, have the old API still perform a copy and then call the zero-copy code. That'll give you a slight performance benefit for explicitly calling the new API over the old one, but the rest should still be identical.
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@Arantor said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
I feel like I had fewer problems in the Win7 era than I ever did in the Win10 era.
One problem I never had in the Win7 era was waking up on Wednesday morning to find all the applications I had been using the previous night gone, because oh crap; yesterday was Tuesday, and I guess it must have been Patch Tuesday; thanks for (not) warning me you're about to reboot.
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@HardwareGeek said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
@Arantor said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
I feel like I had fewer problems in the Win7 era than I ever did in the Win10 era.
One problem I never had in the Win7 era was waking up on Wednesday morning to find all the applications I had been using the previous night gone, because oh crap; yesterday was Tuesday, and I guess it must have been Patch Tuesday; thanks for (not) warning me you're about to reboot.
Don't forget, it also woke up while in your bag. And
crashedbricked because the battery ran out in the middle of the update.
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@topspin said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
@TwelveBaud said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
@topspin said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
Why not use whatever "DirectStorage" does internally there?
It has several preconditions that not all I/O will meet. Things like "must be a multiple of
$clusterSize
/$pageSize
/$somethingElse
", "must follow these lifetime rules, which are stricter than the normal non-blocking I/O lifetime rules", "must be to a device that supports Native Command Queuing"...But the calling program, even if it's aware of the new fancy DirectStorage API, can't change the hardware's capabilities anyway. So, basically, the normal API could just detect if hardware supports it and the IO request meets the size/alignment/whatever requirements and then automatically pick the new vs. the old path.
Which just leaves the "lifetime rules". I guess you mean the new API requires the buffer to stick around unmodified for the duration of IO, so it can do a zero-copy operation, whereas the old one required a copy, or something like that? In that case, have the old API still perform a copy and then call the zero-copy code. That'll give you a slight performance benefit for explicitly calling the new API over the old one, but the rest should still be identical.Apparently it's about compression:
https://www.howtogeek.com/785339/what-is-directstorage-on-windows-11-and-xbox/
The DirectStorage API shifts data decompression duty from the CPU to the GPU. This is a great idea because most of the compressed video game assets are going to the GPU for rendering anyway.
...
By bypassing the CPU, those assets are already where they need to be as soon as they’re decompressed. There’s no need to wait for the relatively slow CPU to finish its decompression work first.This new way of moving compressed data around removes the CPU as a bottleneck and lets the SSD and GPU both work at their maximum potential.
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@dcon said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
Don't forget, it also woke up while in your bag. And
crashedbricked because the battery ran out in the middle of the update.Or in my case, woke me up twice in one night.
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@Zecc said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
@dcon said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
Don't forget, it also woke up while in your bag. And
crashedbricked because the battery ran out in the middle of the update.Or in my case, woke me up twice in one night.
My work laptop would stop that pretty darn quick. The bootstrapper defaults to ubuntu. And then requires a bios password to unlock the disk. Not sure what it would do on battery in that state..
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@boomzilla said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
Apparently it's about compression.
That was part of the original idea, but didn't materialize in 1.0.
Essentially two parts to it:
- move data directly from storage to GPU / VRAM, bypassing the CPU, caches and even system memory (assuming you have the right NVME drive and GPU)
- let the GPU also do decompression
From what I understand, you can kinda do the first part in Windows 11. However, 1.0 didn't include support for decompression on the GPU, so if you use assets that need to be decompressed, you need to go via the CPU and do the decompression there.
The PS5 introduced this with dedicated hardware for IO and (de)compression. NVIDIA has something proprietary. DirectStorage was supposed to be a standardized solution [on Windows], but turned out somewhat halfassed.
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@topspin As mentioned, the idea wasn't a generalized IO API, but rather a method for pushing data into GPU memory. For GPUs with dedicated VRAM, you'd ideally bypass system RAM, CPU etc etc whenever possible.
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What @boomzilla quoted said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
When DirectStorage is active, video game loading screens can be all but eliminated.
Right, right. So there's no soundbanks to load, no game state that needs to be set up and servers won't need to be contacted and clients synced for multiplayer anymore either? Not to mention that it generally applies only to open worlds and other large levels, and not where game's design consists of separate levels or maybe has some non-traditional design altogether.
Jesus on a pogo stick, to whom are they bazooning this dumb shit? I know gamedev has become just as lazy fucks as everybody, taking Unreal or Unity (the definition of cargo cult) and feverishly clicking on things until some wild shapes appear in approximately the right order, but damn, what is it actually selling? And to whom?
Most games can't even use VRAM and RAM to the full extent, settling for "was no pop-in on Xbox at 30 fps checkerboard, I guess" setting and calling it a day.
And sometimes to prevent asset theft and data mining, paks/assetbundles are encrypted. Who's going to handle that?
@TwelveBaud said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
Things like "must be a multiple of $clusterSize / $pageSize / $somethingElse"
Ah, yes. Filesystem and spinning rust had significant overhead for accessing small files, and cluster (sector on CDs) size wasted space. Hence all kinds of packing formats, starting from simple offset+length tables to quasi-filesystems were made to solve that, with entire websites devoted to unpacking whatever bloody format was invented here by some sandal and socks wearing gamdev crank. And now we're going to have the space wasting problem made into a feature, to accomodate DirectumStorage requirements, yes? Very conventient to sell those large
Gen5 = betterer, etc. etc. SSDs while not actually deliver worth shit.Gen3Gen4 = betterWasn't DDR5 supposed to solve this problem by never having to read from the storage again? Ah yes, that was also utter bunkum. Not only it's twice as expensive (if it can be found at all), but first-gen boards don't even support more than 128 GB (and most haven't been tested past 64).
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
And sometimes to prevent asset theft and data mining, paks/assetbundles are encrypted. Who's going to handle that?
The games are handing over unencrypted data to the graphics API / GPU. Intercepting those calls will give you most of the assets anyway, at least as they're being used. Even if games were to use custom formats (to the extent that's feasible), they also need to hand over the shaders that do the decoding of those custom formats, so...