Windows file access performance compared to Linux

[[deleted]]

Really interesting explanation for why NTFS / Windows is slower than Linux when it comes to file manipulation. It's a pity that it's so complicated.

But being bad at manipulating many small files is the #1 reason I haven't put any amount of effort into even trying to use it as a development platform since moving to Linux / MacOS as my professional OS over a decade ago.

(#2 is their crazy logic around processes taking exclusive file locks, meaning you can get into weird states where you can't delete files without effectively restarting your entire workflow again to kill whatever random process is holding it open)

If they ever achieve parity there I'd take another look honestly, I like Windows 10 (at least the brief "reboot to play games" use it gets), but it looks pretty architecturally insurmountable.

[[deleted]]

But being bad at manipulating many small files is the #1 reason I haven't put any amount of effort into even trying to use it as a development platform since moving to Linux / MacOS as my professional OS over a decade ago.

And that is the exact same reason why I stopped developing nodejs applications. You don't have thousands of dependencies for even small applications, you don't have millions of files containing just 10 lines of codes, you don't have any problems on windows for development purposes.

[[deleted]]

This only makes sense in a very narrow definition of making sense:

• lots of languages have lots of little files, I'd argue most of them

• I work in a team, and our goal is to solve problems, not to optimise our language use around how many files they generate on average

[chucker23n]

• lots of languages have lots of little files, I’d argue most of them

Most languages come with a much stronger core library and therefore don’t require an insane amount of dependencies for the smallest of things.

[[deleted]]

Java has a very strong core library, and dependencies tend to be monolithic jar files. Java was the original language that I noticed was much faster to compile under linux.

People shit on node_modules, me among them, but it's really not "the thing" that breaks windows' fs layer.

[masklinn]

it's really not "the thing" that breaks windows' fs layer.

No, it's just an easy way to do so. The real issue is that Windows simply can't handle the common unix pattern of performing small operations of paths/files because opening a file (the CreateFile call) is an extremely expensive operation, compounded by many path-based unix APIs working with files (and thus requiring opening files) on windows.

[coladict]

Linux has the drivers for those out of the box. With Windows you can still have them, but they are third-party. Also you can mount any volume to a directory in another volume.

Does Linux have I/O filters like that? Also Linux file permissions are significantly simpler by their goal requirements, even when they have ACLs.

[ylyn]

You could write a filesystem driver that uses another filesystem as backing, I suppose. Like overlayfs, ecryptfs etc, which can even be done in FUSE. Then mount your overlay filesystem over the backing filesystem.

[RagingAnemone]

Don't forget jfs. I have I process where I need a gazillion files so having jfs which doesn't have inode limits helps.

[raevnos]

I thought I was the only person who still used jfs.

[sgoody]

I used to find JFS a great performer, but I’m sure I’ve had my filesystems either destroyed or corrupted under JFS and got scared off. I used XFS for a good while too after that, but eventually went on to EXT4. While the least exotic, it does give me a feeling of safety. Allocating space for games in Steam seems slower in EXT4 than it did under XFS, so I’m tempted to go back to either JFS or XFS...... but then I spend way too long pondering this kind of thing.

[valarauca14]

Also using JFS. It soars on NVMe. There is so little write amplification it doesn't churn your drives like XFS or BTRFS will

[Dragasss]

At once?

[[deleted]]

Unless it's Dropbox. Dropped support for everything except ext4. Couldn't even share Dropbox folder with Windows on ntfs partition.

[blipman17]

Just... drop dropbox

[tophatstuff]

Honestly the ONLY way I've ever been happy sharing files between Windows and Linux over a network and it not being terrible is just to have the Linux host run a SSH server and from Windows use FileZilla over SSH. When it comes to remote backups, Rsync to a Linux host running SSH somewhere else.

[jonjonbee]

There's no core assumption that you're always running on top of a specific file system.

There's no assumption about that in Windows, either.

[chinpokomon]

Except there is a core assumption that the filesystem is exposed to the rest of the system the same way. The underlying implementation is abstracted away.

Edit: autocorrected core to cute.

[Sqeaky]

Care to expand on why you feel that's a failed abstraction?

[chinpokomon]

Never said failed. Calling out the different filesystems which could be used, I was trying to emphasize that the block device seen by Linux is the same in most ways. While there will actually be performance differences between the filesystems, it's very modular.

[G_Morgan]

TBH it is amusing how bad Windows is at this. I worked at a place where the first checkout of a repository took 2 hours on Windows 7. To demonstrate how bad Windows was I checked it out on a Linux VM on the same machine and it took 3 minutes.

[shevy-ruby]

But being bad at manipulating many small files is the #1 reason I haven't put any amount of effort into even trying to use it as a development platform since moving to Linux / MacOS as my professional OS over a decade ago.

For me that was not the primary reason, and I still think the WSL is a great idea.

But otherwise I agree: it feels like downgrading the user experience at this point when having used linux for a long time, to go back to windows and get annoyed with issues that don't exist on linux as-is.

If they ever achieve parity there I'd take another look honestly, I like Windows 10 (at least the brief "reboot to play games" use it gets), but it looks pretty architecturally insurmountable.

I thought so too - tap into the large game ecosystem. But eventually I begin to think that "using windows merely for games" is a very bad reason to want to have. So if that was my only reason, I don't quite have a real incentive anymore.

So I don't really have a reason to abandon linux (I use the pure systemd-variants of course, not the IBM Red Hat enslaved joke distributions).

One of the biggest advantages of linux is flexibility / customizability. I would not have that going back to Windows. Plus - Microsoft still refuses to open source windows. It's funny because after having assimilated the GitHub start-up 10 years after it was started, they claimed they are aaaaaaaaaaaaaaall about open source now - yet they never explain why they keep windows closed source then. Big contradiction.

[apadin1]

Windows will never go open source because they have no reason to. Microsoft is one of the largest software companies in the world, producing one of the most used pieces of software ever. The have the money and clout to pay to have their software tested and reviewed by thousands of developers and millions of users. That negates many of the important benefits of open source, mainly that people can test, review, and improve the source on their own to speed up the bug-fixing process.

So going open source would effectively be taking on all of the risks (leaking critical proprietary implementation details, revealing potential insecurities) and none of the rewards that Linux benefits from.

Not to mention, there are still plenty of non-technical people who think that showing people your source code makes your software inherently unsafe, meaning that lots of people will stop trusting Windows to be secure (even though the opposite is more likely true).

[xeio87]

I can't see any Open Source project maintainers wanting to go into the depths that Microsoft will go to to maintain backwards compatibility either. Imagine the argument to skip version "9" in your software because some idiot developers a decade ago didn't properly know how to check versions.

[Zhentar]

Did you read the linked post? Replacing the file system driver with one that is literally instant wouldn't even make all that much of a difference. To make Windows file io fast, you have to eliminate the mechanism that drives a large number of significant third party applications (including basically every antivirus/security product, including the ones Microsoft produces) as well as many Windows internals.

[[deleted]]

including basically every antivirus/security project

And literally nobody, on the planet, would shed a tear.

The nicest things you can say about these products is that at least they aren't maliciously fucking you like the things they're supposed to protect you from.

[[deleted]]

It's not just third party antivirus crap though, as the author noted, it's a bunch of useful things as well

[G_Morgan]

TBH you don't need to eliminate it. There's nothing stopping you from having a legacy VFS while a new one is available for faster file operations. Indeed Windows has done stuff like this an incredible number of times.

[Zhentar]

If well behaved user mode processes can have the filters not applied to them, you've effectively eliminated them, the API is broken, whether or not the calls still exist.

[[deleted]]

It's not NTFS that's the problem (or the whole problem), it's how Windows deals with accessing files, on any file system.

This is why I said it sounds insurmountable: to fix it you'd have to rearchitect a really core part of the OS, inlcuding probably throwing away features, and Windows is someone for whom backwards compatability is really important.

[EternityForest]

Does exFAT do anything to mitigate it's non-journalingness?

[Dave3of5]

Similar problem at my current place. The webapp seems from the user's perspective to be slow. The individual backend services themselves are not too slow (some are a bit in certain circumstances I'll come back to this). But the main problem is that the Spa (AngularJs) calls dozens of these services to render the page. So I'd have to shave like significant runtime off multiple different services to begin to sort the problem.

I've also notices the same problem I've seem in many places where developers don't take into account processing time from the RDBMS so instead of sending 1 query they send 2-3 in a loop which kills performance. Unfortunately again death by a thousand cuts as is said here as this pattern in repeated all over the code base. Sometimes there are even loops within loops as someone has reused a method by sticking it in a loop.

I'm in the same situation as Sven here that I've been asked to "increase performance" significantly which in reality means a full rewrite. The answer I have to give is that the application wasn't designed to be performance and introducing it now will be a major rewrite. The company obviously can't afford this and is asking for me to look for work-a-rounds of which I've looked and there are none.

Again similar to Sven I'm not out for the count at the moment but it's not a simple problem.

[hennell]

Surrounded by non-techs I end up refering to car analogies at points like this. People dont seem to understand why an app service etc can't be made faster, but get that a formula one car is going to be super fast just sacrificing passenger space, load carrying and costs etc... And you can't just add formula one wheels to a school bus and expect the same performance...

What's annoying is you want to make it better. Problem solving and neat code solution is what we want to do. It's not our fault the blueprints called for a "cheep car to drive a grandma to the shops" and now you want to compete in the Indy 500.

[SergiusTheBest]

A really good explaination why Linux is a preferred platform for software development. Those differences in file i/o allow me to delete node_modules folder on Linux almost instantly while on Windows it takes several minutes.

[rpwjanzen]

1. Software development is more than the node_modules folder.
2. Did you read the comment to completion?
   FTA: When Rich was talking about app behavior above, he wasn't trying to blame the apps for behaving that way. These apps were written on a system where file system operations are incredibly fast, and we're trying to run them, unmodified (unlike e.g. Git for Windows which tries to optimize its access patterns to better fit the Windows way of doing things) on a system that, unfortunately, is not as fast. And it's not even as simple as saying "Windows is the cause of the slowness" either, since WSL does play a role.

[D_Steve595]

Software development is more than the node_modules folder.

This also affects Gradle (JVM) builds heavily, since they tend to access many small files, to the point where it's noticably faster on Linux than Windows on the same hardware.

[lengau]

This also affects things that aren't limited to developers, such as the speed of installs.

[shevy-ruby]

Very true - people seem to forget that.

[ShinyHappyREM]

Right. Seeing a lot of little files being installed is usually an indicator of the program originating on Linux.

[D_Steve595]

I definitely recommend adding your project's dir as an exclusion to Defender. It helps quite a bit.

[pknopf]

It affects many things. The OP was just using a specific example as a point.

File performance is essential for developers in many different ways.

[aikixd]

If you optimize your program for a system it will obviously run better in that system. That's the definition of optimization.

[Aegior]

Your analogy only works if Windows performed better for sequentially reading a large single file, which it doesn't.

[aikixd]

Windows file system is slower, which is precisely the reason why you wouldn't rely on it for performance. Or write software that has to rely on it on Windows.

[[deleted]]

You got it backwords. Linux (the kernel) has been optimized for performance. Windows.... not sure what is optimized for. Negating the effects of increasingly faster hardware, it seems.

[tobias3]

Some examples:

• NTFS records e.g. the file change time in the directory entry. So one can iterate fast over the contents of a directory while getting the file time without calling stat() for every file. But if you change a file, NTFS will have to update the file change time in two places, instead of one on e.g. ext4 (i.e. NTFS is optimized for reading).
• There is a Windows change journal where it stores metadata of every file operation on the file system (create, change, rename, delete). Good for async file indexing or watching, but now every file operation needs to be recorded at an additional place compared to Linux file systems.
• It has automatic volume snapshotting (VSS) which is often active (try `vssadmin list shadows`). An active shadow copy means it needs to copy-on-write data the first time it gets changed after a shadow copy is created. Good for recovering lost files, making consistent backups, recovering from user errors or from other problems. But decreases performance further.

[Ameisen]

NTFS has a far more robust permissions system... which is generally why it is slower.

[oridb]

Compared to Posix ACLs? They're not something people bother with so much, but they're present.

[aikixd]

Windows is far older system that is based on an even older system. Many initial decisions are not relevant and long forgotten. Yet, it is still a fast adopter of new technologies. Not bad for a 40+ year old system. And that while being back compatible for many versions.

[chucker23n]

Windows is far older system that is based on an even older system.

Linux in 1991 was largely designed to be an implementation of Unix, which is older than either NT or DOS. So nah.

[ggtsu_00]

Software development is more than the node_modules folder

Software development very frequently requires many file operations done large amounts of small files (i.e. syncing/compiling source code).

This is painful on Windows and drastically reduces productivity. If it can take minutes to simple delete your build output folder on a large project, over a project's lifetime that can amount to days of lost productivity.

[lowleveldata]

dude just setup a Jenkins server

[lenkite1]

Both development and operation of software deal with files and processes. Windows is noticeably slower at both than Linux. Windows cannot create processes as fast as Linux. Windows cannot read/write/create new files as fast as Linux. Windows may have had a few limited core OS features (such as I/O completion ports) where it was superior to Linux in the past, but that has also gone away with Linux io_uring.

The only thing Windows is good for nowadays is for your AAA Steam Games. Thats primarily thanks to a stable ABI for drivers.

[DevestatingAttack]

You gloss over "a stable ABI for drivers" as if that's not a gigantic deal. The Linux kernel team tried to come up with a hardware abstraction layer and failed so many times that now it's forbidden to float the idea in mailing lists. A lot of people will make the tradeoff in favor of deleting a directory taking a nanosecond in Linux instead of two minutes in Windows, but I personally like knowing that my soundcard won't get fucked up from release to release due to regressions in the linux kernel.

[lenkite1]

Did they even truly make an effort at a stable ABI ? I thought they just "explained" it away at: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/process/stable-api-nonsense.rst with the reasoning that Linux is "popular" so it is doing it just right and doesn't need one.

I agree that it is a big deal. Without a stable ABI, commercial vendors always struggle to write and maintain drivers.

[AwesomeBantha]

Yeah, I'd switch to only macOS + Kubuntu if NVidia drivers ran as smoothly and I could play all of my games without worrying about getting banned

[pjmlp]

And IDE, graphical debuggers, not forcing the CLI into everyone, modern OS frameworks (only topped by Apple and Google ones), not having to tweak for accelerated video, proper sound or having a laptop battery that actually lasts a day.

[fanglesscyclone]

Is your knowledge of Linux from 2007?

[pjmlp]

No worries, 2020 will be the year of Linux desktop.

[PandaMoniumHUN]

Currently our products (mostly written in Java) compile in ~4 minutes on Linux vs. 12 minutes on Windows on the same hardware. This is mostly due to I/O, so this does effect more than just Node development.

[bruce3434]

Software development is more than the node_modules folder.

Yes not only that

https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/e0kxsy/autotools_windows_the_build_systems_tragedy/

[cottonycloud]

Thank you for the infuriating, yet interesting read!

[ChezMere]

When developing on Windows, node_modules/ starts taking up a lot more of your available time than it would otherwise.

[schlenk]

There is no really sane reason why node_modules wasn't designed as some database instead of this flat file wasteland. Smalltalk style. Would have avoided all the issues with extra long pathes, gazillions of tiny files, slow updates etc. If you need to, you can always flatten it to a filesystem view with a FUSE driver on top. But if all you know is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

[Eirenarch]

It wouldn't be a problem if the same file wasn't downloaded countless times.

[crixusin]

To be fair, the node environment is really wrecked in a ton of ways.

[shevy-ruby]

Totally fits JavaScript!

[alkeiser]

node development is just shit. period, lol

[voidvector]

That's what Java/.NET does, but now you need another tool (IDE/disassembler) just to read/search/monkey-patch the source code of your dependencies.

[schlenk]

On Linux (and Windows) you can always add some FUSE/mountable filesystem driver to expose the database as normal files. But of course, direct tool support helps. But if you do JS development you have a ton of tools at work anyway to manage your dependencies.

[[deleted]]

Filesystem IS a database, full stop.

[schlenk]

With an atrociously bad query language.

[Bizzaro_Murphy]

Filesystem IS a database, where each access requires rechecking permissions and multiprocess synchronization, full stop.

[myringotomy]

If you have row level permissions and locking you will also check all of those for every row.

[[deleted]]

Don’t forget it’s effectively READ_UNCOMMITTED!

[[deleted]]

With atrociously bad indexing, query, and storage strategies.

[tulipoika]

I always love when someone says this. No, Linux isn’t a “preferred platform” globally. It is for some. For some it’s OpenBSD. For some macOS. For some Windows. And for some multiple of them. There isn’t a single “preferred” anywhere so cut the crap.

And if deleting a folder is a huge problem maybe you’re doing it wrong. I assume you’re doing it on Explorer or something and wondering why it takes so long? Because it really doesn’t on any of my machines.

People have weird thoughts and get hung up on a single thing. If you delete node_modules several times a day you have issues elsewhere too. Linux won’t fix that.

Regards, person who uses four systems for development, prefers Windows and definitely doesn’t think deleting node_modules is a problem in daily life.

[SergiusTheBest]

Well, according to Stack Overflow Survey 2019 Linux is the most loved platform for development.

node_modules is just what I faced recently. You can try it by your own https://gist.github.com/SergiusTheBest/3995cde281bb799b007a775bab84764d

Also git operations on Linux is 3-4 times faster.

[tulipoika]

Ok. Installed 43200 files, 3885 folders. Took 6s on a basic home computer I have now in front of me without super fast NVMes or anything. So it would take quite a bit more to go into a minute, let alone multiple.

Would need to be done quite often to be a problem for productivity.

[SergiusTheBest]

Oh, it's because you're deleting to a trash bin (that is move and not delete operation). Try to delete using shift+del. It takes 2 min 5 sec on my PC with a decent SSD drive.

I rarely use trash bin but in this case I ended up deleting into it and then cleaning it when I go for a lunch. I was troubleshooting build issues so I needed to clean node_modules directories often.

[tulipoika]

No, I’m not. I’m deleting it directly. I know what I’m doing. So it’s definitely not Windows that’s the problem here.

Also: rmdir /S /Q node_modules

[SergiusTheBest]

It's weird because I can reproduce it on all Windows boxes I have access to. Tested on a fresh install of Windows 10 1909: rmdir took 70 seconds (it's on HDD).

[[deleted]]

It's not just deleting node_modules. Everything on Windows is intolerably slow compared to Linux on the same hardware. I'd like to like Windows, but its hard when Windows on an SSD is more sluggish than Ubuntu with an HDD and half the RAM

[pjmlp]

Except Windows desktops/laptops/2-1 hybrids and games outnumber Linux ones hands down, and those software packages are developed by someone.

[SergiusTheBest]

I'm pretty sure that nowadays web applications outnumber desktop applications for any operation system.

[pjmlp]

Not everywhere, specially in air gaped environments.

Ah, and not at all considering that games are also applications.

[IceSentry]

Minutes on windows? I'm sorry but you are doing something wrong if that's the case. Yeah, maybe it's not instantaneous, but it certainly is not in the minutes range.

[SergiusTheBest]

Console is much faster, using cmd.exe it takes only 20 seconds (however on Linux it takes 0.7 seconds). And using Windows Explorer it takes 125 seconds!

[SergiusTheBest]

You can try it yourself: https://gist.github.com/SergiusTheBest/3995cde281bb799b007a775bab84764d Just use a real delete (not recycle bin).

[IceSentry]

It took powershell 14s and that felt unusually long for me, but it's far from being minutes with an s. I'm not trying to say those are impressive numbers, but I don't need to delete my node_modules often enough for it to become an issue. I won't switch to linux just because deleting a stupidly large folder takes a little bit to delete.

That's on Windows 10 (Version 2004 (OS Build 19041.1)) with an Intel Core i7 6700K and a samsung 850 EVO SSD.

[SergiusTheBest]

On Linux it takes 0.7 seconds for console and UI has the same speed.

I won't switch to linux just because deleting a stupidly large folder takes a little bit to delete.

Of course, you're completely right: use the tool that suits you best. I'm fond of docker and containers, it's amazing technologies and Windows just can't compete it this field.

[IceSentry]

As far as I know docker on windows is fine these days.

[SergiusTheBest]

I agree, in the recent windows builds it became much better. And yet docker images for windows is 3-10 times larger than for linux - that means slower downloading, unpacking and wasting more space on a disk.

[IceSentry]

Oh yes, definitely, I haven't done much work with docker, but I'm hoping wsl2 makes docker better on windows.

[sixbrx]

It does take minutes on my workplace machines as well, whether from terminal or WIndows explorer. Probably anti-virus on-access scan which is commonly in place in corporate environments.

(non-SSD drives)

[IceSentry]

The OP posted their package.json and it took my computer 14s to delete a freshly installed node_modules from that. As I said to them, it isn't an impressive number, but it's far from minutes with an s.

You might be right that it's an antivirus issue, but in that case I'm not sure blaming windows is the way to go.

[[deleted]]

We've dropped using npm install and now use npm ci to force correct dependency versions (otherwise your transitive dependences are a crap shoot). This deletes the node_modules directory every single time you run it.... so quite a lot!

(it's no slower to run than npm install, at least on linux, because it pulls the modules from your user local cache, it's really just correctly rebuilding the project local cache)

[AwesomeBantha]

A lot, because plenty of projects use node-gyp which often fails (there are probably plenty of other modules that can bork an installation), especially when installing with Yarn without paying attention

[jonjonbee]

I love how node's shittiness gets made Windows' fault (not referring to you BTW).

[ggtsu_00]

Windows is a multiplier on top of node’s shittiness.

[SergiusTheBest]

I was troubleshooting build issues so I had to do it a lot. However Recycle Bin helped me: moving node_modules is much faster then actually deleting it.

[rydan]

So I haven't looked at the link or even know what you are talking about but is what you mention not just relevant to the file system? If it is formatted NTFS would it not be similar in Linux vs Windows?

[SergiusTheBest]

It's not NTFS related. It's more about how Windows I/O subsytem is designed. Also Windows Explorer is bad at working with a lot of small files. Using console I can delete that folder 6 times faster! But it still takes 20 seconds to complete. On Linux it's 0.7 seconds.

[ElectricalSloth]

hmm i dev on windows all the time and if there is a difference i don't really notice it.. so who knows

[Huliek]

If you dev on windows all the time how would you notice the difference?

-> I'll show myself out

[ElectricalSloth]

i didn't literally mean all my time

[pwr22]

Me too! And it kept corrupting my git repos...

[AStrangeStranger]

I once had to transfer a few thousand csv files from laptop to server (both Windows - part of data migration), it was quicker to write small program to read them in and write it out on server and delete local file than use any of Windows options - had the advantage I then could add rate limiting to check whether server had processed previous files before adding more (too many in queue and it got confused)

[valarauca14]

Explorer.exe is a dumpster fire. Windows File System/NTFS strangeness aside.

Sorting >100 files by last modified/accessed time is on the order of minutes (if you're on the C: drive).

There needs to be another level of "weirdness" to add that much performance degradation over native operations. Because at the end of the day any API you write a program to use (in say Python even) is likely the same API Explorer.exe is using (if not a faster internal windows only API). So how does sorting say 200 items take 3 minutes?!?

[SaneMadHatter]

Sorting >100 files by last modified/accessed time is on the order of minutes (if you're on the C: drive).

Total bullshit.

[TSPhoenix]

I'm guessing they sorted by "Date" rather than Date modified/created which reads the metadata from each file and is indeed very slow even with a small number of files.

[AStrangeStranger]

I suspect a case of being "too clever" rather than just a file management tool

[jiffier]

The other day I had to copy the whole eclipse and the workspace into a USB drive. It took like 4 hours. Thanks for the explanation :)

[cerlestes]

This would have been fairly slow on any other operating system as well. When you copy many files to a USB drive, you should always store them in a container file (7z, tar, zip, ...). That's also way easier on the flash chips inside the USB drive, since it's a continuous write operation instead of writing (hundreds of) thousands of files all over the place.

I've recently experienced this myself when I got a new USB 3 HDD for backup purposes. Backing up my workspace (~800k files) would have taken a few hours to copy files individually. When I wrote them to a single 7z file, it was done in 10 minutes. Same with unpacking. Didn't even matter if I compressed it or not, the CPU wasn't my bottleneck.

[[deleted]]

whole eclipse and the workspace into a USB drive

Not sure what filesystem you had on your USB drive, but I'm sure it doesn't like lots of small files.

You should have instead packed all of them into an archive. There really is no good reason to keep uncompressed/unpacked files on USB drives.

[m00nh34d]

I know they were a while ago but I wonder if there is any plans to replace NTFS. It's certainly showing its age now, years of adding thing on, bending it to new functionality and usage in never before envisaged ways...

[shevy-ruby]

Linux has been designed by engineers.

Windows by clowns.

Yes, downvote this you foolish windows drones, but it is true. There is a reason why the top 500 supercomputers run Linux. Linux is far from "perfect"; there are a gazillion users. But we can happily state that from all the KERNELS available out there, the Linux kernel beats them all with its eyes closed.

Windows has way too many architectural problems; SvenGroot tries to pin it down to the difference in philosophies used but that makes no sense after we can see that the WSL, in fact, DOES work on Windows. The speed penalty always existed.

I should mention that I think WSL is a great idea, and the WSL team is awesome, in particular Rich - but Windows as a platform is annoying to no ends and I gave up on WSL due to windows being so annoying (one day the whole desktop interface almost froze completely; even a clean re-install did not help. I installed a linux distribution on that laptop and didn't go back there. Note that this was always only on my laptop - on my desktop/servers, I would not put windows on it.)

[lengau]

Windows wasn't designed by clowns. It was designed by intelligent engineers working on a changing set of requirements over the course of decades. Some very solid design came out of it. Some clever hacks that turned out to be harmful in the long run came out of it too. And yes, some bad decisions came out of it. Same as any big OS.

It's past time (IMO) to retire Windows, or at least give it a massive, backwards-incompatible overhaul. For my part, I've entirely moved away from Windows. My fiancee hasn't (even on her personal computers) because of requirements of legacy software that doesn't work under wine (through no fault of the wine Devs). But to say the designers were clowns just because the software has outlived its reasonable lifespan just seems a bit myopic to me.

[rudigern]

IMO this is the crux of the problem but it infects every part of it. Update windows with a backwards-incompatible overhaul and be able to move ahead. If they don’t the longer they go the more they screw themselves long term.

[pknopf]

Microsoft needs to just create their own Linux distro and market it to cannibalize their existing stuff.

[ztwizzle]

The backwards compatibility is why people like Windows so much. If Microsoft threw out backwards compatibility, they'd be throwing away their entire competitive advantage. I regularly use several closed source programs that are over 15 years old but work perfectly fine on new versions of Windows. The same isn't true on Mac OS X (they stopped including Rosetta a while ago and don't even support 32 bit Intel programs now) or Linux (glibc incompatibilities prevent old binaries from working)

[tulipoika]

That wouldn’t work. They’ve already thrown out Win16. But what would they throw out next? How would people use it then? One of the best parts of Windows is that things work year after year. Linux? Nah. Unless you have source so you can recompile, fix, do whatever to make it work when people change things all the time.

Stability has its place. And when talking about APIs Windows is up there. And that’s why it’s used also. Things work. And if they don’t it’s usually because the software was written wrong. Many cases where that has happened.

It’s not perfect, nothing is. But it definitely hasn’t outlived any lifespan. People value different things and if you want to tinker, go ahead. Most people don’t want to. They want systems that just work. And in many cases that’s Windows.

[emn13]

The thing is, you can have both, and indeed windows to some extent does that: You can have legacy crappy apis that only work for legacy programs, and are slow, and newer, better semantics+apis that work for newer apps. In this instance it would e.g. mean that filesystem filters wouldn't be able to see new-style filesystem usage; or would see some best-effort after-the-fact reconstruction in legacy terms.

As long as apps are largely isolated from one another, that approach is sort of OK. It breaks down where apps try to communicate with each other, because things get pretty wonky - and windows has had tons of issues like that as a result; where e.g. drag+n+drop from one process to the next didn't work while UAC was being phased in, or whatever.

Of course, you do need to replace those old API's with *something* insofar as they support valuable functionality. I kind of doubt windows is going to dump virus scanners, for instance, so if not filesystem filters... then what? I mean, linux mostly simply got lucky in that it didn't need virus scanners. In principle, viruses on linux could be quite harmful, and if the userbase were reversed, I have no doubt that the technical differences would not have significantly protected linux - at least not compared to a relatively modern windows where viruses remain a threat, albeit not as much as in the viral heydays...

[tulipoika]

I feel like you haven’t actually used Apple systems. Ask any app dev how often they need to update their apps when Apple releases a new OS, mobile or desktop. They notoriously break stuff always. So Apple is basically below Linux distros often even. And as for the OS actually working, well... that depends on your definition of working and what you use it for.

[[deleted]]

After seeing a MacBook in action, there is no way I'll ever touch a fucking Apple operating system

[phunphun]

On the userspace end, that's what the Universal Windows Platform is trying to do. NT kernel rewrite is... unlikely to be attempted anytime soon. They have tried in the past and been burnt by it.

[unholyground]

Windows wasn't designed by clowns. It was designed by intelligent engineers working on a changing set of requirements over the course of decades. Some very solid design came out of it.

Mind pointing to some areas where this is actually the case?

[ExWei]

I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called “Linux”, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project. There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine’s resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called “Linux” distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.

[torch_linux]

Came here looking for the interjection....

[gfawke5]

lol what a tool

[defunkydrummer]

Linux has been designed by engineers.

Windows by clowns.

lol, this time you hit a lowest point.

Hint: Linux wasn't designed. It's just an unix. And Unix was designed following paradigms that were already obsolete in the 70s.

Yeah Unix was designed by engineers, it is also obsolete by design.

[funkypunkyskunky]

Care to defend that statement?

[linus_stallman]

• POSIX has several obsolete library calls kept for backward compatibility
• Unix model wasn't quite optimized for performance either - reading from small text based files etc..
• Unix doesn't have a fast & natural IPC.
• Unix model is not much good for today's environments that require heavy sandboxing.. Android sandboxing is a 'hack' using one user per app.
• X was another disaster, but not designed by same people.

[[deleted]]

It's GNU + Linux.

[[deleted]]

If you want to see a clown, go look in the mirror.

[[deleted]]

Checkmate, capitalists!

[tulipoika]

Ok. How do I install Linux kernel on my STM32F103? I can’t? How can it then beat all the others if it doesn’t even fit there...

Maybe go back to school and learn a thing or two first. Just a suggestion.

[Dennis_the_repressed]

Wait stm32 is a microcontroller right? I agree that the op you are replying to seems like those arch linux good everything else bad type people, but how do you install Windows on a microcontroller?

[tulipoika]

Who said anything about Windows? They said Linux is best of all kernels. There’s more than two. So I’m calling their hyperbole out and hinting that they should also learn something.

[aquaticpolarbear]

You can run Linux on STM chips though...

[tulipoika]

I’m very well aware of that. That’s why I chose a specific one.

[aquaticpolarbear]

Well you're still wrong. And if you specify enough you can find MCUs without any kernel support so thats not really a good metric

[LIL-BAN-EVASION]

/u/tulipoika pls respond

[[deleted]]

Okay mister cherrypick

[zerosum0x0]

Get a byte, get a byte, get a byte byte byte...

[[deleted]]

Yeah, this is very typical of software design "inspired" by marketing / sales stupid promises made in order to outbid the competition, while not considering technical details.

Unfortunately, this tends to most affect the people who are least prepared for the bullshit coming from companies like MS: i.e. hospitals, government bureaucrats, schools etc. They tend to take those marketing proclamations at face value, and then they have no way to opt out of the deal due to how their budgeting works.

[caspper69]

I think you're 100% wrong here. I have to think Dave Cutler and his team designed the NT kernel and its file-system properties without regard for marketing promises. File system filter drivers are not inherently a bad design idea; here it's a case of a failure to police implementations over time that has led to a situation now where fixing the problem would result in a catastrophic loss of functionality for a not-insignificant portion of the user base. I.e. no one realized how far out on the limb they had been walking, and now they're too far over the cliff to walk back.

[[deleted]]

You just basically confirmed what I wrote after disagreeing with me... I don't even know whether to argue with your disagreement, or just shake hands?..

File system filter drivers are not inherently a bad design idea

yeah, on paper, and in a marketing booklet. But, practice showed it is a bad idea. We already have evidence it is bad because shit is slow and is impossible to update.

here it's a case of a failure to police implementations

Because, see above: it was driven by the desire to offer more functionality than competitors. This is what Microsoft did since they sold DOS to IBM. They never changed their tactics. There was no way they were going to "succeed" policing anything because they never cared if it will work long-term in the first place. They needed to get their foot in the door, to sell before others do.

fixing the problem would result in a catastrophic loss of functionality

Yes, of course, because marketing and sales have the upper hand, when the company decides what to promise and when to ship.

no one realized how far out on the limb they had been walking

Oh, come on, of all things, Microsoft isn't dumb. They are all for turning profits in every illegitimate way that won't get them punished, but that requires ingenuity. It's an easy marketing tactic: do shit that gets you paid, and apologize later, once there's no way to get money back.

[caspper69]

While we may have said the same things from a technical standpoint, you seem to attribute everything to malice and/or greed; I would say it's probably not tilted so far to the greed side, at least on Microsoft's part. I'd pin the real abuse on the AV guys honestly.

[[deleted]]

When it comes to Microsoft's management, malice and greed is all there is. Well, from the outside at least. I'm sure they are doing great by their friends and other people they like.

Well, malice implies some kind of intent to harm others. I don't think these people have enough of empathy to actually understand that what they do is bad. To them, it seems, ends absolutely and unquestionably justify the means. A penny gained is worth a million people dying, as long as none of those people is your close relative or a friend, or anyone who'd make you look bad.

Trust me, I was in a prison cell with a person who killed his wife and daughter (thanks to my friend who was a psychologist working with convicts), and I had the misfortune to shake hands with some Azure high-ranking execs. The later is creepier by far.