Its interesting that they compare LoC with Windows. I suppose that this article wants us to be amazed at those numbers. However, my experience with Google's products indicates a gradual decline in performance and a simultaneous gradual increase in memory bloat (Maps, Gmail, Chrome, Android). Which ironically, FWIW, hasn't been the case with Windows. I have noticed zero difference in performance going from Windows 7 to 8 to 10.
I'd have to disagree with this. First the baseline: windows is very slow. Second I found later versions slower. Third (and most maddening) every version of windows I've ever used has gotten slower over time (including not installing new s/w and defragmenting).
Windows is slow? Compared to what? In what task? Running a game? Boot time? Opening Firefox?
I have problems with Windows, but it's the fastest desktop os I think, mostly because it's graphics stack is way the best of all. Running a number crunching C code is exactly the same on Windows or Linux. (See all the benchmarks on the Internet.)
It's really not that fast. The filesystem is a total dog (MFT contention) to the point that manipulating lots of small file is up to two orders of magnitude slower than ext4. This is made bearable thanks to SSDs being on the market. Also the amount of friction getting stuff built and running and maintaining it is detrimental to general productivity meaning you piss execution time out of the window regularly just fixing stuff.
Note: windows programmer for 19 years now. Only because of the cash.
I can't say I'm surprised to see people eager to point out how Windows sucks. And sure, maybe it does. However, the fundamental point you're missing is that I don't think that Windows was ever positioned as this OS that was designed for every single type of workload out there (not withstanding marketing noise). Windows is a very general purpose OS meant for general purpose 'mainstream' things. Things that hundreds of millions of people might want to do. Specialty workloads are simply not what Microsoft is ever going to invest any significant amount of time in - unless they see some money there. In that sense, Windows would probably be a far better OS if users could modify it to suit their needs, but thems the breaks. Linux seems to fill that void for some.
The disadvantage of NTFS which you point out, isn't because of a fuckup. It's not designed for your use case. You might even find Microsoft telling you that themselves here :- https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/Cc938932.aspx
As to your point about productivity, I can't comment without knowing specifics. As a primarily C++ programmer, I haven't run into any Windows showstoppers that prevented me from shipping. I have run into showstoppers with their dev tools, but I see them as separate from the OS.
Can you solve all the problems in ext4 that NTFS claims to solve? No you cant. I am not saying either of the systems is perfect nor either of them is horrible. They are perfect for the use cases they are designed for. If somebody had a file system structure that was unusual(say lots of small files) to NTFS, I think it was his mistake in treating it as a black box.
The problem is that a large number of small files is a very common use case. Even Windows itself consists of lots of small files i.e. the source code and WinSxS.
It should handle general scenarios consistently. We've had a few minor versions of NTFS and now ReFS. ReFS should solve this but it doesn't as it's a copy and paste of the NTFS code initially rather than a complete reengineering effort.
You don't need to defragment NTFS either, defragmenter runs in the background. Defragmentation is more an issue of driver and not fs itself, I suspect ext4 does some form of defragmentation itself otherwise I can imagine edge cases that could ruin its day.
I disagree. It isn't that it works well but merely that it is there. In fact the majority of Windows networks both corporate and small business I can safely say that it barely works and is usually a mismanaged unpatched mess or filled with crapware. Occasionally there's a nice tight network (our operations guys run a tight ship which is cool) but the general case is a pit of incompetence.
The mantra among the consults I've met in the UK is if you're charging by the hour, do it in .Net on Windows. If you're charging a fixed rate, use Linux and Python.
I'm not suggesting there is anything better for an end user but I'm pointing out that it doesn't work well enough.
I still use it however and have a fondness. The accumulated knowledge of fixes is incredibly valuable.
In fact the majority of Windows networks both corporate and small business I can safely say that it barely works and is usually a mismanaged unpatched mess or filled with crapware.
And yet, no vendor can hold a candle to Active Directory, which is the single best thing about running Windows in an enterprise.
You literally cannot manage SSO, patching, and config management on a non-Windows environment for more than a few hundred machine without the right tools. Shell scripts and Chef aren't going to cut it when you have 20,000 laptops to take care of.
You're 100% right. Sort of. I've built many an AD forest in my years and it is certainly powerful. However when your laptops drop off the domain after a month or so, things get hairy. That and numerous other problems such as an entire network of 5000 machines with TrustedInstaller.exe hanging at 100% CPU etc etc and it's not all smooth. I've got my fair share of horror stories there.
One of our enterprise clients has just bought 500 Chromebooks and we integrated OpenID in our application and no one has to deal with AD, SSO is sorted and zero management overhead. I really like this solution. If someone could build a standalone product with equal quality it would destroy Microsoft overnight. Their ops team is 4 people and two of them are network people to keep the pipes (and APs) working.
And of course there is FreeIPA and PolicyKit as a contender but that's not really there yet.
Well it's been two months and I haven't heard any complaining other than one ActiveX based drum scanning thing doesn't work. Turns out the scanner's direct descendant has a web API so we're integrating that.
To be fair they are financial point of sale machines so it's all process driven and they're not general purpose computers.
I'm just saying I'd like to see how it goes long-term. Particularly in terms of TCO. Google, AFAIK, doesn't have any vendors making Toughbook-style Chrome OS machines yet.
Haven't tested ext4 and ntfs drivers directly against each other, but an useful trick if you ever need to copy millions of small files from NTFS is to mount it on Linux because Linux driver can work with it way way faster than Windows one.
> Windows is slow? Compared to what? In what task?
I dual booted a laptop for a while with Vista. (I can't speak to anything later, because I use Linux now, and haven't looked back, so take the appropriate grain of salt.) So with Vista / Gentoo on exactly the same hardware (a Lenovo T61):
- boot time on Linux was orders of magnitude faster
- WiFi AP connect was significantly faster[1], esp. on resuming from suspend-to-RAM
- Windows had a tendency to swap things out if they weren't in use, and had to swap like crazy if you paged back to a program you hadn't used in a while; Linux, by comparison, will only swap if required to due to memory pressure.
[1] i.e., WiFi was reconnected before I could unlock the screen. No other OS I've had has been able to do this, and it's bliss.
> mostly because it's graphics stack is way the best of all.
Riiiight. The T61 had an nvidia in it, and it was fairly decent; drivers were decent between the two OSs, and performance on each was about on par with the other. (I used the proprietary drivers; nouveau performed unacceptably bad — bear in mind this was 7 years ago.)
> Running a number crunching C code is exactly the same on Windows or Linux. (See all the benchmarks on the Internet.)
This I will agree with; but what do you do after the number crunching? It's the scaffolding around the program that mattered to me: Linux has a real shell, with real tools. I can accomplish the odd task here or there. But yes, running a "number crunching C code" will perform about equally: you're really only testing the processor, maybe the memory — crucially, the hardware, not the OS.
Well, in all fairness, isn't this true of Linux too? At login, only lightdm (or whatever) is ready; we've not yet loaded the WM, mate-panel, other random stuff, etc.
I know that people have had experiences similar to yours. It's fine to disagree, but AFAIK pretty much all benchmarks show that there is no noticeable difference in performance from 7 to 8 to 10 and this matches with my own experience. I refuse to upgrade unless I get similar or better performance. But then again, I'm not really interested in researching every single benchmark. Windows is fast, stays fast, and that's pretty much all I care about.
8.1 and 10 run incredibly well even on very old hardware. I will agree a given Windows install may feel slower over time, and it makes sense to rebuild the PC occasionally, though that may, again, be less so with 8.1 and 10.
I think Microsoft has tried to address this with 8/10, which have a "refresh" feature, which tries to clean out everything besides Modern apps and your personal data.
I think it's gotten better over time, but non-technical users have an incredible willingness to push buttons they shouldn't. Unfortunately, your options are to either cripple your product's functionality (Chromebook) or accept that users have the power to do things that they shouldn't. I vastly prefer the latter, and I think the latter is better for consumers, in fact, as well. But to each their own.
