I'm curious as to how Windows 10 runs that poorly for you, or what to you counts as an "absolute dog".
I've got a laptop that's only a CPU generation younger than yours, and Windows 10 for general use works okay for me. I don't see a great overall difference in performance when compared to Gnome on Linux. Do you use a lightweight desktop or something on Linux?
(FWIW, I run Fedora for the majority of the time, and I've been using mostly Linux for nearly 20 years, at times exclusively, so this isn't Windows advocacy.)
I think it's a bit of a stretch to call Windows 10 an "absolute dog", but I have experienced a noticeable performance issue myself: low-end power consumption.
I have a new-ish ultrabook laptop with a mobile Intel processor that dual-boots Windows 10 and Linux with the Openbox desktop environment. On Linux, doing Lisp development with Emacs and SLIME hovers around 3-5% CPU usage. Windows 10, with no applications open, idles between 8% and 15%. As a result, I get significantly worse battery life in Windows than in Linux (despite the opposite situation usually being true due to better power-management (drivers) in Windows) - 7 hours vs 10.
(Windows 10 also uses more RAM doing nothing than Linux+Openbox does, but that's not as much of an issue for me - RAM does nothing if it's not being used, while a CPU not in use directly translates to longer battery life)
What is using those CPU cycles? Also, how frequently are you booting into that Windows environment?
There's a number of background tasks that Windows will run periodically (update checks, search reindex, etc) so if you don't regularly boot into Windows it'll end up running those soon after you boot up. Those should really only take a few minutes to complete so it should drop back down to a normal idle level within a short period even if you don't boot into Windows often. But if you're checking CPU load only a few minutes after boot when you haven't booted in a while, its not surprising to have some amount of CPU activity in Windows.
Its really strange you experience that much CPU load idle. I have an i5 3350P running Windows 10. I use it for Steam Home Streaming, Emby, and a few other tasks. Normally its CPU load is <5%. Having your machine use 15% CPU at idle is definitely not normal, I imagine there's something other than just Windows churning away.
The CPU cycles are being used mostly by the Synaptics touchpad driver, Microsoft Telemetry, and Microsoft Defender. However, I will say that I was mostly looking at my CPU usage right after starting up Windows - after I gave it some time to settle down, it did indeed drop to 3%-5% CPU used - so, I was mistaken!
You're right that Windows 10 is "generally okay" on an old CPU, even for relatively heavy dev work. But I just upgraded from i7-3770k to i9-12900k and it made me realize how much time I spent _waiting_ for every little thing. I've been switching back and forth between the two as I migrate, and the old CPU definitely feels like a dog to me now.
Aside: I was planning to switch to Linux too, but apparently this CPU/chipset is "too new" for Ubuntu to work, so I'm stuck on Windows for a few more months.
No doubt things are snappier on a present-day i9 than on an i7 from nearly a decade ago. It's also true that it's easy to get used to things and not see e.g. gradual degradation of performance with new and heavier software revisions.
I was mostly interested in the perceived differences between Windows 10 and present-day mainstream Linux desktops because I don't generally feel a great difference between those.
I have a laptop from 2020 with a midrange CPU, 64GB of ram and a fast ssd. It is slower in almost every task that I throw at it compared to my kid’s lowest config MacBook M1 Air.
My previous Windows 7 device with similar specs was slower on compute tasks, but “felt” faster, and was running all of the same corporate bullshit that the new box runs.
It’s not the hardware, because Linux runs better in a VM.
Also how fast is this SSD for reference - windows seem to absolutely chug on my mother's laptop despite it actually being fairly snappy when the data is loaded into memory.
It’s been about a year, I can’t completely remember all the specific gripes. It just felt slow. I’m thinking of trying again because I’d really love to play that new Halo game :)
I've got a laptop that's only a CPU generation younger than yours, and Windows 10 for general use works okay for me. I don't see a great overall difference in performance when compared to Gnome on Linux. Do you use a lightweight desktop or something on Linux?
(FWIW, I run Fedora for the majority of the time, and I've been using mostly Linux for nearly 20 years, at times exclusively, so this isn't Windows advocacy.)