6mo ago

Title

101 comments

on linux? nah.
try using windows on a machine that old if you want to know the true meaning of slow. it will always be updating something meaningless like edge in the background on top of it.
- Me, who still daily drives an Intel Skylake laptop from 2015: 🤡
  The boot time isn't actually that bad, it's like 6 seconds with Win10 and an SSD.
  
  Your Skylake laptop from 2015 boots faster than my Zen 4 desktop from 2022 (with a PCIe Gen 4 NVME SSD!)
  This thing takes 25 seconds just to POST. The fucked up thing is that it used to be even worse, but has slowly been improving with BIOS updates. The good news is that once it's up and running, this machine is ready to fuck. Programs open the second I click the icon and loading screens don't exist in games anymore. But it's still disappointing that AMD can't figure out how to make their shit boot faster.
  
  skylake with an ssd is not that bad tbh
- I love having it idle at 100% for 30 mins, fan at max, just to update some windows nonsense. Updating 500 packages on linux is done in 5 mins including the download. Like how do you even manage to make the update process THAT bad if not on purpose? I am baffled by that. It's a thinkpad dual core i7 with an SSD. It only runs Debian now thankfully.
  
  right? i literally can't fathom it and i'm not even counting all the crap 3rd parties insist in adding as always running system services for some damn reason. linux was a godsend to switch to.
- I still have my old laptop from college for whenever my PC is dead and I need a backup device. It's from 2008 and still has an HDD. There's Windows 7 installed and last time i booted it up the boot up time said 316 seconds. It's ridiculous.
- Have they fixed that 100% disk usage bug in Windows yet? Seems to disproportionately affect laptops with magnetic disk's and just chokes the whole system making it unusable
  
  Is that what the fuck I've been experiencing?
  Jesus Christ this is it I'm finding a damn DVD and getting Linux.
  
  its not a bug, its a feature. its updates, telemetry and other stuff they want you to use like edge. you can see it for yourself on the task manager.
  you can use some feature disabler apps to cut out a lot of this crap but theres only so much you can do on windows. updates are crazy heavy for what they are.
  it is however a substantial improvement, they undo the mods on update and you will have to play little a cat and mouse game to keep it good.
  windows can be improved but linux is the permanent solution for weaker hardware if you can use it.
- Yes but their RAM management (even though the desktop may use too much by default) seems way better.
  
  On windows? WHAT? You drunk? Linux has zram. This is where the discussion ends immediately.

Have you tried swapping in a 21$ SSD?
- I've on more than one occasion saved an old laptop from being replaced simply by slapping a cheap SATA SSD into them. The owners are almost always convinced that they needed a new PC, when all they do with it is browse Facebook and watch TikTok all day.
  
  all they do with it is browse Facebook and watch TikTok all day.
  World‘s most common PC use case

Kids these days will never know the frustration of booting a PC on an ancient HDD. I'd turn on my laptop, go do something else for 3 minutes, log in, go do something else for everything to wake up, then I can start using it.
- My MILs computer literally takes about 10-20 minutes to boot up. When I told her I'd help her upgrade it, she said she's fine with it. She turns it on and then does a load of laundry while she waits. It's painful.
  
  It's a good motivator to do laundry I guess 👀.
  
  Swap the drive and do a fresh install. It will run like new.
- I still use HDD.
  
  Get a SSD. It will run so much faster and everything will be instant.
  
  But why??
- I've seen PCs that took something like 5 to 10 minutes to boot (xp era).
- When I was using a few years old (not even particularly old, I think it was maybe only like 3–4 years old at that point?) HDD running Windows it took like half an hour to start up lmfao. Now using that HDD as my home directory with an SSD as the root directory of an Artix Linux install and it's silky smooth, including manipulating files in my home dir, so I think Windows might just be bad lol
- I'm using an old laptop as my Linux machine. I set up auto login and sway launch so that I can just power it on when I wake up so I can use it later
- I remember my parents saying „hey don’t use it yet it has to warm up” and it really had to otherwise all sorts of unexplainable things would start to happen. Cold start of pc in the morning was really important ritual that no cc cleaners could shorten.
  Also viruses that would modify browser to something funny. A president of my country with a serious stare appeared at one point in my browser stating that this pc is seized by the government.
  It scared the shit out of young me with all the pirate CDs I had from street vendors. I don’t think even my windows was legit but a pirated one installed by PC parts business as an extra
  To be honest I hate modern web and only Lemmy is feeling cool somewhat again. Everything else about digital landscape has become lame af. Without the struggle things lose any meaning

Just turn it off right after it shuts down before the OS starts booting again. (Or just turn it off whenever, it's not like there's much chance of filesystem corruption these days. Although there is a chance of registry corruption if you're using windows and it's updating, which is honestly worse to fix)
- Modern Windows (and Linux) is very hard to kill. You can unplug it all day without issue. Registry corruption and similar issues have not been an issue in decades.
  
  I had to recover a W10 box from a family members work after windows had slowly given itself cancer of file corruption. I've dealt with this shit before and it's not a big deal... usually...
  This fucker took 3 days of babysitting to bring back to life. In-place upgrades, it required multiple (why, no fucking idea), dism, sfc just chipping away bit by bit. And no, this is a work machine, so wipe and start fresh was reserved for actual "cannot be saved" situations. It has a backup plan, and I am the unofficial/unpaid IT guy for that location, but I don't have license keys or installers for the software used (inherited situation), and it would add lots of friction to get running again. Absolutely not jumping on that grenade unless I must, it's untested if a restore causes license validation errors (time checks and other bullshit).
  After that fiasco I applied a universal scheded task of dism followed by sfc, on a monthly basis, and every six months a few automated checks but also I pop my head in for a minute (remotely) just to validate that those automated tasks are running successfully.
  It's been about... 4 years now? And it's been working as-expected. But windows obliterating itself with no user input isn't what I'd call 'a thing of the past'.
  (also it wasn't a hardware fault)
  
  I wouldn’t say decades.
  
  Last time I used windows 10 on one of my computers an update somehow got stuck so I just turned off the computer and I was never able to get windows to boot again because of how broken the registry was. This was probably around 2019
- A hard power off when the drives are mounted still isn't a good idea. Just turn it off during post or when the grub menu is shown.

My 10 year old laptop (which has been running Linux for 9.5 years now) has an SSD, so it'll restart in a normal amount of time. Even old laptops no longer have HDDs only

I've never experienced major slowdowns when running Linux on old laptops. It helps that OS fragmentation appears to be a problem exclusive to Windows
- Fragmentation is only an issue if you run a HDD.

~~51 years~~ 8 seconds
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$ systemd-analyze Startup finished in 2.277s (firmware) + 1.145s (loader) + 1.644s (kernel) + 3.211s (userspace) = 8.279s graphical.target reached after 3.211s in userspace. $ lscpu | awk -F ' +' '/^ *M.* n/ {print $1, $2}' Model name: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3517U CPU @ 1.90GHz $ vmstat -s | awk -F '^ +' '/[0-9]* K t.* m/ {print $2}' 3901984 K total memory
- 2s in firmware??? I'm used to at least 30s
  
  What ram do you have?

You can always forcefully shut it down while it's rebooting.
- does that...help ?
  edit: obviously it does; i misread the post.

Whaaat my laptop is 13yo, It is faster than new, just because I added ram and ssd 4 years ago
- It is actually amazing how much difference ssd made to my 6 year old laptop
- Same, I have a 2012 laptop, just added RAM recently, with ssd replaced few years back. Boots in seconds.
- Tfw some new laptops don't even have a place to put more RAM.
  Boggles the mind that laptop people just rolled over and accepted this bullshit.
- So it's 4yo.

SSD
- HDD too, with Linux. IME it's just Windows chugging storage devices for entire minutes after booting, for no reason.
  
  (arch with gdm3 and gnome takes around 1:30-2 minutes to boot from an hdd on my old craptop)

Them running dual-boot with Windows as the default boot choice.

I don't understand why many desktop environments don't have a confirmation when you click one of those. Only ones I know that do it are GNOME and KDE
- The confirmation is annoying for many GNU+Linux users. It's like asking are you sure you want to power off even though you had to use three or four keys or mouse clicks just to get to the poweroff menu.
  
  It's not the total number of clicks that matters. It's the fact that several options (sleep, reboot, shut down) are the same final click and often a pixel or two away from each other.
- I think Cinnamon does that too.
  
  On cinnamon: I click the power button in the menu, a pop up asks me what I want to do (suspend, restart, power off, cancel.)
  I generally click suspend. There are no further pop ups.

When running a somewhat descent Linux distro even on a potato rebooting usually takes like ~15s. With windows even on recent hardware probably 5+ min
- Windows boot times aren't nearly that bad actually.

Sometimes I wait to enter the bios so I can press the power off button while there.

not if Arch LInux is installed on it

Pls explain meme.. 🥹 Am a Linux user, haven't experienced that 🤔 I don't see the fundamental difference between powering off Linux machine and restarting it. Presumably you'd have to power it on again at some point? Or is it that you'd have to wait for it to restart to power it off again? 🤔 Cause then it's pretty safe to hold the power button for hardware power off. Once it's restarted, all the user data is synced to disk. Hard power off before user login will not lose any important data 99.99% of the time.
- You could also just press the power button at the GRUB screen, assuming you have one obviously.