All modern versions of Windows will have Microsoft’s Defender antivirus/malware protection turned on by default. That means you incur a penalty every time a file is accessed from disk, or a process is launched, or a library loaded, or sockets are used or certain APIs are called.

It’s better than most 3rd party AV software but it’s still a performance overhead that could be turned off.

Very unlikely that has anything to do with it.

Drivers and “other stuff” have more impact than the OS itself. I would expect if you installed Windows 11 from a USB stick onto this device that it probably puts performance into “balanced” mode for example, fires up antivirus/malware protection, runs a bunch of esoteric services, throws in a WHQL (stable but crappy) GPU driver etc.

I think the article would have been fairer and more useful to install Windows, and optimize the life out of it and then compare performance and other factors (e.g. battery, heat, fan noise etc.)

Device made with software specifically for purpose performs better than generic machine with generic software designed to do a wide range of things. All of my machines are on Linux distros, but this just seems like a no brainer to me. It’s like years ago when the mustang had a 4.6L V8. It was the same engine used in the Ford explorer. Will the Mustang beat the Explorer to 60, of course. But the Explorer will also transport 5 people to the beach with coolers and beach gear and drive in the sand.

Exactly. I don’t think the comparison is very good here. A better article would say - how to performance tune Windows 11 on a Legion Go S for gaming and compare the results to Steam OS, which is already tuned for gaming. I expect the results would be close enough that the OS choice is less of a concern about performance than what games you want to play and any other uses you might have for the device.

I think a far more likely reason for any slow down is Lenovo’s Windows drivers suck, or Windows defaults to a power saving mode that improves battery life but impacts performance, or Windows has antivirus or some other impactful service running that they didn’t turn off. Since the article neglects to say if they tweaked Windows I have to assume they didn’t.

No love for Patchface in GoT? Creepiest jester ever.

I don’t have my Chromebook to hand but I believe the setting is in the Prefs. When you set up Linux it’s a virtualized Debian that you can pretty much do anything with but it can’t mess with ChromeOS outside. Not all Chromebooks support it since it’s space / CPU dependent but if it does then it’s Linux. I was even running graphical apps since the screen is a Wayland server.

Doesn’t matter if they encourage it or, not, the option is there. So if kids want to mess around, compile stuff, run Linux games they can totally do it. The main purpose of the laptop however would be to do work, save / submit stuff to the cloud, run all day and be cheap so if it gets stolen or broken it’s less expense to replace. I think in that role the Chromebook is the best solution anyone came up with. And there were a long line of contenders.

AI has value but first a reality check. Most of the time it produces code which doesn’t work and even if it did is usually of terrible quality, inconsistent style, missing checks, security etc. That’s because there is no “thinking” in AI, it’s a crank handle using training and some rng to shit out an answer.

If you know what you’re doing it can still be a useful tool. I use it a lot but only after carefully reading what it says and understanding the many times it is wrong.

If you don’t know how to program everything might look fine. Except when it crashes, or fails on corner cases, or follows bad practice, or drags in bloated 3rd party libs, or runs out of memory on large datasets or whatever. So don’t trust anybody who blindly uses it or claims to be a “vibe” programmer since it amounts to admission of an incompetence.

Most Chromebooks offered Linux on them. Even Linus Torvalds used a Chromebook when travelling to develop via it. Presumably because he was sick to death of “troubleshooting” when he had other, better things to do. And presumably schools and teachers also have better things to do than deal with bs like conflicting packages, missing drivers, viruses or whatever on every kid’s device.

Chromebooks fucked a generation of kids? Kids got cheap, hard to break, up to date, easy to replace laptops which ran a full desktop and even offered a Linux and android subsystem. Certainly not perfect but better than alternatives like the iPad or Windows S.

Not surprised. Many of these high end GPUs are bought not for gaming but for bitcoin mining and demand has driven prices beyond MSRP in some cases. Stupidly power hungry and overpriced.

My GPU which is an RTX2060 is getting a little long in the tooth and I’ll hand it off to one of the kids for their PC but I need to find something that is a tangible performance improvement without costing eleventy stupid dollars. Nvidia seems to be lying a lot about the performance of that 5060 so I might look at AMD or Intel next time around. Probably need to replace my PSU while I’m at it.

Getting sand and bugs on their lips?

The ribbon was contentious but most people are familiar with it and it has advantages like taskcentricity and less clutter. LibreOffice has an experimental ribbon that I think should be worked on, mainstreamed and set during installation or in the settings.

UX in other areas should be improved. Lots of little annoyances add up for new users and can break their opinions. It’s not hard to look over the UI and see things which have no business being there, or should only appear in certain contexts, or could be implemented in better ways. I think the project should get some MS Office volunteers into a lab and ask them to do things and observe their problems. I’d have power Word, Excel, Powerpoint users come in and do non-trivial things they normally do and see where they trip up or even if they can do what they need.

Good evidence of astroturfing on Reddit. That Reddit took action and banned the Palantir agents only provides evidence that exposure of the op is the problem. Not evidence that Reddit acts in good faith.

A good question to ask, is what would happen if Lemmy was the victim of astroturfing. It’s decentralized for starters and groups might not even reside in the same place on the fediverse. Also I expect Reddit has monitoring, analytics and tools that could flag behaviour rather than somebody having to go through logs trying to find patterns.

I think Lemmy and other federated platforms have escaped having to deal with these issues simply because someone attempting to astroturf will do it on the biggest platform. So Lemmy escapes not by any technical or administrative virtue but by being smallfry.

An LLM is an ordered series of parameterized / weighted nodes which are fed a bunch of tokens, and millions of calculations later result generates the next token to append and repeat the process. It’s like turning a handle on some complex Babbage-esque machine. LLMs use a tiny bit of randomness (“temperature”) when choosing the next token so the responses are not identical each time.

But it is not thinking. Not even remotely so. It’s a simulacrum. If you want to see this, run ollama with the temperature set to 0 e.g.

ollama run gemma3:4b
>>> /set parameter temperature 0
>>> what is a leaf

You will get the same answer every single time.

I think if I were any non-US government I’d be very seriously thinking about not using Microsoft software at this time, particularly if it connects to the cloud. And that goes for companies with government contracts, or merely companies who are potential targets of industrial espionage.

That said, LibreOffice needs to tap the EU for funding to broaden its features and also improve the UX because it’s not great tbh. It can be extremely frustrating using LibreOffice after using MS Office, in part because the UI is so different, noisy with esoteric actions, and very unrefined compared to its MS counterpart. That needs funding and to get to the point that somebody can pick up LibreOffice for the first time and not be surprised or stuck by the way it behaves.

It’s even worse when AI soaks up some project whose APIs are constantly changing. Try using AI to code against jetty for example and you’ll be weeping.

All AIs are the same. They’re just scraping content from GitHub, stackoverflow etc with a bunch of guardrails slapped on to spew out sentences that conform to their training data but there is no intelligence. They’re super handy for basic code snippets but anyone using them anything remotely complex or nuanced will regret it.

Hardly surprising. Llms aren’t -thinking- they’re just shitting out the next token for any given input of tokens.