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Well I always strip out 99% of the crap that the re-sellers add. E.g. my HP laptop came with all sorts of HP-branded guff. But most of the O/S stuff I leave in. I uninstall the Games if it comes with that. Solitaire is not my thing.
I think that's what you saw with Vista. The reason it was a mess when it came out was because MS had given it a major overhaul and taken out a lot of stuff they didn't want and put in new things that they wanted. And of course it had all sorts of problems because it was a first attempt at doing things in a new way. My colleague got a Designed For Windows Vista logo and stuck it on the bin in our office!
Secondly, there are some drivers that are built in. The O/S needs to be able to talk to disks, boot up, etc. before it can start loading drivers from disk. But these are a small sub-set of the total number of drivers.Do you mean WHQL? No, you're not quite correct. Drivers normally exist as "dynamically linked libraries". That is where the file extension .DLL comes from. What dynamically linked means, is that they are loaded as needed. So if you have a voice recording program that uses BlueTooth to connect to your headset (this is just a simplistic example to explain), then it will have a driver for the BlueTooth hardware. But until you start up that voice recording program, the driver is just a file on disk. It gets loaded up when needed dynamically. So you can have drivers installed for all sorts of hardware (legacy stuff, stuff you don't have, etc.) but they have no impact until you actually use them.
Note the above is slightly simplified in a couple of ways. Firstly, in an absolute technical sense, references to an unused library are taking up memory, causing the occasional extra if/else. But try compiling the Linux kernel with and without support for a particular network card family and just try and see if you can spot any difference in performance or memory usage.
So basically, your reasoning is good, but you are unaware of how drivers are dynamically loaded. It's good to clean out whatever is never going to be used, but Windows is not loading a tonne of unneeded drivers.
Win8 hasn't omitted CD / DVD ROM drivers. (Well possibly on ARM tablets and such, I have no way of knowing). Possibly you are thinking of them omitting the codecs to play DVD movies. They've done that because they said that huge numbers of installs never even touched a DVD and that the licences to play the DVDs cost about $2 dollars per licence. So they've taken this out and are selling the DVD and Dolby support in a separate add-on for those that want it.
Your CD ROM is not working in the Preview? I confess I haven't actually tried that with mine. I'll give it a go and let you know but I had thought it should work...
Still, I wont argue the point further. I've never worked on the Windows O/S. I'm going on what I've read and what I think are reasonable suppositions. That is all. At least I'm fairly sure on that. Not the answer you were expecting? It's basically an issue of being able to roll back and of whether there is an impact from allowing that. You can uninstall updates and service packs normally. (But don't! ). They accumulate on your disk. So if you're worried about hard drive space then yes, there is bloat. I don't deny it! But it has little impact on performance or memory usage. If a DLL is patched for example, the reference is now simply to mylibary.dll.2 instead of to mylibrary.dll.1. So now there is some extra on disk, but it's still only loading the one (comparable) DLL and memory and processor load are unlikely to be impacted. I'm pretty sure it's more complicated than that in principle. Ironically given I seem to be defending Win8 here, I actually know a lot more about how Linux is put together than I do Windows. But principles are similar and I'm reasonably confident in all of this. The simple fact that I can uninstall a security update indicates the original must be there.
) would slap the younger programmer for for being wasteful. But I even tightly written code moves on. For example, I made several typos whilst I wrote this reply to you. The autocorrect that you get in Word is now built into IE10 and it's been tidying up my typos as I go. No matter how tightly you write your code, that's still more lines of it. Don't want the feature, then yes, it's bloat to you. But I keep coming back to that 2% CPU utilization on my older dual core and thinking I've got a tonne of resource here, so why not have features like this?
It depends where you're coming from I think. I notice earlier that you were praising the AS400. Whilst that's fine, any modern O/S is going to look bloated compared to an IBM system that came out in the Eighties. I don't know what AS400's look like these days. I remember them having fixed-width. non-aliased terminals. I'm sure they've come on since then but I'd be interested to see what they are like compared to Win7, Ubuntu or OSX.
I mention this because it seems like there are some very different expectations. Your complain that Win8 will run between 50 and a 100 processes at a time... My Debian home server will run something like that number of processes by default and it doesn't even have a GUI. I'm typing this on an older HP laptop with Win8. It has an AMD Turion II (dual core chip, 2.3GHz). It currently has just under a hundred processes listed. CPU utilization is bouncing around the 2% mark with 33 processes active. What does that mean? Well firstly it means that even though there are a hundred processes running, the O/S shelves those that are idle and only 33 of them (at the moment) are actively impacting the CPU. And those processes are actually only forcing the CPU to use 2% of its available capacity. To be honest, I suspect most of that 2% is me typing this reply anyway.
So I guess what I'm saying is that for me, this isn't bloat. It's trivial impact on my computer. Bloat to me implies slowness or poor response or wasted memory usage. Of course if a process is completely unnecessary, then it is technically bloat. But I don't know enough to say which processes if any are completely redundant. For example you mention:
For those that don't know (which is going to be 99.97% of the planet), BITS is Background Intelligent Transfer System. It's a process that moves files around on request, but only at idle times on the network. So say the Windows Update process wants to download the latest security updates. Rather than just leaping in and downloading them when you might be grabbing a file or watching a streaming video or whatever, it files a request with the BITS service for what it wants and goes back to sleep. BITS keeps out of the way so long as you are using your network connection (i.e. active programs take priority), but when you're not it'll say 'okay, not holding anyone up, I'll go get the next thing in the queue). That's a good thing. And the process doesn't really have any impact on CPU usage as can be seen by looking at resource usage on your system. So I don't really consider it "bloat". It does something useful and has no noticeable performance impact. I'm not sure what you're referring to about it "causing nightmares" when combined with Desktop and "remove reg". It sounds like you're referring to some security vulnerability. I'm not familiar with that. Security is an important issue but I consider it a separate issue to "bloat". What was the security issue with BITS? As it's just a means of moving files around at quiet times, I would think that a compromised program could use a more direct means of file transfer if it wanted. Is that right?
The hardware and software industries do "feed off each other". Naturally as hardware gets better, software evolves to take advantage of that. And naturally when people see that newer software can do more, they want to buy the hardware that can support it. WE the customer drive that cycle. Presumably because we want to. I would think that Overclockers.com is one of the last places you'll find people complaining about over-powered hardware.
I'm not sure about Vista being faster than XP. It had better disk caching, but I never really used XP or Vista (only used Windows at work at the time for email). My understanding was that Vista was supposed to make better use of modern, better resources than XP. So for example, when XP came out, 4GB RAM was a rare thing. By the time Vista arrived, it was something home users might often have. So XP tended not to cache much of the disk content whilst Vista aggressively pre-fetched disk contents it thought would be used into RAM. Which makes sense. If you have more resources, make use of them. But I have no idea how much it actually translated into performance differences as I've never read any stats on it. Still it seems good to me in principle and they stole it from Linux which had been doing that for years so that speaks well of it.
Sure. But would the typical user today want to use DOS or at best, Windows 3.1. Minesweeper vs. Arkham City with DX11... which do people want? I want to be clear that I'm not disputing what you say above, I just think your needs are different to most users.
Here I do disagree. Firstly that Windows is no longer an Operating System. it fits all the requirements of the term and the rest of the world plus dog calls it one. Secondly, that an OS should be something that comes on a few floppies. Hardware has moved on since the early 1980s. It is right that we make use of it. It's not a case of programmers being profligate. Like I say, your example of BITS. It does something useful, it's running on my box as I type this, but my CPU utilization is about 2%. I am willing to spare the tiny amount of resource for it. Sure I've seen some pretty lax code that an older programmer (like me for example.
Then I have good news for you. With Metro, MS are making HTML+CSS one of the ways of developing an interface. You can actually code a Metro program up like this using a JavaScript interface for system calls. Kind of freaky. Normally I would dislike this if it were actually just being rendered from scratch like a web-page, but it all gets compiled down, it's just a way of enabling people to make clean interfaces.
I disagree about PHP. You seem to be suggesting that all O/S should run a web server with a PHP parser built in and that all management of the system be done through web-front ends. *Shudder*. The online versions of Excel and Word are pretty good, but I don't want to give up my normal windowed programs, thanks! Also, having everything done through a PHP processor rather than directly compiled and making its system calls direct to the O/S, is extremely wasteful of processor cycles. Even when you use PHP caching such as APC, it's far less efficient than a bit of proper C or C++. That's a definite fact. I don't think web-front ends are suitable except for some server management tasks, in my personal opinion.
I can slim things down on it a bit more with Gentoo or Slackware, but that's more effort too. Debian has long been my benchmark for the efficiency vs. effort compromise. Thanks for an interesting discussion.
