> If Project Zenith is a "distraction-free Windows experience," does that imply that everyone else is using nerfed experiences with needless distractions?
Well, I mean, no. It could mean that regular Windows has things that could be distracting for developer workflows but might have other legitimate purposes.
Like when a Porsche 911 trim strips out the AC and stereo to provide a "distraction free driver experience" that doesn't mean that those things are "needless" to everyone else.
(Though in truth Windows 11 is full of dumb crap, but that doesn't mean we have to try---and fail!---to play clever lawyerball word games to make the point.)
(And honestly, I don't think MS's idea of a good developer experience is going to be the same as mine or most of HN's. There are entire other worlds of 'development' out there.)
Windows does care about file extensions but is mildly embarrassed about it, hence the "show" default that has existed from Win 8 (?) onwards.
Linux and co generally work with magic bytes which is just another way of doing file formats. Is it better to signify your file format with a .ext or otherwise?
I find myself turning on file extensions if I have to use Windows and on Linux, I don't care and it just works.
I think the UIs for Linux are better. I think that MS are hung up on trying to suggest their stuff so it gets in the way a bit. On Linux, you just get the best option based on what is installed.
I have gone and ticked the “stop hiding file extensions” since they were introduced in ~98 (or was it Windows 95?)
When antivirus weren’t widespread, having a person click on a virus was just so easy: create a program with the icon of an image file. God forbid people learn that .exe means executable program. Learning new stuff is scary!
> I have gone and ticked the “stop hiding file extensions” since they were introduced in ~98 (or was it Windows 95?)
I think Windows 95, although even selecting that option still hides some file name extensions (such as ".lnk"). However, I have found that it is possible to use the registry editor to force all file name extensions to be displayed.
But even on system where they aren't needed they're useful IMO, for me as a user. Magic bytes mean you have to seek into each file, and if you care about file types, it means anything that lists files has to do that.
Personally, I'm not against file extensions, and I like to see and use them, however when something (i.e. magic bytes of a file) is used a lot system-wide, the underlying mechanisms optimize towards the use case as a natural tendency.
The interesting, or more accurately neat thing about EXT family of filesystems is, the file header is always one pointer away from your inode structure for that file.
With NVMe disks or SSDs in general, this is a very cheap operation, even when done en-masse. Even when we were using HDDs, anti-fragmentation features of EXT3/4 kept that one seek pretty cheap.
As a test, I fed my whole documents folder (~3500 files) into "file" tool to see what it does (via "file -f $filelist"). It finished in ~1,5 seconds. I redirected the output to /dev/null to eliminate the overhead incurred by printing things over SSH, though.
While everything is fast for small n, the consideration of small for this operation goes a long way, AFAICS.
When I read the headline of the announcement article, I thought it would be in the spirit of https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-drive/, instead it's just advertising a series of device that most devs won't ever buy.
Devs might be bad at marketing to general public, but if the target market are devs, run the ads through them first. Even if they're in a building with no dev at all, surely one can be reached through an internal email.
If I can install Linux on these unified-memory PCs, then it sounds quite cool.
I wouldn't wish any developer to be forced to use W11 though. I'm already miserable enough at work, I just use a VM with Fedora and W11 is just a bootloader.
Meanwhile my steam library of 900+ works pretty much flawlessly on linux. Yes the odd esoteric game needs a workaround or two, but honestly if you browse the pcgamingwiki then you'd notice you also need to tweak them on windows too, such is the problem with older games.
It does happen, but it's pretty rare. Specifically, the MechWarrior 5 games don't work with my VKB joystick out of the box (had to do some config shenanigans to get that to work), Rome II Total War crashes pretty regularly, and the sound doesn't work right in HBS Battletech (which is odd cause I'm pretty sure that's a unity game). But the vast, vast majority of my library works without any tinkering.
I shelled out for a Steam Machine (SteamOS ≈ Arch Linux.) I do gamedev, and I figured having a test machine was a decent enough excuse for a purchase. It's working suprisingly well for the games I'm actually playing. They're playing better than on my last Windows desktop tower, even, presumably due to a better GPU.
Granted, catalogs vary - anti-cheat and DRM may not play nice, and EvE Online wasn't stable until I switched the renderer from D3D12 to D3D11 (and I haven't tried playing with multiple accounts) - but you might revisit Linux gaming if it's been awhile since you last have.
The enshittification of Windows has finally driven me to the point where Linux compatability is going to start affecting my Steam purchases.
Only a token test amount so far. The root filesystem is read-only by default, but without the whole Nix ecosystem, which is a little awkward (can't install packages even as root without changing that.) On the other hand, it comes with `distrobox` preinstalled, so it's easy enough to spin up a container and use that (including package installation.)
Whenever I used windows for games I just installed it on a partition and solely used it for steam. Nothing else installed but steam and games. Usually with the free unregistered version of windows because I could not care less about setting a desktop background. Too insufferable for any other use.
Maybe the main feature they are not telling anyone is that it slurps your valuable code bases faster in order to feed their AI? I guess usurping github ain't enough.
It’s true unused it wasted but unfortunately what it’s used for is decided by corporate flavor of the month so garbage one drive, teams and Gemini builds eat all the ram that would be better used by other applications people actually like
I was quite surprised that this phrase, which papers over nuances in how operating systems classify and manage memory, was posted by someone who studied CS.
Indeed. They can’t know what other applications you need to run. So they more frugal the OS and application, the more available for other software apps.
> But the OS should be as lean as possible because the entire reason is to run other programs.
In my mind Classic Mac OS (minus its design issues) is the ideal to strive for here.
It was barely even an OS and more like a substrate for GUI applications to run on top of. Even “essentials” like networking and USB support were implemented by way of extensions which could be disabled at will. If you disabled all extensions you’d get something resembling a full color version of the original 1985 System 1.0 that took almost no resources. This was great for squeezing out every last drop for things like games and emulators.
It was that lightweight because it provided basically none of the functionality that is essential to a modern OS. Because it wasn't a modern OS.
The surface area of stuff that an OS has to do today is absolutely massive, and the dependency graphs are poorly understood even by the engineers who work on those systems. Innocuous pieces of functionality have a way of becoming load-bearing over time.
If you ran around disabling random bits of functionality in Windows because you wanted to reclaim some resources for your games, you'd probably wedge the OS, cause random crashes, and prevent your games from even launching. Like you might think "Well my game doesn't need Bluetooth, I only use a wired controller!" but I would not be surprised at all if yanking out the Bluetooth stack from the OS caused random crashes and hangs.
I’m not convinced that it’s impossible to build a modern OS in a way that’s properly modular and allows most functionality to be disabled entirely (as in never even loaded into memory).
Windows almost categorically can’t because it’s only ever been developed organically and is pathologically backwards compatible, which keeps it forever tied to past design decisions.
Linux could get a much closer but is hamstrung by monolithic kernel design which puts more functionality there.
You’d need a clean sheet design which positions most subsystems as discrete components.
"Linux" encompasses everything from microcontrollers to planet-scale supercomputers. You can, in fact, build a Linux that runs in as few resources as you like. No qualifiers.
Technically true, though that comes with the caveat that doing so requires considerable time and technical skill… we're talking compiling your own kernel and assembling your userland and desktop.
The nice thing about classic Mac OS is that its modularity was more accessible. All one had to be capable of to pare down or customize their install was move files in or out of /System Folder/Extensions/ and /System Folder/Control Panels/. I'd like to see a Linux desktop distribution that works that way.
> The surface area of stuff that an OS has to do today is absolutely massive, and the dependency graphs are poorly understood even by the engineers who work on those systems. Innocuous pieces of functionality have a way of becoming load-bearing over time
It’s not that huge. I use OpenBSD and the code is surprisingly approachable and readable. And even with no support for runtime modules, it’s pretty easy to customize and strip out whole features. Current complexity in something like linux is stretching the subsystems to support a huge array of use cases.
The windows kernel is smart enough to free RAM for the highest demanding app like rendering or video editing, even if the idle is high.
That's why there's no accurate 1:1 comparison between operating systems. Windows, MacOS, and LInux will treat physical memory very differently bot at idle, and during heavy use.
Sure, Win 11 has a lot of bloat and poorly coded Web apps that should be removed or rewritten in native, but the kernel is still top notch at managing even limited memory and handling OOM cases.
The thing with windows is that there is no idle state, something is always busy with the CPU/hogging ram. With Linux I can have like 98% idle and the system taking 2Gb out of my 8gb of ram, but with windows, the system is more like 30% cpu and more than 4GB of currently being used ram.
If idle on Win 11 already pre-caches most-used apps like Chrome/FF and not on Linux, how can you accurately measure what true idle is?
You have to remember the Win (and MacOS) kernel is tuned to consumer desktop user use cases, while Linux kernel is tuned to server/DC use-cases.
That's why ~15 years ago when I was in uni, you'd get audio stutter when playing music/movies of spinning rust on linux while torrenting file on the same HDD, and not on Windows/MacOS, due to different queuing algorithms used thet prioritised audio decoding tasks over everything else, which Linux kernel out of the box didn't, unless you tinkered and changed it.
> while Linux kernel is tuned to server/DC use-cases
That depends on the distro / flavor of kernel; the Linux kernel is pretty flexible and you can cut it however you want. If you use a distro like CachyOS for example, you'll find that they use a kernel tuned for desktop use-case, so you don't need to tinker with anything.
> You have to remember the Win (and MacOS) kernel is tuned to consumer desktop user use cases, while Linux kernel is tuned to server/DC use-cases.
I don’t mind the kernel doing kernel things. The issue is system services and other software that are either unnecessary or badly coded. You can’t disable them because of “reasons” and they’re just wasting your time and your electricity.
A tangent to this which annoys me is not specifically windows, but the way the ecosystem has evolved over the years, by guidance/enforcement or lack thereof from MS. Unless you're very careful about what applications you install and how you manage/monitor them, you can end up with a lot of background applications loaded each boot, each doing some combination of non-centralized updating itself or applications it manages, preloading, quick launch, etc.
Your dream developer experience is already here; since I've switched to Linux, I feel like I'm experiencing Linux psychosis. It's such a breath of fresh air. I've reconfigured my entire workflow around terminal programs and every action feels instant, even with maxed out power saving settings. There's an upfront time investment, sure - a weekend or two to set things up and figure out how you want the basics configured - but I've found myself immediately productive, and after that it's all compound interest, baby. Over the next few months, I've pushed my muscle memory to a point that's completely unachievable on Windows.
Another big advantage of the platform is that some Linux distributions will come bundled absolutely no software, saving you from having to uninstall and disable annoying bloat you have no use for. Additionally, you don't even need to install WSL, because you've already got the L.
> If Project Zenith is a "distraction-free Windows experience," does that imply that everyone else is using nerfed experiences with needless distractions?
Yes.
Well, I mean, no. It could mean that regular Windows has things that could be distracting for developer workflows but might have other legitimate purposes.
Like when a Porsche 911 trim strips out the AC and stereo to provide a "distraction free driver experience" that doesn't mean that those things are "needless" to everyone else.
(Though in truth Windows 11 is full of dumb crap, but that doesn't mean we have to try---and fail!---to play clever lawyerball word games to make the point.)
(And honestly, I don't think MS's idea of a good developer experience is going to be the same as mine or most of HN's. There are entire other worlds of 'development' out there.)
my gripe is, isnt this filling the role pro was supposed to fill?
The funny thing is: They have plenty of more-or-less standard issue developers at MSFT, they'd just need to ask them.
Don't they just use Macs at Microsoft?
Do they mean like, a version of Windows where I don't have to go into folder options and click "show file extensions"?
Windows does care about file extensions but is mildly embarrassed about it, hence the "show" default that has existed from Win 8 (?) onwards.
Linux and co generally work with magic bytes which is just another way of doing file formats. Is it better to signify your file format with a .ext or otherwise?
I find myself turning on file extensions if I have to use Windows and on Linux, I don't care and it just works.
I think the UIs for Linux are better. I think that MS are hung up on trying to suggest their stuff so it gets in the way a bit. On Linux, you just get the best option based on what is installed.
I have gone and ticked the “stop hiding file extensions” since they were introduced in ~98 (or was it Windows 95?)
When antivirus weren’t widespread, having a person click on a virus was just so easy: create a program with the icon of an image file. God forbid people learn that .exe means executable program. Learning new stuff is scary!
> I have gone and ticked the “stop hiding file extensions” since they were introduced in ~98 (or was it Windows 95?)
I think Windows 95, although even selecting that option still hides some file name extensions (such as ".lnk"). However, I have found that it is possible to use the registry editor to force all file name extensions to be displayed.
But even on system where they aren't needed they're useful IMO, for me as a user. Magic bytes mean you have to seek into each file, and if you care about file types, it means anything that lists files has to do that.
Personally, I'm not against file extensions, and I like to see and use them, however when something (i.e. magic bytes of a file) is used a lot system-wide, the underlying mechanisms optimize towards the use case as a natural tendency.
The interesting, or more accurately neat thing about EXT family of filesystems is, the file header is always one pointer away from your inode structure for that file.
With NVMe disks or SSDs in general, this is a very cheap operation, even when done en-masse. Even when we were using HDDs, anti-fragmentation features of EXT3/4 kept that one seek pretty cheap.
As a test, I fed my whole documents folder (~3500 files) into "file" tool to see what it does (via "file -f $filelist"). It finished in ~1,5 seconds. I redirected the output to /dev/null to eliminate the overhead incurred by printing things over SSH, though.
While everything is fast for small n, the consideration of small for this operation goes a long way, AFAICS.
Oracle has a great write-up about EXT4 and its structure: https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/understanding-ext4-disk-layou...
Actually, yes.
That is one of the primary points in the list of advantages.
>File Explorer shows file extensions, hidden files, the full path in the title bar, and the details pane, with long-path support enabled.
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2026/09/04/announ...
If this is intended for developers who aren't that good at quickly setting these simple options by now though I don't know what to think :\
When I read the headline of the announcement article, I thought it would be in the spirit of https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-drive/, instead it's just advertising a series of device that most devs won't ever buy.
Devs might be bad at marketing to general public, but if the target market are devs, run the ads through them first. Even if they're in a building with no dev at all, surely one can be reached through an internal email.
It's just cover to justify the future claim: "See? Nobody wants a distraction-free, decrappified Windows. Nobody bought it..."
Have they considered providing unconditional support to WINE and releasing a Linux distro?
If I can install Linux on these unified-memory PCs, then it sounds quite cool.
I wouldn't wish any developer to be forced to use W11 though. I'm already miserable enough at work, I just use a VM with Fedora and W11 is just a bootloader.
I refuse to use windows at home. I'll use it at work, but it's either Xubuntu or MacOS at home. I couldn't be happier.
I have no choice but to use Windows at home due to 200+ Steam games I own. Many work only on Windows only. Emulation don't work for most on Linux.
I got a separate PC just for linux btw, so no biggie
Meanwhile my steam library of 900+ works pretty much flawlessly on linux. Yes the odd esoteric game needs a workaround or two, but honestly if you browse the pcgamingwiki then you'd notice you also need to tweak them on windows too, such is the problem with older games.
Echoing this. I would have to go out of my way to find one that does not work simply by double-clicking the steam entry. This is on Arch
It does happen, but it's pretty rare. Specifically, the MechWarrior 5 games don't work with my VKB joystick out of the box (had to do some config shenanigans to get that to work), Rome II Total War crashes pretty regularly, and the sound doesn't work right in HBS Battletech (which is odd cause I'm pretty sure that's a unity game). But the vast, vast majority of my library works without any tinkering.
Ditto. Nothing I want to play doesn’t work on Linux / bazzite.
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I shelled out for a Steam Machine (SteamOS ≈ Arch Linux.) I do gamedev, and I figured having a test machine was a decent enough excuse for a purchase. It's working suprisingly well for the games I'm actually playing. They're playing better than on my last Windows desktop tower, even, presumably due to a better GPU.
Granted, catalogs vary - anti-cheat and DRM may not play nice, and EvE Online wasn't stable until I switched the renderer from D3D12 to D3D11 (and I haven't tried playing with multiple accounts) - but you might revisit Linux gaming if it's been awhile since you last have.
The enshittification of Windows has finally driven me to the point where Linux compatability is going to start affecting my Steam purchases.
Out of interest, are you doing any dev on the SM? If so, how is it for that?
Only a token test amount so far. The root filesystem is read-only by default, but without the whole Nix ecosystem, which is a little awkward (can't install packages even as root without changing that.) On the other hand, it comes with `distrobox` preinstalled, so it's easy enough to spin up a container and use that (including package installation.)
My raw notes are here: https://github.com/MaulingMonkey/notes/blob/master/programmi...
Whenever I used windows for games I just installed it on a partition and solely used it for steam. Nothing else installed but steam and games. Usually with the free unregistered version of windows because I could not care less about setting a desktop background. Too insufferable for any other use.
I have the separate PC just for Steam, at least that's how I look at it :]
There are far more penguins in my homelab
Same. ArchLinux and macOS for me.
So what is it, concretely? Default settings and bundled software? Like Lenovo bloatware but from Microsoft?
Maybe the main feature they are not telling anyone is that it slurps your valuable code bases faster in order to feed their AI? I guess usurping github ain't enough.
They could stop hogging so much memory. My work laptop was fine on Win 10 and on Win 11 it began swapping to disk.
Unused RAM is wasted RAM. And swap usage is not an issue either unless there's a lot of swap in/out happening.
> Unused RAM is wasted RAM
A terrible phrase constantly used in defense of bloated, wasteful programs using gobs of memory to achieve nothing.
It’s true unused it wasted but unfortunately what it’s used for is decided by corporate flavor of the month so garbage one drive, teams and Gemini builds eat all the ram that would be better used by other applications people actually like
I was quite surprised that this phrase, which papers over nuances in how operating systems classify and manage memory, was posted by someone who studied CS.
Indeed. They can’t know what other applications you need to run. So they more frugal the OS and application, the more available for other software apps.
> Unused RAM is wasted RAM
This applies to caches, and it applies to time versus memory tradeoffs in expensive algorithms. Win11 wastes a lot of memory on neither.
If I’m encoding video or running a database, sure.
But the OS should be as lean as possible because the entire reason is to run other programs.
> But the OS should be as lean as possible because the entire reason is to run other programs.
In my mind Classic Mac OS (minus its design issues) is the ideal to strive for here.
It was barely even an OS and more like a substrate for GUI applications to run on top of. Even “essentials” like networking and USB support were implemented by way of extensions which could be disabled at will. If you disabled all extensions you’d get something resembling a full color version of the original 1985 System 1.0 that took almost no resources. This was great for squeezing out every last drop for things like games and emulators.
It was that lightweight because it provided basically none of the functionality that is essential to a modern OS. Because it wasn't a modern OS.
The surface area of stuff that an OS has to do today is absolutely massive, and the dependency graphs are poorly understood even by the engineers who work on those systems. Innocuous pieces of functionality have a way of becoming load-bearing over time.
If you ran around disabling random bits of functionality in Windows because you wanted to reclaim some resources for your games, you'd probably wedge the OS, cause random crashes, and prevent your games from even launching. Like you might think "Well my game doesn't need Bluetooth, I only use a wired controller!" but I would not be surprised at all if yanking out the Bluetooth stack from the OS caused random crashes and hangs.
I’m not convinced that it’s impossible to build a modern OS in a way that’s properly modular and allows most functionality to be disabled entirely (as in never even loaded into memory).
Windows almost categorically can’t because it’s only ever been developed organically and is pathologically backwards compatible, which keeps it forever tied to past design decisions.
Linux could get a much closer but is hamstrung by monolithic kernel design which puts more functionality there.
You’d need a clean sheet design which positions most subsystems as discrete components.
"Linux" encompasses everything from microcontrollers to planet-scale supercomputers. You can, in fact, build a Linux that runs in as few resources as you like. No qualifiers.
Technically true, though that comes with the caveat that doing so requires considerable time and technical skill… we're talking compiling your own kernel and assembling your userland and desktop.
The nice thing about classic Mac OS is that its modularity was more accessible. All one had to be capable of to pare down or customize their install was move files in or out of /System Folder/Extensions/ and /System Folder/Control Panels/. I'd like to see a Linux desktop distribution that works that way.
> The surface area of stuff that an OS has to do today is absolutely massive, and the dependency graphs are poorly understood even by the engineers who work on those systems. Innocuous pieces of functionality have a way of becoming load-bearing over time
It’s not that huge. I use OpenBSD and the code is surprisingly approachable and readable. And even with no support for runtime modules, it’s pretty easy to customize and strip out whole features. Current complexity in something like linux is stretching the subsystems to support a huge array of use cases.
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The windows kernel is smart enough to free RAM for the highest demanding app like rendering or video editing, even if the idle is high.
That's why there's no accurate 1:1 comparison between operating systems. Windows, MacOS, and LInux will treat physical memory very differently bot at idle, and during heavy use.
Sure, Win 11 has a lot of bloat and poorly coded Web apps that should be removed or rewritten in native, but the kernel is still top notch at managing even limited memory and handling OOM cases.
The thing with windows is that there is no idle state, something is always busy with the CPU/hogging ram. With Linux I can have like 98% idle and the system taking 2Gb out of my 8gb of ram, but with windows, the system is more like 30% cpu and more than 4GB of currently being used ram.
If idle on Win 11 already pre-caches most-used apps like Chrome/FF and not on Linux, how can you accurately measure what true idle is?
You have to remember the Win (and MacOS) kernel is tuned to consumer desktop user use cases, while Linux kernel is tuned to server/DC use-cases.
That's why ~15 years ago when I was in uni, you'd get audio stutter when playing music/movies of spinning rust on linux while torrenting file on the same HDD, and not on Windows/MacOS, due to different queuing algorithms used thet prioritised audio decoding tasks over everything else, which Linux kernel out of the box didn't, unless you tinkered and changed it.
> while Linux kernel is tuned to server/DC use-cases
That depends on the distro / flavor of kernel; the Linux kernel is pretty flexible and you can cut it however you want. If you use a distro like CachyOS for example, you'll find that they use a kernel tuned for desktop use-case, so you don't need to tinker with anything.
> You have to remember the Win (and MacOS) kernel is tuned to consumer desktop user use cases, while Linux kernel is tuned to server/DC use-cases.
I don’t mind the kernel doing kernel things. The issue is system services and other software that are either unnecessary or badly coded. You can’t disable them because of “reasons” and they’re just wasting your time and your electricity.
A tangent to this which annoys me is not specifically windows, but the way the ecosystem has evolved over the years, by guidance/enforcement or lack thereof from MS. Unless you're very careful about what applications you install and how you manage/monitor them, you can end up with a lot of background applications loaded each boot, each doing some combination of non-centralized updating itself or applications it manages, preloading, quick launch, etc.
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These days, swapping to disk means your SSD wears out and dies faster. That's very much an issue.
Until you open something else
Or one can simply optimize the memory?
Developers, developers, developers.
Your dream developer experience is already here; since I've switched to Linux, I feel like I'm experiencing Linux psychosis. It's such a breath of fresh air. I've reconfigured my entire workflow around terminal programs and every action feels instant, even with maxed out power saving settings. There's an upfront time investment, sure - a weekend or two to set things up and figure out how you want the basics configured - but I've found myself immediately productive, and after that it's all compound interest, baby. Over the next few months, I've pushed my muscle memory to a point that's completely unachievable on Windows.
Another big advantage of the platform is that some Linux distributions will come bundled absolutely no software, saving you from having to uninstall and disable annoying bloat you have no use for. Additionally, you don't even need to install WSL, because you've already got the L.
They should go do version 9 like a fork with hindsight
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