my major gripe with both windows 10 and 11 is how bloated they feel at all times. Even with 16 GB RAM it feels like a chore doing anything on them. It could be a perception issue or perhaps an actual one but Windows 7 was so much more faster at a time when hardware was not even that evolved
This is a general trend in all propriety operating systems. The better the hardware gets, the more stuff they add like transparency effects, animations, other stuff that runs in background that most people don't event need. On Windows you can do certain things to make it more efficient by using those open source utilities that strips out a lot of unnecessary stuff from Windows.
Yep, MS has to throw a bone to the h/w manufacturers every so often. That was probably a factor in MS backpedalling on Win10 being the 'last version of Windows ever' (that, and Apple advancing macOS beyond major version 10).
It is a trend in all operating systems. All operating systems and their desktop applications (the whole package counts!) run best on the hardware that is made around their release. Debian-derived (Ubuntu Mint) runs dog slow on an laptop of 10 years old.
Windows 11 memory management is better than Windows 10. Im no longer on 16gb ram but back when I upgraded to windows 11, it was day and night difference (and this was not a clean install).
yeah, it's awful. I have a 32gig machine and "only" windows 10. And have to go back to micro-managing memory like in winxp times. Restarting programs from time to time - and rebooting every couple of days. Inb4 "free memory is wasted memory" apologists. Programs just flat out refuse to start or crash when memory is >85%.