Current versions of Windows really feel like they're chugging under the hood. I got a GPD Win Max 2 last year, with 64GB RAM, an eight-core Ryzen and an RTX-capable GPU, it's a beast of a machine.

The start menu still takes a second to open. The explorer menu is loading in after the window has opened. Doing a right-click to open context menus also takes longer than it should take (and it's noticeably quicker when you bring the old context menus back). Every time you do an action in Windows 11 it feels like an old geezer gets up from his wheelchair, fights a cough attack and almost collapses while trying to go to the bathroom.

I once read that the new start menu and those fancy explorer ribbons and context menus are written in React, so I guess the rendering engine is just a massive bloated browser nowadays that puts your system under way more load than it needs to.

Compared to that, Fedora 42 is blazingly fast on this machine. With a Samsung SSD the whole thing was installed in five minutes and KDE Plasma is just so snappy - everything opens instantly and it never feels like my machine needs to think for a second before displaying something. Now that we've also reached higher FPS in games with Proton in some scenarious, there is no good reason for me to even use Windows anymore.