I mean the trackpad issue is generally down to the manufacturer and the drivers they provide, but I take your point otherwise.
A pro tip with 7z is to use the two pane interface to extract and not dragging files to Explorer. The latter option extracts the files to a temp directory before copying them whereas the former extracts directly to the destination.
The Windows file systems are pretty cruddy in general though so decompressing tonnes of small files in general will take longer than on OS X or Linux.
> I mean the trackpad issue is generally down to the manufacturer and the drivers they provide...
Was just wondering this myself. I tried a Surface Laptop this week, and its trackpad has everything I love from the 2012-era Mac trackpads. A satisfyingly snappy physical mouse click, gestures & acceleration, and a perfect size. (I can't stand Force Touch on the new MacBook Pro, and I don't like their new giant trackpads.)
The Windows file systems are pretty cruddy in general though so decompressing tonnes of small files in general will take longer than on OS X or Linux.
I haven't checked this in a while, so it could be out of date... But what you claim is windows being cruddy, might be a symtom of a slightly different mindset in data protection. Here is a test, grab a big tar.gz/zip file and uncompress it in linux and in windows from the command prompt. As soon as you see it complete, pull the power plug/battery from the machine. Plug it back in, check the result.
In the past windows seemed to be more aggressive about flushing things to disk, and applications were far more generous with calls to FlushFileBuffers() on windows than similar apps on linux were about calling fsync(). Seemingly because fsync() is a machine deathblow on linux when under IO load. Where as windows did a slightly better job of only flushing the requested file. Also, i've seen a number of "streaming" apps on windows play nice and use FILE_FLAG_WRITE_THROUGH.. which makes them run slower, but doesn't trash the whole system.
Bottom line is that I wouldn't call NTFS cruddy, it does a lot of things that still aren't mainstream in linux filesystems. If your seeing some huge performance anomaly between windows & linux look closer. NTFS may not be sexy, but its a solid piece of engineering (ok some things are cool like VSS. TxF is also cool but might get deprecated because no one knows about it).
No, NTFS is cruddy. It is eager to flush metadata but not data, and there is no way to switch it to "journal data as well" mode (at least not as far as Win8.1, maybe 10 added this mode).
This is the default behavior on ext3 and ext4 as well, of course, and if you pull the plug on NTFS, ext3 or ext4, you WILL end up with files whose length reflects recent writes but whose contents do not (and I am saying this from analyzing hundreds of cases of file contents that are impossible given program flow -- about 10:1 on NTFS than on non-data-journalled ext4). But at least on linux you can tune2fs -o journal_data, still get very decent performance and much, much better integrity.
Also, I think you are conflating sync(), fsync(), fdatasync() and FlushFileBuffers. calling fsync() or fdatasync() on linux is no worse than FlushFileBuffers - the IO killing behaviour you describe is associated with sync(), which, when you need it, is perfectly justified in killing IO.
> A pro tip with 7z is to use the two pane interface to extract and not dragging files to Explorer. The latter option extracts the files to a temp directory before copying them whereas the former extracts directly to the destination.
It's because the 7-Zip file manager first extracts to %temp% and then copies (not moves) to the drop location. If you use the regular extract function it extracts to the destination directly. Using the Explorer context menu does the same thing, and thus is also fast.
A pro tip with 7z is to use the two pane interface to extract and not dragging files to Explorer. The latter option extracts the files to a temp directory before copying them whereas the former extracts directly to the destination.
The Windows file systems are pretty cruddy in general though so decompressing tonnes of small files in general will take longer than on OS X or Linux.