> Refresh a webpage on Windows or Linux, mp3 you're playing pops and skips about half the time.
Not my experience. Windows (and IIRC MacOS too) always had a great disk I/O scheduler that prioritized audio related tasks so I never had mp3s pop or skip on me, no matter how hard I was thrashing my spinning rust disks back then.
Linux was the one where I noticed this issue intensely back then as the schedulers used by mainstream distros were all tuned for server/mainframe workloads.
To be fair to Windows, it didn't take much more powerful hardware before that problem went away—the mp3 stuttering, anyway, UI lag/unresponsiveness is still struggling to match BeOS on ~every major OS, today. Was all Win98 for me in that era, maybe XP and such improved it (I don't think I ever tried to run it on anything that weak)
Not my experience. Windows (and IIRC MacOS too) always had a great disk I/O scheduler that prioritized audio related tasks so I never had mp3s pop or skip on me, no matter how hard I was thrashing my spinning rust disks back then.
Linux was the one where I noticed this issue intensely back then as the schedulers used by mainstream distros were all tuned for server/mainframe workloads.