Pro install on Windows or Server?

[RTPL_AU]

Does anyone have opinions or experience, even anecdotal, related to the performance and stability of contemporary 2025 ArcGIS Pro versions on Server 2025 vs Windows 11 24H2?

This will be for bare metal local workstation use only; my split personalities do not yet deserve multiple remote desktop sessions.....

With a Server based desktop having less 'fluff' and although using similar architecture, Server versions are more performant with regards to some networking and disk based workloads. 

I may have alluded to it in other posts but my current opinion of Pro is pretty low, specifically related to user interface performance and stability (anti-crash, not anti-change). 
My day to day typical datasets are small, hence more interaction with UI bits & pieces, compared to people that work on large datasets that have to wait minutes for things to load/process/save/refresh. 

There is some new hardware ogling me and picking the OS is the next step prior to moving it into my office.

[Leena_Abdulqader]

Hi @RTPL_AU, this might be late, but here is my opinion: ArcGIS Pro 3.5 supports both Windows 11 24H2 and Windows Server 2025. For a single-user workstation, Windows 11 24H2 is the better fit because it has a more up-to-date GPU/display driver pipeline. Server editions are really aimed at VDI/RDS.

However, performance wins for UI snappiness come more from hardware and settings than OS choice. Here is what I do: Keep GPU drivers current; try Pro’s Display options (DirectX vs OpenGL, lower rendering quality). Enable feature caching, exclude Pro folders from antivirus scans, and keep .NET/WebView2 runtimes up to date.

For your "small datasets, heavy UI interaction" workflow: go Windows 11 24H2 + strong CPU, NVMe SSD, discrete GPU + Pro display/cache tuning, that's the smoothest path.

Hope that helps!

[RTPL_AU]

Thank you @Leena_Abdulqader  - never too late to hear other perspectives.
My hardware has been at the top end of the scale for a few years now and I feel Pro's in-app performance/responsiveness is getting worse. It got better for a few versions; 3.2 and 3.3 felt decent in hindsight (but not great) - until the license checking fiasco killed the experience there. 

The question about Server 2025 is a grasping-at-straws scenario. I am so frustrated that I am willing to pay the money for the per-processor licensing of Server on a Threadripper system if it performs better. 

If Pro is SO sensitive to its install environment, which I feel it is, that any issue in the pipeline of .NET, WebView, etc can so fundamentally mess up the user experience, Esri has a lot of work to do. 

With all the issues in 3.5 I have gone through an update  / re-install fest to all the latest everything on my current system - against my better judgement.
I feel overall Pro responsiveness is worse in 24H2 and the latest NVidia drivers vs 23H2 with the late 2024 (566) drivers. That has led me to building another new PC with PCIe Gen5 SSDs, etc. and just need to find time to hook it into the office network.  

I have to mention that everything else on the computer, ArcMap, QGIS, Solid Edge, Corel, etc perform to the level you expect from this hardware.

[RTPL_AU]

I've plugged the Server 2025 based pc into the network today and overall there is a bit of an improvement.
As a whole the Windows experience is quite good - amazing what less MS fluff can do to the overall responsiveness.

Pro, however, is perhaps a bit better than my other machine. Some of the things that have lag on Win11 are gone for now - Contents feel a bit better and Catalog browsing as well. I'll see how I feel once I get the next big job done tomorrow.
I'll have to figure out how to test what the cause is as it may either be just being a new install, or it not being Win11. It can also be due to the decent hardware bump up. 

For those who though this may be a magic bullet - sorry to disappoint.  Many of the age old Pro UI issues are still there.  Setting patch sizes in legends still require you to wait between width & height otherwise it reverts to the previous height, changing graticule/grid settings is laggy, etc. 

I also tried a network share with an all-SSD mirror of my main share - not much of an improvement in Pro. 
Even though all my machines are 10GBE with decent arrays on the server side, I was expecting a bit more 'zip' in Pro's step.  I'd probably have to go to a large enterprise Kioxia arrays..... or maybe Pro will just remain wallowing in its pool sipping a diet soda...

Was the exercise worth the time? Yes. Is Server 2025 a valid option? I think so. It just feels less 'ick' than Win 11, even with the desktop experience enabled. 
I'll give it a few months as the main machine and see how we go.  At least until the next few updates, maybe till Pro 3.6 so we can see if it falls on its face after updates.
I'm still running in the trial period and the Server 2025 per-core licensing is something to carefully consider on high core cpus; but if it can save me days of work over a few years it has paid for itself. 

Anecdotally there is also less chance Microsoft will hose your Server discs with an update compared to Win 11.  KB5063878 is what I'm going hunting for once I finish here.

[RTPL_AU]

I think the improvement was mainly due to being on Server and the newer generation hardware (other apps etc fly!) .

Pro, after working in a project for a few hours, starts grinding and you start seeing the spinny-wheel-thingy a lot more.  Add to this the Copy bug and you have a recipe for wanting to take up rock farming.

It is still better than on the other machine (throw electricity at a problem is so 2025 eh?), but for it to devolve so quickly with no updates / other changes to the pc, just means the app itself is written badly, in my opinion. 
After a decade, I suspect there is serious technical debt at play, and we are unlikely to see real improvement until they do a new build of ArcGIS Next on a new dev platform (please prove me wrong).

I can follow the Esri recommendation and create a new user profile, fully uninstall & re-install Pro using the Esri AU blog, but doing that every week seems a bit counter-productive. 

While typing this I noticed Pro is sitting in the background doing something - you can see it grey out parts of the UI every few seconds. I suspect the cursor will be a spinny wheel periodically if I move it over the app. 
The Diag Monitor shows there is activity and the memory usage is steadily climbing, but I have no geo-processes running, no web services in the map, Indexing should be off, so what is it doing while it is supposed to be doing nothing?

[RTPL_AU]

I'm getting more frequent random hard crashes on this machine than I did on the Win11 PC.

I've been editing in an enviro compliance project all day and have had a few hard crashes where Pro will just disappear and you get the small notification box saying the application has crashed. 

Most recent I was editing the fields in a SHP file to remove 3 unneeded fields. Clicked Save & Boom. Gone.
Data was OK after re-opening.

The other crashes earlier today were all random things - one was changing a colour in symbology and the other while looking for a GP tool.  

I've been updating old maps in ArcMap on another machine and it is stable and responsive. Yes - it doesn't have as many pretty trinkets but these are compliance and disturbance maps, not trying to win a Nat Geo prize, so I want to get the job done and not wait for a pretty .... menu to appear.
I'll say it again - some areas of ArcMap also take a second to open, but it feels the same every time you click the button - that means you can get into a rhythm and get work done. Pro just wants to mess around, play with the dog, update Insta, Tik some Toks or who knows what else, instead of just getting doing what the user wants!