10 ms·

“start menus made with React Native, control-alt-delete menus that are actually just webviews” Haven’t used windows in five years or so but I’ve kept hearing b

• cogman10 10mo ago
  The windows problem is every other OS release has included new UI libraries. Over the last 10 years they've made something like 5 different new ways to make native windows UIs. And, of course, they support all of them. You can use the classic Win32 API or you can use the newest WinUI 3
• memoriuaysj 10mo ago
  what has gone horribly wrong is the native UIs. they are completely worthless, across all OSes - difficult to use, limited, and in general suck compared to HTML/CSS. I've worked with all major GUI frameworks, from MFC to Qt, they all suck compared with React/Vue
  • cogman10 10mo ago
    I generally agree with you, but it does entirely depend on the type of application you want to make. If you need a lot of graphical elements and customization to get a look and feel that matches what you want, then yeah, nothing really beats html/css/js for both it's flexibility and available ecosystem. But if what you need is an application with a button that does magic things when you push it, or a text box or table that allows for customization of the text color, then all the other types of UX frameworks work just fine. You just can't expect to do something like make a pretty chart.
  • Barrin92 10mo ago
    and yet the Telegram Desktop App, written in Qt/C++ is the only goddamn desktop messenger app that actually feels smooth and feature rich rather than the webclient wrapper abominations of everyone else that eat half a gig of ram on startup and randomly hang on searches
    • Klonoar 10mo ago
      macOS has two separate Telegram apps, technically speaking. The one (most) everyone uses is AppKit based.
    • mbirth 10mo ago
      I’ve recently downgraded my 10 year old used-only-for-obscure-firmware-updaters laptop to Windows 7 and enabled the “Classic” design. The snappiness of that GUI is unmatched even with Win 10/11 on much better hardware. Makes you wonder about the rest of Windows when Microsoft can’t even optimise the most basic things in modern Windows anymore.
      • tvbusy 9mo ago
        Same here. I developed desktop applications for 15+ years and was really frustrated with Microsoft's direction for the UI around the time of Windows Phone. While Windows Forms may not be the best, it worked for decades until then. Now even if someone wants to build a desktop application using native UI, it's next to no resource at all because it's all about cross platform nowadays.
  • cageface 10mo ago
    SwiftUI on macOS 26 still has issues but it’s finally starting to evolve into something usable. In particular it seems like the long standing performance problems are being addressed.
  • ffaser5gxlsll 10mo ago
    For whom? Every single web or mobile app does his own custom thing nowadays. As a user I couldn't care less how it's implemented, what I want consistency in behavior and style across the board. It feels like this has been completely lost, even on platforms like mac where consistency used to be important. I'd take MFC everything over random behavior if I could.
    • klabb3 10mo ago
      > It feels like this has been completely lost, even on platforms like mac where consistency used to be important. There are two kinds of consistency: across apps within a platform and across platforms within the same app. As someone who uses multiple platforms regularly, I have forever been annoyed when eg keyboard shortcuts change when I switch to a different computer, especially when I’m using the same app. Apps like Discord, Spotify and VSCode are consistently the most pleasurable to use because they are largely the same. For a unique piece of hardware like the old iPod, it made more sense to do your special custom UX as a unified product. But we’re talking about general purpose computers. The ”platform” shouldn’t be special imo, it should simply be predictable and stay out of the way. They mostly provide the same thing, like copy paste and maximizing a window, yet have different controls. This differentiation adds no value, at least to me.
      • d12bb 9mo ago
        You forget you’re a minority. Most users use one platform, or at most one work one private (probably with different software). So most software should be optimized for the platform, not consistency across them.
  • cosmic_cheese 10mo ago
    I don’t agree with this at all. I’ll take AppKit (preferably with Swift, but Obj-C is fine too) over anything web. There’s a number of reasons, but the biggest is that AppKit has an expansive set of well implemented, accessible, flexible, efficient, and ready to use widgets that are all designed to work together, and the truth is that this isn’t something you can get on the web. Even the most complete “UI frameworks” on the web are full of holes, leaving you to build a patchwork monster out of a laundry list of third party widgets (all of which themselves are full of shortcomings and concessions) or build your own. As an aside, this gripe isn’t exclusive to the web. It’s a problem with many others such as Windows App SDK (aka WinUI) and Flutter, among others. At least for the things I build, they’re unsuitable at best.
    • bitwize 10mo ago
      There's one problem: If you're competent with non-web UI technologies, it's probably time to schedule your colonoscopy. Late millennials and gen Z have been spoiled by declarative, reactive frameworks that work identically whether you're doing a local UI or the Web, and the tools (for example Figma) that have grown up around these frameworks. Using C++, Objective-C, or even Swift will be just fine for a personal project, but if you're talking something that needs to be maintained and refined over the long term by a team, you will have a much worse time finding people competent in those languages than in JavaScript+React+Electron. This is also one of the reasons behind rewriting everything in Rust: C is so dangerous, people who don't already know it inside and out are unwilling to touch it. Virtually all of the younger system developers are already working in Rust, and would vastly prefer it over working in C given the choice, so keeping a C project maintained has gotten a whole lot harder.
      • cosmic_cheese 10mo ago
        I write plenty of declarative UI too in the form of SwiftUI (where it makes sense; often on Apple platforms the imperative frameworks are better suited) and Jetpack Compose. Declarative UI has its upsides, but it’s hardly a panacea. There are places where it’s a straightforward dramatic improvement and then others where it’s an awkward contortion at best. Reactivity can be great but works in imperative setups too. The explosion of popularity of front end web frameworks comes down almost entirely to two things: accessibility and commodity talent. It has a low bar to entry and JS+React is the closest the industry has come yet to achieving its undying dream of cheap, easily replaceable, interchangeable developers. In most other aspects it’s objectively worse than alternatives.
  • Aloisius 10mo ago
    Sucks a whole lot less for users though. I remember when people argued that because the time spent running an app was so much greater than the time spent developing it that one should be more conscientious about a user's time than a developer's. After all, wasting a minute of time from 20 million users is 38 man-years of lost life. Doing that just to save a developer a week or a month is ethically troubling. Of course, people also upgraded their computers a lot less frequently and you'd publish minimum machine requirements for software which probably made it easier to make such arguments as you'd also lose customers if software was slow or had minimum hardware requirements a lot of people didn't have. That largely went out the window with web developers where users were just as likely to blame browser makers or their ISP for poor performance. Now with app developers and OS makers doing it, I guess there's just so many users at this point that losing a few with older hardware just doesn't matter.
  • fragmede 10mo ago
    Ugh, opposite. CSS is the fucking worst way of laying out a UI. How many human lives have been lost to div class layout nonsense that a better system could handle directly.
  • ykonstant 10mo ago
    Not for the user, unless I forgot that today is opposite day.
  • yndoendo 9mo ago
    I would hard disagree. Give me QT to make cross-platform applications that properly manage resources, have low latency, and barely register in memory usage. There was a cross-platform QT tool, running on macOS, Windows, and Linux, for debugging and updating the firmware for an embedded platform solution. macOS & Linux both were quick and fast to code. Windows needed more work and also an abstracted write management system because the application was bringing the OS to screeching halt while writing the debug messages to a SQLite database. The write issue was only on Windows. HTML pages / reports were being saved into the SQLite database and viewable with-in the application. This was all packed into a single file executable so nothing and to be installed, just copied to the computer and ran. Often low-end hardware is sold in product solutions and frameworks like QT are better suited to make the end user happy with load and response time than HTML5. The only reason I find bloated frameworks being used on such hardware is because the developer only understood one programing language and one UI framework. The former developer who's job I took over jumped ship because he did not want to learn WPF and only knew WinForms. QT, HTML5, React, WinForms, Gtk ... are all tools in a tool box and each has a proper usage. Hell, if I ever make an iPhone based application I will be learning Swift and the Apple frameworks for such a task.
• AceJohnny2 10mo ago
  Microsoft has a history of creating new UI frameworks. IMHO it's the result of Ballmer's "Developers, developers, developers!" attitude, which I think is a good thing at core (court the developers that add value to your platform!) But this results in chasing a new paradigm every few years to elicit new excitement from the developers. It'll always be more newsworthy to bring in a new framework than add incremental fixes to the old one. React has had tremendous success in the web world, so why not try and get those developers more comfortable producing apps for your platform? (Tangentially, see also the mixed reaction to Mac native apps switching from AppKit to SwiftUI)
  • cjbgkagh 10mo ago
    The decisions reg UI frameworks are largely due to internal political conflicts, mostly between DevDiv and Windows.
    • markus_zhang 10mo ago
      Just curious what is DevDiv? Tools division?
      • xmcp123 10mo ago
        As I understand it, .NET, developer tools, and VS. Basically you have tight OS integration vs developer friendly cross platform.
        • seanmcdirmid 10mo ago
          I think it also includes GitHub now.
          • Conan_Kudo 9mo ago
            I believe GitHub is under a different group (CoreAI), not DevDiv.
        • markus_zhang 9mo ago
• Johanx64 10mo ago
  >OS manufacturer can’t be bothered to interact with their own UI libraries to build native UIs something has gone horribly wrong. I honestly think that has way less to do with Microsoft, more of a representation of "software engineering" practices these days. For example, Gnome shell has bunch of javascript in it, GTK has layout and styling defined in some flavour of CSS, etc. I'm of opinion if you start writing OS userland in either javascript or python (or both), you should be fired on the spot, but I don't make the shots. Most technical decisions aren't really driven by what makes a better end-user experience or a better product, it's mostly defined by convenience and familiarity of substandard software developers - with mostly and primarily web-slop background.
  • zozbot234 10mo ago
    Cosmic (from the PopOS folks) is getting rid of the crappy javascript from GNOME Shell. And the CSS in GTK+ themes is just for the sake of syntactic convenience.
    • tormeh 10mo ago
      Cosmic is quite nice. There's some polishing left to do, but it's already pretty solid. The app store is a bit of a turd, but I bet that's just because it's by nature connected to the internet. More could surely be done with caching and pre-loading, but not sure if I want my computer to pre-load app store content all the time just in case I open it. Compared to Windows it's of course absolutely unreal.
  • cryptica 10mo ago
    The last point is very astute. The software industry has always had more juniors than seniors so this issue of juniors calling the shots is not a new one but it does feel like it's been getting worse and worse... Now it's basically AI slop vibe coders calling the shots about coding best-practices.
  • amlib 10mo ago
    But the difference is that none of the CSS or Javascript usage in gnome is tied to a webview. They are all binding in some way to GTK and much simpler rendering routines.
• jasonlotito 10mo ago
  Yeah. Crazy when the two most significant desktop OS's (Windows and MacOS) have native UIs where something has gone horribly wrong.
  • justinhj 10mo ago
    Both are absolutely fine. I don't get it. I use both os daily and neither is remotely laggy, looks nice, supports all the hardware and software and I don't have to be surprised or spend hours downloading drivers to make it work.
    • d12bb 9mo ago
      macOS is fine on all officially supported machines. Windows 11 is fine on high-end machines, and sucks on everything else. I have to use Windows 11 for work unfortunately, an almost bare install with just the two programs we use added, no background stuff or other extra resource hogs, and it just. sucks. shit!
  • kcplate 10mo ago
    I can’t speak to windows since it’s been at least a decade since I have had to use it, but I really don’t understand the hate on the new Apple OSs. I haven’t found them to be a measurably different user experience than their respective prior versions. So when you say “horribly wrong” it makes me wonder exactly what you mean, specifically.
    • jasonlotito 9mo ago
      I didn't say that. From the parent: > if a OS manufacturer can’t be bothered to interact with their own UI libraries to build native UIs something has gone horribly wrong.
      • kcplate 9mo ago
        You certainly repeated it and didn’t dispute it. I ask again—What is horribly wrong where you agree enough to repeat the claim?
• justinhj 10mo ago
  How the start menu is programmed is of zero consequence to me.
  • ezst 10mo ago
    > is of zero consequence to me It is inconsequential, until it isn't. In front of me I've got a 2017 lenovo thinkpad running the latest Fedora+KDE, as well as a 2025 HP elitebook running "last corporate-friendly-stable version of W11". I can pop open the lenovo, key in my session password and hit enter, and I'm instantly productive, with shortcuts like meta+E giving me a working file explorer within milliseconds. On the Windows' side, there are several seconds of delay between typing my password and the on-screen feedback. Once finally unlocked, I've got a laggy environment where OS-essentials like the start menu and file explorers take whole seconds to render and respond. It's a shame, if you ask me, that a dozen-or-so CPU and "general hardware" generations between those two devices got to waste due to poor software engineering and practices. And I'm not even talking about quality/reliability which is another sore point for Windowses of late.
    • winrid 10mo ago
      Same. 2017 thinkpad, latest KDE, snappier than my 2025 Dell with Win11 and a processor that should be about 60% faster for single thread tasks.
    • justinhj 10mo ago
      Windows 11 has zero lag on the start menu so I don't care if it is hand coded assembler or some bloated web crap. I even ran Windows 10 on Thinkpad x240 a couple of years ago, it also ran fine.
  • solumunus 10mo ago
    Performance isn’t a consequence?
• reincarnate0x14 10mo ago
  Pretty standard for Microsoft lately. The old stuff is still there, we're adding a completely new stack adjacent to it so now you can live with the worst of both! The Windows 8 tablet interface and the Win11 wtfever that is still sometimes kick out a dialogue box unchanged since Windows XP. One can only imagine what the product managers of like .NET think of all this.
  • Macha 10mo ago
    > Pretty standard for Microsoft lately. The old stuff is still there, we're adding a completely new stack adjacent to it so now you can live with the worst of both! The Windows 8 tablet interface and the Win11 wtfever that is still sometimes kick out a dialogue box unchanged since Windows XP. At least in Windows 10, there was even still the occasional Windows 3.1 file picker hanging around in the really dusty locations
    • bitwize 10mo ago
      When Windows 11 first dropped, a Win3.x file picker buried deep in the OS was memed around (I believe it was the picker for a .dso file for ODBC).
• lawgimenez 10mo ago
  Microsoft dropped the ball with Universal Windows Platform framework, I worked on one project using this framework and it was one the best. Our codebase run on both phone and desktop Windows 8. This was 2014-ish if I remember, and then Windows phone got killed.
  • yunnpp 10mo ago
    I still have my Nokia Lumia around. Best phone I ever had. And I say this hating everything about Microsoft and Windows. That phone clicked just right with the tile design and overall usability. Of course, MS having pulled the plug, it's basically a DRM brick now.
    • lawgimenez 10mo ago
      Truly an underrated phone, this was my wife's phone when we met. Developing for Windows 8 was one of the best imo, I don't know any C# prior to it but it was just so easy, native and fast.
    • jokethrowaway 10mo ago
      I agree but that's because both iOS and Android are pretty bad in several ways. MeeGo from Nokia was pretty amazing as well and I'm sure it could have launched Linux phones into actual competitors to iOS and Android - if only Microsoft and Elop didn't manage to kill Linux at Nokia.
      • okanat 9mo ago
        If Microsoft didn't kill it, lack of YouTube and other Google services would. That was the primary difference. With iPhone you had access to Google-owned stuff, Google never allowed other platforms like Symbian/MeeGo/Windows Phone to ever use its online services. The game was broken from the start. Microsoft had no chance.
    • hshdhdhj4444 10mo ago
      I had a cheap $25 Lumia (520?) that was the most delightful phone I used. If it wasn’t for 3rd parties sunsetting their apps, there would have been no reason to give it up. Despite being a highly underpowered dirt cheap phone it was incredibly smooth and fast to use.
• trueismywork 10mo ago
  Long time ago, I read a blog about how the user must absolutely trust the dialog boxes for Ctrl+Alt+Delete and Adminstrator passwords and why they were tricky to get right.. Then I hear that now ctrl alt delete is a webview. Its difficult to believe. Do you have a reference?
  • memoriuaysj 10mo ago
    the thing you need to trust is that pressing that combination shows the legit OS stuff, that it can't be intercepted (Secure Attention Key). how the OS implements what is displayed is irrelevant windows has all kinds of virtualizations today, it can literally run web views in separate (invisible) VMs for security purposes
  • _fzslm 10mo ago
    bump, tbh I think this is hyperbole as on my w11 pc the ctrl alt delete menu hasn't changed since 2021's RC (which was just a reskinned version of w10's, which was just a reskinned version of w8.1's... going all the way back to vista)
  • RandomDistort 9mo ago
    On the new Windows 365 Link thin client I think it is, not sure about normal builds of Windows though? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAKg-Z6m8nM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAKg-Z6m8nM - 6:50
• chroma_zone 10mo ago
  The Win11 start menu used to have a fun bug where pressing Ctrl-Minus would open search with the phrase "zoom out". No other shortcut did this. Just Zoom Out. No idea how a bug like that happens.
  • anhner 9mo ago
    wait till you see the bugs introduced by their AI rewrite!
• jsheard 10mo ago
  Typing "Visual Studio" into the new start menu may randomly trigger a Bing search for "Visual Studio" instead of running it, but on the other hand that makes Bings KPIs go up so it's impossible to say if it's bad or not.
  • darubedarob 10mo ago
    Objectively it wastes developer time making the OS in a non linear way more expensive for companies. Its like a minthly subscription for ever more minutes.
    • tom_ 10mo ago
      If your opinion mattered, you would work at Microsoft setting the targets that the Start Menu team need to meet to hit their bonuses/not get fired. But you don't. So it doesn't. (I've pinned Visual Studio to the start menu.)
  • devinprater 10mo ago
    I hate that so much. When blind people are trying to start JAWS (the screen reader) by typing "jaws" into the start menu and pressing Enter, it will sometimes pull up a Bing page on Jaws the movie instead. And the blind person is just sitting there waiting for the screen reader to start. I tell people to use the run dialog for that reason. Sucks but that's what you have to do in the age of inshittisoft.
    • eptcyka 9mo ago
      This is purely insane. Doesn’t Microsoft violate accessibility laws in some jurisdiction due to this?
      • webtcp 9mo ago
        "rules for thee not for me"
    • ptx 9mo ago
• CjHuber 10mo ago
  AFAIK the Start Menu itself is still C++ and XAML however only the Recommended section is build with React Native [1]. Funnily or rather sadly, they seem to be quite proud of using it as seen in the video. 1: https://youtu.be/kMJNEFHj8b8?t=4m47s https://youtu.be/kMJNEFHj8b8?t=4m47s
  • buccal 10mo ago
    Still in some cases you have to wait a few minutes to get working Start menu search or menu itself on a new not low-end device.
    • sevensor 9mo ago
      My work computer takes a full five minutes to become usable on the first login after a cold boot, and that’s not even counting the time from boot to entering my password. Before the upgrade from Windows 10, it only took three. Teams, of course, takes another five minutes to become functional. Meanwhile I have a 13 year old low end Asus laptop at home that boots to a fully usable Linux desktop in well under a minute. It’s been this way for over a decade. The year of the Linux desktop was 2009; the world is only just catching up.
      • Semaphor 9mo ago
        > My work computer takes a full five minutes to become usable on the first login after a cold boot, and that’s not even counting the time from boot to entering my password. Yeah, that’s a misconfigured system. I bet you can fuck up Linux enough to get a similar experience. I’ve always been using Windows and the only time I ever had to wait that long was around the Win98 times on slow hardware. After login, I can instantly use everything on Win 11, and the only delay is a bunch of apps starting (that I chose to start on boot).
        • NoGravitas 9mo ago
          A lot of it is probably the shoveled-on layers of enterprise endpoint security bloatware.
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 10mo ago
  It takes over five seconds for task manager to open on my Windows 11 work laptop.
  • BLKNSLVR 10mo ago
    Yep, Windows performance on my work laptop reminds me of computing in the 90s: waiting and resource management.
  • claaams 10mo ago
    It takes ~5 seconds for activity monitor on my macbook pro to populate data, although the window for it opens right away.
  • layer8 10mo ago
    What’s worse, the list of tasks/apps in Task Manager for some reason populates gradually over a couple of seconds, so when you right-click on some task to perform an action, it might switch to a different task under the mouse cursor while you’re clicking because it’s still populating.
    • bluecalm 10mo ago
      For me at least "details" tab populates in one step (there is a slight delay and then all processes appear). You can set it as the default tab as it's the most useful anyway.
      • layer8 9mo ago
        I actually need the Processes tab more frequently, which shows the process hierarchy and relates to the visible windows. For example to restart Explorer.
    • andyjohnson0 9mo ago
      Holding the control key down stops the task list from updating. Release the key to resume updates. Works on Windows 10 and 11.
• publicdebates 10mo ago
  Am I missing something, or hasn't Microsoft done this since Windows 9x with apps like Explorer and Control Panel heavily using web views internally rather than "native" WinAPI GUIs?
  • bawolff 10mo ago
    Remember when Active Desktop! Was the shiny new thing?
    • necovek 10mo ago
      That was actually fun if not very useful (I had a dynamic school timetable programmed as my "wallpaper" as I was in high school at the time). Not very useful because you quickly realize you mostly obscure your desktop with actual applications you want to use on your computer.
      • publicdebates 9mo ago
        They tried fixing that by creating widgets, but effectively had the same problem. Then they tried fixing that by making them always present, but then you just lose desktop space. I guess it makes sense if you have two monitors, but at that point, why not just have the full apps open in those same spots? Widgets are a great idea that I wish we could make useful somehow.
  • amlib 10mo ago
    But those weren't entirely done with a webview. They were just embedding views where it made sense, like rendering a section that looks like a document (with fancy hyperlinks woooo) or render a preview of the file you selected in the main (native) view of explorer. Now we are talking about entire apps being built with that stuff, down to the window border (or lack of it). It's impossible to have a consistent looking and working OS with this approach. It's impossible to share code between these things and the actual native apps, and often things have to be written from scratch and end up using 10x memory than the native solution.
• smileson2 10mo ago
  I'm honestly not sure Microsoft even cares about Windows anymore, to me it's felt like they burned everything internally during Windows8 and the ValueAct battles sealed it .. hell they even entirely removed the Taskbar back then I've always wondered what things would be like the Microsoft break up went though, I really do think personal computing would be better off and the people involved would probably have even more money to boot
• chabska 10mo ago
  Whenever web dev comes up, we got people saying it's fad-driven development where a new framework comes out every week. Those people have never done real native development. React and Angular have been the solid stable bedrock of web frontend for ten years, and the churn is nothing compared to Windows, OSX, Android, and iOS UI dev.
• jordwest 10mo ago
  > but if a OS manufacturer can’t be bothered to interact with their own UI libraries to build native UIs But if they don’t use web tech it would be too expensive to build the start menu in a way that works cross platform! Oh wait
• wiseowise 9mo ago
  > their own UI libraries It doesn't help that their own UI libraries are unfinished, unpolished, hot garbage. I commend on using React, though. Like it or hate it, React is the closest to one true framework for everything.
  • okanat 9mo ago
    WPF is pretty complete and used widely in various engineering, finance and corporate applications. It is HiDPI compliant. It is mature (developed since pre-Vista). It supports modern look too (can even look like Win-11, they officially support it!). Some of the beloved Microsoft late programs like Windows Terminal are written in it. If they use it and keep improving it, it has a huge potential. But no. We cannot have nice things. Microsoft has lost the ability and management capability to release nice things. For some reason, Microsoft is trying to reinvent the wheel with UWP (aka WinUI2) and WinUI3. They are trying to replace everything with these half-arsed libraries when very complete and well-thought, future proof stuff already exists in Windows' DNA. They are shitting on the work of their earlier engineering.
• prism56 9mo ago
  Not a developer, what's the issue with React Native?
  • eptcyka 9mo ago
    React native will always be more resource intensive than a native framework because it relies on a whole javascript runtime to work. Don’t know about others, but I personally don’t want a system tool that I cannot disable easily to be designed like this - it ultimately be less responsive and take up more of my resources from other apps. Yet somehow I am OK with gnome shell.
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• sandworm101 9mo ago
  I am forced to use windows at work. Last week my web searches looked strange ... not getting the ussual results. Bing! Some windows update reset my default search from google to bing. Again! Microsoft's dirty tricks will never stop. I am considering writing software specifically to feed random junk jnto Microsoft's telemetry cloud. I will call it "fusk-MS" and it will send random searches to Bing and fake screenshots of a linux desktop to copilot ten times a second until Microsoft stops acting like such a jerk.
  • kwar13 9mo ago
    "update" lol
• yokoprime 9mo ago
  I'm not maining windows, but i dual-boot it on my gaming pc (no BF6 on Linux). In all fairness, Windows is no better or worse now than it was 5 years ago. Its not like its suddenly become completely unusable (or more unusable, depending on your perspective). Copilot fluff is being injected a lot of places, but you can largely ignore it and use windows as before. I do feel like Windows is on some sort of life support, that its not the main focus of Microsoft. Again, this is not really new.
  • buo 9mo ago
    I have to use a Windows laptop for work; it was migrated to Windows 11 a few months ago. Win 11 is definitely, measurably worse than Win 10, at least in the configuration that my employer's IT forces on the machine. One example is that its UI is much slower (typing in the search box at normal speed often misses keystrokes, for instance -- never happened on Win 10).
  • II2II 9mo ago
    I'm not a regular user of Windows, so I don't know if the changes I've seen were within the past 5 years or over five years ago. But ... I've noticed Microsoft has introduced things like programs hijacking the screen (e.g. first launch of Edge, even if the launch was unintentional) and they have been making it increasingly difficult to make a local account on installation (even in the Pro version). Things like promotions for Xbox whatever popping up while I'm at work also tweak me the wrong way. Of course they don't know I'm at work, which is all the more reason not to do it! As an operating system, I would rate it as fine. Compared to Linux, it appears to have performance issues in some areas, with file access being the main one I notice. They have made some progress in some areas (improved terminal, winget for software management). Compared to Windows of 20 years ago, the base operating system appears to be much better. But none of that means little when your main goal is for the "operating system" to get out of your way and let you use what matters.
• einpoklum 9mo ago
  I am forced to use Windows 11 at work on my laptop (produced in 2023). When resuming after hibernation - from the time I press the power key and I see the the release-lock prompt screen with the password/PIN box - that's maybe 5 to 10 seconds; but from that point, until the OS actually responds to key presses and shows characters typed into the text box - well, that takes between 2 and 3 _minutes_. And that's just one example. I curse Microsoft every day.
  • yndoendo 9mo ago
    On my work laptop, the only Windows 11 OS I use bare metal, the UAC prompt can take 30 seconds to one minute to show after requesting _Task Manager_ to start. IT decided to hide a number of applications behind UAC. Newer version of Windows seem to add latency were there was none before.
• andrekandre 9mo ago
  > OS manufacturer can’t be bothered to interact with their own UI libraries to build native UIs i wonder if they ever thought about using copilot to fix that (insert thinking-face)
• mindcrash 9mo ago
  A loI of people don't know about this and I don't know if they really went ahead with it (been away from everything Microsoft professionally just about three years now) but at the time they were pretty serious about the idea to build all Office apps in React, so (according to them) they could more easily build "great multi platform experiences" from the same codebase. Why they thought it couldn't be done with the .NET stack they already had (this was after the purchase of Xamarin and Blazor becoming a thing, mind you) still baffles me.