Comment by dstaley
4 years ago
I honestly don't envy Microsoft. On one hand, you have the people who don't want Microsoft to break backwards compatibility. They want Microsoft to retain the ability to run programs written a quarter of a century[1] ago. This is why all this legacy stuff sticks around in Windows. Then, you have those who want Microsoft to radically reinvent Windows, either by embracing WinUI 3 fully (what most people mean when they say UWP) or through something even newer. Windows 10X was a sort of middle ground: a OS that pushed all the old cruft into isolated containers. Sadly it looks like that approach isn't going anywhere (unless we see it come back in Windows 11). Project Reunion is a nice attempt to give developers an incremental upgrade path to modern Windows, so I'm hopeful that within the lifecycle of Windows 11 we'll start to see Microsoft develop a reasonable separation between modern and classic Windows apps.
[1] Edit: quarter of a century, not quarter of a decade.
> They want Microsoft to retain the ability to run programs written a quarter of a decade ago.
Enterprises expect to run programs developed a quarter century ago... if a quarter decade was all that was required, MS could have abandoned a lot more cruft.
Blergh, was trying to decide between "two decades" and "quarter of a century" and my brain went with both!
2.5 years?! Who wants stability that short?
...android security/version updates??
yes, I understand - bring on the downvotes
> retain the ability to run programs written a quarter of a decade ago
I think I've seen computers with more uninterrupted uptime than that, even if servers. Or at least approaching this figure.
Perhaps you meant ‘quarter of a millennium’ or something like that.
I know Enterprise customers require extreme backward compatibility, but it must be a fairly small number who are still running legacy code written in 1771.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/jacquard-loom-simulator/
https://github.com/jfinkels/analyticalengine
https://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/emulator.html
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What about me? I don't care about backwards compatibility - but I don't want "UWP" because it's impossible to make great apps following the guidelines.
Sounds like you might want to look into MacOS. Or at least might've wanted before Big Sur, dunno about now.
Yeah, macOS jumping on the "huge UI elements with tons of empty space" bandwagon was the proverbial straw for me that moved my beloved MBP from daily workhorse to random idle browsing machine.
I'd say it's still not as bad as Windows, in that at least it's not pure white that burns your eyes, but I still hate how half of my laptop screen is taken up by useless UI elements.
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> something even newer
;) Sadly I think this is the group Microsoft is least likely to attempt to cater towards.
I'm on the same boat, and would like to see proper design instead of supporting 200-years-old programs. But apparently we are minority and not the best interest of Microsoft. (Which is okay, BTW)
UNIX is older than Windows, and most people still expect to run their UNIX CLI applications on APIs that exist since UNIX V6.