Comment by roxolotl

The software biz in general has a major "out with the old, in with the new" attitude, which paired with the attitude of, "We're going to build what we know, instead of learning the old stuff which is new to us".

I've seen time and again, things like apps rewritten from scratch because nobody knew C++, and they only had C# devs. Or a massive runaround because the last guy on the team who knew C++ wrote a bunch of stuff and left a couple years back, and now nobody really knew how any of that stuff worked.

> React has had tremendous success in the web world, so why not try and get those developers more comfortable producing apps for your platform?

IMO - this is worth talking about. Zune, Windows Phone, and some others died when they did not, in fact, suck, and were pretty good products which while late to the game, could have competed if there had just been a decent app ecosystem.

The decisions reg UI frameworks are largely due to internal political conflicts, mostly between DevDiv and Windows.

I think the reason they keep trying new UI frameworks is that no one really adopts them. Developers know that Microsoft won’t kill off backward compatibility and break all the enterprise apps, so why rewrite? When one framework fails, they start working on the next one. I question if they understand the corner they’ve painted themselves into.

> the result of Ballmer's "Developers, developers, developers!" attitude

I think Microsoft’s framework chasing has been a betrayal of that philosophy. Internal divisional politics have been major drivers behind fracturing and refusing to unify the stack and its UI approach, and without clear guidance from the Office team the direction of the entire platforms UI is opaque. Short term resume and divisional wins at the expense of the whole ecosystem.

A developer centric platform would let developers easily create platform specific UIs that look modern and normal. As-is the answer to how to ‘hello world’ a windows desktop app is a five hour “well, akshully…” debate that can reasonably resolve to using Meta’s stack. “VB6 for the buttons, C++ for the hard stuff” is a short conversation, at least.

I think it's more of result of "okay we made it and it works, how we now can excuse still being employed in same head-count" development. And the answer is of course "rewrite, rewrite, rewrite". UI works well, no major bugs ? TIME TO CHANGE IT TO BE "MODERN"

Operating systems should always use C/C++ UI frameworks, and as little costly abstraction as possible, period. Anything else is wasting resources.

Changing UI framework all the times is fine, so is not changing anything for decades. Different strategies that both have value. Reasonably you want to be somewhere in the middle, depending on the use case. In an industrial setting, production infrastructure, etc... you generally want to change as little as possible "if it isn't broken, don't fix it". On emerging, consumer-facing technology such as mobile in the 2000s, "move fast and break things" makes sense.

But anyways, it is not the problem. The problem is just that Microsoft today is doing a terrible job.

The best example, I think, is the control panel. Starting from Windows 8, they changed it. Ok fine, you may like it or hate it, but to be honest, it is not a big deal. The problem is that they never finished their job, more than a decade later! Not all options are available in the new UI, so sometimes the old control panel pops up in a completely different style with many overlaps in features. And every now and then, they shuffle things around in hope that one day, the old control panel won't be needed anymore.

If you make a change, commit to it! If you decide to replace the old control panel, I don't want to see it anymore. It is certainly easier said than done, but if you are a many-billion dollar company and that's your flagship product, you can afford to do hard things!

Using a web engine to build UIs is fine too. As an OS-wide component, a web engine is not that big in terms of resource use, if properly optimized. The problem with Electron is that every app ships with its own engine, so if you have 10 apps, you have 10 engines loaded. But everything uses the same engine, and apps don't abuse it, then the overhead is, I think, almost negligible. It is rare not to have a browser loaded nowadays, so system components can take advantage of this. But again, you need to do it right and it takes skills, effort and resources.

> React has had tremendous success in the web world, so why not try and get those developers more comfortable producing apps for your platform?

Because web stuff utterly sucks for making UIs on the desktop. Microsoft either doesn't know this (bad sign), or is choosing to use the trendy thing even though it'll make their software worse for customers (a worse sign). Either way it's a very bad look from MS.

Blaming this on Ballmer is a serious stretch, I can't see how you would come to that conclusion. Developers Developers Developers was for the launch of .NET and it brought us a platform that is still considered cutting edge 25 years later.

UX was fine in the Windows Forms days, and WPF was a large step forward (responsive layouts, etc...). The problem was after that it all fell apart with Windows 8 and the attempt to switch to Metro, followed by the Windows Store fiasco and attempting to move to a sandboxed application model.

It all comes down to Microsoft's failure to adapt to mobile/tablets in so many ways. Which is kind of hilarious, because they had some really cool tech for the time (the PocketPCs were pretty fun back in the day, before touch came along).

Remember when Silverlight was _the_ future?

How long did it last. Ironically it still gives me the shits because you can't select text on Netflix's front end.

Problem with SwiftUI is that it only works well on macOS 26, maybe one version prior. AppKit works well on all macOS versions.

Building a macOS 26 only app in SwiftUI today is a great UX, just as fast as AppKit.

But it takes quite some effort to turn an iOS SwiftUI app into a real macOS experience. Though most macOS optimizations help for iPadOS as well.

When I was a developer I was not amused at all with constantly changing APIs to be honest. And UWP was really sucky. Way too aligned with mobile and tablet which nobody actually uses on windows. Even as a user I'm glad it didn't take off.

>Tangentially, see also the mixed reaction to Mac native apps switching from AppKit to SwiftUI

I'll take AppKit -> SwiftUI over Win32-> windowsx.h -> VB6 -> MFC -> ATL -> WTL -> WFC -> WinForms -> WPF -> WinRT -> UWP -> WinUI3 -> MAUI.

Even with all that Microsoft still went outside and used React Native for the start menu and Electron for the Visual Studio installer and Visual Studio Code.

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.

In the challenges section, they list a few challenges with React Native that they had to overcome. Interesting thing is that MS already has XAML, WinUI etc., that they built and control and don't havr those "challenges". I don't understand what the team got by using React Native compared to using XAML. Anyone from MS here who could provide some technical benefits for this decision?

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.

Spot on, .NET Native and C++/CX on top of COM is what .NET 1.0 should have been all about.

Unfortunately it was a big ball of mud in mismanagement.

You would really like Uno Platform. It is the same API.

https://platform.uno/platform/

wait till you see the bugs introduced by their AI rewrite!

> 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

It's been a while since I used Windows regularly or seriously, but I remember start menu search actually being good - maybe around Win7 days? You would just press <Win>, type a few letters of the software you wanted and hit enter, and it would work every time with minimal latency.

You know, like KDE Plasma in 2026.

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.

'Randomly' here likely corresponds to a typo in the search term.

If I type "Visual Std" instead of "Visual Stu" it goes to the Bing results.

Alternatively it shows No results if you disable Bing in the Search settings found in the top right meatballs menu.

I also would expect fuzzy search by default instead of typos sending users to Bing.

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.

It takes literally a click to deactivate it though. One could argue about Bing Search being the default, but I didn’t run the user surveys to see, which is best for the average user.

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

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 - 6:50

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)

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.

It takes ~5 seconds for activity monitor on my macbook pro to populate data, although the window for it opens right away.

Yep, Windows performance on my work laptop reminds me of computing in the 90s: waiting and resource management.

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).

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.

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.

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.

You can dislike the visual approach of modern macOS but on a framework level the UI ecosystem is generally very powerful and feature rich.

With SwiftUI you’ve been able to pick and choose where to integrate it over the years, it’s not like you had to go whole-hog.

It's almost like the rush to ship new features year after year without ever pausing to fix and optimize things has taken its toll.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Not for the user, unless I forgot that today is opposite day.

"update" lol

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.

Remember when Active Desktop! Was the shiny new thing?

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.

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.

> 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.

KDE Plasma, which is in my opinion the most advanced desktop environment is written in Qt QML which is JavaScript. There are advantages to that over C++, namely your session won't simply crash.

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.

When I read comments like this, I honestly think that people are only complaining about this because the "bad people" are doing this (in this case Microsoft/Gnome Team).

Neglecting the fact that almost everyone else is doing similar things.

> For example, Gnome shell has bunch of javascript in it, GTK has layout and styling defined in some flavour of CSS, etc.

What GTK is doing isn't really any different than how many UI framework work and have done so for quite a while now.

Almost every desktop UI toolkit/library/framework in the past 15-20 years has the following:

- Markup interface for defining the layout. If they don't have that they have a declarative way of defining the UI.

- Some sort of bindings for popular scripting language that hook into native code.

- Some of styling language that isn't that different from CSS.

This has been the norm for quite some time now. It works reasonably well.

Futhermore there isn't much difference between what desktop developers are doing and what web developers are doing.

> 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.

Why? I find Gnome works really well on Linux. I have a pretty nice desktop environment after adding two extensions (Dash To Dock and App Indicators). Gnome runs well on relatively ancient hardware I own (2011 Dell E6410) with a garbage GPU (it isn't OpenGL 3.3 compliant). It actually performs a lot better than some other DEs that are 100% native.

JavaScript is indeed a slow language. However in Gnome that isn't the bottleneck. People have been making UIs with JScript (basically JavaScript) using WSH back in the 90s on Windows 98.

> 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.

What makes a better end user experience has nothing to do with any of this. There has to be an incentive to create a good end user experience and there simply isn't in the vast majority of cases.

In many cases it doesn't matter really what the tech behind something is. Most popular programmings and associated frameworks all work reasonably well on machines that are over a decade old. I am running Discord on a 15 year machine dual core laptop processor and it works "ok".

So this sort of complaining about "modern devs" I've been hearing about for almost 20 years now. The issues I've faced with doing quality work has been almost always to do with how projects are (mis)-managed.

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.

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.

> 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.

Performance isn’t a consequence?