Comment by epolanski

Same here, we’ve hit parity with Windows

I guess that’s the difference.

I have used a tiling WM before.

So I wonder whether the benefits you’re seeing in Omarchy are simply the result of using a tiling WM for the first time, which overrode what I believe Omarchy detracted from a general tiling WM.

Or whether my poorer experience was a result of the fact that having used a tiling WM I was more comfortable customizing and so found the Omarchy opinionated behavior restrictive or if the benefits Omarchy brings to someone who’s new to a tiling WM are lost on me.

I've been pretty much exclusively Linux-based for over a decade now, but I used every version of Windows from 3.11 to Windows 7, so I still have some muscle memory from the good ol' days.

Recently I was helping a relative do something on their Windows 11 machine and I asked them to press Windows key + R, type calc, press Enter. And I was astonished at the result. Literally: Mouth agape, frozen in astonishment for about 10 seconds.

I knew about the ads and tracking and the local account bullshit, but I didn't realize just how bad the Windows experience has become.

If it loads at all. The last two days, the start menu refuses to launch it when you click on it.

The lack of quality in Windows is simply astonishing. And the new start menu and taskbar are terrible. Quite how a company can transform a product into such a mess in just a few years is incredible.

I still use a copy of Calc.EXE from Windows 2000 that I just move from machine to machine. It stopped being useful after that. That old one is nice. Hex mode. Starts quickly.

Best part is that on a fresh install without internet you are not able to use it...well all of the modern replacement apps.

It was rewritten into WinUI, hence why.

Apparently this is not entirely true. It’s just a section of the start menu that’s based on React/React Native.

React Native*

I see you were fortunate enough to not use notepad aprox 5 months ago, when they were running the rich formatting preview. It was on by default, and would drop around 5% of the characters you type. Literally failing at the only thing it's supposed to do. I repro'd this on 2 out of 2 machines.

Maybe they fixed it, maybe they haven't. I both turned off formatting and am using vscode for notes now.

I've been a Notepad++ user for about 20 years. It's a pain to use it in Win11 as they force their crappy notepad on context menus and such. It's still usable (with some registry changes) but annoying that they're doogfooding their own an keep on changing settings on updates. I'm only using Win11 at work, I'm done with Windows and MS otherwise.

Yes, some nice to have features were added, but it’s a text editing app, and not a good one at that, so it shouldn’t be crashing like that.

[dead]

In my opinion this is mostly self-inflicted by Microsoft.

Sure some push for web-based solution has moved a lot of people away from desktop applications, but even before that Microsoft muddied the waters of native UI development.

Moving from User32.dll and GDI to GPU based rendering with WPF, might not have been the worst idea - and WPF is still going strong - but it's a clear cut, leaving old apps un-upgradable. So if companies need to eventually rewrite it, will they stick with desktop apps or move to "web apps"?

Unfortunately, Microsoft didn't stop there, but we've since seen a bunch of different attempts at new Windows UI libs to the point, where nobody trusts Microsoft anymore (remember Silverlight?) and everyone else is left confused by the chaos of an ecosystem.

Why can’t Microsoft employees learn on the job? When I joined a (non-Microsoft) BigTech company, I was expected to learn C++ and internal libraries and tools within a couple months while working on newbie projects. The company recouped that investment many times over.

> The reason for this is that it's hard to hire native UI developers, but easy to hire web devs

Funny. Back in the 90s Microsoft just hired kind of random kids from college to write their OS in C.

This is directionally not totally off-base, but:

> it's hard to hire native UI developers

This is the pool of mobile devs. If Microsoft is unwilling to eat the lead time (measured in weeks) for an existing native mobile dev to become productive on their stack, that's a sign of much bigger organizational problems.

The analogy with evolution breaks down because currently the fitness function is broken. It would work in a world where anti trust would be still enforced, where customers could vote with their money instead of having to deal with enshitiffied monopolies. In a world where tech CEOs can buy a dinner to stay above the law, where tech is used as a weapon of influence so that other countries like in the EU are not allowed under penalty of sanctions to not use US platforms even when it breaks their law, it is reassuring for engineer minds but ultimately pointless to explain the state of the industry from market dynamics alone.

>The reason for this is that it's hard to hire native UI developers, but easy to hire web devs.

This ... has been very opposite of my experience:

1) I've seen websites turn into poor imitations of mobile apps that lose all the features of web UIs that I want: ability to open links in tabs, use of affordances to scroll up and down, dense packing of information, ability to edit the size, etc. (Edit: almost forgot how they run the back button too!)

2) Generally, I see that the more UI specialists they have, the worse the UI gets. There's the saying, "developers are responsible for mediocre UIs, designers are responsible for horrible UIs".

The reason is that the web empire is just better at operating systems than Microsoft. If they just had less bad development tools for native UI this would not be a problem. Look at what Google does with Android, or Apple.

Excuses, a $4 trillion valued company can surely afford some training on the technology it owns.

That makes little sense, notepad.exe already exists. The only development required on it would be to add AI shit to it. They could just leave it alone.

web is, frighteningly, much faster and more responsive than local desktop apps are now (e.g., gmail is infinitely more responsive than desktop modern outlook generally speaking - even web spreadsheets are superior to modern Excel (though not, say, Excel 2003...))

Linux? You mean the C nest? KDE and QT (the default serious framework) with C++?

You pushed ActiveX on the web, and viceversa with IE4 and Windows98. Now, the web turd came back with Electron. If any, thanks Microsoft for that.

> The reason for this is that it's hard to hire native UI developers

Yeah, it's a wonder they were able to do it so many years (ftom win 1.0 to Win 8).

I for one like the comparison of web apps with scrotums

Which is exactly the problem, and isn't UWP, rather WinUI/WinAppSDK, the WinRT version on top of Win32, instead of UWP.

UWP is actually faster, yes that is that bad.

UWP, one of the 10+ frameworks used to run Windows 11's system components. Wonderful! Exemplary!

https://old.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/o2a0kp/there_are...

Re "just another program" - the old Notepad was deliberately designed with minimal dependencies so that even if everything else in the system went to hell you'd still have a working editor to try and fix things.

I recommend https://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html - it's even snappier than Notepad++

Use MetaPad - like Notepad.

https://liquidninja.com/metapad/

It’s opinionated coming from Arch Linux. Compared to MacOS or Windows it’s a big giant push over. Opinionated in this context just means it comes with defaults rather than asking you to research your own display compositor.

Although there are some places you want that! WireGuard is often described as cryptographically opinionated because it doesn't even bother trying to negotiate crypto primitives which makes it immune to downgrade attacks. Though, to be fair, that also means that if its primitives ever do get broken you need to roll out an entirely new release.

opinionated versus unopinionated is a tradeoff. Things that boast about how unopinionated they are often require a lot of hand holding or manual config. I think there's a big audience of people that have non-Appleware that want an OS that is not Windows, but don't actually care to customize it.

It’s by David Heinemeier Hansson. Based on his writings, he’s very inflexible. He’s even unwilling to accept that a person of color who was born and raised in Britain can be British.

Yeah, it's just one of those, but worse. It's basically run by a bunch of badly written bash scripts:

https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/a-word-on-omarchy/

I think MS's biggest mistake was to not properly maintain and develop the Foundation Classes, basically a thin C++ wrapper library on top of the C API that retained most of the benefits of the Win32 API while eliminating a lot of the boilerplate code. Instead they went after Java with the .NET managed stuff, bloated and slow compared to the native API.

Qt is now the best "old school" UI framework by far.

Experimentation is a cost center?

>including the framework schizophrenia, as Microsoft shifted between Win32, UWP, WPF

Ah yes, and the solution being presented is Linux, with Xlib, Motif, Qt, GTK, and your choice of 167 different desktop environments. Don't forget the whole Wayland schism.

Mac is no better, shifting SDKs every few years, except Apple goes one step further by breaking all legacy applications so you are forced to upgrade. Can't be schizo when you salt the earth and light a match to everything that came before the Current Thing.

Ultimately it still comes down to someone in the chain giving a damn. There are obvious, surface level bugs across most technologies. Yet, developers, PMs, VPs all sign off and say, "Close enough".

Does Satya Nadella even use a windows laptop?

It's not such a difficult task to set up hyprland. And niri doesn't even need to be configured, the default configuration performs all the required tasks.