Comment by spikej
1 day ago
Even without the AI, it's replacing native apps with web based ones. Case in point: Notepad. It's slower than WordPad on Win 10... and crashes!
1 day ago
Even without the AI, it's replacing native apps with web based ones. Case in point: Notepad. It's slower than WordPad on Win 10... and crashes!
And Calc! It takes about 5 seconds to load. And search is so unreliable mixing web and local results.
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.
What does happen? I'm using Windows 10 Enterprise (is that GitHub repo to activate any license still around?) , with policy to disable Internet search from the start menu... so your story makes me wonder what the astonishment is.
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Bit of a clickbaity way of phrasing it, but I'm also curious what the result was? From googling it I don't see any stories about recent changes to the calculator app, other than a few features like graphing.
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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 love when it takes 3 minutes to open "Add or Remove Programs" because the Start menu search decides that typing a, ad, add, r, re, remove, unin, install, etc. definitely means "let me Bing that for you" instead of opening the one thing I clearly want.
It obviously knows what I'm trying to do (Bing search recommendation is for "Add or Remove Programs"), yet refuses to surface the actual shortcut to that settings page (or "app", or whatever Microsoft calls it this week). Even better: some days it pops up immediately after typing "Add" and other days I'm wrestling with it like I'm training a stubborn animal, clicking the result in the hope that the OS will "learn" that yes, this is what I want when I type "Add".
Most of the time I just give up and dig through the Settings menu like it's 1999.
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.
If I could get regular security updates for Windows 2000 I might still be using it- peak Windows
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I have a derive.exe from 1996 that I still use. TI's calculator, as an incredibly fast windows app that's like 20% of wolframalpha.
And to think on all "modern" OSes you can't even do that. Neither Android nor IOS let you do this in any way shape or form. Even with portable webapps it doesn't work, as webapps go offline. And microsoft clearly wants to create this situation too (last brute force attempt was windows home)
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Best part is that on a fresh install without internet you are not able to use it...well all of the modern replacement apps.
Yeah first time Windows Clock wouldn’t restore because the net wasn’t ready I was shocked
It was rewritten into WinUI, hence why.
I do not know anything about this team, but I worked with a team before that migrated from a native app to an Electron-based version. It was worse in literally every way except one: the developers on that team preferred developing that way. Nothing else mattered.
The kind of developers who are willing to work with native GUI APIs (even though a framework) simply don't exist in enough quantity anymore.
I remember reading that even the Start menu is now a React app.
Apparently this is not entirely true. It’s just a section of the start menu that’s based on React/React Native.
Regardless, at least a few of my colleagues using Windows have reported issues with the new start menu. It seems very slow, and sometimes you have to close & reopen it for content to appear.
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React Native*
What does notepad have to do with web based apps? case in what point?
New Notepad in 11, with tabs and autosave (and dark mode), is so much better and more practical to use over old one, it just stays open all the time and become my main notetaking pick. It may take a beat to open a big file (1+ mb) with line wrapping, but it's pretty much just as fast as anything (and may be even faster than some other editors). It's just very easy to reach for and quite snappy.
There are some apps on Windows with actual gripes, but Notepad, Paint, Snipping tool, they're quite solid and have become everyday tools that eliminated the need to reach for some other third party apps.
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 think I had to disable spellcheck to fix the ignored keystrokes, it happened even after disabling formatting
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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.
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The reason for this is that it's hard to hire native UI developers, but easy to hire web devs.
Something like 90% of all new devs today learn only cloud-native backend dev or web frontend dev. The only exceptions tends to be mobile and game developers. Collectively cloud+web, mobile, and games account for like 98% of all new devs it seems. Nobody learns anything else.
The web is going to become the desktop UI in the future for this reason alone. It's going to be slower and much more bloated than almost any other alternative, but it's got the critical mass of adoption behind it and that's what determines core technologies in the industry. Technical merit is a distant second or third.
This is frustrating but it's not surprising to one who has studied biology and evolution. In evolution this is called "path dependence," and it's why we have weird things like a man's testicles hanging in a bag below his body. A previous evolutionary path optimized the sperm production process to run at a lower temperature than the rest of the body, so then evolution's hack for this is to put them in a bag outside the body. Ticket closed with "resolved." The pathways taken through a complex solution space determine the outcome and the outcome is often bizarre and "hacky" for this reason. The key is that it's very hard to back-track. Once a path has been taken, it's very hard to un-take it.
Large industries and markets are essentially "biological," not rationally designed, so you get the same kinds of phenomena.
It could be much worse. If Linux+HTML+JS had not taken over, we might have the Microsoft Enterprise Web(tm) where Visual Basic (not VB.NET, OG Visual Basic) is the main language and each service or site would require an NT license for every node and an IIS license for every web hostname. UIs might be written in ActiveX or desktop ones in Microsoft C/C++ with OLE and similar horrors. It might be just as slow and infinitely uglier and more expensive and less open. Apple would be dead and open source would much more marginalized than it is today. The net would basically be a total MS monopoly. If you didn't live through the 90s: this nearly happened.
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.
There is a lot of idiocy/stubbornness among middle managers. I worked for a large consulting firm for a few years and would see hiring managers pass by candidates with good aptitude whom they could’ve trained in 4-6 weeks. Instead, they had the position open for several months waiting for someone who knew the exact technologies they were using and still didn’t find anyone in some cases. Seemed to me that the middle managers need more tolerance for non-billable time. But when everyone is incentivized to meet quarterly goals, this is what you get.
My thoughts as well. And it's not like we're talking about taking random people off the street and teaching them to program, it's just a UI framework. And the stuff people are talking about in here isn't IDEs or CAD suites, it's like... the calculator app and the start menu. What kind of devs is MSFT hiring and paying $200k a year that can't learn a UI framework?
That can work if you're not expecting to be fired on a whim in one of those 20k+ layoffs when suddenly you have a skill no one seeks while you have not grown in the other area the market wants.
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> 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.
Yup, coming from iOS and Android, I learned most of WinUI in two weeks, even before LLMs. GUI frameworks are largely similar, so there’s no real justification for reimplementing single-platform applications with HTML.
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.
WinUI 3 was pretty decent even back in 2021, and much easier to learn than the clusterfuck of Android SDK.
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.
That means you have to work on the original code, and modern entry-mid level devs can't do that. It's probably in C++. Your expensive senior and staff level devs are on more important projects.
Make it a web app and your cheap entry level grads can do it.
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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
But Notepad is not web based? It's still a native app but now uses UWP instead.
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...
Those are design languages/styles, not frameworks. There is a fewer number of frameworks but it's still a handful. Win32, WPF, UWP, MAUI, etc... but at least they're fairly consistent at using UWP for system UI, with older bits using Win32 still.
This. It was infuriating to find Notepad got updated to a bloated app with rich text and Copilot. It's so different, it just should have been another program. The whole reason I use Notepad is because it's a simple, dumb, fast, predictable program. If I wanted the rich text, I would use any of the numerous other options!
And for the kicker, the update made it forget my font settings.
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.
So, you're just screwed if you need a working editor in safe mode now?
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I recommend https://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html - it's even snappier than Notepad++
Use MetaPad - like Notepad.
https://liquidninja.com/metapad/