“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 bad things. This really is the icing on the cake though. Yea the AI stuff is dumb but if a OS manufacturer can’t be bothered to interact with their own UI libraries to build native UIs something has gone horribly wrong.
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)
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.
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"
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
>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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If this wasn’t HN, I would swear that my personal recommendation algorithm has gotten Linux desktop-pilled and that’s why I’m seeing so many posts like these every day. But in reality I think there is a groundswell of momentum happening here, and with component prices rising, I only see this continuing as more people look to breathe new life into older hardware.
I've been seeing it a lot on reddit as well, with a lot of non-technical users asking "how do I get started with linux?"
I think this is a real thing and I think a combination of MS demanding everyone get new hardware and Valve really polishing a lot of linux has gone a long way to get non-technical users to start seriously considering linux.
It's a huge added bonus that old hardware simply flies with linux. I have a 5 year old laptop that feels about 10x more responsive since I killed the windows install and put linux on it.
And I know that laptop will continue to fly because, unlike windows, it's never going to get any sort of serious bloatware added on as I update it.
Yeah, I think a big part of the momentum toward Linux is from the end of Windows 10 support, and Windows 11's increased hardware demands.
Given how rough and uncertain the economy is, this creates a large group of people who can't or aren't comfortable upgrading their computer, but at the same time don't want to be stuck on EOL Windows 10 forever either.
Anecdotally I’ve seen among my non-tech friends more questions about VPNs. Several of my friends own Steam Decks which is pretty wild to me given they are just normie gamers.
It’s literally the ads and bloatware. Windows is horrible unless you are technical enough to strategically disable the bloatware, and keep on disabling it as the updates continually reenable it. And if you are technical enough to disable it then Linux isn’t a problem.
Microsoft really is enterprise, cloud, and GitHub / AI tools. Windows for personal users is harvesting as much cash as possible from boomers and gamers, but the gamers are leaving en masse now. Software professionals only use macOS or Linux unless they are a MS shop that has to use Windows stack.
It is an incredible shift for those of us who have been around forever. But it’s a true look at how impossible things shift, bit by bit, until all of a sudden it all washes away. Never believe the tech cos on top today can’t be beat. It can and will happen someday
> It's a huge added bonus that old hardware simply flies with linux. I have a 5 year old laptop that feels about 10x more responsive since I killed the windows install and put linux on it.
I fact, Linux is much easier to run on somewhat older hardware because drivers are often a bit slow to land and Ubuntu and its derivatives always lag in kernel versions.
Older hardware becoming more valuable because price hikes doubly benefit Linux.
That increase in donations may also be due to more prominent prompting for them. Got me to donate, at least. But I would be pretty sad if the prompting were to get any more in-your-face than it currently already is.
I think it's a lot of different factors coming together. The success of the steam deck has really breathed life into the linux gaming scene - certainly for me personally, that was the main blocker to switching from windows.
That, plus (what feels like) a lot of recent advances in Linux. When I tried it... 2-3ish years ago? I recall e.g. fractional display scaling being basically nonfunctional. But when I tried again early 2025, it pretty much Just Worked (arguably even better than it did on windows), I just had to manually enable wayland. Pretty sure even that's just the default nowadays.
Which basically sums up my personal windows -> linux pipeline: bought a steam deck, was impressed at how well it ran my steam library; had my old laptop finally die on me, ran my life off the steam deck for a while; decided to eventually build a new machine, and figured I might as well try installing linux from the get-go. Everything worked fine on the first try, and I ended up not even installing windows.
certainly within my friend groups, I'm seeing more and more people entertaining the idea of making the switch as well. Admittedly, that's primarily "tech-savvy" folks though.
Yeah there are many things coming together on top of W11 fuckups.
Proton was good, but SteamDeck did 2 things:
* informed bigger public that hey, it is good enough for vast majority of games/gamers in the public eye
* more importantly, *made developers care* about their stuff working on Steam Deck. And if it works on Steam Deck, very good chance it will work on <generic linux distro> just fine
Indeed, it's the Linux super power. I've mentioned this before but my favorite linux adventure was, being a borderline penniless college student, having broken Toshiba Tecra 8000 from 1998 with a dead hard drive. But it had a working CD drive and USB port, so I got Puppy Linux 4.0 on a CD, booted from a CD, and installed to a 1gb USB stick and set it to boot from USB.
I had Dillo for a web browser, a stripped down version of VLC that could play 360p Youtube videos without issue, downloaded via Youtube-DL. I had XMMS which looked just like Winamp, and Sega/Nintendo emulation and even Duke Nukem 3D. For programs I had epub/pdf/djview readers, xpaint which is like classic MS Paint, feh as a hyperlightweight all purpose image viewer and background manager, a super lightweight RSI break popup program, and even a fully functional web server stack. It also had a window manager (JWM) that handled multiple desktops more intuitively and effortlessly than Windows does now.
It feels that way. I’m just one person but I’ve tried Linux several times over the decades and never stuck with it, for various reasons. Last year I got so fed up of Windows and tried Ubuntu. I can confidently say I’ll never install Windows again. Ubuntu has been good out of the box, but another difference to when I last tried Linux is the invention of LLM’s. Any issues I’ve had have been quickly resolved through troubleshooting with Claude/Perplexity, and I’ve used both to quickly learn the things I need. There were occasions last time where I spent literal days trying to fix things through searching and that was intolerable.
- macOS is kind of crapifying, with Liquid Glass UI, iCloud services pushed down your throat…
- Windows 11…
- (some) Europeans are getting concerned about their complete lack of sovereignty on the tech stack, and Linux is one way to reclaim a small part of it.
- LLM agents like Claude code have lowered the bar so much for any setup operation and bash commands.
All in all, it seems like a good time for Linux to broaden a bit its adoption.
Same here. I spent a good chunk of the evening just today messing around with Steam to see what I could get running on Linux. It's been a while since I tried in earnest, but I got all the games I wanted running (minus VR, but that felt like it was close). Even though I barely play any games anymore, it's the last reason I haven't wiped my Win10 drive.
Just anecdotally, I'm seeing a lot of momentum in my social circles. My friends and their parents (!!!) who are asking about Linux.
My "year of the Linux desktop" was in 2010, because even then everything was much, much faster on Ubuntu. (It helps major browsers were shipping 64-bit versions for Linux only, but Minecraft simply did not run on my laptop under Windows).
Does anyone else feel kind of sick (something like pity?) when they see people using Windows 11? Right click menus which have a loading spinner, advertisements littered throughout, and headlines from right-wing tabloids spammed in news widgets.
These past six years have been absolutely bonkers incredible for Linux, and it can all be attributed to Microsoft shooting themselves in the head with Windows. Proton work started after Windows 8 and really became usable in late 2019. Now we're seeing something again with Windows 11. It's awesome, hope it sticks.
> These past six years have been absolutely bonkers incredible for Linux, and it can all be attributed to Microsoft shooting themselves in the head with Windows.
It can’t all be attributed to Microsoft. There have been huge efforts by many parties to make this happen. Folks working on the Kernel, desktop environments, distros, applications, tooling, advocacy, and more.
I believe people who say they are being pushed away from ms because of disillusionment with windows 11. But there also needs to be someone to pick up the ball after it was dropped — and those people deserve equal if not more credit
I'd argue that its drips and papercuts all over. Everything is trying to extract rent, and that makes things unreliable enough that even basic users are starting to notice.
Um, can't connect to the Internet? Nope, you can't play a game on your machine, and you may not even be able to log in. Service hiccup? Booted from whatever you were doing because we can't extort your if we leave data on your machine. And, oh, if you have the nerve to complain, you ungrateful serf, we will kickban you with no recourse. etc.
And this is before we even bring the AI bukkake into the picture ...
Statistics show adoption rate is increasing. According to [1] it historically took a decade to double Linux desktop market share, but market share has almost doubled since 2022.
Now, two in five PCs worldwide are running Windows 10, an unsuppoted OS. What are the user's options? Either buy a new PC, switch to Mac or run Linux.
For a lot of those people the options are "spend a lot of money to upgrade your hardware to either run Win11 or buy a Macbook" or "use your existing hardware and ask your tech friend for a Linux distro recommendation".
When prices are going nuts and the economy is tanking the option that doesn't cost you money starts to look a lot more appealing, and for some the first isn't even an option; they're completely priced out of the new market for the foreseeable future.
If Microsoft could make me move to Linux, they will be getting a lot more people to switch. I was very into Microsoft's OS since v3.0, I used Outlook for all my email for decades. I recently moved over to Linux Mint and Firebird for email and have not looked back. All my Windows VMs are now Linux VMs. All of Microsoft's invasive "AI" was the last straw. I don't like the direction they are headed.
I was a bit puzzled by Firebird (I thought that’s a fork of Thunderbird, like, say, LibreWolf or Waterfox), but I couldn’t quickly find the project, so my assumption is that it’s just the misprint, and author thinking of Fire-fox -> Fire-bird, not being into ecosystem for too long to remember the actual bird. Anyway, that’s irrelevant to the point author’s making, and I’m happy there’s a new Linux adopter now. Thanks, M$, I guess.
I honest felt like the tide had turned when my elderly parents both asked me wipe Windows and install Linux on their laptops this Christmas. So far they have both had an overwhelming positive experience. They say it's such a relief not to have to dodge the minefield of popups and upsells and ads.
Pewdiepie’s linux video alone is almost at 8 million views. There’s another 3-4 million views in reaction videos to it. I think primagen also stayed on archlinux after his ricing experiment
i think its just that its new year and year of the linux desktop is a meme (in the actual definition of the word kind of way) and the meme is growing over time
For those of us that have been using Linux for a long time (since 1999, here), the improvements have been incremental, and hard to spot over time. But sometimes I encounter something and it just blows my mind how good desktop Linux has become.
I just bought a laptop that came with Fedora installed. This isn't anything new, but what really blew me away is that everything... just worked. No tinkering. No alternative modules built from source (hopefully with a good DKMS script). Everything... just worked. I'd blocked out a few hours to get everything working in a satisfactory state and... I had nothing to do, really.
And when I say everything I mean EVERYTHING, not just the features that were significant to my own use cases. Mind-blowing, if you think about it.
To temper expectations a bit, I’ve installed Linux recently on my HP Omen to pretty decent results. Still having some lingering issues, e.g the WiFi adapter going dead after a sleep. But have found the experience relatively similar to my recent windows installs.
For a laptop user who likes to game, you’ll definitely encounter some issues based on my experience. Better than it was 2 years ago, but it’s not a seamless experience (laptops!!) that you’d expect from posts like these.
For a Linux savvy user, it’s definitely worth the switch. I haven’t had any ads in months and it’s magical
Sleep and suspend are still kinda buggy on Linux, and probably will be for the near future. This is more of a vendor thing (as most of the annoying problems in Linux) than a dev thing. To the point where I mostly avoid it, I either shutdown the laptop completely or just let it plugged on a desk 24h
Things are improving, and we should see this fixed in the next years I assume. This is the good thing about it, Linux will probably be fixing all annoying bugs in the next few years.
This has been my experience too, with installing common (Ubuntu, Fedora, and other popular ones) distros.
The only exception is when we got a really new batch of Lenovo P1 laptops for work, and the patches likely were not fully merged yet. So as long as you’re not getting the first batch it is generally pretty good.
I left desktop Linux in 2010 because everything did not just work. Looking at the responses to your comment, it seems that basic stuff like wifi still doesn't always just work. If it's been true since 2010, I think the problem is systematic, and won't go away with "just one more year".
> it seems that basic stuff like wifi still doesn't always just work
This is true. I've been using Ubuntu since 2006, but still see issues with
Wifi: Ubuntu 22 didn't work out of the box with a 2014 macbook air
Bluetooth: maddening trying to set "listening" mode instead of headset mode on JBL earphones - it seems to choose randomly every time it connects, and the setting isn't exposed in any UI
Sleep: I don't think I've ever seen sleep/suspend working reliably on a Linux laptop, to the point I don't know the difference between the two. I have one thinkpad which never wakes from sleep, and also never fully shuts down on system shutdown without a long press of the power button.
I accept all this so that I don't have to wait seconds for basic UI things to happen, like switching virtual desktop (osx) and opening the application launcher (windows).
If you mean with ”just working” that any distro works out-of-the-box with any piece of hardware ever existing, then obviously no, that won’t happen. It won’t happen with any OS ever.
I have never had any issues with any Linux-distro regarding WiFi. Most hardware I have used has been largely compatible even. Maybe I have just been lucky, but it seems there’s millions of us who are really lucky these days.
What has also changed from 2010’s is that the documentation like Arch wiki is a lot better. You can also ask an LLM to help you configure things - obvs the docs are better and safer - so if and when you do have a problem, there’s actually sources to help you fix it.
A lot of the WiFi and BT issues were due to proprietary firmware blobs which weren't included in package management repos either due to licensing issues or decision not to pollute OSS repos with nonfree software.
This has mostly been solved by either putting them in the nonfree repos or just the fact that WiFi hardware vendors aren't using such stuff anymore.
I still remember pulling firmware blobs for my Broadcom cards, then it magically worked fine. It was far from trivial and I think that's what caused a lot of people who tried Linux on laptops in early 2000s to turn away.
> it seems that basic stuff like wifi still doesn't always just work
This is why I don't use Windows. Early last year I paid for a copy of "Windows 10", and it didn't support most of the hardware in my laptop. Even plugging in a mouse I had to use keyboard shortcuts to let it load a "driver", and after that it still didn't support the scroll wheel. Wifi didn't work at all, and wired network was painfully slow. It did at least support FHD resolution in 24-bit colour but very slowly.
My audio interface was completely unsupported, my MIDI interfaces were completely unsupported. Eventually I gave up attempting to run it, wiped the laptop again, reinstalled Ubuntu, and went for Bitwig instead of Ableton, and I've had no problems since.
Maybe one day we'll see the year of Windows on the desktop, but this isn't it yet.
This was true in 2010. I use to have a USB wifi adapter that was specifically meant to make sure linux would always work. I lost that adapter years ago.
I can't remember the last time I tried a distro that didn't just work on a random computer with a random wifi but it has been several years now.
Nvidia cards on the other hand...last year I had to try about 10 distros before I found something that wasn't a huge pain in the ass.
I wanted to try Fedora recently but it crashed over and over in the install on the screen where you select a time zone. Looked it up and tons of people had the same issue and didn't find any fix that worked for me.
Turned me off Fedora completely.
Tried two other distros on the same machine right afterwards with no problems though.
I've made the complete switch recently (been using Linux on and off for years, including WSL as well) after my pleasant experience with the Steam Deck and it's been fantastic, but not without issues. A recurring issue over the years of trying Linux has been WiFi drivers; I really can't afford to have WiFi not work as I can't run an Ethernet cable to my computer room. I get that Linux heavily relies on volunteer work, but a broken WiFi driver due to an update is a big roadblock.
Beside that though, I'm happy to have left Windows behind completely.
>> what really blew me away is that everything... just worked
It has improved greatly over the years. When I was using it relatively regularly in the mid-00's it still took a lot of effort to get everything to work.
But long-time users being amazed that buying a brand new linux laptop in 2026 'just works' says a lot about how far behind it is/was. PC's that 'just work' have been available for 40 years. That should be the starting point for any shipping product.
I had a similar experience after switching to Fedora Silverblue (but any of the immutable Linuxes will probably do - and over time, I'm sure most will be like that). Had set aside a bunch of time to do a major version update, everything fully backed up, and then it was done in a couple of minutes. Literally no different from any other update.
I've done more than a handful of major version updates since then, and almost don't bother to backup any more.
yeah, the "it actually just works now" is quite a powerful transition. for all my hardware, that happened like 3 years ago, but I've been Mac-bound for a decade until recently so I'm only really sinking in now.
That brings back my memory (again) installing Mandriva on my old old old computer which has a NVIDIA TNT2 graphics card. It was a completely nightmare back then to install driver for it in order to get it to output at the correct resolution and refresh rate...
Now I have a Thinkpad T440p with a GeForce GT 730M dGPU which NVIDIA no longer provide driver for newer Linux kernels, so I have to use slower nouveau driver.
I recall my older brother and his friends trying to install Linux on a system with a Matrox S3 graphics pn our families computer, HP Pavilion 133mhz with 16mb RAM.
Back when X was Xfree86 and you were required to create the X configuration without internet.
I strongly agree on this. I mained Windows for the last few years and got to the point where I was comfortable doing development similarly to how I would on Linux (text editor and command line build tools, cl, ml64, batch, etc.). I did that mostly so I could game and develop on the same machine. I learned a ton doing it but it has just gotten too awful to carry on.
It was faster to rg to search files, drop into WSL and run find for file name searches. The start menu was laggy, explorer was laggy (open up a folder with a couple dozen OGG files and it won't render for a solid minute). Mystery memory usage from privileged processes I had little control over. Once I realized that the one game I play (Overwatch) ran on Linux I decided to swap back.
I installed Linux Mint earlier this year and I've been extremely happy. The memory consumption is stable and low, and if something is broken I have the control to fix it. It just feels so much less hostile. This is largely possible thanks to the work Steam has done with Proton. The last real barrier is kernel level anti-cheat which prevented me from trying out this years Call of Duty. Oh well!
This continuously drives me crazy on Windows and macOS. I am befuddled at the number of times where I'm searching for a top level subdirectory that starts with 'foo' but the search bar spins and spins..
Eventually I get fed up and just sort by name and perform an alphabetical visual search in meat-space.
On my Windows machines, every time I have to click my Bluetooth icon, which is about a dozen times every day, the full second pause before it presents me with a menu makes me wish I didn't need Windows on two of my systems. It's mindbogglingly stupid that a UI element has a one second delay to present a menu on...any hardware, much less "2025" hardware.
But that's the kind of product they're shipping, because that's the kind of people they're employing, and that's the kind of decisions they're allowed to make. It permeates everything.
And on laptops you may need to write a script to disable Bluetooth before the lid closes and re-enable it when the lid opens because Microsoft in its wisdom forced S0 sleep but didn't care to make it stable enough so a drivers can't crash your system during it.
Additionally there is no reliable mechanism to do so as doing it through Task Scheduler causes a race condition - will your script be allowed to run and finish before S0 sleep cuts power to it? You can not be sure.
Additionally if you got cornered into making an online account Task Scheduler doesn't even work with that reliably (for task that require privileges like turning off BT on lock and turning it on on unlock) so then you have disable the online account Microsoft manipulated you to make. Of course the failure is silent so you have to discover all that by yourself.
That is a a driver but Windows can also crash during S0 sleep because of its own updater failing to update some random app (like Microsoft Phone w/e that is).
On Linux it's just not an issue. The script runs on events and is guaranteed to finish. Random updates at random times won't happen either.
“They've managed to take some of their most revolutionary technological innovations (the NT kernel's hybrid design allowing it to restart drivers, NTFS, ReFS, WSL, Hyper-V, etc.) then just shat all over them”.
Well said. I wonder what the kernel team thinks about it.
I really don't understand what is different about my installs of Windows 11 compared to what I read in all these types of articles.
I have zero issues with the platform day in and day out with heavy workloads like Pro Tools and Unreal Engine devkit. Games run without stutter and issue, all my features are snappy, Explorer loads instantly, etc. Even search is performant and gives decent results. I have tweaked a few settings but nothing you can't find in settings menus.
I'm not sure a lot of people having issues with pretty damn stable platform are going to have a better experience in something they have zero familiarity with and isn't exactly going to be intuitive when things go sideways, as they most undoubtedly will.
> Explorer loads instantly, etc. Even search is performant and gives decent results.
There is likely too big of a gap in "terminology".
For example, the file explorer startup is so "Instant" that even Microsoft officially added an option to preload the app to fix the delay. But if you don't notice / don't appreciate real instant, then sure, you won't understand the complaints. (or maybe your hardware masks it well enough)
Similarly, if you've never used Everything or better file manager for search, you might get used to the bad search results and call them "decent" since you're not aware how awesome it can be
I have the same confusion as you do. Note, I am not ignorant about Linux or MacOS. I ran Linux as my main OS from 2001 - 2015, still run it on a server. MacOS from 2015 - 2021. Since 2021 I am on Windows for my main machine (a laptop) and my gaming desktop.
Win 11 seems fine to me. I do see Copilot appearing everywhere. I don't see ads from MS at all, though- sometimes my vendor driver-management software asks me if I was to extend my warranty. Not Win11 fault, though. Start menu seems fine, phone integration is nice, OS runs very stable (in the very early days of using Linux 20y ago I marveled at how much more stable it was than Win98! That gap is gone now as far as I can tell).
My suspicion: I am paying for M365 (or whatever they call it now) and so they don't advertise it (or anything?) to me. I don't see CandyCrush or other random things added to my machine. All seems OK.
I've read that Win12 will be subscription-based. Maybe I am personally already there. For now, M365 offers me good value- I use MS Office and OneDrive. But if this changes I can see the equation balance shifting and I will then change platforms again.
TMI, I left MacOS because of Gatekeeper and the inability to repair hardware. Before that I left Linux for work interoperability and regressions I saw on my personal mobile hardware. Neither were "bad", really, I have experienced different trade-offs among the three choices I have used. For now, Win 11 is working just fine for me, with no fuss.
I suspect these articles are targeted at techies and tinkerers, where being able to do things their way is very important to them. This is reflected in the many mentions of tinkering with registry keys, which I never have nor felt the need to.
I personally run win11 for gaming, android for media consumption and proxmox for homelab and I think all of these systems are fine as is. They serve their purpose well enough.
My prediction is that steamOS (when it is released) will end up being the only mainstream Linux desktop because of its corporate backing. It would be interesting to see desktop Linux mimicking the android ecosystem, where different vendors provide a different skin on top of SteamOS.
> will end up being the only mainstream Linux desktop because of its corporate backing
Ubuntu, Fedora, SUSE, Pop!, Deepin (and the list goes on) all have corporate backing. Steam is a well-known consumer brand though, so that might make a difference.
I had to edit windows registry to fix the worst misfeatures of start & context menu. I never found solution to random wake up after suspend or missing icons after wake up - MS support was useless. Linux desktop even with non-zero amount of issues can't frustrate me nearly as much as Windows. All games I ran so far on Linux worked as good or better as/than on Windows. I keep Windows installed just in case some game really won't work, but combination of SteamDeck (Proton) and Vulkan did wonders for Linux compatibility kudos to Steam/Valve. And I would not want to do software development on Windows, that is number one reason I am using Linux (not that I am using Unreal Engine). Recent MS fever dream with LLMs only adds to general frustration with Windows.
Windows can be a good desktop OS. It just takes a lot of work to get it there. And you have to keep putting in a little more work with each update.
I set up a lot of PCs and what has astounded me is how much less work it takes. Unlike with Windows, most of the defaults are fine. I don't have to scour through all the settings after a fresh install. I only need to install half as many apps. I don't have to run powershell scripts to debloat everything. And I don't have to worry about updates undoing all the changes I've made in the future.
I have pro edition on multiple home systems, definitely have had more issues with my corporate issued Win11 laptop, but it's also many major versions behind what I have at home.
For the last few days I was trying to revive an old MacBook Air for a non-techie friend. It had 4 GB of RAM.
It had Catalina on it and was completely unusable. Hovering on anything would bring up the spinner which would take a couple of minutes to resolve itself.
I tried reinstalling the OS, which didn't help. The top recommendation was to revert to Mojave.
Finally, after three days of struggle, I gave up and installed Linux Mint.
The difference is absolutely unbelievable. Even heavy applications like LibreOffice and Zoom are snappy.
Apple makes such good hardware. I felt really sad about the state of their software compatibility with older machines.
So, I don't know about the rest of the world, but I know one more person will be using Linux in 2026!
Yeah I've been running EndeavourOS on my 2015 Air (4 GB) and it is so incredibly snappy and efficient now. Makes macOS look like a lurching zombie of an OS.
Readit News
Haven’t used windows in five years or so but I’ve kept hearing bad things. This really is the icing on the cake though. Yea the AI stuff is dumb but if a OS manufacturer can’t be bothered to interact with their own UI libraries to build native UIs something has gone horribly wrong.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
How long did it last. Ironically it still gives me the shits because you can't select text on Netflix's front end.
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.
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.
1: https://youtu.be/kMJNEFHj8b8?t=4m47s
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.
Unfortunately it was a big ball of mud in mismanagement.
https://platform.uno/platform/
One can only imagine what the product managers of like .NET think of all this.
At least in Windows 10, there was even still the occasional Windows 3.1 file picker hanging around in the really dusty locations
You know, like KDE Plasma in 2026.
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.
Then I hear that now ctrl alt delete is a webview. Its difficult to believe. Do you have a reference?
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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAKg-Z6m8nM - 6:50
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.
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.
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.
And that's just one example. I curse Microsoft every day.
Newer version of Windows seem to add latency were there was none before.
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
I've worked with all major GUI frameworks, from MFC to Qt, they all suck compared with React/Vue
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Deleted Comment
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
Yet somehow I am OK with gnome shell.
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.
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.
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.
I think this is a real thing and I think a combination of MS demanding everyone get new hardware and Valve really polishing a lot of linux has gone a long way to get non-technical users to start seriously considering linux.
It's a huge added bonus that old hardware simply flies with linux. I have a 5 year old laptop that feels about 10x more responsive since I killed the windows install and put linux on it.
And I know that laptop will continue to fly because, unlike windows, it's never going to get any sort of serious bloatware added on as I update it.
Given how rough and uncertain the economy is, this creates a large group of people who can't or aren't comfortable upgrading their computer, but at the same time don't want to be stuck on EOL Windows 10 forever either.
It’s literally the ads and bloatware. Windows is horrible unless you are technical enough to strategically disable the bloatware, and keep on disabling it as the updates continually reenable it. And if you are technical enough to disable it then Linux isn’t a problem.
Microsoft really is enterprise, cloud, and GitHub / AI tools. Windows for personal users is harvesting as much cash as possible from boomers and gamers, but the gamers are leaving en masse now. Software professionals only use macOS or Linux unless they are a MS shop that has to use Windows stack.
It is an incredible shift for those of us who have been around forever. But it’s a true look at how impossible things shift, bit by bit, until all of a sudden it all washes away. Never believe the tech cos on top today can’t be beat. It can and will happen someday
I fact, Linux is much easier to run on somewhat older hardware because drivers are often a bit slow to land and Ubuntu and its derivatives always lag in kernel versions.
Older hardware becoming more valuable because price hikes doubly benefit Linux.
As I wrote on HN just yesterday, I've been working on the Linux desktop for 20 years and the momentum has never been higher. 2026 will be fun.
Deleted Comment
That, plus (what feels like) a lot of recent advances in Linux. When I tried it... 2-3ish years ago? I recall e.g. fractional display scaling being basically nonfunctional. But when I tried again early 2025, it pretty much Just Worked (arguably even better than it did on windows), I just had to manually enable wayland. Pretty sure even that's just the default nowadays.
Which basically sums up my personal windows -> linux pipeline: bought a steam deck, was impressed at how well it ran my steam library; had my old laptop finally die on me, ran my life off the steam deck for a while; decided to eventually build a new machine, and figured I might as well try installing linux from the get-go. Everything worked fine on the first try, and I ended up not even installing windows.
certainly within my friend groups, I'm seeing more and more people entertaining the idea of making the switch as well. Admittedly, that's primarily "tech-savvy" folks though.
Proton was good, but SteamDeck did 2 things:
* informed bigger public that hey, it is good enough for vast majority of games/gamers in the public eye
* more importantly, *made developers care* about their stuff working on Steam Deck. And if it works on Steam Deck, very good chance it will work on <generic linux distro> just fine
I had Dillo for a web browser, a stripped down version of VLC that could play 360p Youtube videos without issue, downloaded via Youtube-DL. I had XMMS which looked just like Winamp, and Sega/Nintendo emulation and even Duke Nukem 3D. For programs I had epub/pdf/djview readers, xpaint which is like classic MS Paint, feh as a hyperlightweight all purpose image viewer and background manager, a super lightweight RSI break popup program, and even a fully functional web server stack. It also had a window manager (JWM) that handled multiple desktops more intuitively and effortlessly than Windows does now.
Good for checking which photo of a dozen is clearest, while zoomed in 800%.
- macOS is kind of crapifying, with Liquid Glass UI, iCloud services pushed down your throat… - Windows 11… - (some) Europeans are getting concerned about their complete lack of sovereignty on the tech stack, and Linux is one way to reclaim a small part of it. - LLM agents like Claude code have lowered the bar so much for any setup operation and bash commands.
All in all, it seems like a good time for Linux to broaden a bit its adoption.
My "year of the Linux desktop" was in 2010, because even then everything was much, much faster on Ubuntu. (It helps major browsers were shipping 64-bit versions for Linux only, but Minecraft simply did not run on my laptop under Windows).
Does anyone else feel kind of sick (something like pity?) when they see people using Windows 11? Right click menus which have a loading spinner, advertisements littered throughout, and headlines from right-wing tabloids spammed in news widgets.
These past six years have been absolutely bonkers incredible for Linux, and it can all be attributed to Microsoft shooting themselves in the head with Windows. Proton work started after Windows 8 and really became usable in late 2019. Now we're seeing something again with Windows 11. It's awesome, hope it sticks.
It can’t all be attributed to Microsoft. There have been huge efforts by many parties to make this happen. Folks working on the Kernel, desktop environments, distros, applications, tooling, advocacy, and more.
I believe people who say they are being pushed away from ms because of disillusionment with windows 11. But there also needs to be someone to pick up the ball after it was dropped — and those people deserve equal if not more credit
I'd argue that its drips and papercuts all over. Everything is trying to extract rent, and that makes things unreliable enough that even basic users are starting to notice.
Um, can't connect to the Internet? Nope, you can't play a game on your machine, and you may not even be able to log in. Service hiccup? Booted from whatever you were doing because we can't extort your if we leave data on your machine. And, oh, if you have the nerve to complain, you ungrateful serf, we will kickban you with no recourse. etc.
And this is before we even bring the AI bukkake into the picture ...
Now, two in five PCs worldwide are running Windows 10, an unsuppoted OS. What are the user's options? Either buy a new PC, switch to Mac or run Linux.
[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/2025-could-finally-be-the-year...
When prices are going nuts and the economy is tanking the option that doesn't cost you money starts to look a lot more appealing, and for some the first isn't even an option; they're completely priced out of the new market for the foreseeable future.
MS fucked up
Deleted Comment
I just bought a laptop that came with Fedora installed. This isn't anything new, but what really blew me away is that everything... just worked. No tinkering. No alternative modules built from source (hopefully with a good DKMS script). Everything... just worked. I'd blocked out a few hours to get everything working in a satisfactory state and... I had nothing to do, really.
And when I say everything I mean EVERYTHING, not just the features that were significant to my own use cases. Mind-blowing, if you think about it.
For a laptop user who likes to game, you’ll definitely encounter some issues based on my experience. Better than it was 2 years ago, but it’s not a seamless experience (laptops!!) that you’d expect from posts like these.
For a Linux savvy user, it’s definitely worth the switch. I haven’t had any ads in months and it’s magical
Things are improving, and we should see this fixed in the next years I assume. This is the good thing about it, Linux will probably be fixing all annoying bugs in the next few years.
I had the same problem on my new Yoga laptop with Fedora and an Intel BE200 Wi-Fi card.
The only exception is when we got a really new batch of Lenovo P1 laptops for work, and the patches likely were not fully merged yet. So as long as you’re not getting the first batch it is generally pretty good.
This is true. I've been using Ubuntu since 2006, but still see issues with
Wifi: Ubuntu 22 didn't work out of the box with a 2014 macbook air
Bluetooth: maddening trying to set "listening" mode instead of headset mode on JBL earphones - it seems to choose randomly every time it connects, and the setting isn't exposed in any UI
Sleep: I don't think I've ever seen sleep/suspend working reliably on a Linux laptop, to the point I don't know the difference between the two. I have one thinkpad which never wakes from sleep, and also never fully shuts down on system shutdown without a long press of the power button.
I accept all this so that I don't have to wait seconds for basic UI things to happen, like switching virtual desktop (osx) and opening the application launcher (windows).
I have never had any issues with any Linux-distro regarding WiFi. Most hardware I have used has been largely compatible even. Maybe I have just been lucky, but it seems there’s millions of us who are really lucky these days.
What has also changed from 2010’s is that the documentation like Arch wiki is a lot better. You can also ask an LLM to help you configure things - obvs the docs are better and safer - so if and when you do have a problem, there’s actually sources to help you fix it.
This has mostly been solved by either putting them in the nonfree repos or just the fact that WiFi hardware vendors aren't using such stuff anymore.
I still remember pulling firmware blobs for my Broadcom cards, then it magically worked fine. It was far from trivial and I think that's what caused a lot of people who tried Linux on laptops in early 2000s to turn away.
This is why I don't use Windows. Early last year I paid for a copy of "Windows 10", and it didn't support most of the hardware in my laptop. Even plugging in a mouse I had to use keyboard shortcuts to let it load a "driver", and after that it still didn't support the scroll wheel. Wifi didn't work at all, and wired network was painfully slow. It did at least support FHD resolution in 24-bit colour but very slowly.
My audio interface was completely unsupported, my MIDI interfaces were completely unsupported. Eventually I gave up attempting to run it, wiped the laptop again, reinstalled Ubuntu, and went for Bitwig instead of Ableton, and I've had no problems since.
Maybe one day we'll see the year of Windows on the desktop, but this isn't it yet.
I can't remember the last time I tried a distro that didn't just work on a random computer with a random wifi but it has been several years now.
Nvidia cards on the other hand...last year I had to try about 10 distros before I found something that wasn't a huge pain in the ass.
Turned me off Fedora completely.
Tried two other distros on the same machine right afterwards with no problems though.
Beside that though, I'm happy to have left Windows behind completely.
It has improved greatly over the years. When I was using it relatively regularly in the mid-00's it still took a lot of effort to get everything to work.
But long-time users being amazed that buying a brand new linux laptop in 2026 'just works' says a lot about how far behind it is/was. PC's that 'just work' have been available for 40 years. That should be the starting point for any shipping product.
I've done more than a handful of major version updates since then, and almost don't bother to backup any more.
Could you share the model, please?
Now I have a Thinkpad T440p with a GeForce GT 730M dGPU which NVIDIA no longer provide driver for newer Linux kernels, so I have to use slower nouveau driver.
Ah, something never change.
Back when X was Xfree86 and you were required to create the X configuration without internet.
It was faster to rg to search files, drop into WSL and run find for file name searches. The start menu was laggy, explorer was laggy (open up a folder with a couple dozen OGG files and it won't render for a solid minute). Mystery memory usage from privileged processes I had little control over. Once I realized that the one game I play (Overwatch) ran on Linux I decided to swap back.
I installed Linux Mint earlier this year and I've been extremely happy. The memory consumption is stable and low, and if something is broken I have the control to fix it. It just feels so much less hostile. This is largely possible thanks to the work Steam has done with Proton. The last real barrier is kernel level anti-cheat which prevented me from trying out this years Call of Duty. Oh well!
Fixed via the Everything app - instant search of any file in a nice resizable/sortable table
> if something is broken I have the control to fix it.
Instant search doesn't exist, how do you fix it?
This continuously drives me crazy on Windows and macOS. I am befuddled at the number of times where I'm searching for a top level subdirectory that starts with 'foo' but the search bar spins and spins..
Eventually I get fed up and just sort by name and perform an alphabetical visual search in meat-space.
But that's the kind of product they're shipping, because that's the kind of people they're employing, and that's the kind of decisions they're allowed to make. It permeates everything.
Additionally there is no reliable mechanism to do so as doing it through Task Scheduler causes a race condition - will your script be allowed to run and finish before S0 sleep cuts power to it? You can not be sure.
Additionally if you got cornered into making an online account Task Scheduler doesn't even work with that reliably (for task that require privileges like turning off BT on lock and turning it on on unlock) so then you have disable the online account Microsoft manipulated you to make. Of course the failure is silent so you have to discover all that by yourself.
That is a a driver but Windows can also crash during S0 sleep because of its own updater failing to update some random app (like Microsoft Phone w/e that is).
On Linux it's just not an issue. The script runs on events and is guaranteed to finish. Random updates at random times won't happen either.
Well said. I wonder what the kernel team thinks about it.
I have zero issues with the platform day in and day out with heavy workloads like Pro Tools and Unreal Engine devkit. Games run without stutter and issue, all my features are snappy, Explorer loads instantly, etc. Even search is performant and gives decent results. I have tweaked a few settings but nothing you can't find in settings menus.
I'm not sure a lot of people having issues with pretty damn stable platform are going to have a better experience in something they have zero familiarity with and isn't exactly going to be intuitive when things go sideways, as they most undoubtedly will.
There is likely too big of a gap in "terminology".
For example, the file explorer startup is so "Instant" that even Microsoft officially added an option to preload the app to fix the delay. But if you don't notice / don't appreciate real instant, then sure, you won't understand the complaints. (or maybe your hardware masks it well enough)
Similarly, if you've never used Everything or better file manager for search, you might get used to the bad search results and call them "decent" since you're not aware how awesome it can be
Win 11 seems fine to me. I do see Copilot appearing everywhere. I don't see ads from MS at all, though- sometimes my vendor driver-management software asks me if I was to extend my warranty. Not Win11 fault, though. Start menu seems fine, phone integration is nice, OS runs very stable (in the very early days of using Linux 20y ago I marveled at how much more stable it was than Win98! That gap is gone now as far as I can tell).
My suspicion: I am paying for M365 (or whatever they call it now) and so they don't advertise it (or anything?) to me. I don't see CandyCrush or other random things added to my machine. All seems OK.
I've read that Win12 will be subscription-based. Maybe I am personally already there. For now, M365 offers me good value- I use MS Office and OneDrive. But if this changes I can see the equation balance shifting and I will then change platforms again.
TMI, I left MacOS because of Gatekeeper and the inability to repair hardware. Before that I left Linux for work interoperability and regressions I saw on my personal mobile hardware. Neither were "bad", really, I have experienced different trade-offs among the three choices I have used. For now, Win 11 is working just fine for me, with no fuss.
> I don't see ads from MS at all
You can only pick one.
I personally run win11 for gaming, android for media consumption and proxmox for homelab and I think all of these systems are fine as is. They serve their purpose well enough.
My prediction is that steamOS (when it is released) will end up being the only mainstream Linux desktop because of its corporate backing. It would be interesting to see desktop Linux mimicking the android ecosystem, where different vendors provide a different skin on top of SteamOS.
Ubuntu, Fedora, SUSE, Pop!, Deepin (and the list goes on) all have corporate backing. Steam is a well-known consumer brand though, so that might make a difference.
I set up a lot of PCs and what has astounded me is how much less work it takes. Unlike with Windows, most of the defaults are fine. I don't have to scour through all the settings after a fresh install. I only need to install half as many apps. I don't have to run powershell scripts to debloat everything. And I don't have to worry about updates undoing all the changes I've made in the future.
Dead Comment
It had Catalina on it and was completely unusable. Hovering on anything would bring up the spinner which would take a couple of minutes to resolve itself.
I tried reinstalling the OS, which didn't help. The top recommendation was to revert to Mojave.
Finally, after three days of struggle, I gave up and installed Linux Mint.
The difference is absolutely unbelievable. Even heavy applications like LibreOffice and Zoom are snappy.
Apple makes such good hardware. I felt really sad about the state of their software compatibility with older machines.
So, I don't know about the rest of the world, but I know one more person will be using Linux in 2026!