Holy fucking shit this isn't just a meme, wtaf is going on at Microsoft.
The FOSS aficionados of Lemmy will probably be quick to tell me it's always been shit, but this seems like a marked increase in bad decisions in the past 5-10 years
If you go back to an older version of Windows, it becomes clear how bad Microsoft has become. Try Windows 95 and you'll be surprised how clean it is. How few distractions the OS is showing into your face. How tidy the menus are and they also give you little hints for the keyboard shortcuts
I look forward to a glirchy vibe coded OS that uses embeded AI for everything, yet some people still manage to turn into a demented semi-functional ecosystem. Probably mostly run by seniors and computer illiterate consumers who just "want latest tech" for bragging rights.
Borked comes from Robert Bork, who was nominated to the US Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan. He was rejected by the Senate, with many of the opinion that he and Reagan made a mistake.
Bork also borked US agriculture as a federal judge. He's literally the reason that there has been so much consolidation because of his ruling that corporate consolidation is, by default, magically both good for customers and somehow doesn't violate anti-trust laws. To be clear, both are lies and he clearly knew that at the time of the ruling but, like all right-wing judges, loved money and imposing his right-wing values from the bench more than his constitutionally defined duties.
Probably mostly run by seniors and computer illiterate consumers who just “want latest tech” for bragging rights.
My mum doesn't use Microsoft because she cares about bragging rights, she uses it because it comes with Microsoft Word and all of that OneCloud sync junk, and she expects it to work so that she can do her work on it. We tried Ubuntu with her for a while, and Microsoft Word and Excel were the main pain points
They'll think that it's totally normal for computers to get confused about whether it should open an app or start playing a documentary about how that app went to shit. And probably still not pay attention to the documentaries that constantly start to the point where ms just gives up on figuring out how to block them and instead just charges people for the views.
I knew that the Xbox 360 3RR, red ring of death problem... was so bad, that it actually would have been more cost effective for MSFT to give each buyer two 360s, instead of one, at the same price, because of how mismanaged the RMA process was... I knew a whole bunch of such details a almost a decade before the documentary on it came out.
Yay NDAs.
...
I was also there during the Windows 8 rollout.
Shut down basically everything for a month, because MSFT 'dogfoods' all their software: Every MSFT worker is beta/alpha testing all MSFT software all the time.
We spent weeks just, unable to have more than 3 windows open at a time, half the tools we used on a daily basis just not working.
We asked them to let us go back to 7, asked them if therr was some way to return to a 7 like GUI.
For weeks they said nope, impossible, Win 8 is an entirely new GUI, totally new OS, the Win 7 GUI isn't there.
Oh then uh, weeks later, yeah, yeah it actually is there, you just have to follow this arcane override proceduren to see and use it.
... And then they just relented, put the non tablet UI fully back in, and called that Windows 8.1.
...
Windows is now layers upon layers upon decades of insane spaghetti code.
Even in Win 10, which was the last version I ever used... there are like 3 or 4 different eras of UI, for various settings menus, which people sometimes need to actually use... but they are considered legacy and thus not important.
Sometimes some newer era UI menus will have some of the options from some of the more buried stuff, but not all of them.
My favorite detail on the 3RL saga was when I took my second bricked unit to the local UPS store and they had a special bin for boxes that perfectly fit the 360 for shipping them back.
After a certain point, a bunch of the 360s... they weren't even like, 'fixed'.
They just ... not sure of which exactly, this level of detail was basically rumors and contradictions from my POV...
But they were either just physically putting old hard drives in new units, that or just digitally transferring their contents over to new units...
And then they'd tell people 'yup, your unit has been refurbished'.
Like, ship of theseus not withstanding... not really fixing them, no, rofl.
And then this would lead to other problems like... ooops, we didn't correctly re register your new 360's serial number to your Live account, or we didn't deregister the old one, and now you're unjustly banned because MSFT tech support fucked up.
...
Assuming my memory is still reasonably sccurate:
Though it did vary somewhat from team to team, the internal nomenclature my team was using was... 3RR.
Like, 1RR, 2RR, 3RR, 4RR.
While all of them were quite problematic, 3RR was the one that... basically 100% of the time, no over the phone, web instructions, or even RMA ... could actually fix that one.
For the other codes, following over the phone / web instructions could actually fix it sometimes, or an RMA repair could actually fix it with a speific hardware component replacement... that or it was a problem with the actual cable connecting to the TV, or the Xbox was like, jammed in a little nook with no airflow, and dudes were chain smoking blunts in their apartment, rofl.
I have an original 360 I barely played. I don't have any games for it really, but if I were to use it again, do you have any suggestions for avoiding red rings? My understanding is airflow is paramount.
Really the airflow thing is the most important for just most non catastrophicly unfixable problems.
Give a foot to its left and right of nothing, and nothing over it, if possible... don't smoke in the same room with it, possibly plug it into a power strip/surge protector if the electrical in your living space is kind of shoddy, or your local grid is fucky wucky.
Do not immerse in water, do not have your dog pee on it, do not drop test it, etc, lol.
All that goes for the power brick as well, it also needs space to not overheat and ... well, brick itself.
If your room temp is getting higher than maybe... 80, 85, 90 degrees F? Consider either getting an AC unit ... or pointing fans at the 360 or something?
I throw my hands up at understanding precisely what that all means.
... maybe just... don't give it internet access, at all, at this point?
Also, I am required by MSFT to inform you that, though it is possible to successfully hard mod your 360 into being able to run, and access unapproved software, this will void your warranty that is almost certainly no longer in effect, and may also lead to irreprable hardware damage and/or the revocation of your Xbox Live Xbox Games Pass account.
=D
(Yeah my actual job involved reorganizing and fixing up the spider's web of... the entire branching set of all possible questions and tech support script prompts that all the call center tech support people would run down.
There were... I think over 1000 different possible nodes you could land on, god knows how many possible distinct, branched paths.
The super fun part was when my boss and I would find ... infinite recursive loops within certain branching question/script paths, because we would be having people pick from an insufficient set of answers to a question ... because we didn't even realize some scenarios were even possible... which we did not realize because our contacts at the hardware design department told us they were impossible... even though ... in actuality, they were indeed possible, and common, and hardware did not want to admit the extent to which the fundamental design was fucked.
So, if during the 360 era, anyone ever called into MSFT support and got stuck in an infinite loop of repeating questions: I am sorry, part of that is technically my fault, but in my defense, I was there from '11 to part of '12, I didn't set up this broken system, it had existed for at least 2 years prior, and I tried my damndest to fix it in the 9 months that was me and my boss's job.)
Oh how I miss the beautiful simplicity of Win95/98/NT UIs. It seems as our screens have become larger, they found more shit to put on them that I don't want to see.
The initial release was a bit rough but holy shit that OS was basically magic when it was dialed in. 100% my favorite.
Next to no resource usage. Reasonably secure (for its time - especially compared to other offerings) ... and all settings were right in reach.
No bullshit, no fluff. It played the os role perfectly. Run your shit and get the hell out of your way. I still believe they killed it off early to force people to switch. It was murdering the new os in performance benchmarks.
In my experience people were saying that about 98SE after ME came out. People didn’t really have many issues with XP until the internet got really popular, and by then we had some nice service packs to help with the security nightmares of ye ole internet.
It was a known rule that every second version of Windows was good. 95 was good, 98SE was good, XP was good, 7 was good, but sadly they never released Windows 9, so we're still waiting for the good version to come after 8.
They were still good windowses for their time, especially when you compare them to DOS and Mac OS 9 which would have been the alternatives.
For a fair comparison with professional OSes with full memory protection like UNIX you'd have to look at Windows NT, but there the preimise is true as well (as far as I can tell by googling, I only ever used 2000 Pro): 3.1 was bad, 3.5(1) good, 4.0 bad, 2000 good, 2003 meh.
I’m with you. 8.1 was underrated. Yes the start screen wasn’t for everyone, but I didn’t mind it. It was the last native Windows start menu that would just find the apps you wanted to run. No Cortana, no web searches, no ads.
If you bought a top of the line computer in 1990, it would barely have been able to run Win95. It wouldn't have been able to run Win98 at all. Conversely, even with Win11 obsoleting a lot of systems due to TPM, there are plenty of 7 or 8 year old systems that will still work with it just fine.
Win95 was a leap in complexity compared to Win3.1/DOS 6. It replaced a sloppy, manual memory management system with a sloppy, automatic memory management system. It created the registry system as we know it, and instantly got a reputation as a fast way to ruin your system.
Do you like files named "big long name.txt"? Because sometimes that will come out as "biglon~1.txt" or something like that. It was still using the same shitty FAT system, now with 32-bit extensions that technically allowed long file names, but had to shorten them for compatibility with older stuff.
Win98 added Active Desktop, which made your desktop part of IE. This meant that every time IE crashed, your whole desktop went with it. Didn't necessarily need to reboot to fix it, but it cleared out your background and a toolbar thing. In a way, it was an attempt to do what Electron apps do now, except with Microsoft proprietary web stuff.
Oh, and once it got USB support, it sucked ass. It had to reinstall drivers if you plugged your keyboard into a different USB port than you usually did.
Neither Win98 or ME would fix its memory management issues. That had to wait for Microsoft to get off their ass and release a home version of NT with WinXP (sorta Win2k, but that's complicated). This memory management issue was the root cause of most BSODs at the time.
People hated Windows at the time for exactly the same fundamental reason they hate it today: it's a clunky piece of shit. Win 7/8/10 was actually an attempt to simplify things in many ways, but Microsoft has fallen back to what they did before.
Thank you for the blast of sanity. Older versions of windows were pretty shit, and the newer versions offer tons of improvements right next to the fresh horrors they bring along.
There did not yet exist channels of psyop slop that could pay MS to give them access to their users at their most vulnerable or it would have been in Vista.
Come on, Vista was a genuinely good system. Everyone ran it on 256 Mb of RAM or some shit. If you had a high end system, it was truly some awesome shit for the time
The original design philosophy of the PC was as a plug-in-play device. Everything was designed to be friendly to new software, new hardware, and new integrations. The whole point was to give you a device that was a programmatic multi-tool.
The advent of computers as a financial vehicle radically changed that design philosophy. Once you could extract money from a computer owner, the open and extremely mutable hardware/software became a massive financial liability.
Imagine getting handed a wad of playdough, having all sorts of fun with it, finding all sorts of useful household applications for it, and filling it into every crevass in your house. Then imagine someone showing up and saying "We're going to use the thumb print you leave on the playdough to verify all your future payments and assignment of future debts." Suddenly, a burglar can walk off with your entire bank account if they can scrap a bit of thumbed playdough out of a corner of your house. And - oh, whoops - all your door locks and window jams are full of playdough, too, because it was so damned useful for customized security.
Damn that's a good analogy. Just needs a bit about how they're changing the formula of the playdoh so that it's no longer useful for half the shit you're relying on it for.
I have a very feeble 25-year-old computer running Windows 2000 on a low-wattage CPU for embedded systems, and it feels far more responsive than Windows 11 on my desktop with an AMD 5950x. And I dual-boot Linux, which also feels much faster than Windows 11.
Same as everywhere else, management wants random shit done chop chop chop, fires actual developers who tell them they're the dumbest pieces of shit they've seen in this lifetime and hire random bros who say "whatever dude, just wanna get paid" then copy-paste google results because bing sucks.
Middle manglement is the source of nearly all bad decisions once companies get large enough to have it. Upper management is often dog shit, but they usually have an idea of what they want done. Whether that's. Net positive for consumers is a different story, but they don't intend for it to be implemented poorly.
Middle manglement then takes that, fucks it up putting each of their little stamps on it as it hits every rung on the ladder as it works it's way down to the people that have to implement it.
Everything is done by vibe coders under the direction of project managers who're just trying to get their name on shit. No one actually cares about the quality of the end product.
The reality is it's not bad as an end user at all unless you're on 10 year old hardware. The number of support requests my team received for slow start menu issues was zero while providing hundreds of windows machines.
This is a made up issue to get engagement from CS students who like to say actually a lot. I mean you actually have a person bitching about JavaScript in the browser. Let it fucking go already lol.
Oh, but it absolutely is true. Microsoft really did decide to use React Native for parts of the Windows 11 Start menu. They're also using it in sections of the Settings app.
The technical reality is even more absurd than the meme suggests. Microsoft is currently maintaining eight different UI frameworks for Windows, including their own .NET MAUI and WinUI 3 that were specifically built for their OS. Yet somehow they thought, "You know what this native operating system needs? A JavaScript framework originally designed for mobile apps."
The CPU usage spikes aren't necessarily from React Native itself being particularly heavyweight, but rather from the fundamental architectural choice of running a web-based rendering engine for core system UI elements. Every time you click Start, you're essentially launching a mini web application just to display a menu.
What's particularly galling is that Microsoft has acknowledged WinUI's performance issues for years, to the point where they recommend their partners use the older WPF for performance-critical applications. So instead of fixing their native framework, they decided to add another layer of abstraction.
This is what happens when corporate development teams prioritize "developer experience" and trendy frameworks over system efficiency. Richard Stallman's expression in that image perfectly captures the appropriate level of technical horror at this decision.
The old world built operating systems. The new world builds web apps that pretend to be operating systems.
So, what I'm hearing you say is that MS should jam Copilot into every single app and every corner of the OS, to turn ordinary actions into LLM-driven ones? Because that's what the users and the planet are clamouring for.
React Native doesn't render using a browser instance, it's native code (as the name implies), it's actually a layer over WinUI 3 (Previous versions used WPF/UWP)
So it's in the same boat as MAUI, which is also a layer over WinUI 3.
The CPU usage spikes aren’t necessarily from React Native itself being particularly heavyweight, but rather from the fundamental architectural choice of running a web-based rendering engine for core system UI elements.
I suppose i lack an understanding of whether React Native is a web based rendering engine or not but i figured they could also be referring to edge implementation in the same feature.
Like saying coffee isn't hot because of the mug it's in but the brewing machine it came out of.
Yes, technically The_Decryptor is correct - React Native doesn't literally spin up a Chromium instance like Electron does. It transpiles JavaScript into native calls. But they're completely missing the forest for the trees here.
The fundamental architectural absurdity remains unchanged: Microsoft is using a JavaScript framework - originally designed for mobile apps - to render core operating system UI elements. Whether that JavaScript gets compiled to native calls or interpreted in a browser engine is irrelevant to the core criticism.
Your coffee analogy is actually closer to the mark than The_Decryptor realizes. The performance issues aren't just about the final native calls - they're about the entire abstraction stack Microsoft has built.
You've got JavaScript -> React Native bridge -> WinUI 3 -> whatever underlying Windows API calls. Each layer adds overhead, complexity, and potential failure points. The_Decryptor saying "it's in the same boat as MAUI" isn't the defense they think it is - MAUI has its own performance issues precisely because of similar abstraction layers.
This is exactly the kind of technical bike-shedding that lets corporations get away with architectural disasters. Everyone argues about implementation details while the Start menu still stutters when you click it.
The old world would have written the Start menu in C++ and called it a day. The new world creates dependency graphs that look like spider webs and then argues about whether the spider web is technically made of silk or polyester.
Can't they extract more data from a mobile set-up? I'm assuming that's why they did it, they're trying to take it to a phone experience for the corporations.
The reason you do react native is because it's easier to hire react native devs. Further, there's a plethora of react native libraries that make it easier to make UXes above other UX frameworks.
The problem MS has is they have spent decades making platform locked UX frameworks because they were deathly afraid someone would use Linux instead of Windows.
Browser tech won because every major platform needs a browser and basically no organization was investing in multiplatform UX libraries. The likes of both Microsoft and Apple are openly hostile to such frameworks (QT and GTK come to mind).
I have a Windows laptop for the first time in well over a decade for a project I am working on. Even though it is overpowered (i7, 64gb ram), and it is currently "idle", the cooling fans are working overtime because the damn OS is always busy doing some random shit when "idle". This is AFTER I ran a debloat script. It was near impossible to use before then.
EDIT: I found the cause of the fanning issue and different behavior between Win 11 and Linux (Pop!_OS). Even though the laptop comes with an Nvidia RTX 4000 series GPU, Windows 11 set the global default GPU to be the integrated graphics (Intel UHD). The same laptop under Pop!_OS automatically set the default GPU to Nvidia. As soon as I dug this up and switched the settings to Nvidia, the laptop stopped fanning full speed nonstop.
I'll just reiterate that this is a work computer provided by a client. They lend them out to contractors like myself. Since they don't know what the work will require, they order them with max specs. It'd be a monster if I could slap linux on it, but with Win 11 it is just meh at best.
kind of apples to oranges, but the bit about contractors and employees being assigned computers that dont match the needs of the job hit me.
a friend of mine is a video game developer, works for one of the Microsoft studios, He's a Narrative Director, and no that isnt writing. to my understanding his job is mostly revolving around setting up sequences of events so that characters, special effects, music, etc all plays in the correct sequence and functions properly, its kind of like editing, but instead of a timeline, its a 3d world.
It does need a graphics card and a fair amount of ram, but the computer they gave to him, since he works from home as a remote employee in Canada, is a complete beast. its about 3x more than what is needed for the job.
It was actually kind of comical listening to him complain about a game he wanted to play, not working very well on his personal PC, and he had a monster system in his possession, that couldnt be used to play games.
Nahhhh. If they're willing to let you work remote and also give you over specced stuff instead of underspecced that sounds like a good gig. Don't ruin it.
Everything by VoidTools is a million times better than the Windows search, it indexes every file and then actually finds it right away when you search for it.
I don't get why people exaggerate this much. I have a laptop with a 7840hs and 32gb of ram so it's also "overpowered" but it's whisper quiet and consumes 30-45w while doing simple tasks. Consumption only increases if I'm running code, playing games, etc which makes total sense.
Windows is not a well optimized os and the telemetry sucks but you're just flat out lying with your claims. It's either that or your laptop has the worst possible cooling.
I have a laptop that I dual boot Windows 11 and Ubuntu on.
If I leave the Windows desktop idle for >20 minutes the fans will almost always randomly flare up even though I'm doing nothing. On Ubuntu, the desktop usually stays silent, or sometimes the fans come on a little (probably due to bloated browser apps) but never flare up the way it does on Windows.
Again, the most common problem in those cases are crappy drivers/fan curves. I have a laptop with W11 on it and fix/maintain laptops for friends as well and this is not an issue with any of them. The only time I had this problem was with a specific laptop.
Honestly, of all of the things you could criticize about windows (and there are lots), this is the one thing that is simply not an inherent OS problem.
I should test this. I normally set an aggressive fan curve so the CPU doesn't overheat, and because I game on my laptop I use the custom fan profile instead of the default quiet one. I should try using a different fan profile when not gaming.
No exaggeration. I could literally record video at any time to show how it is fanning like crazy. If it is on, it is fanning like a jet plane.
EDIT: Problem found. Win 11 defaulted to integrated graphics even though the laptop has an Nvidia GPU. The same laptop with a Linux (Pop!_OS) install defaulted to the Nvidia GPU. That's just dumb.
Exactly this. I used to have an HP Omen 15 laptop with a 10th gen H variant i7 cpu that would constantly make a noticeable fan noise and would ramp up and down for no reason but the problem was the laptop. Everyone complained about it. The current one is an Omen 16 and it doesn't have that problem at all. Even when gaming.
This was my first thought. Maybe I'm way off the mark (I stopped using Windows in 2012) but I always thought the only thing it has going for itself is their toolkit. Not because it's pretty but because everyone writes applications for the same toolkit.
JavaScript was never fit for purpose even in a browser. We could've had Python or Scheme in the browser instead, but nooooo, Brandon Eich had to be fucking incompetent.
I wasn't idly speculating about languages that I personally happen to like better; I was listing the two languages that Netscape was actively considering at the time before they decided to glom on to the Java hype. When I say "we could've had Python or Scheme," I mean Netscape almost picked Python or Scheme.
If it makes you feel any better, I get the impression that Scheme would've been the more likely of the two. Also, this was happening in 1995, so Lua was less than two years old at the time and, according to this page, not internationally known yet (that would happen in 1996).
Recently something has changed and the start menu likes to search for apps in its browser (not my default app). I used to press windows key then type "snip" for the screenshot tool, now half of the time is does the wrong thing ...
glad I am not the only one. I even disabled the Bing and Websearch bullshit, but somehow in 1 of 5 cases the search result is not the software I am looking for. Even when I type exactly its name.
I've been seriously considering switching to Mint or Ubuntu since they're user friendly. The more I hear about win 11 the less and less I want anything to do with it.
also, my pc isn't compatible so there's that 😂
I gave up on windows 11 last week after my downloads folder decided to stop opening any more. Every other folder worked fine, and I could use a save dialogue to see and navigate inside downloads, but if I opened the folder run file explorer I was met woth a never ending "working on it.." Screen. Hours of trawling useless Microsoft posts to see its a common issue but none of the suggested fixes worked.
I installed Pop! OS, which is essentially Ubuntu but Ive heard works very well with games. Few small hiccoughs getting used to the UI paradigm shift but its motoring along now with no problems. My 5 year old desktop is running much smoother with less overall resource use too. Feels snappier.
Let me know what you think of it! I had some minor issues with my secondary hard drive, but they were entirely my fault, I had a lot of backups on it so didn't initially reformat it from NTFS which I was using for windows to ext4 which is a native Linux format. It would sometimes not mount the drive on boot, but after transferring the backups to an external drive and reformatting the internal drive it was all good.
And it's a terrible app, at that. No organization, just either some random application links, or one giant list with no categories or organization past alphabetical.
I remember people arguing that Linux having two main toolkits were holding it back back in 2000-2010 but then Microsoft invents a few billion UIs just for itself. Even the one big megacorp can't be bothered to keep things consistent.
Ironically, this is the result of various people at Microsoft at various times declaring "we need to scrap all this shit and start over"
There's some logic behind each, but each time assumes they don't have to do anything to port forward the previous approach to new UX standards as those will just die out. If it was roughly 13 screenshots of different developer experience, but consistent looking and behaving UI for the actual user, everyone could just shrug, maybe developers getting a bit grumpy about Microsoft's inconsistency.
I’ve been experimenting with Linux for a year now running a home server. It’s not that hard, the other person’s comment is exactly what I did.
I used Ubuntu at first but when I fried it I figured I’d try Mint on my re-install. It’s been on Mint for about 4 weeks now.
My thoughts as a still relative newbie:
On both Ubuntu and Mint, user/group permissions are confusing to me even using the GNOME tools app. I wish I there was a better UI to set it up.
My issues are mostly to do with external drives. First of all, it’s weird that I even have to specify a mount point if I don’t want to have to memorize my drive’s device ID, but I figured that out.
Then in Ubuntu I’d reboot and my server software would lose access to the drives. If I unplugged them before rebooting and let it boot then plugged them in the server software could read but not write. So I’d have to do a sudo chmod 777 -R /external drives/ after rebooting too.
I’m having the same issue with reboots in Mint if I don’t unplug them, but if I do it now remembers the permissions now so I don’t have to do the terminal command. This may have nothing to do with the OS. Maybe I messed something up the first time. 🤷♂️ Point is: I’m not having fun dealing with external drives.
Ubuntu didn’t come with GNOME tools but Mint did. (It’s basically a set of apps for all your system settings. Command line is so annoying for this stuff.)
Aesthetically, Ubuntu reminds me of Mac OS while Mint reminds of Windows. Apparently they’re the same-ish under the hood.
I’m a Mac user and I’m not ready to switch my daily driver to Linux yet, but I’m sure I will one day.
FWIW, the permissions thing is generally fixable with fstab entries or editing mount options instead of always doing chmod. The uid/gid and umask/fmask mount options are what you're looking for. I think mint has a UI method to modify mount options for it's auto mounter, but I've not used it in a while so I can't be super specific. I'd recommend fstab for anything that's always connected and the other way for things you plug/ unplug
It’s a good call. I still haven’t tried it on my main hardware, but I have an old SDD I plan to use for that sometime soon.
The laptop I’m running my server on is old, so I don’t really see a point in testing the games I usually play on it. I did try a couple low-resource games: OpenRA and 0AD; they’re fine. Steam works and Dawn of War booted up, but I haven’t done much else in that area.
I haven’t touched video or audio editing at all for the same reasons. Especially with it running server stuff in the background.
Email, web browsing, all you basic stuff works just fine. No complaints.
Well first and foremost find yourself a distro you like, I'd suggest something Debian based if your just starting out but no judgement if you want to so to speak jump in the deep end. After that you'll grab a .iso file from wherever said distro keeps such things and you'll need to learn how to 'burn' that to either a USB drive or a regular disc if you want to do it old school. Then you'll need to learn how to get to either the boot menu or BIOS on your computer in order to get it to start from the new OS you've just plugged in. After that the install menu on the new distro should walk you through the rest. Don't worry, I know it sounds foreboding but I first did it as a kid, it's easier than it looks.
Switched to Linux at the beginning of the year. Still have a lobotomized local windows 11 boot for gaming/VR still though. Can't wait for the day I can finally get rid of it totally.
Yet using React is a red flag for an OS. You'd imagine Microsoft has the means to make it work with just JS. I doubt they use 10% of the React depency. All for a start menu...
So is using JavaScript. If I find any enduring process running on my computer running JavaScript, I mercilessly hunt it down, murder it, then uninstall it.
The only application I allow to run JS is the browser, because the modern web is almost unusable without it. No other app needs it, and there's always an alternative that doesn't.
Oh, there are better people than myself to belabor this particular point.
JS is a not-language that over-exceeded anyone's wildest expectations for popularity, and people have been playing catch up to try to turn it into a real language with things like TypeScript for years. It's not designed; it grew, like kudzu. Like poison ivy.
But the worst thing about JavaScript isn't really its fault; it's how it's been abused by web developers. The ecosystem is a toxic mess of security holes and abuse opportunities. The standard development practices resemble less real software development and more Jackson Pollock throwing paint at a canvas.
It's just awful. Everything about it is awful. Really good developers can create nice, well-structured, secure, efficient applications in JavaScript; there are 6 of those people in the entire world, and every JS developer thinks they're one of them.
I don't think you're entirely wrong here, but you make sweeping generalizations about programmers that I see a lot online that irk me.
Most developers I know have a few languages they're familiar with. A good developer uses the right tools for the job. When I work with my python shop I use that. When I need a quick webapp it'll be JS. If there's something that requires high performance I might try go.
Every language has pitfalls and vulnerabilities, but that really says nothing of their utility. Any flame war between languages is typically pedaled by dilettantes fueled by memes they don't understand (like javascript == memes)
In JS, you don't have to free memory manually. Nor in python. This (mostly) precludes a whole class of severe bugs/vulns, but those weren't relevant anyway because they're different tools for different jobs.
We can bemoan the gigantic js ecosystem, but we can also realize it is a fantastic resource for novices and veterans alike.
remember that interview with the microsoft chief imbecile that maybe somewhere somehow up to between 20 to 30 % or 10% of all of the projects is written by AI?
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/05/13/if-ai-is-so-good-at-coding-where-are-the-open-source-contributions/
i think it makes sense...shitty copilot is more likely to suggest some react snippets to the intern tasked with making the start buttom than knowing anything about WinUI or other closed source shit.
They should turn WinUI into a react wrapper like they did with powershell.... enshittify everything.
AFAIK, React is a Single-Page Web Application that refreshes everytime something changes. It's benefits are fast load times and lower overhead because it ONLY updates things that are changed on re-render, but the downsides are that it relies on other libraries for things like multiple pages, etc.
So for it to be a Windows System application, yes that's fucking attrocious. Did you ever hear how angry people were about the Warcraft 3 update that added a bunch of webapp nonsense and bricked a lot of people's old copies? Well, that's basically what Windows 11 did.
React Native can be built for, not only mobile targets, but multiple platforms, such as Windows, tvs,..., or even the web, trying to use as much native implementations as possible.
Now, should you?, that's a different discussion...
Okay, the cross platform part makes it make a little sense. They're trying to push everything over to arm (again!) and having something easy to cross compile would help..... But, you know .... The start menu is small potatoes compared to gestures at the rest of Windows ...
Small nitpicks: The point of react is that it DOESN'T refresh. It maintains a virtual DOM which is faster to update and diff than the regular browser DOM, which you hinted at. No libraries necessary to do routing, but they do make it easier and better.
This however is a React Native application which doesn't have the same (browser) backend or requirements. It's native code. There is no refresh or routing per se.
That all said, the start menu is an abomination of the highest order. It just isn't really React's fault. People just love to hate on React and . React also gets a bad rap because it's so ubiquitous and easy to start using that novices and morons alike can make atrociously slow, bloated web apps with it.
I love PowerToys Run. The Command Palette is ass compared to it. PT Run is basically KRunner from KDE, and I'm absolutely here for it. Finding things (that you have properly indexed) is so fast and easy!
I've got Wine 9, running on Linux Mint. I mostly use it for older games and a few Windows programs like IrfanView. All my modern games I bought on Steam, run great under Linux. (Steam has a native Linux client and uses it's own Windows compatability layer called Proton to run games).
I use LibreOffice for productivity, Thunderbird for email and GIMP has a native Linux client, too.
I tried using vms or wine, which wasn't a good experience. But my computer isn't really the fastest. BUT i got an solution for you. I am using an old computer as a backup with windows. It needs an average gpu like an geforce 970. Then install sunshine and moonlite and connect to it. Its a software like remote desktop, but its so fast that you can play games, which is the original intend. But you can use it for Cad or other programs aswell, Iam still impressed that this works (and its open source)
As someone who has been on Linux (openSUSE Tumbleweed) for almost 6-7 months now, I still don't understand how to get some of my programs running in Wine. I tried Bottles, and that's a little better, but it still leaves MUCH to be desired. I have two SSDs in my computer, one Windows and one Linux, and that's how I do some of my stuff. Lutris works for some things, but I generally don't like having 3-4 programs that are trying to do the same thing, but it only works on 1-2 of those programs. In my opinion, it's a little silly, but I've mainly just given up on trying to make all of that work and just boot into Windows when I need something done quickly without having to jump through hoops. I love Linux, but it is still lacking in some areas.
The best part about Linux, though, is that we can potentially fix our issues with a little bit of collaboration, whereas with Windows, you're stuck with whatever M$ wants you to have. It's something, at least! :)
For windows-only software, you can keep a copy of windows as a dual boot. Not the most ideal solution, but minimizing windows usage by any little bit decreases the chances of you getting annoyed at Windows.
Alternatively, if it's a lightweight software, you could run it in a virtual machine and use something like WinApps to blend it into Linux
At the risk of saying, "I use arch btw" - I've found CachyOS to be fairly great.
I'm running it on my Rog Zephyrus M16 purchased in late 2023 (it came with Windows 11). It's great for pretty much all games that I've thrown at it with proton, Heroic games handles Amazon Games, Epic, and GOG stuff.
You have lots of options (probably too many to be honest) for getting windows programs to run on Linux - ranging from very hands on with no-frills wine to more hand holding things like Lutris or Bottles.
My wife (who is only a techie from osmosis) switched to CachyOS on her laptop and seems to be fine with it (her game of choice is Last Epoch and it's painless to run).
I can make my CPU usage jump from next to nothing as it sits on the desktop not doing anything, to 100% usage by just shaking my mouse around like a maniac. 😤
I have heard that Classic Shell is once again functional under Windows 11, but it was critically broken and thoroughly unusable for too long for me, and I have since moved on to StartIsBack, which can do almost everything I found essential with Classic Shell.
React is a Web UI framework. React Native is the same thing but compiles to a native Windows executable (without the performance benefit of native code).
It's a javascript app that uses the react library - which is an open source library originated by Meta. It's supposed to be easier to maintain and port cross platform apps. However it is not as efficient as a native app and given the Start menu is so frequently used it's probably not a very efficient way to program it (or parts of it - I think the start menu has reactive native components rather than entirely made in it).
This is why I use Open-Shell. Ever since MS decided that the entire program list should be in a tiny little scroll window I've been giving it the middle finger.
Yes and yes. Pick anything that is large and actively under development (Mint, Fedora, Arch, etc.) or anything actively in development based on valve's stuff (Bazzite, Nobara, SteamOS** but that is currently focused on handheld devices so desktop support technically comes second place. I'm going to let the official steamOS simmer for another 6 months or so before trying it on a custom build desktop.)
Valve and AMD have freed Linux gaming by injecting cash into the FOSS ecosystem and giving it enough power to build momentum.
Nvidia's monopoly on AI, academic researchers getting budgets for it, and Microsoft's and Apple's refusal to make software that meets scientific quality, have all coalesced freeing us from proprietary drivers never getting ported to Linux.
The year of the Linux desktop is now, and is so hype inducing that Microsoft used their trillions of dollars and world class research facilities to calculate the exact date for us: October 14.
As of last week, you can. But Valve isn't officially recommending it as a general purpose OS yet.
There are some Linux distros that are very similar to steamOS that are very popular right now. I personally ditched Windows for Bazzite early this year and haven't had any regrets about it. I've been using both windows and Linux for decades and this was the first distro that made me confident enough to ditch Windows completely.
I got a few bugs here and there but only one annoying issue that I had to fix (PC wouldn't wake up from sleep properly). I'm fine with using the terminal on my day to day so I can't say for sure but I think I only ever needed to use it once, to fix that specific issue.
All games I've tried worked perfectly well, though one of them (InZoi) required installing an external tool (proton-GE). Some older stuff like World of Warcraft were easier to install on it than on windows (and wow doesn't even support it officially).
Unlike other popular distros like Mint, Bazzite works in a way that prevents programs from messing with each other or with the system itself, so you're much more unlikely to ever break it. And if you do break it, there's a quick option to go back to the last working version. The downside is that if you manage to break it even beyond that, then fixing the issue will probably be harder than it would be to fix a similar problem on Mint.
Probably not a good idea to go for SteamOS. I get the appeal, but I've since come to realize that SteamOS isn't going to work for what we want. It's designed for handhelds, so it's never going to be seamless for desktops.
Valve's work on SteamOS is open so their work is utilized by a bunch of other distros. So you can actually get the best of both worlds if you expand your options a bit. Pick a popular distro and you'll be fine
I made a post starting my Linux journey (and I probably won’t start for a while until I can get a new PC) but hopefully you can get some information out of it
Question for those who know more than me: how much is different 11 from 10, obviously excluding the desktop theme? I imagine very little but I'm curious.
It's like a modern version of the worst parts of Vista.
The UI is a clunky mess. I had to spend a week to make it about usable. Every menu is now a submenu of a new new menu, so you often have to click 3-4 times for stuff you'd have in a top-level right click menu not so long ago. Now they've been doing that for a while now, so some settings are getting quite deep at this point.
The whole thing feels unresponsive and sluggish.
Ostensibly it's to protect things like credit card information. In reality it's to make sure Microsoft has more control over your computer than you do.
I'm no programmer nor coder or such, I call myself advanced user only.
If having part of an app (I refer app as OS here, and start menu as part of an OS) to spike CPU/memory usage, does that means that part is not being used without being called? and leaves resources fully free? Sure big spike happen when the sub-part is called, but without being called?
IF part of an app is not even loaded while not used, isn't that actually good? I mean, depends how often that app part is called and have to load from the void.
I imagine that could be better than having unused part loaded all the time, wasting the resources?
Also, I totally skip part of poorly coded compared to old smooth and optimized code.
Switched to windows 10 a month or so ago just for ease of use with video games and mods. Man does windows suck ass. Wants to open random web pages, use dumb AI tools and give me useless info on every empty inch of screen space . At the end of the day it works but quality of life is low.
TBH I tried Photoshop's most recent version out a little while ago and it was ass. It's like 8 buttons and 5 of them were some kind of AI autofill bullshit.
Any good start menu will have almost the whole start menu loaded into memory and clicking the start button should do nothing more than making it visible and enabling some event handlers.
I tried spam clicking my Javascript start menu on Gnome Linux (ArcMenu):
1 click per second: 0.2% increase
5 clicks per second: 1% increase
10 clicks per second: 2% increase
Looking at the reddit thread posted in this discussion somewhere it looks like a single click is 5% on Windows.
So no. This just shows awful programming by Microsoft and it's not up to the end users to just buy better hardware.
So no. This just shows awful programming by Microsoft and it's not up to the end users to just buy better hardware
Exactly. Javascript performs just as well as any other JIT scripting language. But taking bets, they are loading the entire engine on every click event instead just keeping the engine running in the background...
Holy fucking shit this isn't just a meme, wtaf is going on at Microsoft.
The FOSS aficionados of Lemmy will probably be quick to tell me it's always been shit, but this seems like a marked increase in bad decisions in the past 5-10 years
If you go back to an older version of Windows, it becomes clear how bad Microsoft has become. Try Windows 95 and you'll be surprised how clean it is. How few distractions the OS is showing into your face. How tidy the menus are and they also give you little hints for the keyboard shortcuts
FYI, those are called menu mnemonics. 😊
Menumonics, got it
Money eunuchs, got it
My new Inuits, got it.
Boycott Intuit for taxes, got it.
Menu harmonicas
Johnny Mnemonics?
Where’s the junkie dolphins?
No, those are different, I believe.
I look forward to a glirchy vibe coded OS that uses embeded AI for everything, yet some people still manage to turn into a demented semi-functional ecosystem. Probably mostly run by seniors and computer illiterate consumers who just "want latest tech" for bragging rights.
I love it when typos create new words that fit so well.
Any other good examples? Only one that immediately came to mind was "borken", and even that usually gets used as "borked"
Borked comes from Robert Bork, who was nominated to the US Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan. He was rejected by the Senate, with many of the opinion that he and Reagan made a mistake.
Therefore Borked means fucked up.
Huh, TIL - it just works so naturally as a typo that I assumed it started there.
That's the way it started for many of the tech people that I've known (typo).
Bork also borked US agriculture as a federal judge. He's literally the reason that there has been so much consolidation because of his ruling that corporate consolidation is, by default, magically both good for customers and somehow doesn't violate anti-trust laws. To be clear, both are lies and he clearly knew that at the time of the ruling but, like all right-wing judges, loved money and imposing his right-wing values from the bench more than his constitutionally defined duties.
My mum doesn't use Microsoft because she cares about bragging rights, she uses it because it comes with Microsoft Word and all of that OneCloud sync junk, and she expects it to work so that she can do her work on it. We tried Ubuntu with her for a while, and Microsoft Word and Excel were the main pain points
This is functionally just the modern incarnation of Apple.
And every small and large organization who uses enterprise software that doesn't work on any other OS.
That OS already exists. Why do with AI vibe-coding what Microsoft already got paying shitty programmers to make a slapshod OS?
Microsoft was ahead of its time.
They'll think that it's totally normal for computers to get confused about whether it should open an app or start playing a documentary about how that app went to shit. And probably still not pay attention to the documentaries that constantly start to the point where ms just gives up on figuring out how to block them and instead just charges people for the views.
Looks like we aren't too far off from that.
I used to do V Dash contracts for MSFT.
I knew that the Xbox 360 3RR, red ring of death problem... was so bad, that it actually would have been more cost effective for MSFT to give each buyer two 360s, instead of one, at the same price, because of how mismanaged the RMA process was... I knew a whole bunch of such details a almost a decade before the documentary on it came out.
Yay NDAs.
...
I was also there during the Windows 8 rollout.
Shut down basically everything for a month, because MSFT 'dogfoods' all their software: Every MSFT worker is beta/alpha testing all MSFT software all the time.
We spent weeks just, unable to have more than 3 windows open at a time, half the tools we used on a daily basis just not working.
We asked them to let us go back to 7, asked them if therr was some way to return to a 7 like GUI.
For weeks they said nope, impossible, Win 8 is an entirely new GUI, totally new OS, the Win 7 GUI isn't there.
Oh then uh, weeks later, yeah, yeah it actually is there, you just have to follow this arcane override proceduren to see and use it.
... And then they just relented, put the non tablet UI fully back in, and called that Windows 8.1.
...
Windows is now layers upon layers upon decades of insane spaghetti code.
Even in Win 10, which was the last version I ever used... there are like 3 or 4 different eras of UI, for various settings menus, which people sometimes need to actually use... but they are considered legacy and thus not important.
Sometimes some newer era UI menus will have some of the options from some of the more buried stuff, but not all of them.
It is a gigantic fucking mess.
My favorite detail on the 3RL saga was when I took my second bricked unit to the local UPS store and they had a special bin for boxes that perfectly fit the 360 for shipping them back.
It was a mess.
After a certain point, a bunch of the 360s... they weren't even like, 'fixed'.
They just ... not sure of which exactly, this level of detail was basically rumors and contradictions from my POV...
But they were either just physically putting old hard drives in new units, that or just digitally transferring their contents over to new units...
And then they'd tell people 'yup, your unit has been refurbished'.
Like, ship of theseus not withstanding... not really fixing them, no, rofl.
And then this would lead to other problems like... ooops, we didn't correctly re register your new 360's serial number to your Live account, or we didn't deregister the old one, and now you're unjustly banned because MSFT tech support fucked up.
...
Assuming my memory is still reasonably sccurate:
Though it did vary somewhat from team to team, the internal nomenclature my team was using was... 3RR.
Like, 1RR, 2RR, 3RR, 4RR.
While all of them were quite problematic, 3RR was the one that... basically 100% of the time, no over the phone, web instructions, or even RMA ... could actually fix that one.
For the other codes, following over the phone / web instructions could actually fix it sometimes, or an RMA repair could actually fix it with a speific hardware component replacement... that or it was a problem with the actual cable connecting to the TV, or the Xbox was like, jammed in a little nook with no airflow, and dudes were chain smoking blunts in their apartment, rofl.
I have an original 360 I barely played. I don't have any games for it really, but if I were to use it again, do you have any suggestions for avoiding red rings? My understanding is airflow is paramount.
Really the airflow thing is the most important for just most non catastrophicly unfixable problems.
Give a foot to its left and right of nothing, and nothing over it, if possible... don't smoke in the same room with it, possibly plug it into a power strip/surge protector if the electrical in your living space is kind of shoddy, or your local grid is fucky wucky.
Do not immerse in water, do not have your dog pee on it, do not drop test it, etc, lol.
All that goes for the power brick as well, it also needs space to not overheat and ... well, brick itself.
If your room temp is getting higher than maybe... 80, 85, 90 degrees F? Consider either getting an AC unit ... or pointing fans at the 360 or something?
Also um:
https://battleverse.io/is-xbox-live-still-a-thing
I throw my hands up at understanding precisely what that all means.
... maybe just... don't give it internet access, at all, at this point?
Also, I am required by MSFT to inform you that, though it is possible to successfully hard mod your 360 into being able to run, and access unapproved software, this will void your warranty that is almost certainly no longer in effect, and may also lead to irreprable hardware damage and/or the revocation of your
Xbox LiveXbox Games Pass account.=D
(Yeah my actual job involved reorganizing and fixing up the spider's web of... the entire branching set of all possible questions and tech support script prompts that all the call center tech support people would run down.
There were... I think over 1000 different possible nodes you could land on, god knows how many possible distinct, branched paths.
The super fun part was when my boss and I would find ... infinite recursive loops within certain branching question/script paths, because we would be having people pick from an insufficient set of answers to a question ... because we didn't even realize some scenarios were even possible... which we did not realize because our contacts at the hardware design department told us they were impossible... even though ... in actuality, they were indeed possible, and common, and hardware did not want to admit the extent to which the fundamental design was fucked.
So, if during the 360 era, anyone ever called into MSFT support and got stuck in an infinite loop of repeating questions: I am sorry, part of that is technically my fault, but in my defense, I was there from '11 to part of '12, I didn't set up this broken system, it had existed for at least 2 years prior, and I tried my damndest to fix it in the 9 months that was me and my boss's job.)
Thanks for your perspective!
I guess at this point it's served its function. It's made its money. Most people use mobile OSs/web nowadays anyway.
Oh how I miss the beautiful simplicity of Win95/98/NT UIs. It seems as our screens have become larger, they found more shit to put on them that I don't want to see.
XP was the last good Windows.
I remember when people were saying this about Windows 95 because XP was so cursed
Everybody who did know what they were doing were using Windows 2000. That was a really, really good one.
The initial release was a bit rough but holy shit that OS was basically magic when it was dialed in. 100% my favorite.
Next to no resource usage. Reasonably secure (for its time - especially compared to other offerings) ... and all settings were right in reach.
No bullshit, no fluff. It played the os role perfectly. Run your shit and get the hell out of your way. I still believe they killed it off early to force people to switch. It was murdering the new os in performance benchmarks.
In my experience people were saying that about 98SE after ME came out. People didn’t really have many issues with XP until the internet got really popular, and by then we had some nice service packs to help with the security nightmares of ye ole internet.
7 was decent too; I personally feel like 8 is where things went off the rails.
It was a known rule that every second version of Windows was good. 95 was good, 98SE was good, XP was good, 7 was good, but sadly they never released Windows 9, so we're still waiting for the good version to come after 8.
I liked Vista and 8.1.
Vista was fucking terrible on launch, it got better towards the end it it's life, much like 8.1 was to 8, but it was still a mess when 7 came out.
No problem, we don't kinkshame here.
Prior XP they were really bad at memory management and isolation.
They were still good windowses for their time, especially when you compare them to DOS and Mac OS 9 which would have been the alternatives. For a fair comparison with professional OSes with full memory protection like UNIX you'd have to look at Windows NT, but there the preimise is true as well (as far as I can tell by googling, I only ever used 2000 Pro): 3.1 was bad, 3.5(1) good, 4.0 bad, 2000 good, 2003 meh.
8.1 was ok. Fight me.
I’m with you. 8.1 was underrated. Yes the start screen wasn’t for everyone, but I didn’t mind it. It was the last native Windows start menu that would just find the apps you wanted to run. No Cortana, no web searches, no ads.
98 for me. Was good stuff.
... or less. For some reason they think desktop PC operating systems need to look like modern websites that are 90% whitespace.
Ugh true, it's really the worst of both worlds somehow.
Boiled lobster effect at work.
If you bought a top of the line computer in 1990, it would barely have been able to run Win95. It wouldn't have been able to run Win98 at all. Conversely, even with Win11 obsoleting a lot of systems due to TPM, there are plenty of 7 or 8 year old systems that will still work with it just fine.
Win95 was a leap in complexity compared to Win3.1/DOS 6. It replaced a sloppy, manual memory management system with a sloppy, automatic memory management system. It created the registry system as we know it, and instantly got a reputation as a fast way to ruin your system.
Do you like files named "big long name.txt"? Because sometimes that will come out as "biglon~1.txt" or something like that. It was still using the same shitty FAT system, now with 32-bit extensions that technically allowed long file names, but had to shorten them for compatibility with older stuff.
Win98 added Active Desktop, which made your desktop part of IE. This meant that every time IE crashed, your whole desktop went with it. Didn't necessarily need to reboot to fix it, but it cleared out your background and a toolbar thing. In a way, it was an attempt to do what Electron apps do now, except with Microsoft proprietary web stuff.
Oh, and once it got USB support, it sucked ass. It had to reinstall drivers if you plugged your keyboard into a different USB port than you usually did.
Neither Win98 or ME would fix its memory management issues. That had to wait for Microsoft to get off their ass and release a home version of NT with WinXP (sorta Win2k, but that's complicated). This memory management issue was the root cause of most BSODs at the time.
People hated Windows at the time for exactly the same fundamental reason they hate it today: it's a clunky piece of shit. Win 7/8/10 was actually an attempt to simplify things in many ways, but Microsoft has fallen back to what they did before.
Thank you for the blast of sanity. Older versions of windows were pretty shit, and the newer versions offer tons of improvements right next to the fresh horrors they bring along.
And the consistent ui.
There did not yet exist channels of psyop slop that could pay MS to give them access to their users at their most vulnerable or it would have been in Vista.
psyslop was right there
Come on, Vista was a genuinely good system. Everyone ran it on 256 Mb of RAM or some shit. If you had a high end system, it was truly some awesome shit for the time
I'm saying that M$ was always just as bad as the times demanded/allowed.
It was fine after the initial fuckup.
After watching Brutalmoose use a native Windows 98 machine to play old 98 games for like 20 hours, I long for the simpler times of Wandows…
A new coat of paint and a spotlight style search and that’s a mighty fine OS.
Though it does need a lot of work for security, they really underestimated the internet on that one.
The original design philosophy of the PC was as a plug-in-play device. Everything was designed to be friendly to new software, new hardware, and new integrations. The whole point was to give you a device that was a programmatic multi-tool.
The advent of computers as a financial vehicle radically changed that design philosophy. Once you could extract money from a computer owner, the open and extremely mutable hardware/software became a massive financial liability.
Imagine getting handed a wad of playdough, having all sorts of fun with it, finding all sorts of useful household applications for it, and filling it into every crevass in your house. Then imagine someone showing up and saying "We're going to use the thumb print you leave on the playdough to verify all your future payments and assignment of future debts." Suddenly, a burglar can walk off with your entire bank account if they can scrap a bit of thumbed playdough out of a corner of your house. And - oh, whoops - all your door locks and window jams are full of playdough, too, because it was so damned useful for customized security.
This is why my house is dumb.
I’ve got some ikea remote lights that does not run on wifi, and a pin coded garage door button, and that’s it.
A lot of tech is a vulnerability surface.
Damn that's a good analogy. Just needs a bit about how they're changing the formula of the playdoh so that it's no longer useful for half the shit you're relying on it for.
ReactOS really is our future, then, visually speaking. And here I thought we'd have to explain it away, but we can pitch it as clean and calm.
Oh man, thank you for this nostalgia trip your image sent me on!
I have a very feeble 25-year-old computer running Windows 2000 on a low-wattage CPU for embedded systems, and it feels far more responsive than Windows 11 on my desktop with an AMD 5950x. And I dual-boot Linux, which also feels much faster than Windows 11.
Business majors.
Same as everywhere else, management wants random shit done chop chop chop, fires actual developers who tell them they're the dumbest pieces of shit they've seen in this lifetime and hire random bros who say "whatever dude, just wanna get paid" then copy-paste google results because bing sucks.
Middle manglement is the source of nearly all bad decisions once companies get large enough to have it. Upper management is often dog shit, but they usually have an idea of what they want done. Whether that's. Net positive for consumers is a different story, but they don't intend for it to be implemented poorly.
Middle manglement then takes that, fucks it up putting each of their little stamps on it as it hits every rung on the ladder as it works it's way down to the people that have to implement it.
I was expecting it t9 at least be a XAML C# app
Everything is done by vibe coders under the direction of project managers who're just trying to get their name on shit. No one actually cares about the quality of the end product.
Is Growth Mindset. Don’t you have Growth Mindset?
~2018 to ~2022 was nice, things started to get a little better. But now it's trash.
The reality is it's not bad as an end user at all unless you're on 10 year old hardware. The number of support requests my team received for slow start menu issues was zero while providing hundreds of windows machines.
This is a made up issue to get engagement from CS students who like to say actually a lot. I mean you actually have a person bitching about JavaScript in the browser. Let it fucking go already lol.
Oh, but it absolutely is true. Microsoft really did decide to use React Native for parts of the Windows 11 Start menu. They're also using it in sections of the Settings app.
The technical reality is even more absurd than the meme suggests. Microsoft is currently maintaining eight different UI frameworks for Windows, including their own .NET MAUI and WinUI 3 that were specifically built for their OS. Yet somehow they thought, "You know what this native operating system needs? A JavaScript framework originally designed for mobile apps."
The CPU usage spikes aren't necessarily from React Native itself being particularly heavyweight, but rather from the fundamental architectural choice of running a web-based rendering engine for core system UI elements. Every time you click Start, you're essentially launching a mini web application just to display a menu.
What's particularly galling is that Microsoft has acknowledged WinUI's performance issues for years, to the point where they recommend their partners use the older WPF for performance-critical applications. So instead of fixing their native framework, they decided to add another layer of abstraction.
This is what happens when corporate development teams prioritize "developer experience" and trendy frameworks over system efficiency. Richard Stallman's expression in that image perfectly captures the appropriate level of technical horror at this decision.
The old world built operating systems. The new world builds web apps that pretend to be operating systems.
Not to mention, windows 11's hardware requirements creating needles e-waste
So, what I'm hearing you say is that MS should jam Copilot into every single app and every corner of the OS, to turn ordinary actions into LLM-driven ones? Because that's what the users and the planet are clamouring for.
🌈 sarcasm🌈
React Native doesn't render using a browser instance, it's native code (as the name implies), it's actually a layer over WinUI 3 (Previous versions used WPF/UWP)
So it's in the same boat as MAUI, which is also a layer over WinUI 3.
They didn't say it was?
I suppose i lack an understanding of whether React Native is a web based rendering engine or not but i figured they could also be referring to edge implementation in the same feature.
Like saying coffee isn't hot because of the mug it's in but the brewing machine it came out of.
Oh, the pedants have arrived. How delightful.
Yes, technically The_Decryptor is correct - React Native doesn't literally spin up a Chromium instance like Electron does. It transpiles JavaScript into native calls. But they're completely missing the forest for the trees here.
The fundamental architectural absurdity remains unchanged: Microsoft is using a JavaScript framework - originally designed for mobile apps - to render core operating system UI elements. Whether that JavaScript gets compiled to native calls or interpreted in a browser engine is irrelevant to the core criticism.
Your coffee analogy is actually closer to the mark than The_Decryptor realizes. The performance issues aren't just about the final native calls - they're about the entire abstraction stack Microsoft has built.
You've got JavaScript -> React Native bridge -> WinUI 3 -> whatever underlying Windows API calls. Each layer adds overhead, complexity, and potential failure points. The_Decryptor saying "it's in the same boat as MAUI" isn't the defense they think it is - MAUI has its own performance issues precisely because of similar abstraction layers.
This is exactly the kind of technical bike-shedding that lets corporations get away with architectural disasters. Everyone argues about implementation details while the Start menu still stutters when you click it.
The old world would have written the Start menu in C++ and called it a day. The new world creates dependency graphs that look like spider webs and then argues about whether the spider web is technically made of silk or polyester.
Heel yeah now that's the clarification I'm here for! (Actually honest, cheers and thanks!)
Can't they extract more data from a mobile set-up? I'm assuming that's why they did it, they're trying to take it to a phone experience for the corporations.
Nope.
The reason you do react native is because it's easier to hire react native devs. Further, there's a plethora of react native libraries that make it easier to make UXes above other UX frameworks.
The problem MS has is they have spent decades making platform locked UX frameworks because they were deathly afraid someone would use Linux instead of Windows.
Browser tech won because every major platform needs a browser and basically no organization was investing in multiplatform UX libraries. The likes of both Microsoft and Apple are openly hostile to such frameworks (QT and GTK come to mind).
Funny thing, the OneDrive client app that ships with Windows, uses Qt
I have a Windows laptop for the first time in well over a decade for a project I am working on. Even though it is overpowered (i7, 64gb ram), and it is currently "idle", the cooling fans are working overtime because the damn OS is always busy doing some random shit when "idle". This is AFTER I ran a debloat script. It was near impossible to use before then.
EDIT: I found the cause of the fanning issue and different behavior between Win 11 and Linux (Pop!_OS). Even though the laptop comes with an Nvidia RTX 4000 series GPU, Windows 11 set the global default GPU to be the integrated graphics (Intel UHD). The same laptop under Pop!_OS automatically set the default GPU to Nvidia. As soon as I dug this up and switched the settings to Nvidia, the laptop stopped fanning full speed nonstop.
I'll just reiterate that this is a work computer provided by a client. They lend them out to contractors like myself. Since they don't know what the work will require, they order them with max specs. It'd be a monster if I could slap linux on it, but with Win 11 it is just meh at best.
kind of apples to oranges, but the bit about contractors and employees being assigned computers that dont match the needs of the job hit me.
a friend of mine is a video game developer, works for one of the Microsoft studios, He's a Narrative Director, and no that isnt writing. to my understanding his job is mostly revolving around setting up sequences of events so that characters, special effects, music, etc all plays in the correct sequence and functions properly, its kind of like editing, but instead of a timeline, its a 3d world.
It does need a graphics card and a fair amount of ram, but the computer they gave to him, since he works from home as a remote employee in Canada, is a complete beast. its about 3x more than what is needed for the job.
It was actually kind of comical listening to him complain about a game he wanted to play, not working very well on his personal PC, and he had a monster system in his possession, that couldnt be used to play games.
I’d boot that fucker from a usb drive and have my own shit on that. Or I’d borrow the video card every evening.
I know they lock them down pretty good, but not so good that they could stop me gaming on it in some way.
Nahhhh. If they're willing to let you work remote and also give you over specced stuff instead of underspecced that sounds like a good gig. Don't ruin it.
From where have you downloaded the script? Was it trustworthy?
This time around I used the Chris Titus Tech one, but there are a few other open source and reputable scripts out there.
Probably the raphire power shell script. Works pretty well, and is widely used as far as I know
Unticking "alow this drive and its contents to be indexed" and terminating the indexing service helps.
And might as well, not like the fucking search works anyway, even with web search disabled. At least on W10.
Everything by VoidTools is a million times better than the Windows search, it indexes every file and then actually finds it right away when you search for it.
Have enterprise win 11 now and it isnt as bad as that. Its stupid, but not evil.
I don't get why people exaggerate this much. I have a laptop with a 7840hs and 32gb of ram so it's also "overpowered" but it's whisper quiet and consumes 30-45w while doing simple tasks. Consumption only increases if I'm running code, playing games, etc which makes total sense.
Windows is not a well optimized os and the telemetry sucks but you're just flat out lying with your claims. It's either that or your laptop has the worst possible cooling.
I have a laptop that I dual boot Windows 11 and Ubuntu on.
If I leave the Windows desktop idle for >20 minutes the fans will almost always randomly flare up even though I'm doing nothing. On Ubuntu, the desktop usually stays silent, or sometimes the fans come on a little (probably due to bloated browser apps) but never flare up the way it does on Windows.
Again, the most common problem in those cases are crappy drivers/fan curves. I have a laptop with W11 on it and fix/maintain laptops for friends as well and this is not an issue with any of them. The only time I had this problem was with a specific laptop.
Honestly, of all of the things you could criticize about windows (and there are lots), this is the one thing that is simply not an inherent OS problem.
I should test this. I normally set an aggressive fan curve so the CPU doesn't overheat, and because I game on my laptop I use the custom fan profile instead of the default quiet one. I should try using a different fan profile when not gaming.
No exaggeration. I could literally record video at any time to show how it is fanning like crazy. If it is on, it is fanning like a jet plane.
EDIT: Problem found. Win 11 defaulted to integrated graphics even though the laptop has an Nvidia GPU. The same laptop with a Linux (Pop!_OS) install defaulted to the Nvidia GPU. That's just dumb.
Exactly this. I used to have an HP Omen 15 laptop with a 10th gen H variant i7 cpu that would constantly make a noticeable fan noise and would ramp up and down for no reason but the problem was the laptop. Everyone complained about it. The current one is an Omen 16 and it doesn't have that problem at all. Even when gaming.
Seriously? Got a link for that? (Not in a “I don’t believe you” way, but more of an “I’m curious to learn more” way)
Somehow this is hard to google, so sorry for linking to reddit, but here's a thread where people are discussing it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/1ctuz4w/the_recommended_section_in_start_menu_is_actually/
(edit: looks like someone found a better source elsewhere in the comments)
LOL
Can add farside.link/ before reddit, YT, etc. links, for mirrors!
https://farside.link/https://reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/1ctuz4w/the_recommended_section_in_start_menu_is_actually/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMJNEFHj8b8&t=276
The start menu section starts @ 4:36
I want to see how that works too!
This was my first thought. Maybe I'm way off the mark (I stopped using Windows in 2012) but I always thought the only thing it has going for itself is their toolkit. Not because it's pretty but because everyone writes applications for the same toolkit.
Why even building .NET, when they are rewriting typescript in go. It's Microsoft, often shoots itself in the other foot 🤪
Windows is not making much money, and they are reducing costs. Frontend devs are cheaper than dot net.
Fuck JavaScript in all its forms.
Ok, in a browser is fine. But HARD pass on electron and all this bullshit
JavaScript was never fit for purpose even in a browser. We could've had Python or Scheme in the browser instead, but nooooo, Brandon Eich had to be fucking incompetent.
How about Lua? I don't like Python that much.
I wasn't idly speculating about languages that I personally happen to like better; I was listing the two languages that Netscape was actively considering at the time before they decided to glom on to the Java hype. When I say "we could've had Python or Scheme," I mean Netscape almost picked Python or Scheme.
If it makes you feel any better, I get the impression that Scheme would've been the more likely of the two. Also, this was happening in 1995, so Lua was less than two years old at the time and, according to this page, not internationally known yet (that would happen in 1996).
But we can do it now ^^
Gonna be real, Lua would have been perfect for this. I get what you're saying about netscape though,
There was an older alternative with PS and Tcl from Sun. I don't know if I would like that more.
What are you talking about, giving one of the only programming languages where binary sizes matters a tiny standard library is a great idea!
Good news: there's been talk to having python be part of the DOM.
I believe chromium has been working on it but no real thought on when this will happen.
Recently something has changed and the start menu likes to search for apps in its browser (not my default app). I used to press windows key then type "snip" for the screenshot tool, now half of the time is does the wrong thing ...
Also here's a link to post talking about react in the start menu https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30384494
Yeah. It's quite obnoxious how bad they've made their OS and it's obvious they are FARMING searches on bing with these tactics lmao
glad I am not the only one. I even disabled the Bing and Websearch bullshit, but somehow in 1 of 5 cases the search result is not the software I am looking for. Even when I type exactly its name.
It's why I'm gonna change to Linux permanently come the end of Win10.
Do it now. It's great!
I've been seriously considering switching to Mint or Ubuntu since they're user friendly. The more I hear about win 11 the less and less I want anything to do with it. also, my pc isn't compatible so there's that 😂
I gave up on windows 11 last week after my downloads folder decided to stop opening any more. Every other folder worked fine, and I could use a save dialogue to see and navigate inside downloads, but if I opened the folder run file explorer I was met woth a never ending "working on it.." Screen. Hours of trawling useless Microsoft posts to see its a common issue but none of the suggested fixes worked.
I installed Pop! OS, which is essentially Ubuntu but Ive heard works very well with games. Few small hiccoughs getting used to the UI paradigm shift but its motoring along now with no problems. My 5 year old desktop is running much smoother with less overall resource use too. Feels snappier.
The smoother part sounds very appealing. I will look into this distro. Thanks.
Let me know what you think of it! I had some minor issues with my secondary hard drive, but they were entirely my fault, I had a lot of backups on it so didn't initially reformat it from NTFS which I was using for windows to ext4 which is a native Linux format. It would sometimes not mount the drive on boot, but after transferring the backups to an external drive and reformatting the internal drive it was all good.
That's the reason I swapped.
So far it's been a good switch
Download the Mint live CD and give it a shot!
That is a great idea. And since my desktop is old as a dinosaur it still has a cd burner. So I'll take it as a win LOL
The easiest distro I have used so far it's Endeavour-Os (for my desktop). All my homelab uses debian except the mandatory W11 VM and a WS for veeam.
Endeavour-Os sounds appealing. I like easy!
Same same, I just hope I can replace my dying PC before switching
I just did that, using Fedora KDE now, works great
The only realistic answer to the win11 situation. I chose bazzite because I like to game. It's a dream, I never looked back.
I mean there's also 0patch.
I'm already rocking Manjaro, put my old windows boot drive in a box in case I need it for whatever reason.
Mint + a game-box user myself :-)
Sometimes there is an old soft inly working on windows, but they are getting more and more rare as they no monger work on windows... Fantastic.
Why wait? Switch now and get used to it.
I switched last August.
Say what you will but I'm kind of addicted to the PC Gamepass. I have to get through a backlog before I give it up.
That's how they get you.
And it's a terrible app, at that. No organization, just either some random application links, or one giant list with no categories or organization past alphabetical.
New CPU benchmark: 100 start menu clicks per second.
Going to need some LN2 for that!
Don't they have like 9 graphics libraries and frameworks accross 4 languages already?
It's actually at least 13.
I remember people arguing that Linux having two main toolkits were holding it back back in 2000-2010 but then Microsoft invents a few billion UIs just for itself. Even the one big megacorp can't be bothered to keep things consistent.
They need to scrap all this shit and take a massive step back and start over. Absolute bollocks.
reminds me of this story: “Temporary” disk formatting UI from 1994 still lives on in Windows 11 - Ars Technica
Ironically, this is the result of various people at Microsoft at various times declaring "we need to scrap all this shit and start over"
There's some logic behind each, but each time assumes they don't have to do anything to port forward the previous approach to new UX standards as those will just die out. If it was roughly 13 screenshots of different developer experience, but consistent looking and behaving UI for the actual user, everyone could just shrug, maybe developers getting a bit grumpy about Microsoft's inconsistency.
What MS needs is a new unifying framework and then they can change everything to that new standard. Call it Framework 927.
I'm foreseeing a spike in people asking me for help installing Linux.
He you there, totally random person. How do I install Linux?
Any experience with blood sacrifices?
Did the Linux gods see what the hardware gods had going on and decide to get in on the action?
Full guide here for Linux Mint. But the tl;dr is:
Download iso
Create bootable USB drive
Boot to that USB drive
Press next a bunch in the Mint installer
I’ve been experimenting with Linux for a year now running a home server. It’s not that hard, the other person’s comment is exactly what I did.
I used Ubuntu at first but when I fried it I figured I’d try Mint on my re-install. It’s been on Mint for about 4 weeks now.
My thoughts as a still relative newbie:
On both Ubuntu and Mint, user/group permissions are confusing to me even using the GNOME tools app. I wish I there was a better UI to set it up.
My issues are mostly to do with external drives. First of all, it’s weird that I even have to specify a mount point if I don’t want to have to memorize my drive’s device ID, but I figured that out.
Then in Ubuntu I’d reboot and my server software would lose access to the drives. If I unplugged them before rebooting and let it boot then plugged them in the server software could read but not write. So I’d have to do a sudo chmod 777 -R /external drives/ after rebooting too.
I’m having the same issue with reboots in Mint if I don’t unplug them, but if I do it now remembers the permissions now so I don’t have to do the terminal command. This may have nothing to do with the OS. Maybe I messed something up the first time. 🤷♂️ Point is: I’m not having fun dealing with external drives.
Ubuntu didn’t come with GNOME tools but Mint did. (It’s basically a set of apps for all your system settings. Command line is so annoying for this stuff.)
Aesthetically, Ubuntu reminds me of Mac OS while Mint reminds of Windows. Apparently they’re the same-ish under the hood.
I’m a Mac user and I’m not ready to switch my daily driver to Linux yet, but I’m sure I will one day.
FWIW, the permissions thing is generally fixable with fstab entries or editing mount options instead of always doing chmod. The uid/gid and umask/fmask mount options are what you're looking for. I think mint has a UI method to modify mount options for it's auto mounter, but I've not used it in a while so I can't be super specific. I'd recommend fstab for anything that's always connected and the other way for things you plug/ unplug
Thx! That's insightful! I'll go for dual boot tho.
It’s a good call. I still haven’t tried it on my main hardware, but I have an old SDD I plan to use for that sometime soon.
The laptop I’m running my server on is old, so I don’t really see a point in testing the games I usually play on it. I did try a couple low-resource games: OpenRA and 0AD; they’re fine. Steam works and Dawn of War booted up, but I haven’t done much else in that area.
I haven’t touched video or audio editing at all for the same reasons. Especially with it running server stuff in the background.
Email, web browsing, all you basic stuff works just fine. No complaints.
Well first and foremost find yourself a distro you like, I'd suggest something Debian based if your just starting out but no judgement if you want to so to speak jump in the deep end. After that you'll grab a .iso file from wherever said distro keeps such things and you'll need to learn how to 'burn' that to either a USB drive or a regular disc if you want to do it old school. Then you'll need to learn how to get to either the boot menu or BIOS on your computer in order to get it to start from the new OS you've just plugged in. After that the install menu on the new distro should walk you through the rest. Don't worry, I know it sounds foreboding but I first did it as a kid, it's easier than it looks.
Switched to Linux at the beginning of the year. Still have a lobotomized local windows 11 boot for gaming/VR still though. Can't wait for the day I can finally get rid of it totally.
I'm rocking an LTSC 10 until 2027.
Depending on what games you’re running you might already be able to. https://lvra.gitlab.io/ https://areweanticheatyet.com/ https://www.protondb.com/
The latest Proton update finally fixed VR on linux for me. It's working like a dream now with my index.
This explains so much
For what it’s worth, GNOME Shell and its extensions are written in JavaScript too.
Yet using React is a red flag for an OS. You'd imagine Microsoft has the means to make it work with just JS. I doubt they use 10% of the React depency. All for a start menu...
So is using JavaScript. If I find any enduring process running on my computer running JavaScript, I mercilessly hunt it down, murder it, then uninstall it.
The only application I allow to run JS is the browser, because the modern web is almost unusable without it. No other app needs it, and there's always an alternative that doesn't.
Did javascript kill your family?
Worse sob It killed the web
Ooh, could you elaborate on that if possible? I have some vague ideas why JS is a scourge on the web but I've never looked into the specifics.
Do most of the issues stem from the language itself (which is held by effectively duct tape) or do they stem from how it is used?
Oh, there are better people than myself to belabor this particular point.
JS is a not-language that over-exceeded anyone's wildest expectations for popularity, and people have been playing catch up to try to turn it into a real language with things like TypeScript for years. It's not designed; it grew, like kudzu. Like poison ivy.
But the worst thing about JavaScript isn't really its fault; it's how it's been abused by web developers. The ecosystem is a toxic mess of security holes and abuse opportunities. The standard development practices resemble less real software development and more Jackson Pollock throwing paint at a canvas.
It's just awful. Everything about it is awful. Really good developers can create nice, well-structured, secure, efficient applications in JavaScript; there are 6 of those people in the entire world, and every JS developer thinks they're one of them.
I don't think you're entirely wrong here, but you make sweeping generalizations about programmers that I see a lot online that irk me.
Most developers I know have a few languages they're familiar with. A good developer uses the right tools for the job. When I work with my python shop I use that. When I need a quick webapp it'll be JS. If there's something that requires high performance I might try go.
Every language has pitfalls and vulnerabilities, but that really says nothing of their utility. Any flame war between languages is typically pedaled by dilettantes fueled by memes they don't understand (like javascript == memes)
take this admittedly ancient study of vulnerabilities divvied up by language:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/which-are-the-most-insecure-programming-languages/
In JS, you don't have to free memory manually. Nor in python. This (mostly) precludes a whole class of severe bugs/vulns, but those weren't relevant anyway because they're different tools for different jobs.
We can bemoan the gigantic js ecosystem, but we can also realize it is a fantastic resource for novices and veterans alike.
remember that interview with the microsoft chief imbecile that maybe somewhere somehow up to between 20 to 30 % or 10% of all of the projects is written by AI? https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/05/13/if-ai-is-so-good-at-coding-where-are-the-open-source-contributions/ i think it makes sense...shitty copilot is more likely to suggest some react snippets to the intern tasked with making the start buttom than knowing anything about WinUI or other closed source shit. They should turn WinUI into a react wrapper like they did with powershell.... enshittify everything.
Is it really? Does microsoft have no faith in its own user32 UI API?
Yeah, windows apps, even official ones are just a mix of react native apps.
https://microsoft.github.io/react-native-windows/
I used to be with it! (XAML) Then they changed what it is! (WinUI)
WinUI is yet another thing, it's not React native. It's kind of a new version of WPF with additional things and you can still use XAML
When I tried to use it it seemed like WPF but worse (except for the modern theming, but that I can get in WPF via the 3rd party ”WPF UI”).
AFAIK, React is a Single-Page Web Application that refreshes everytime something changes. It's benefits are fast load times and lower overhead because it ONLY updates things that are changed on re-render, but the downsides are that it relies on other libraries for things like multiple pages, etc.
So for it to be a Windows System application, yes that's fucking attrocious. Did you ever hear how angry people were about the Warcraft 3 update that added a bunch of webapp nonsense and bricked a lot of people's old copies? Well, that's basically what Windows 11 did.
I'm confused though. The op says "react native", but AFAIK, react native is a mobile app framework.
Does it work/deploy on desktop now?
React Native can be built for, not only mobile targets, but multiple platforms, such as Windows, tvs,..., or even the web, trying to use as much native implementations as possible. Now, should you?, that's a different discussion...
Okay, the cross platform part makes it make a little sense. They're trying to push everything over to arm (again!) and having something easy to cross compile would help..... But, you know .... The start menu is small potatoes compared to gestures at the rest of Windows ...
Yes, there's support for compiling React Native to UWP apps for Windows. No, I don't know why anyone thought that was a good idea.
Small nitpicks: The point of react is that it DOESN'T refresh. It maintains a virtual DOM which is faster to update and diff than the regular browser DOM, which you hinted at. No libraries necessary to do routing, but they do make it easier and better.
This however is a React Native application which doesn't have the same (browser) backend or requirements. It's native code. There is no refresh or routing per se.
That all said, the start menu is an abomination of the highest order. It just isn't really React's fault. People just love to hate on React and . React also gets a bad rap because it's so ubiquitous and easy to start using that novices and morons alike can make atrociously slow, bloated web apps with it.
Oh man that explains so many pains in the ass at work
Right?
Doesn't explain why the fucking lock screen does the same thing though and needs a Ctrl+alt+del just to free up resources
WHY WOULD IT EVER
WHYWHYWHYWHYWHYWHYWHYWHYWHYWHYWHYWHYWHYWHYWHY
This is hilariously bad. I think it might be time to bring back some of the old "launcher" utils for Windows like Slickrun or Launchy.
I love Launchy, never stopped using it.
They have power toys run now which is pretty nice and fast
I love PowerToys Run. The Command Palette is ass compared to it. PT Run is basically KRunner from KDE, and I'm absolutely here for it. Finding things (that you have properly indexed) is so fast and easy!
lmao gottem
Remember when discord changed its android app to use react native?
They fixed most of it by now but god it was terrible back then
Jesus I really need to install linux don’t I?
Is there a distribution that is better at running conversion layers like Wine? I need to run some windows only software (Solidworks, Affinity Suite…)
I've got Wine 9, running on Linux Mint. I mostly use it for older games and a few Windows programs like IrfanView. All my modern games I bought on Steam, run great under Linux. (Steam has a native Linux client and uses it's own Windows compatability layer called Proton to run games).
I use LibreOffice for productivity, Thunderbird for email and GIMP has a native Linux client, too.
I tried using vms or wine, which wasn't a good experience. But my computer isn't really the fastest. BUT i got an solution for you. I am using an old computer as a backup with windows. It needs an average gpu like an geforce 970. Then install sunshine and moonlite and connect to it. Its a software like remote desktop, but its so fast that you can play games, which is the original intend. But you can use it for Cad or other programs aswell, Iam still impressed that this works (and its open source)
I'm saving this comment because our engineering department has been complaining about rdp being too slow for CAD.
As someone who has been on Linux (openSUSE Tumbleweed) for almost 6-7 months now, I still don't understand how to get some of my programs running in Wine. I tried Bottles, and that's a little better, but it still leaves MUCH to be desired. I have two SSDs in my computer, one Windows and one Linux, and that's how I do some of my stuff. Lutris works for some things, but I generally don't like having 3-4 programs that are trying to do the same thing, but it only works on 1-2 of those programs. In my opinion, it's a little silly, but I've mainly just given up on trying to make all of that work and just boot into Windows when I need something done quickly without having to jump through hoops. I love Linux, but it is still lacking in some areas.
The best part about Linux, though, is that we can potentially fix our issues with a little bit of collaboration, whereas with Windows, you're stuck with whatever M$ wants you to have. It's something, at least! :)
For windows-only software, you can keep a copy of windows as a dual boot. Not the most ideal solution, but minimizing windows usage by any little bit decreases the chances of you getting annoyed at Windows.
Alternatively, if it's a lightweight software, you could run it in a virtual machine and use something like WinApps to blend it into Linux
At the risk of saying, "I use arch btw" - I've found CachyOS to be fairly great.
I'm running it on my Rog Zephyrus M16 purchased in late 2023 (it came with Windows 11). It's great for pretty much all games that I've thrown at it with proton, Heroic games handles Amazon Games, Epic, and GOG stuff.
You have lots of options (probably too many to be honest) for getting windows programs to run on Linux - ranging from very hands on with no-frills wine to more hand holding things like Lutris or Bottles.
My wife (who is only a techie from osmosis) switched to CachyOS on her laptop and seems to be fine with it (her game of choice is Last Epoch and it's painless to run).
All of that is not Cachy OS specific, you can use any major distro
Oh, that's very true. I've used most on Ubuntu in the past as well.
To me, CachyOS shockingly seems really stable and "fast" in a subjective way.
Nah, it's all the same. You can try using Bottles or Lutris to make things a bit more convenient.
I can make my CPU usage jump from next to nothing as it sits on the desktop not doing anything, to 100% usage by just shaking my mouse around like a maniac. 😤
I have heard that Classic Shell is once again functional under Windows 11, but it was critically broken and thoroughly unusable for too long for me, and I have since moved on to StartIsBack, which can do almost everything I found essential with Classic Shell.
long time startisback user, even paid for it.
Yup, it's great!
Can someone explain what "react native" is?
React is a Web UI framework. React Native is the same thing but compiles to a native Windows executable (without the performance benefit of native code).
Now can you explain what a Web UI framework is?
Tool to create user interface for websites.
It's a javascript app that uses the react library - which is an open source library originated by Meta. It's supposed to be easier to maintain and port cross platform apps. However it is not as efficient as a native app and given the Start menu is so frequently used it's probably not a very efficient way to program it (or parts of it - I think the start menu has reactive native components rather than entirely made in it).
So, WTF would Microsoft make a core Windows component with Meta libraries? I remember when Microsoft would only use Microsoft libraries.
FrontEnd™ Enterprise® Pro .NET 2000© Hybrid Native Cloud Edition
It's an old joke, but it still checks out.
Edit: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k
All the Windows fuckery aside, what's going on with Stallman in this picture? 🥺
Out of toenails
Oh god, what did I miss on this one... 😬
He bites his toenails )and walks around barefoot(.
Oh god, yeah, why does that ring a bell. Why that is common knowledge, I do not know.
There is a video of him doing it.
I wouldn't recommend watching it, but here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ
Yo you weren't kidding.
Love your username, by the way. 👌✨
Thanks!
it needs to check your license and onedrive files for DRM compliance. every click
You'll have to pry my Windows 10 launcher from my cold dead hands.
people have been saying stuff like this since Windows XP came out
This is why I use Open-Shell. Ever since MS decided that the entire program list should be in a tiny little scroll window I've been giving it the middle finger.
To think what lengths we went to keep the Win7 launcher
Everything since 7 has been a downgrade.
Windows 8 was a vast aesthetic improvement over Windows 7.^\s^
Every Facebook product is cancer including react
Can I replace Windows with SteamOS directly yet? -Basic Win11 user who is getting sick of Win11. Get off my WinXpLawn
You can definitely replace it with Linux Mint, I did it 8 months ago and it was seamless, save for a little bit of fussing with my GPU driver.
You don't need SteamOS, or Bazzite.
Just get a desktop focused distro that looks interesting and install Steam.
Yes and yes. Pick anything that is large and actively under development (Mint, Fedora, Arch, etc.) or anything actively in development based on valve's stuff (Bazzite, Nobara, SteamOS** but that is currently focused on handheld devices so desktop support technically comes second place. I'm going to let the official steamOS simmer for another 6 months or so before trying it on a custom build desktop.)
Valve and AMD have freed Linux gaming by injecting cash into the FOSS ecosystem and giving it enough power to build momentum. Nvidia's monopoly on AI, academic researchers getting budgets for it, and Microsoft's and Apple's refusal to make software that meets scientific quality, have all coalesced freeing us from proprietary drivers never getting ported to Linux.
The year of the Linux desktop is now, and is so hype inducing that Microsoft used their trillions of dollars and world class research facilities to calculate the exact date for us: October 14.
As of last week, you can. But Valve isn't officially recommending it as a general purpose OS yet.
There are some Linux distros that are very similar to steamOS that are very popular right now. I personally ditched Windows for Bazzite early this year and haven't had any regrets about it. I've been using both windows and Linux for decades and this was the first distro that made me confident enough to ditch Windows completely.
I got a few bugs here and there but only one annoying issue that I had to fix (PC wouldn't wake up from sleep properly). I'm fine with using the terminal on my day to day so I can't say for sure but I think I only ever needed to use it once, to fix that specific issue.
All games I've tried worked perfectly well, though one of them (InZoi) required installing an external tool (proton-GE). Some older stuff like World of Warcraft were easier to install on it than on windows (and wow doesn't even support it officially).
Unlike other popular distros like Mint, Bazzite works in a way that prevents programs from messing with each other or with the system itself, so you're much more unlikely to ever break it. And if you do break it, there's a quick option to go back to the last working version. The downside is that if you manage to break it even beyond that, then fixing the issue will probably be harder than it would be to fix a similar problem on Mint.
My Windows PC doesn't wake up from sleep properly anyway. lol
Probably not a good idea to go for SteamOS. I get the appeal, but I've since come to realize that SteamOS isn't going to work for what we want. It's designed for handhelds, so it's never going to be seamless for desktops.
Valve's work on SteamOS is open so their work is utilized by a bunch of other distros. So you can actually get the best of both worlds if you expand your options a bit. Pick a popular distro and you'll be fine
I made a post starting my Linux journey (and I probably won’t start for a while until I can get a new PC) but hopefully you can get some information out of it
If you have AMD hardware, maybe. If not, definitely will be troubles.
I had to test it. That is wild.
there is massive financial incentives for these companies to write shit code because it makes people have to get newer computers
Clean code is more expensive than shit. That adds to the problem.
At least my wallpaper transitions will stay smooth.
If its react native it shouldn't slow down. It still does tho, mst be the 30% vibe code.
Question for those who know more than me: how much is different 11 from 10, obviously excluding the desktop theme? I imagine very little but I'm curious.
It's like a modern version of the worst parts of Vista.
The UI is a clunky mess. I had to spend a week to make it about usable. Every menu is now a submenu of a new new menu, so you often have to click 3-4 times for stuff you'd have in a top-level right click menu not so long ago. Now they've been doing that for a while now, so some settings are getting quite deep at this point. The whole thing feels unresponsive and sluggish.
The main difference is that it requires TPM 2.0, which allows applications to run in a fully encrypted mode and prevent user tampering.
Oh no! Not the user tampering! 😱
Ostensibly it's to protect things like credit card information. In reality it's to make sure Microsoft has more control over your computer than you do.
I mean, for most users there's not much meaningful difference between OS's other than the UI, especially when comparing iterations of the same OS
I'm no programmer nor coder or such, I call myself advanced user only.
If having part of an app (I refer app as OS here, and start menu as part of an OS) to spike CPU/memory usage, does that means that part is not being used without being called? and leaves resources fully free? Sure big spike happen when the sub-part is called, but without being called?
IF part of an app is not even loaded while not used, isn't that actually good? I mean, depends how often that app part is called and have to load from the void.
I imagine that could be better than having unused part loaded all the time, wasting the resources?
Also, I totally skip part of poorly coded compared to old smooth and optimized code.
Switched to windows 10 a month or so ago just for ease of use with video games and mods. Man does windows suck ass. Wants to open random web pages, use dumb AI tools and give me useless info on every empty inch of screen space . At the end of the day it works but quality of life is low.
No "should we." Probably no "can we." Just a "hey AI, how do I..."
My pc "spikes" from 6% to 11% but was only noticeable when I raised the update speed to high
Is that the spiking, and are other people seeing more?
Those are definitely words in that sentence.
ExplorerPatcher https://github.com/valinet
Been using it for a few months, quite happy. Does not seem to spike CPU with my settings
Does anybody know if photoshop works on linux yet?
Old version of Photoshop works under wine,try also krita
No, but GIMP does.
TBH I tried Photoshop's most recent version out a little while ago and it was ass. It's like 8 buttons and 5 of them were some kind of AI autofill bullshit.
no, but I heard Putin is coming out with big news soon
???
That's all I'm waiting for
Epic
I don't understand what this means, but try and find a single Windows user who cares (assuming everyone here is on Linux).
Literally anything you do on a computer does this. That's why turbo boost exists.
Why would you bother to write efficient code when you can just throw more resources at it? The future is now, old man.
Any good start menu will have almost the whole start menu loaded into memory and clicking the start button should do nothing more than making it visible and enabling some event handlers.
I tried spam clicking my Javascript start menu on Gnome Linux (ArcMenu):
Looking at the reddit thread posted in this discussion somewhere it looks like a single click is 5% on Windows.
So no. This just shows awful programming by Microsoft and it's not up to the end users to just buy better hardware.
Exactly. Javascript performs just as well as any other JIT scripting language. But taking bets, they are loading the entire engine on every click event instead just keeping the engine running in the background...
I'll take the bet and say "user clicks start so we must startup copilot" .
You mean I have to buy that Silverstone case with the turbo button to make the start menu responsive? /s