I have to use Windows sometimes at work, and of all indignities, this is surely a small one, but it is an indignity. Everyone complains about ads, which is a real issue, but to me the biggest issue is how blatantly suboptimal everything is. Nobody has put any effort into making Windows good for a very very long time. The terminal and/or powershell is incredibly slow - ls should not take perceptible time to execute. The settings menus are made with 3 to 5 different layers of UI frameworks and design guidelines. Forced OneDrive. The pestering about copilot... I even like LLMs, but my user experience is so clearly subordinate to some KPI that it annoys me anyway. I'm sure I could come up with more if I had touched it recently, but I thankfully haven't.
2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop
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Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop
#92My main problem with Linux is that I have to trust all the applications that I install (unless I am willing to do an extreme amount of sysadmin which I am not). On a smartphone at least I can easily assign permissions to each app.
> On a smartphone at least I can easily assign permissions to each app.
Those permission categories are so coarse grained as to be useless. In order to pause a media player when a call comes in I have to give the media player access to the phone app. Pure madness.
Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very much this. I bet the Xbox/games division would be up in arms about it, but they got told to spend less money and also not to bother the important people. The Windows people might care, but with how bad they've been shepherding the OS I'm not so sure. Nadella is focused on AI and Azure. Bet he could hardly care less.
Yeah, it's all AI, Azure, and Office 365. Everything else is basically a forgotten product by microsoft. Even xbox is basically dead at this point.
VS (and vscode) also get some love, though mainly as drivers towards getting things published using Azure infrastructure, SQL Server too.
Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop
#94“start menus made with React Native, control-alt-delete menus that are actually just webviews” Haven’t used windows in five years or so but I’ve kept hearing bad things. This really is the icing on the cake though. Yea the AI stuff is dumb but if a OS manufacturer can’t be bothered to interact with their own UI libraries to build native UIs something has gone horribly wrong.
AFAIK the Start Menu itself is still C++ and XAML however only the Recommended section is build with React Native [1].
Funnily or rather sadly, they seem to be quite proud of using it as seen in the video.
Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop
#95“start menus made with React Native, control-alt-delete menus that are actually just webviews” Haven’t used windows in five years or so but I’ve kept hearing bad things. This really is the icing on the cake though. Yea the AI stuff is dumb but if a OS manufacturer can’t be bothered to interact with their own UI libraries to build native UIs something has gone horribly wrong.
It takes over five seconds for task manager to open on my Windows 11 work laptop.
Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop
#96My main problem with Linux is that I have to trust all the applications that I install (unless I am willing to do an extreme amount of sysadmin which I am not). On a smartphone at least I can easily assign permissions to each app.
GUI apps often come in Flatpak[1] these days - which are sandboxed[2] like you are expecting. Flathub[3] is the primary place to get GUI apps, but many distros also have their own app store too. Flatseal[4] is a GUI that allows you to mange the sandboxes/permissions. You can also manage them via cli if you prefer. For CLI apps, you can use distrobox[5] or toolbx[6]. [1] https://flatpak.org/ [2] https://docs.flatpak.o…
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Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
The decisions reg UI frameworks are largely due to internal political conflicts, mostly between DevDiv and Windows.
Just curious what is DevDiv? Tools division?
As I understand it, .NET, developer tools, and VS.
Basically you have tight OS integration vs developer friendly cross platform.
Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop
#98“start menus made with React Native, control-alt-delete menus that are actually just webviews” Haven’t used windows in five years or so but I’ve kept hearing bad things. This really is the icing on the cake though. Yea the AI stuff is dumb but if a OS manufacturer can’t be bothered to interact with their own UI libraries to build native UIs something has gone horribly wrong.
Am I missing something, or hasn't Microsoft done this since Windows 9x with apps like Explorer and Control Panel heavily using web views internally rather than "native" WinAPI GUIs?
Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop
#99“start menus made with React Native, control-alt-delete menus that are actually just webviews” Haven’t used windows in five years or so but I’ve kept hearing bad things. This really is the icing on the cake though. Yea the AI stuff is dumb but if a OS manufacturer can’t be bothered to interact with their own UI libraries to build native UIs something has gone horribly wrong.
How the start menu is programmed is of zero consequence to me.
> is of zero consequence to me
It is inconsequential, until it isn't. In front of me I've got a 2017 lenovo thinkpad running the latest Fedora+KDE, as well as a 2025 HP elitebook running "last corporate-friendly-stable version of W11". I can pop open the lenovo, key in my session password and hit enter, and I'm instantly productive, with shortcuts like meta+E giving me a working file explorer within milliseconds. On the Windows' side, there are several seconds of delay between typing my password and the on-screen feedback. Once finally unlocked, I've got a laggy environment where OS-essentials like the start menu and file explorers take whole seconds to render and respond.
It's a shame, if you ask me, that a dozen-or-so CPU and "general hardware" generations between those two devices got to waste due to poor software engineering and practices. And I'm not even talking about quality/reliability which is another sore point for Windowses of late.
Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop
#100“start menus made with React Native, control-alt-delete menus that are actually just webviews” Haven’t used windows in five years or so but I’ve kept hearing bad things. This really is the icing on the cake though. Yea the AI stuff is dumb but if a OS manufacturer can’t be bothered to interact with their own UI libraries to build native UIs something has gone horribly wrong.
I'm honestly not sure Microsoft even cares about Windows anymore, to me it's felt like they burned everything internally during Windows8 and the ValueAct battles sealed it .. hell they even entirely removed the Taskbar back then
I've always wondered what things would be like the Microsoft break up went though, I really do think personal computing would be better off and the people involved would probably have even more money to boot