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2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

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Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#402
post #84
post #4

“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.

Typing "Visual Studio" into the new start menu may randomly trigger a Bing search for "Visual Studio" instead of running it, but on the other hand that makes Bings KPIs go up so it's impossible to say if it's bad or not.

It's been a while since I used Windows regularly or seriously, but I remember start menu search actually being good - maybe around Win7 days? You would just press , type a few letters of the software you wanted and hit enter, and it would work every time with minimal latency.

You know, like KDE Plasma in 2026.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#403
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typing "Visual Studio" into the new start menu may randomly trigger a Bing search for "Visual Studio" instead of running it, but on the other hand that makes Bings KPIs go up so it's impossible to say if it's bad or not.

'Randomly' here likely corresponds to a typo in the search term. If I type "Visual Std" instead of "Visual Stu" it goes to the Bing results. Alternatively it shows No results if you disable Bing in the Search settings found in the top right meatballs menu. I also would expect fuzzy search by default instead of typos sending users to Bing.

It also orrelates with missing the first letter off search terms, such as when you start typing immediately after opening the start menu

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#404
post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has a history of creating new UI frameworks. IMHO it's the result of Ballmer's "Developers, developers, developers!" attitude, which I think is a good thing at core (court the developers that add value to your platform!) But this results in chasing a new paradigm every few years to elicit new excitement from the developers. It'll always be more newsworthy to bring in a new framework than add incremental fix…

The software biz in general has a major "out with the old, in with the new" attitude, which paired with the attitude of, "We're going to build what we know, instead of learning the old stuff which is new to us". I've seen time and again, things like apps rewritten from scratch because nobody knew C++, and they only had C# devs. Or a massive runaround because the last guy on the team who knew C++ wrote a bunch of stuf…

Windows Phone was actually doing well and adoption was taking off when Nadella came in and killed it. It didn't help that they changed the app framework and then blamed lack of apps. Such a brain-dead decision.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> React has had tremendous success in the web world, so why not try and get those developers more comfortable producing apps for your platform? Because web stuff utterly sucks for making UIs on the desktop. Microsoft either doesn't know this (bad sign), or is choosing to use the trendy thing even though it'll make their software worse for customers (a worse sign). Either way it's a very bad look from MS.

No, it does not suck. I attempted to use WinUI 3, and could not even get PNGs to render the colors correctly, no matter what setting I tried. Then I gave Tauri a try, and everything worked out of the box, with the PNGs rendering even better than in the Windows Photos app. Building the UI was much easier, it looked better, and you get to build the "backend" in Rust. Nothing about this sucked.

WinUI 3 is basically utterly pathetic bul_sh_t attempting to pretend that it is a UI framework. A wet paper plane passing itself off as a passenger aircraft. Please compare with a real desktop UI framework like GTK or Qt. Or just a more modern one like Rust Iced or gpui/slint

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#406

I really don't understand what is different about my installs of Windows 11 compared to what I read in all these types of articles. I have zero issues with the platform day in and day out with heavy workloads like Pro Tools and Unreal Engine devkit. Games run without stutter and issue, all my features are snappy, Explorer loads instantly, etc. Even search is performant and gives decent results. I have tweaked a few s…

I suspect these articles are targeted at techies and tinkerers, where being able to do things their way is very important to them. This is reflected in the many mentions of tinkering with registry keys, which I never have nor felt the need to. I personally run win11 for gaming, android for media consumption and proxmox for homelab and I think all of these systems are fine as is. They serve their purpose well enough.…

> will end up being the only mainstream Linux desktop because of its corporate backing

Ubuntu, Fedora, SUSE, Pop!, Deepin (and the list goes on) all have corporate backing. Steam is a well-known consumer brand though, so that might make a difference.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The decisions reg UI frameworks are largely due to internal political conflicts, mostly between DevDiv and Windows.

They have a lot of staff turnover too, and each generation of new SDE has less of a clue how the old stuff worked. So when they're tasked with replacing the old stuff, they don't understand what it does, and the rewrite ends up doing less. That was my impression of one of the major problems when I worked there 2008-2011. But I don't think it's just one problem.

Raymond Chen tries to document it, but he's just one person.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either I am stupid or you're being dishonest. There is no one click way to disable it. Only on pro versions of windows, with a group policy otherwise a couple of obscure registry keys no regular users know.

No group policy is needed on Windows 11 Pro, it's in the settings: --- Type something in the Start menu Top right meatballs menu button 'Search settings' 'Let search apps show results' -> Off (or disable only Bing) --- I don't know about the Home edition.

That doesn't appear for me. Win 11 Pro 25H2.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#410
post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Randomly' here likely corresponds to a typo in the search term. If I type "Visual Std" instead of "Visual Stu" it goes to the Bing results. Alternatively it shows No results if you disable Bing in the Search settings found in the top right meatballs menu. I also would expect fuzzy search by default instead of typos sending users to Bing.

It also orrelates with missing the first letter off search terms, such as when you start typing immediately after opening the start menu

I can only reproduce this by hovering the Windows icon with the mouse and having the finger on a character, in order to press it immediately after clicking. In that case most of the time the Start menu does not open at all, and sometimes it opens but does not have the letter.

When I use the Windows key to open the Start menu I cannot reproduce this, as eg. Win + E opens the Explorer instead of the Start menu.

It does not appear on my machine as if this could possibly happen when opening the Start menu during regular use. Can you reproduce this on your machine?

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