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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

#71

Post by reincarnate0x14 »

roxolotl wrote: 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.

Pretty standard for Microsoft lately. The old stuff is still there, we're adding a completely new stack adjacent to it so now you can live with the worst of both! The Windows 8 tablet interface and the Win11 wtfever that is still sometimes kick out a dialogue box unchanged since Windows XP.

One can only imagine what the product managers of like .NET think of all this.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#72

Post by easton »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #51
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #35

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

From the outside looking in one wonders why this is allowed to continue. Microsoft’s old school “developer tools for money” business is slowly dying (because Visual Studio proper is less popular than its ever been since so much is targeting web), you would think they’d reorganize and move .net and GitHub and stuff into their cloud team and yeet whatever toxic leadership is preventing Windows from using Microsoft’s own frameworks.

IIRC .NET was banned from core Windows components after longhorn died, but its been 20 years. .NET is fast now, and C++ is faster still. Externally developed web frameworks shouldn’t be required for Windows.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#73

Post by zamalek »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #51
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #35

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

Yeah, as far as I understand it, that politics is: Sinofsky entrenched NIH on every team that he touched.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#75

Post by debo_ »

People loudly declaring they are switching to Linux feel to me like people loudly declaring they are leaving Twitter. That's nice? I've had my home machines on Linux since forever and it's fun. I like trying new distros about once a year to see what people are up to. It's been possible to run a basic setup for normies for a solid decade now, it's unfortunate that it took Microsoft waging UX war for some techies to notice.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#76

Post by lawgimenez »

roxolotl wrote: 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.

Microsoft dropped the ball with Universal Windows Platform framework, I worked on one project using this framework and it was one the best. Our codebase run on both phone and desktop Windows 8. This was 2014-ish if I remember, and then Windows phone got killed.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#77

Post by trueismywork »

roxolotl wrote: 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.

Long time ago, I read a blog about how the user must absolutely trust the dialog boxes for Ctrl+Alt+Delete and Adminstrator passwords and why they were tricky to get right..

Then I hear that now ctrl alt delete is a webview. Its difficult to believe. Do you have a reference?

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#78

Post by chroma_zone »

roxolotl wrote: 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.

The Win11 start menu used to have a fun bug where pressing Ctrl-Minus would open search with the phrase "zoom out". No other shortcut did this. Just Zoom Out. No idea how a bug like that happens.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#79

Post by bigstrat2003 »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #35
roxolotl wrote: 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.

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…

> 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.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#80

Post by MarkSweep »

I made the switch as well. For many years I dual-booted Ubuntu and Windows, hanging on to my familiarity with Windows and love for Visual Studio. Finally October 2025 some update made games laggy on Windows while they still worked fine on Ubuntu. I attempted to fix this by reinstalling Windows 11 and found I could not figure out how to remove advertisements from the start menu. So I finally transferred all my files from ReFS to ZFS and committed to 100% Linux.

Something has gone wrong in Microsoft in the product management organization where they are more concerned with chasing advertising dollars and upselling OneDruge than building a good product. It is depressing because all the Microsoft engineers I’ve interacted with in open source work have been excellent.

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