“start menus made with React Native, control-alt-delete menus that are actually just webviews”

Haven’t used windows in five years or so but I’ve kept hearing bad things. This really is the icing on the cake though. Yea the AI stuff is dumb but if a OS manufacturer can’t be bothered to interact with their own UI libraries to build native UIs something has gone horribly wrong.

Microsoft has a history of creating new UI frameworks. IMHO it's the result of Ballmer's "Developers, developers, developers!" attitude, which I think is a good thing at core (court the developers that add value to your platform!)

But this results in chasing a new paradigm every few years to elicit new excitement from the developers. It'll always be more newsworthy to bring in a new framework than add incremental fixes to the old one.

React has had tremendous success in the web world, so why not try and get those developers more comfortable producing apps for your platform?

(Tangentially, see also the mixed reaction to Mac native apps switching from AppKit to SwiftUI)

The software biz in general has a major "out with the old, in with the new" attitude, which paired with the attitude of, "We're going to build what we know, instead of learning the old stuff which is new to us".

I've seen time and again, things like apps rewritten from scratch because nobody knew C++, and they only had C# devs. Or a massive runaround because the last guy on the team who knew C++ wrote a bunch of stuff and left a couple years back, and now nobody really knew how any of that stuff worked.

> React has had tremendous success in the web world, so why not try and get those developers more comfortable producing apps for your platform?

IMO - this is worth talking about. Zune, Windows Phone, and some others died when they did not, in fact, suck, and were pretty good products which while late to the game, could have competed if there had just been a decent app ecosystem.

Out with the old, in with the new, doesn't have to be bad, but it depends on what your old and new are. I'd be a lot less skeptical about migrating OS-level sttuff from C to Rust than from C to React.

If the motivation is "Because I refuse to learn C", then both approaches will be bad. You can't avoid understanding what you're migrating, but seemingly Microsoft thinks they're above that. Fits with the average mindset of developers within the Windows ecosystem, at least from my experience.

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.

I maintain to this day that the Zune was one of the best designed hardware and software platforms I've ever used. Probably the only truly design forward product that MS ever produced.

The Zune hardware was slick, particularly the solid state players. The music store worked great and their music licensing was so much better than Apple - $10 a month for unlimited streaming, unlimited downloads (rentals) to Zune devices and 10 free mo3 downloads to own.

Their only misstep was making one of their colorways poop brown! That and being too late to market with a phone that used the same design language

There was also the fact that Microsoft introduced it 3 months before Apple announced the product that would kill the iPod, leading with the HDD model (a direct competitor to what would become known as the iPod Classic line) when Apple’s real flagship was the iPod nano.

There was also the crap that was Windows Media Player 11 which I tried to like for about a month.

There was also the incompatibility with Microsoft’s own DRM ecosystem in PlaysForSure which was full of these subscription music services, some of which were quite popular with the kind of people that were inclined to buy a Zune: folks in Microsoft’s ecosystem that had passed up on using an iPod and used something from SanDisk, Creative, Toshiba or iRiver instead. This is because they wanted to replicate the entire iPod+iTunes model entirely.

The 2006 lineup of iPods was also particularly strong, and included the first aluminum iPod nano’s. When Microsoft announced and released the Zune, they were counter-programming against that, right into the Holiday season with a new brand that had no name ID, with a product that was just like the iPod, couldn’t play any of your music from iTunes or Rhapsody, but with… HD radio.

More than a few missteps were made.

> the result of Ballmer's "Developers, developers, developers!" attitude

I think Microsoft’s framework chasing has been a betrayal of that philosophy. Internal divisional politics have been major drivers behind fracturing and refusing to unify the stack and its UI approach, and without clear guidance from the Office team the direction of the entire platforms UI is opaque. Short term resume and divisional wins at the expense of the whole ecosystem.

A developer centric platform would let developers easily create platform specific UIs that look modern and normal. As-is the answer to how to ‘hello world’ a windows desktop app is a five hour “well, akshully…” debate that can reasonably resolve to using Meta’s stack. “VB6 for the buttons, C++ for the hard stuff” is a short conversation, at least.

I think it's more of result of "okay we made it and it works, how we now can excuse still being employed in same head-count" development. And the answer is of course "rewrite, rewrite, rewrite". UI works well, no major bugs ? TIME TO CHANGE IT TO BE "MODERN"

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.

I think that because their total compensation is lower than FAANG, especially at senior levels, and they are seen as uncool, they sometimes have issues retaining top-notch talent. It's paradoxical, because MS Research is probably the best PLT organization in the world. But they have failed to move a lot of that know-how into production.

Besides, because it's an older company, it might have more organizational entropy, i.e. dysfunctional middle-management. As you say it's probably several other causes too. But still, hard to understand how they can create F#, F*, and Dafny, just to name a few, and fail with their mainstream products.

You also probably couldn't pay me enough to work in the kind of environment that produces such buggy software as Microsoft teams. A message based app which can't even guarantee delivery of messages, or synchronization across devices isn't a good sign for management and delivery.

I was a unix head at the time and ran OpenBSD on my personal Thinkpad. I figured a stint on the Windows team would broaden my horizons and expose me to differences. It did that. I don't regret it. I did in the end feel that the company was not my vibe, but I respect and appreciate some of what came out of there.

Back when I was there, part of my calculus was that cost of living in Seattle was cheaper than the bay. It was about 35% cheaper back then, according to regional CPI data I looked at at the time. Not sure what the difference is today. I believe housing is still substantially cheaper.

I think a few years after I left when more Big Tech opened offices in Seattle, competing companies started paying Bay Area salaries for Seattle living, removing this argument. I haven't watched this closely in recent years.

But fwiw, I was able to save and invest a lot in my Seattle days, despite a salary that was lower than in the bay.

Seattle cost of living is still significantly cheaper than the Bay Area. A lower salary goes even farther given the lack of state income tax, too.

Because those languages were created at Microsoft Research, not DevDiv nor Windows.

All different business units.

I can confirm, the guys still around for WinUI team and related frameworks, always appear clueless when posed questions about Windows features they were supposed to know about.

Just go watch a few recordings on their YouTube channel.

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

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing

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.

It’s a largely dysfunctional org creating largely dysfunctional software, I.e. Conway law. Dysfunctional orgs tend not to be capable of fixing themselves, especially without external threat. Satya Nadella, like many CEOs, seems mostly interested in impressing his peers and these days that means fancy AI, before that it was Quantum chips.

Microsoft has produced some great technology and when I was last there I was definitely focusing on getting as much of the good stuff out into open source as possible.

Back in the early V8 days the execs imagined JavaScript would keep getting exponentially faster, I tired to explain with a similar investment anything V8 could do dotnet could do better as we had more information available for optimization.

Yeah, .NET is actually an impressive piece of tech. They have F# too which is a really solid programming language. And then they chose React of all things to build core OS UI.

Because .NET is under DevDiv, F# came from Microsoft Research, and the OS is under Windows team.

Windows team even refuses to have managed bindings for DirectX, like Apple and Google do on their platforms.

Managed DirectX and XNA were pushed by highly motivated individuals, and lasted only as long as they stayed at Microsoft.

Longhorn was politics, then Google ate their lunch on mobile with Java and JavaScript userspace, across two platforms.

DevDiv is a "here C++ rules!" silo, even the Rust adoption is being widely embraced at Azure, less so on Windows team.

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

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.

I think it also includes GitHub now.

I think the reason they keep trying new UI frameworks is that no one really adopts them. Developers know that Microsoft won’t kill off backward compatibility and break all the enterprise apps, so why rewrite? When one framework fails, they start working on the next one. I question if they understand the corner they’ve painted themselves into.

I stopped writing Windows applications back in the early 00s

my Windows API knowledge (essentially: just Win32) is still exactly as useful as it was then, having missed the 7 or 8 different UI frameworks in the interim

Win32 is basically frozen on Windows XP.

Since Vista most newer APIs are done in COM, or WinRT nowadays.

I remember a thin book describing changes to the API in Vista and 7 compared to XP and it was really thin. Just a few extra APIs to be able to show controls in the taskbar preview and things like that. Win32 is a stable API and I hope they don't let anyone from the Windows 11 modernization team touch it.

>Win32 is a stable API and I hope they don't let anyone from the Windows 11 modernization team touch it.

I've heard a Microsoft executive talk about win32 as legacy that they want to replace. I don't think that's realistic though, it's probably the last piece of technology keeping people on the platform.

Except for anything that came after XP, you need to at least make use of COM.

WinRT can be avoided if you don't do any modern stuff like the new context menu, WinUI, or Windows ML.

Me too, back then I wrote applications either using the raw Win32 API (GetMessage, TranslateMessage, DispatchMessage, etc), or using MFC.

I think MFC is now long-time dead and buried, but at the time I liked it despite the ugly macros.

MFC is actually still supported by MS, works in the most recent MSVS, and even occasionally receives updates.

>Tangentially, see also the mixed reaction to Mac native apps switching from AppKit to SwiftUI

I'll take AppKit -> SwiftUI over Win32-> windowsx.h -> VB6 -> MFC -> ATL -> WTL -> WFC -> WinForms -> WPF -> WinRT -> UWP -> WinUI3 -> MAUI.

Even with all that Microsoft still went outside and used React Native for the start menu and Electron for the Visual Studio installer and Visual Studio Code.

Operating systems should always use C/C++ UI frameworks, and as little costly abstraction as possible, period. Anything else is wasting resources.

It’s not so much about wasting resources as it is about the added latency, jankiness, and inconsistency in look & feel hurting usability.

And how about reliability? Having to start a web browser and a web framework to display core OS functionality adds a lot of moving parts that can break.

Latency is literally wasting resources

The point was that users mostly don’t care about wasting resources, but about usability. If usability wasn’t impacted, few people would care about resources being wasted. But since usability is very much impacted, people (rightfully) complain.

> 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.

probably trying to repro the crazy success of vscode, surely electron is the magic sauce and not the dream team of devs. azure data studio should've proved that you can't just sprinkle electron dust and get a winner.

sadly I loved azure data studio despite its being afflicted with electron, but it became so bug infested they had to completely abandon it.

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

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.

1: https://youtu.be/kMJNEFHj8b8?t=4m47s

In the challenges section, they list a few challenges with React Native that they had to overcome. Interesting thing is that MS already has XAML, WinUI etc., that they built and control and don't havr those "challenges". I don't understand what the team got by using React Native compared to using XAML. Anyone from MS here who could provide some technical benefits for this decision?

Still in some cases you have to wait a few minutes to get working Start menu search or menu itself on a new not low-end device.

My work computer takes a full five minutes to become usable on the first login after a cold boot, and that’s not even counting the time from boot to entering my password. Before the upgrade from Windows 10, it only took three. Teams, of course, takes another five minutes to become functional. Meanwhile I have a 13 year old low end Asus laptop at home that boots to a fully usable Linux desktop in well under a minute.

It’s been this way for over a decade. The year of the Linux desktop was 2009; the world is only just catching up.

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

I still have my Nokia Lumia around. Best phone I ever had.

And I say this hating everything about Microsoft and Windows. That phone clicked just right with the tile design and overall usability. Of course, MS having pulled the plug, it's basically a DRM brick now.

Truly an underrated phone, this was my wife's phone when we met. Developing for Windows 8 was one of the best imo, I don't know any C# prior to it but it was just so easy, native and fast.

I had a cheap $25 Lumia (520?) that was the most delightful phone I used.

If it wasn’t for 3rd parties sunsetting their apps, there would have been no reason to give it up.

Despite being a highly underpowered dirt cheap phone it was incredibly smooth and fast to use.

I agree but that's because both iOS and Android are pretty bad in several ways.

MeeGo from Nokia was pretty amazing as well and I'm sure it could have launched Linux phones into actual competitors to iOS and Android - if only Microsoft and Elop didn't manage to kill Linux at Nokia.

Spot on, .NET Native and C++/CX on top of COM is what .NET 1.0 should have been all about.

Unfortunately it was a big ball of mud in mismanagement.

You would really like Uno Platform. It is the same API.

https://platform.uno/platform/

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

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

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

At least in Windows 10, there was even still the occasional Windows 3.1 file picker hanging around in the really dusty locations

When Windows 11 first dropped, a Win3.x file picker buried deep in the OS was memed around (I believe it was the picker for a .dso file for ODBC).

The windows problem is every other OS release has included new UI libraries. Over the last 10 years they've made something like 5 different new ways to make native windows UIs. And, of course, they support all of them. You can use the classic Win32 API or you can use the newest WinUI 3

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

I hate that so much. When blind people are trying to start JAWS (the screen reader) by typing "jaws" into the start menu and pressing Enter, it will sometimes pull up a Bing page on Jaws the movie instead. And the blind person is just sitting there waiting for the screen reader to start. I tell people to use the run dialog for that reason. Sucks but that's what you have to do in the age of inshittisoft.

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

You know, like KDE Plasma in 2026.

Objectively it wastes developer time making the OS in a non linear way more expensive for companies. Its like a minthly subscription for ever more minutes.

If your opinion mattered, you would work at Microsoft setting the targets that the Start Menu team need to meet to hit their bonuses/not get fired.

But you don't. So it doesn't.

(I've pinned Visual Studio to the start menu.)

'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?

It takes literally a click to deactivate it though. One could argue about Bing Search being the default, but I didn’t run the user surveys to see, which is best for the average user.

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.

I stand corrected. I didn’t know the Home Version has no option to disable it. You are right for calling me out.

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.

After you typed a Search term, there is no menu button at the right on the same vertical row as the 'All / Apps / Documents' bar?

You can also launch that Settings page by running in powershell:

  Start-Process "ms-settings:cortana-windowssearch"

Or just 'Settings' and in the left navigation 'Privacy & Security' -> 'Search'

The best is none. I have no idea why anyone would want a web search there.

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.

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?

the thing you need to trust is that pressing that combination shows the legit OS stuff, that it can't be intercepted (Secure Attention Key).

how the OS implements what is displayed is irrelevant

windows has all kinds of virtualizations today, it can literally run web views in separate (invisible) VMs for security purposes

bump, tbh I think this is hyperbole as on my w11 pc the ctrl alt delete menu hasn't changed since 2021's RC (which was just a reskinned version of w10's, which was just a reskinned version of w8.1's... going all the way back to vista)

what has gone horribly wrong is the native UIs. they are completely worthless, across all OSes - difficult to use, limited, and in general suck compared to HTML/CSS.

I've worked with all major GUI frameworks, from MFC to Qt, they all suck compared with React/Vue

Sucks a whole lot less for users though.

I remember when people argued that because the time spent running an app was so much greater than the time spent developing it that one should be more conscientious about a user's time than a developer's.

After all, wasting a minute of time from 20 million users is 38 man-years of lost life. Doing that just to save a developer a week or a month is ethically troubling.

Of course, people also upgraded their computers a lot less frequently and you'd publish minimum machine requirements for software which probably made it easier to make such arguments as you'd also lose customers if software was slow or had minimum hardware requirements a lot of people didn't have.

That largely went out the window with web developers where users were just as likely to blame browser makers or their ISP for poor performance. Now with app developers and OS makers doing it, I guess there's just so many users at this point that losing a few with older hardware just doesn't matter.

For whom?

Every single web or mobile app does his own custom thing nowadays. As a user I couldn't care less how it's implemented, what I want consistency in behavior and style across the board.

It feels like this has been completely lost, even on platforms like mac where consistency used to be important.

I'd take MFC everything over random behavior if I could.

> It feels like this has been completely lost, even on platforms like mac where consistency used to be important.

There are two kinds of consistency: across apps within a platform and across platforms within the same app. As someone who uses multiple platforms regularly, I have forever been annoyed when eg keyboard shortcuts change when I switch to a different computer, especially when I’m using the same app.

Apps like Discord, Spotify and VSCode are consistently the most pleasurable to use because they are largely the same.

For a unique piece of hardware like the old iPod, it made more sense to do your special custom UX as a unified product. But we’re talking about general purpose computers. The ”platform” shouldn’t be special imo, it should simply be predictable and stay out of the way. They mostly provide the same thing, like copy paste and maximizing a window, yet have different controls. This differentiation adds no value, at least to me.

I don’t agree with this at all. I’ll take AppKit (preferably with Swift, but Obj-C is fine too) over anything web. There’s a number of reasons, but the biggest is that AppKit has an expansive set of well implemented, accessible, flexible, efficient, and ready to use widgets that are all designed to work together, and the truth is that this isn’t something you can get on the web.

Even the most complete “UI frameworks” on the web are full of holes, leaving you to build a patchwork monster out of a laundry list of third party widgets (all of which themselves are full of shortcomings and concessions) or build your own.

As an aside, this gripe isn’t exclusive to the web. It’s a problem with many others such as Windows App SDK (aka WinUI) and Flutter, among others. At least for the things I build, they’re unsuitable at best.

There's one problem: If you're competent with non-web UI technologies, it's probably time to schedule your colonoscopy.

Late millennials and gen Z have been spoiled by declarative, reactive frameworks that work identically whether you're doing a local UI or the Web, and the tools (for example Figma) that have grown up around these frameworks. Using C++, Objective-C, or even Swift will be just fine for a personal project, but if you're talking something that needs to be maintained and refined over the long term by a team, you will have a much worse time finding people competent in those languages than in JavaScript+React+Electron.

This is also one of the reasons behind rewriting everything in Rust: C is so dangerous, people who don't already know it inside and out are unwilling to touch it. Virtually all of the younger system developers are already working in Rust, and would vastly prefer it over working in C given the choice, so keeping a C project maintained has gotten a whole lot harder.

> Virtually all of the younger system developers are already working in Rust

I'd love to know where you get your statistics from.

FYI, as an anecdote, I am 'younger', in the sense of 'only recently joined the workforce', and I write 100+ lines of C and C++ a day, both at work and in side projects. Haven't touched Rust once, although I would like to get into it.

And funnily, the one UI framework I did use at work is Avalonia, which is strongly inspired by Windows Presentation Foundation.

I write plenty of declarative UI too in the form of SwiftUI (where it makes sense; often on Apple platforms the imperative frameworks are better suited) and Jetpack Compose.

Declarative UI has its upsides, but it’s hardly a panacea. There are places where it’s a straightforward dramatic improvement and then others where it’s an awkward contortion at best. Reactivity can be great but works in imperative setups too.

The explosion of popularity of front end web frameworks comes down almost entirely to two things: accessibility and commodity talent. It has a low bar to entry and JS+React is the closest the industry has come yet to achieving its undying dream of cheap, easily replaceable, interchangeable developers. In most other aspects it’s objectively worse than alternatives.

I generally agree with you, but it does entirely depend on the type of application you want to make.

If you need a lot of graphical elements and customization to get a look and feel that matches what you want, then yeah, nothing really beats html/css/js for both it's flexibility and available ecosystem.

But if what you need is an application with a button that does magic things when you push it, or a text box or table that allows for customization of the text color, then all the other types of UX frameworks work just fine. You just can't expect to do something like make a pretty chart.

SwiftUI on macOS 26 still has issues but it’s finally starting to evolve into something usable. In particular it seems like the long standing performance problems are being addressed.

Not for the user, unless I forgot that today is opposite day.

Ugh, opposite. CSS is the fucking worst way of laying out a UI. How many human lives have been lost to div class layout nonsense that a better system could handle directly.

and yet the Telegram Desktop App, written in Qt/C++ is the only goddamn desktop messenger app that actually feels smooth and feature rich rather than the webclient wrapper abominations of everyone else that eat half a gig of ram on startup and randomly hang on searches

I’ve recently downgraded my 10 year old used-only-for-obscure-firmware-updaters laptop to Windows 7 and enabled the “Classic” design. The snappiness of that GUI is unmatched even with Win 10/11 on much better hardware. Makes you wonder about the rest of Windows when Microsoft can’t even optimise the most basic things in modern Windows anymore.

Same here. I developed desktop applications for 15+ years and was really frustrated with Microsoft's direction for the UI around the time of Windows Phone. While Windows Forms may not be the best, it worked for decades until then. Now even if someone wants to build a desktop application using native UI, it's next to no resource at all because it's all about cross platform nowadays.

macOS has two separate Telegram apps, technically speaking. The one (most) everyone uses is AppKit based.

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

Am I missing something, or hasn't Microsoft done this since Windows 9x with apps like Explorer and Control Panel heavily using web views internally rather than "native" WinAPI GUIs?

But those weren't entirely done with a webview. They were just embedding views where it made sense, like rendering a section that looks like a document (with fancy hyperlinks woooo) or render a preview of the file you selected in the main (native) view of explorer.

Now we are talking about entire apps being built with that stuff, down to the window border (or lack of it). It's impossible to have a consistent looking and working OS with this approach. It's impossible to share code between these things and the actual native apps, and often things have to be written from scratch and end up using 10x memory than the native solution.

Remember when Active Desktop! Was the shiny new thing?

That was actually fun if not very useful (I had a dynamic school timetable programmed as my "wallpaper" as I was in high school at the time).

Not very useful because you quickly realize you mostly obscure your desktop with actual applications you want to use on your computer.

It takes over five seconds for task manager to open on my Windows 11 work laptop.

What’s worse, the list of tasks/apps in Task Manager for some reason populates gradually over a couple of seconds, so when you right-click on some task to perform an action, it might switch to a different task under the mouse cursor while you’re clicking because it’s still populating.

Holding the control key down stops the task list from updating. Release the key to resume updates. Works on Windows 10 and 11.

For me at least "details" tab populates in one step (there is a slight delay and then all processes appear). You can set it as the default tab as it's the most useful anyway.

I actually need the Processes tab more frequently, which shows the process hierarchy and relates to the visible windows. For example to restart Explorer.

Yep, Windows performance on my work laptop reminds me of computing in the 90s: waiting and resource management.

It takes ~5 seconds for activity monitor on my macbook pro to populate data, although the window for it opens right away.

Whenever web dev comes up, we got people saying it's fad-driven development where a new framework comes out every week. Those people have never done real native development. React and Angular have been the solid stable bedrock of web frontend for ten years, and the churn is nothing compared to Windows, OSX, Android, and iOS UI dev.

> their own UI libraries

It doesn't help that their own UI libraries are unfinished, unpolished, hot garbage.

I commend on using React, though. Like it or hate it, React is the closest to one true framework for everything.

Yeah. Crazy when the two most significant desktop OS's (Windows and MacOS) have native UIs where something has gone horribly wrong.

I can’t speak to windows since it’s been at least a decade since I have had to use it, but I really don’t understand the hate on the new Apple OSs. I haven’t found them to be a measurably different user experience than their respective prior versions. So when you say “horribly wrong” it makes me wonder exactly what you mean, specifically.

You can dislike the visual approach of modern macOS but on a framework level the UI ecosystem is generally very powerful and feature rich.

With SwiftUI you’ve been able to pick and choose where to integrate it over the years, it’s not like you had to go whole-hog.

It's almost like the rush to ship new features year after year without ever pausing to fix and optimize things has taken its toll.

Both are absolutely fine. I don't get it.

I use both os daily and neither is remotely laggy, looks nice, supports all the hardware and software and I don't have to be surprised or spend hours downloading drivers to make it work.

> but if a OS manufacturer can’t be bothered to interact with their own UI libraries to build native UIs

But if they don’t use web tech it would be too expensive to build the start menu in a way that works cross platform!

Oh wait

>OS manufacturer can’t be bothered to interact with their own UI libraries to build native UIs something has gone horribly wrong.

I honestly think that has way less to do with Microsoft, more of a representation of "software engineering" practices these days.

For example, Gnome shell has bunch of javascript in it, GTK has layout and styling defined in some flavour of CSS, etc.

I'm of opinion if you start writing OS userland in either javascript or python (or both), you should be fired on the spot, but I don't make the shots.

Most technical decisions aren't really driven by what makes a better end-user experience or a better product, it's mostly defined by convenience and familiarity of substandard software developers - with mostly and primarily web-slop background.

Cosmic (from the PopOS folks) is getting rid of the crappy javascript from GNOME Shell. And the CSS in GTK+ themes is just for the sake of syntactic convenience.

Cosmic is quite nice. There's some polishing left to do, but it's already pretty solid. The app store is a bit of a turd, but I bet that's just because it's by nature connected to the internet. More could surely be done with caching and pre-loading, but not sure if I want my computer to pre-load app store content all the time just in case I open it.

Compared to Windows it's of course absolutely unreal.

But the difference is that none of the CSS or Javascript usage in gnome is tied to a webview. They are all binding in some way to GTK and much simpler rendering routines.

> I'm of opinion if you start writing OS userland in either javascript or python (or both), you should be fired on the spot, but I don't make the shots.

KDE Plasma, which is in my opinion the most advanced desktop environment is written in Qt QML which is JavaScript. There are advantages to that over C++, namely your session won't simply crash.

QML is not JavaScript.

(While you can use some JavaScript from QML, the application still have a C++ core. QML applications can still crash. There is no DOM with QML, no browser overhead)

When I read comments like this, I honestly think that people are only complaining about this because the "bad people" are doing this (in this case Microsoft/Gnome Team).

Neglecting the fact that almost everyone else is doing similar things.

> For example, Gnome shell has bunch of javascript in it, GTK has layout and styling defined in some flavour of CSS, etc.

What GTK is doing isn't really any different than how many UI framework work and have done so for quite a while now.

Almost every desktop UI toolkit/library/framework in the past 15-20 years has the following:

- Markup interface for defining the layout. If they don't have that they have a declarative way of defining the UI.

- Some sort of bindings for popular scripting language that hook into native code.

- Some of styling language that isn't that different from CSS.

This has been the norm for quite some time now. It works reasonably well.

Futhermore there isn't much difference between what desktop developers are doing and what web developers are doing.

> I'm of opinion if you start writing OS userland in either javascript or python (or both), you should be fired on the spot, but I don't make the shots.

Why? I find Gnome works really well on Linux. I have a pretty nice desktop environment after adding two extensions (Dash To Dock and App Indicators). Gnome runs well on relatively ancient hardware I own (2011 Dell E6410) with a garbage GPU (it isn't OpenGL 3.3 compliant). It actually performs a lot better than some other DEs that are 100% native.

JavaScript is indeed a slow language. However in Gnome that isn't the bottleneck. People have been making UIs with JScript (basically JavaScript) using WSH back in the 90s on Windows 98.

> Most technical decisions aren't really driven by what makes a better end-user experience or a better product, it's mostly defined by convenience and familiarity of substandard software developers - with mostly and primarily web-slop background.

What makes a better end user experience has nothing to do with any of this. There has to be an incentive to create a good end user experience and there simply isn't in the vast majority of cases.

In many cases it doesn't matter really what the tech behind something is. Most popular programmings and associated frameworks all work reasonably well on machines that are over a decade old. I am running Discord on a 15 year machine dual core laptop processor and it works "ok".

So this sort of complaining about "modern devs" I've been hearing about for almost 20 years now. The issues I've faced with doing quality work has been almost always to do with how projects are (mis)-managed.

The last point is very astute.

The software industry has always had more juniors than seniors so this issue of juniors calling the shots is not a new one but it does feel like it's been getting worse and worse... Now it's basically AI slop vibe coders calling the shots about coding best-practices.

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.

Same. 2017 thinkpad, latest KDE, snappier than my 2025 Dell with Win11 and a processor that should be about 60% faster for single thread tasks.

Performance isn’t a consequence?

If this wasn’t HN, I would swear that my personal recommendation algorithm has gotten Linux desktop-pilled and that’s why I’m seeing so many posts like these every day. But in reality I think there is a groundswell of momentum happening here, and with component prices rising, I only see this continuing as more people look to breathe new life into older hardware.

It might be the alignment of several forces :

- macOS is kind of crapifying, with Liquid Glass UI, iCloud services pushed down your throat… - Windows 11… - (some) Europeans are getting concerned about their complete lack of sovereignty on the tech stack, and Linux is one way to reclaim a small part of it. - LLM agents like Claude code have lowered the bar so much for any setup operation and bash commands.

All in all, it seems like a good time for Linux to broaden a bit its adoption.

I've been seeing it a lot on reddit as well, with a lot of non-technical users asking "how do I get started with linux?"

I think this is a real thing and I think a combination of MS demanding everyone get new hardware and Valve really polishing a lot of linux has gone a long way to get non-technical users to start seriously considering linux.

It's a huge added bonus that old hardware simply flies with linux. I have a 5 year old laptop that feels about 10x more responsive since I killed the windows install and put linux on it.

And I know that laptop will continue to fly because, unlike windows, it's never going to get any sort of serious bloatware added on as I update it.

Yeah, I think a big part of the momentum toward Linux is from the end of Windows 10 support, and Windows 11's increased hardware demands.

Given how rough and uncertain the economy is, this creates a large group of people who can't or aren't comfortable upgrading their computer, but at the same time don't want to be stuck on EOL Windows 10 forever either.

Anecdotally I’ve seen among my non-tech friends more questions about VPNs. Several of my friends own Steam Decks which is pretty wild to me given they are just normie gamers.

It’s literally the ads and bloatware. Windows is horrible unless you are technical enough to strategically disable the bloatware, and keep on disabling it as the updates continually reenable it. And if you are technical enough to disable it then Linux isn’t a problem.

Microsoft really is enterprise, cloud, and GitHub / AI tools. Windows for personal users is harvesting as much cash as possible from boomers and gamers, but the gamers are leaving en masse now. Software professionals only use macOS or Linux unless they are a MS shop that has to use Windows stack.

It is an incredible shift for those of us who have been around forever. But it’s a true look at how impossible things shift, bit by bit, until all of a sudden it all washes away. Never believe the tech cos on top today can’t be beat. It can and will happen someday

> It’s literally the ads and bloatware

I hope more companies and MBAs open their eyes to this: that the long term cost of user-hostile changes is negative compared to respecting users and building good products.

Also currently it helps to stand out from the sea of crap products.

Play the long game. Make good products. Bring joy and positive experience to peoples lives. Sleep well at night.

It won’t help, because once those MBAs take VC money, the incentives push the product toward enshittification sooner or later.

What we’re seeing instead is open-source becoming the real alternative. People used to look for other proprietary tools, but now open-source options are getting good enough, and more people are building personal software that fits their needs instead of bloated do-everything apps.

That’s the shift. Open-source is rising, and I don’t think these companies can reverse course fast enough.

I’m a big fan of staying private. I own a company that took VC many years ago but we strategically stayed private for a decade now and made peace with the VC. You just keep being honest, stacking customers, playing the long game. I see the value of being public but as a 100 to 500 person company that grows steadily, you keep it private and remove the quarterly earnings. The constant drive to hit the quarterly nut at all costs causes so many stupid short term benefits that hurt long term value. There is an enormous number of small companies you have never heard of like this. It’s just so short sighted to kill the golden goose to juice some profit

> Several of my friends own Steam Decks which is pretty wild to me given they are just normie gamers.

I would say that’s absolutely the most normal gamer way of playing PC games. As someone who is mostly given up on playing games on a computer and prefer consoles, I’ve thought of doing the same thing.

I agree it’s really impressive that lots of people have decided to try Linux, far more than I remember ever before.

But I’m worried this is “the moment“. Possibly the best shot that’s gonna happen for a long time. And if people find things aren’t as ready as they think from what they hear they’re going to be burned and they’re not coming back. The next time around not only will they not come, they’ll push other people away from trying.

I don’t know if we’ve reached that magical inflection point or not. I think some people are using rosy glasses again though. The real momentum has never been this strong. But it’s not a done deal.

I was never really a serious gamer and don't do it much at all any longer.

But one of my senses is that the sort of games that really benefited from a desktop system--primarily Windows--like serious simulations and resource allocation games are increasingly fringe.

Certainly there are games on Linux today but I also wonder if a lot of people won't decide, as you say, that consoles are just easier.

Their point was that Steam Deck is a gaming console with Linux on it.

KDE's income from individual donations has doubled recently, and many of the comments we get with donations are from recent Windows switchers.

As I wrote on HN just yesterday, I've been working on the Linux desktop for 20 years and the momentum has never been higher. 2026 will be fun.

That increase in donations may also be due to more prominent prompting for them. Got me to donate, at least. But I would be pretty sad if the prompting were to get any more in-your-face than it currently already is.

It's a difficult balance, though I think most open source projects are too modest in asking for donations, which, fair enough is pretty uncomfortable at first. You can definitely be too in-your-face, like Jimbo Wales is the sad-eyed picture of taking this too far sometimes.

Thing is that explicitly asking for money works, it gets results. If you can get people to pay money to watch you screaming at video games on Twitch, you can definitely get people to pay money for working on useful software.

Thank you for reminding me that I should set up some recurring donations to the teams powering my Linux experience

Thank you very much in advance!

I think it's a lot of different factors coming together. The success of the steam deck has really breathed life into the linux gaming scene - certainly for me personally, that was the main blocker to switching from windows.

That, plus (what feels like) a lot of recent advances in Linux. When I tried it... 2-3ish years ago? I recall e.g. fractional display scaling being basically nonfunctional. But when I tried again early 2025, it pretty much Just Worked (arguably even better than it did on windows), I just had to manually enable wayland. Pretty sure even that's just the default nowadays.

Which basically sums up my personal windows -> linux pipeline: bought a steam deck, was impressed at how well it ran my steam library; had my old laptop finally die on me, ran my life off the steam deck for a while; decided to eventually build a new machine, and figured I might as well try installing linux from the get-go. Everything worked fine on the first try, and I ended up not even installing windows.

certainly within my friend groups, I'm seeing more and more people entertaining the idea of making the switch as well. Admittedly, that's primarily "tech-savvy" folks though.

Yeah there are many things coming together on top of W11 fuckups.

Proton was good, but SteamDeck did 2 things:

* informed bigger public that hey, it is good enough for vast majority of games/gamers in the public eye

* more importantly, *made developers care* about their stuff working on Steam Deck. And if it works on Steam Deck, very good chance it will work on <generic linux distro> just fine

Indeed, it's the Linux super power. I've mentioned this before but my favorite linux adventure was, being a borderline penniless college student, having broken Toshiba Tecra 8000 from 1998 with a dead hard drive. But it had a working CD drive and USB port, so I got Puppy Linux 4.0 on a CD, booted from a CD, and installed to a 1gb USB stick and set it to boot from USB.

I had Dillo for a web browser, a stripped down version of VLC that could play 360p Youtube videos without issue, downloaded via Youtube-DL. I had XMMS which looked just like Winamp, and Sega/Nintendo emulation and even Duke Nukem 3D. For programs I had epub/pdf/djview readers, xpaint which is like classic MS Paint, feh as a hyperlightweight all purpose image viewer and background manager, a super lightweight RSI break popup program, and even a fully functional web server stack. It also had a window manager (JWM) that handled multiple desktops more intuitively and effortlessly than Windows does now.

Hah. Feh, I still use that once in a while. It is one of very few image viewers that can lock in pan and zoom and then look over multiple frames.

Good for checking which photo of a dozen is clearest, while zoomed in 800%.

Same here. I spent a good chunk of the evening just today messing around with Steam to see what I could get running on Linux. It's been a while since I tried in earnest, but I got all the games I wanted running (minus VR, but that felt like it was close). Even though I barely play any games anymore, it's the last reason I haven't wiped my Win10 drive.

Statistics show adoption rate is increasing. According to [1] it historically took a decade to double Linux desktop market share, but market share has almost doubled since 2022.

Now, two in five PCs worldwide are running Windows 10, an unsuppoted OS. What are the user's options? Either buy a new PC, switch to Mac or run Linux.

[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/2025-could-finally-be-the-year...

For a lot of those people the options are "spend a lot of money to upgrade your hardware to either run Win11 or buy a Macbook" or "use your existing hardware and ask your tech friend for a Linux distro recommendation".

When prices are going nuts and the economy is tanking the option that doesn't cost you money starts to look a lot more appealing, and for some the first isn't even an option; they're completely priced out of the new market for the foreseeable future.

In reality, people will probably keep their insecure Win 10 machines running as long as they can. Linux is a leap especially for busy folk (most people in this economy).

I predict a rise in antivirus company share prices.

If Apple do make the rumoured cheap A-series based MacBook, it could be a hit.

I honest felt like the tide had turned when my elderly parents both asked me wipe Windows and install Linux on their laptops this Christmas. So far they have both had an overwhelming positive experience. They say it's such a relief not to have to dodge the minefield of popups and upsells and ads.

Just anecdotally, I'm seeing a lot of momentum in my social circles. My friends and their parents (!!!) who are asking about Linux.

My "year of the Linux desktop" was in 2010, because even then everything was much, much faster on Ubuntu. (It helps major browsers were shipping 64-bit versions for Linux only, but Minecraft simply did not run on my laptop under Windows).

Does anyone else feel kind of sick (something like pity?) when they see people using Windows 11? Right click menus which have a loading spinner, advertisements littered throughout, and headlines from right-wing tabloids spammed in news widgets.

These past six years have been absolutely bonkers incredible for Linux, and it can all be attributed to Microsoft shooting themselves in the head with Windows. Proton work started after Windows 8 and really became usable in late 2019. Now we're seeing something again with Windows 11. It's awesome, hope it sticks.

> These past six years have been absolutely bonkers incredible for Linux, and it can all be attributed to Microsoft shooting themselves in the head with Windows.

It can’t all be attributed to Microsoft. There have been huge efforts by many parties to make this happen. Folks working on the Kernel, desktop environments, distros, applications, tooling, advocacy, and more.

I believe people who say they are being pushed away from ms because of disillusionment with windows 11. But there also needs to be someone to pick up the ball after it was dropped — and those people deserve equal if not more credit

I've even seen gaming YTbers I occasionally watch being fed up with that shit and moving or at least trying Linux

MS fucked up

Pewdiepie’s linux video alone is almost at 8 million views. There’s another 3-4 million views in reaction videos to it. I think primagen also stayed on archlinux after his ricing experiment

It feels that way. I’m just one person but I’ve tried Linux several times over the decades and never stuck with it, for various reasons. Last year I got so fed up of Windows and tried Ubuntu. I can confidently say I’ll never install Windows again. Ubuntu has been good out of the box, but another difference to when I last tried Linux is the invention of LLM’s. Any issues I’ve had have been quickly resolved through troubleshooting with Claude/Perplexity, and I’ve used both to quickly learn the things I need. There were occasions last time where I spent literal days trying to fix things through searching and that was intolerable.

Yeah, myself and several friends of mine with EOL Windows 10 PCs are looking to jump ship.

Simpler - it is now objectively a much better OS and it’s free

If Microsoft could make me move to Linux, they will be getting a lot more people to switch. I was very into Microsoft's OS since v3.0, I used Outlook for all my email for decades. I recently moved over to Linux Mint and Firebird for email and have not looked back. All my Windows VMs are now Linux VMs. All of Microsoft's invasive "AI" was the last straw. I don't like the direction they are headed.

Avalanches start with small movements ...

I'd argue that its drips and papercuts all over. Everything is trying to extract rent, and that makes things unreliable enough that even basic users are starting to notice.

Um, can't connect to the Internet? Nope, you can't play a game on your machine, and you may not even be able to log in. Service hiccup? Booted from whatever you were doing because we can't extort your if we leave data on your machine. And, oh, if you have the nerve to complain, you ungrateful serf, we will kickban you with no recourse. etc.

And this is before we even bring the AI bukkake into the picture ...

For those of us that have been using Linux for a long time (since 1999, here), the improvements have been incremental, and hard to spot over time. But sometimes I encounter something and it just blows my mind how good desktop Linux has become.

I just bought a laptop that came with Fedora installed. This isn't anything new, but what really blew me away is that everything... just worked. No tinkering. No alternative modules built from source (hopefully with a good DKMS script). Everything... just worked. I'd blocked out a few hours to get everything working in a satisfactory state and... I had nothing to do, really.

And when I say everything I mean EVERYTHING, not just the features that were significant to my own use cases. Mind-blowing, if you think about it.

I had a similar experience after switching to Fedora Silverblue (but any of the immutable Linuxes will probably do - and over time, I'm sure most will be like that). Had set aside a bunch of time to do a major version update, everything fully backed up, and then it was done in a couple of minutes. Literally no different from any other update.

I've done more than a handful of major version updates since then, and almost don't bother to backup any more.

To temper expectations a bit, I’ve installed Linux recently on my HP Omen to pretty decent results. Still having some lingering issues, e.g the WiFi adapter going dead after a sleep. But have found the experience relatively similar to my recent windows installs.

For a laptop user who likes to game, you’ll definitely encounter some issues based on my experience. Better than it was 2 years ago, but it’s not a seamless experience (laptops!!) that you’d expect from posts like these.

For a Linux savvy user, it’s definitely worth the switch. I haven’t had any ads in months and it’s magical

See this for something that might help your Wi-Fi issue. https://gist.github.com/gornostal/192e2ae29af3da1baeea384d0f...

I had the same problem on my new Yoga laptop with Fedora and an Intel BE200 Wi-Fi card.

Thanks, will give that whirl. Appreciate the info

This has been my experience too, with installing common (Ubuntu, Fedora, and other popular ones) distros.

The only exception is when we got a really new batch of Lenovo P1 laptops for work, and the patches likely were not fully merged yet. So as long as you’re not getting the first batch it is generally pretty good.

I wanted to try Fedora recently but it crashed over and over in the install on the screen where you select a time zone. Looked it up and tons of people had the same issue and didn't find any fix that worked for me.

Turned me off Fedora completely.

Tried two other distros on the same machine right afterwards with no problems though.

I've made the complete switch recently (been using Linux on and off for years, including WSL as well) after my pleasant experience with the Steam Deck and it's been fantastic, but not without issues. A recurring issue over the years of trying Linux has been WiFi drivers; I really can't afford to have WiFi not work as I can't run an Ethernet cable to my computer room. I get that Linux heavily relies on volunteer work, but a broken WiFi driver due to an update is a big roadblock.

Beside that though, I'm happy to have left Windows behind completely.

I left desktop Linux in 2010 because everything did not just work. Looking at the responses to your comment, it seems that basic stuff like wifi still doesn't always just work. If it's been true since 2010, I think the problem is systematic, and won't go away with "just one more year".

If you mean with ”just working” that any distro works out-of-the-box with any piece of hardware ever existing, then obviously no, that won’t happen. It won’t happen with any OS ever.

I have never had any issues with any Linux-distro regarding WiFi. Most hardware I have used has been largely compatible even. Maybe I have just been lucky, but it seems there’s millions of us who are really lucky these days.

What has also changed from 2010’s is that the documentation like Arch wiki is a lot better. You can also ask an LLM to help you configure things - obvs the docs are better and safer - so if and when you do have a problem, there’s actually sources to help you fix it.

A lot of the WiFi and BT issues were due to proprietary firmware blobs which weren't included in package management repos either due to licensing issues or decision not to pollute OSS repos with nonfree software.

This has mostly been solved by either putting them in the nonfree repos or just the fact that WiFi hardware vendors aren't using such stuff anymore.

I still remember pulling firmware blobs for my Broadcom cards, then it magically worked fine. It was far from trivial and I think that's what caused a lot of people who tried Linux on laptops in early 2000s to turn away.

> it seems that basic stuff like wifi still doesn't always just work

This is true. I've been using Ubuntu since 2006, but still see issues with

Wifi: Ubuntu 22 didn't work out of the box with a 2014 macbook air

Bluetooth: maddening trying to set "listening" mode instead of headset mode on JBL earphones - it seems to choose randomly every time it connects, and the setting isn't exposed in any UI

Sleep: I don't think I've ever seen sleep/suspend working reliably on a Linux laptop, to the point I don't know the difference between the two. I have one thinkpad which never wakes from sleep, and also never fully shuts down on system shutdown without a long press of the power button.

I accept all this so that I don't have to wait seconds for basic UI things to happen, like switching virtual desktop (osx) and opening the application launcher (windows).

Counterpoint: I've been using enterprise thinkpads for the past 15 years and never had issues with wifi, or suspend. So again, it's about how you choose your hardware so it works with Linux...

yeah, the "it actually just works now" is quite a powerful transition. for all my hardware, that happened like 3 years ago, but I've been Mac-bound for a decade until recently so I'm only really sinking in now.

On my Windows machines, every time I have to click my Bluetooth icon, which is about a dozen times every day, the full second pause before it presents me with a menu makes me wish I didn't need Windows on two of my systems. It's mindbogglingly stupid that a UI element has a one second delay to present a menu on...any hardware, much less "2025" hardware.

But that's the kind of product they're shipping, because that's the kind of people they're employing, and that's the kind of decisions they're allowed to make. It permeates everything.

And on laptops you may need to write a script to disable Bluetooth before the lid closes and re-enable it when the lid opens because Microsoft in its wisdom forced S0 sleep but didn't care to make it stable enough so a drivers can't crash your system during it.

Additionally there is no reliable mechanism to do so as doing it through Task Scheduler causes a race condition - will your script be allowed to run and finish before S0 sleep cuts power to it? You can not be sure.

Additionally if you got cornered into making an online account Task Scheduler doesn't even work with that reliably (for task that require privileges like turning off BT on lock and turning it on on unlock) so then you have disable the online account Microsoft manipulated you to make. Of course the failure is silent so you have to discover all that by yourself.

That is a a driver but Windows can also crash during S0 sleep because of its own updater failing to update some random app (like Microsoft Phone w/e that is).

On Linux it's just not an issue. The script runs on events and is guaranteed to finish. Random updates at random times won't happen either.

I strongly agree on this. I mained Windows for the last few years and got to the point where I was comfortable doing development similarly to how I would on Linux (text editor and command line build tools, cl, ml64, batch, etc.). I did that mostly so I could game and develop on the same machine. I learned a ton doing it but it has just gotten too awful to carry on.

It was faster to rg to search files, drop into WSL and run find for file name searches. The start menu was laggy, explorer was laggy (open up a folder with a couple dozen OGG files and it won't render for a solid minute). Mystery memory usage from privileged processes I had little control over. Once I realized that the one game I play (Overwatch) ran on Linux I decided to swap back.

I installed Linux Mint earlier this year and I've been extremely happy. The memory consumption is stable and low, and if something is broken I have the control to fix it. It just feels so much less hostile. This is largely possible thanks to the work Steam has done with Proton. The last real barrier is kernel level anti-cheat which prevented me from trying out this years Call of Duty. Oh well!

> It was faster to rg to search files, drop into WSL and run find for file name searches.

Fixed via the Everything app - instant search of any file in a nice resizable/sortable table

> if something is broken I have the control to fix it.

Instant search doesn't exist, how do you fix it?

>It was faster to rg to search files

This continuously drives me crazy on Windows and macOS. I am befuddled at the number of times where I'm searching for a top level subdirectory that starts with 'foo' but the search bar spins and spins..

Eventually I get fed up and just sort by name and perform an alphabetical visual search in meat-space.

On Windows, just use Everything: https://www.voidtools.com/

Yes, "Everything" is the tool to use, but to be honest, why isn't MS getting the same speed?

I'm a SE for 25 years now, sticking with C#. Microsoft always did great tech platforms and left the missing 20% to the developers. Look at the .net framework (the old one), microsoft windows until win11, office until 2025, and even Excel that can't open csv files because the delimeter is a region setting.

On one side I hated this attitude, on the other side it allowed and enabled developers to get their own business running - see jetbrains resharper functionality - visual studio up until 2024 was a mess without it...

I see this contradiction all the time. Windows is a mess but there are lots of examples of rock solid, performant applications that have been developed and maintained over decades. Everything is one, also one that springs to mind which is much more performant compared to Linux alternatives is WinMerge.

> much more performant compared to Linux alternatives is WinMerge

I have found Beyond Compare to be very good on Linux, even on large files/directories.

While Everything is good on Linux you are spoiled with things like fzf or rgfzf (instant fuzzy search on text file content so you can find "TODO" or "ideas to try" in any file instantly).

Fzf also works on Windows. That being said, most content search I need is for PDFs and Office documents.

Maybe I'm more tolerant, but for me Linux was ready for the desktop in 2005 and windows 11 is ok for what I use it for (cubase and games). When I switched my laptop from Windows XP it was a test. 3 years later I noticed I didn't boot back into windows not even once so concluded the test successful. My desktop later was windows only because cubase (and later steam) runs on it, but I honestly don't mind. However, I had to do some development on windows once for a client and that was indeed a horrible experience.

“They've managed to take some of their most revolutionary technological innovations (the NT kernel's hybrid design allowing it to restart drivers, NTFS, ReFS, WSL, Hyper-V, etc.) then just shat all over them”.

Well said. I wonder what the kernel team thinks about it.

ReFS riffs on reflinks - take a gander at XFS.

I really don't understand what is different about my installs of Windows 11 compared to what I read in all these types of articles.

I have zero issues with the platform day in and day out with heavy workloads like Pro Tools and Unreal Engine devkit. Games run without stutter and issue, all my features are snappy, Explorer loads instantly, etc. Even search is performant and gives decent results. I have tweaked a few settings but nothing you can't find in settings menus.

I'm not sure a lot of people having issues with pretty damn stable platform are going to have a better experience in something they have zero familiarity with and isn't exactly going to be intuitive when things go sideways, as they most undoubtedly will.

> Explorer loads instantly, etc. Even search is performant and gives decent results.

There is likely too big of a gap in "terminology".

For example, the file explorer startup is so "Instant" that even Microsoft officially added an option to preload the app to fix the delay. But if you don't notice / don't appreciate real instant, then sure, you won't understand the complaints. (or maybe your hardware masks it well enough)

Similarly, if you've never used Everything or better file manager for search, you might get used to the bad search results and call them "decent" since you're not aware how awesome it can be

I had to edit windows registry to fix the worst misfeatures of start & context menu. I never found solution to random wake up after suspend or missing icons after wake up - MS support was useless. Linux desktop even with non-zero amount of issues can't frustrate me nearly as much as Windows. All games I ran so far on Linux worked as good or better as/than on Windows. I keep Windows installed just in case some game really won't work, but combination of SteamDeck (Proton) and Vulkan did wonders for Linux compatibility kudos to Steam/Valve. And I would not want to do software development on Windows, that is number one reason I am using Linux (not that I am using Unreal Engine). Recent MS fever dream with LLMs only adds to general frustration with Windows.

I have the same confusion as you do. Note, I am not ignorant about Linux or MacOS. I ran Linux as my main OS from 2001 - 2015, still run it on a server. MacOS from 2015 - 2021. Since 2021 I am on Windows for my main machine (a laptop) and my gaming desktop.

Win 11 seems fine to me. I do see Copilot appearing everywhere. I don't see ads from MS at all, though- sometimes my vendor driver-management software asks me if I was to extend my warranty. Not Win11 fault, though. Start menu seems fine, phone integration is nice, OS runs very stable (in the very early days of using Linux 20y ago I marveled at how much more stable it was than Win98! That gap is gone now as far as I can tell).

My suspicion: I am paying for M365 (or whatever they call it now) and so they don't advertise it (or anything?) to me. I don't see CandyCrush or other random things added to my machine. All seems OK.

I've read that Win12 will be subscription-based. Maybe I am personally already there. For now, M365 offers me good value- I use MS Office and OneDrive. But if this changes I can see the equation balance shifting and I will then change platforms again.

TMI, I left MacOS because of Gatekeeper and the inability to repair hardware. Before that I left Linux for work interoperability and regressions I saw on my personal mobile hardware. Neither were "bad", really, I have experienced different trade-offs among the three choices I have used. For now, Win 11 is working just fine for me, with no fuss.

> I do see Copilot appearing everywhere.

> I don't see ads from MS at all

You can only pick one.

I suspect these articles are targeted at techies and tinkerers, where being able to do things their way is very important to them. This is reflected in the many mentions of tinkering with registry keys, which I never have nor felt the need to.

I personally run win11 for gaming, android for media consumption and proxmox for homelab and I think all of these systems are fine as is. They serve their purpose well enough.

My prediction is that steamOS (when it is released) will end up being the only mainstream Linux desktop because of its corporate backing. It would be interesting to see desktop Linux mimicking the android ecosystem, where different vendors provide a different skin on top of SteamOS.

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

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

Is your windows 11 home edition or managed by corporate IT?

I think the main problem for Linux is the fragmentation and lack of focus. If you can live without the Adobe suite and such, any number of distros and desktops can serve you well, but it often tries to do so

An initiative like Omarchy got a lot of traction just by "picking one" of all the infinite options available, writing decent documentation for how it all works in Omarchy specifically, and having the whole thing install in minutes.

Omarchy and tiling VM's are not for everyone but I think the principles are great, and can surely be applied to other DE's as well.

I'm giving Apple the benefit of the doubt until macOS 27 (but I'm still on 15.7.4 hehe).

Mac OS X and Aqua wasn't very well received either at launch.

A similar thing happened with the flat design of iOS 7.

Apple's pattern is initially going overboard with a new design and then scaling it back slowly like a sculptor.

I think they're happy with this method, even if things miss at first the big changes usually create a lot of hype and excitement for the masses.

The vast majority of users don't care about the finer things, Apple knows that the nerds can sweat it out until they straighten things out at which point everyone is happy in a hero's journey kind of way.

I just hope this pattern stays true and that this isn't an inflection point.

Adding from Mac perspective, I am also keeping an eye on Linux. I’ve hit a wall with Mac window management, and find the operating system just gets in the way for professional use across multiple of their digital “desktops”. I have no useful way to isolate work streams, and would gladly move to something better.

The blocker for Linux for me as someone who wants some level of reliability has always been fiddling with low level config, but now with Claude Code, low level config appeals!

There's a mix of both worlds that I've tried for a while and want to pick up again in 2026: Use macOS so that I can utilize the great hardware and the well integrated drivers (e.g. sleep, performance, silence), but then for each project / work stream just fire up a lightweight linux VM fullscreen and do everything related there. E.g. all browser windows/tabs, apps, file explorer windows, terminal sessions. When I stop working I pause the VM. When I need to continue everything is as I left it. The main reason why I stopped was that the 2d hardware acceleration for Linux didn't work in UTM.app. I think I'll just need switch to Parallels or VMWare

For the last few days I was trying to revive an old MacBook Air for a non-techie friend. It had 4 GB of RAM.

It had Catalina on it and was completely unusable. Hovering on anything would bring up the spinner which would take a couple of minutes to resolve itself.

I tried reinstalling the OS, which didn't help. The top recommendation was to revert to Mojave.

Finally, after three days of struggle, I gave up and installed Linux Mint.

The difference is absolutely unbelievable. Even heavy applications like LibreOffice and Zoom are snappy.

Apple makes such good hardware. I felt really sad about the state of their software compatibility with older machines.

So, I don't know about the rest of the world, but I know one more person will be using Linux in 2026!

Yeah I've been running EndeavourOS on my 2015 Air (4 GB) and it is so incredibly snappy and efficient now. Makes macOS look like a lurching zombie of an OS.

Yep, we upgraded an old ~2010 iMac to 8gb and put Mint on it, good as new.

I've been using a system 76 laptop for the past 3 years. Runs perfectly, no surprises. Unfortunately, I need a mac for work because the laptop service folks do not know what to do with linux and do not have a relationship with a vendor like system76.

Pros: The best development experience you can have. Everything is native linux. There is no beating that. This of course will be a problem if hobbies/work use windows. I've never been a windows person. So I've never missed it. Power and peripherals work on the system76 seamlessly.

Cons: Battery life. Runs out in about 2.5 hrs but its an AMD not an ARM.

I did run linux on a tower exclusively while I did my PhD. Did everything on it - code, writing my thesis in LaTeX, store data, connect to dropbox for backup, watch netflix, etc.

You're not missing much by dumping windows.

“Runs perfectly” but it’s 2025 and you’re getting 2.5 hours of battery life.

Seems more hardware than OS related, my MacBook Air M2 on Asahi Linux gets to 9+ hours.

> Cons: Battery life. Runs out in about 2.5 hrs but its an AMD not an ARM.

Damn, even my several year old Intel + Nvidia MSI GE66 can match that. Why is it so bad?

Really only Photoshop is the big gaping hole I feel as a linux user. Gimp is just atrocious.

There is a desktop webview of PhotoPea, but it's not the same.

I thought the same about Gimp, until I sat down and tried to learn it's workflows. Once you adjust, it's pretty great. imo, ymmv, obviously.

2.5 hours of battery is a serious gaping hole imo.

Year of the Linux desktop perhaps; Year of the Linux laptop perhaps not..

2.5h of battery life is absolutely not typical though. Linux on laptops is often fine.

Picking hardware with good support helps a lot. I would expect system76 to be a safe bet though (but I haven't tried their hardware).

I removed the batteries in our laptops because we use them like desktops all the time and it's one less fire hazard to worry about.

I guess it works out for you but I’d be inconvenienced for not being able to move around and paranoid that I may jerk the wire powering the machine. Still glad you were able to find a solution for your setup though.

Even if you are plugged all the time you may want batteries as it prevents crashes when power is cut off or the cable randomly disconnects (especially with USB-C that can easily happen as it's designed to disconnect easily). It's not that file system of today are immune to stability issues when power randomly cuts off not to mention losing your work/state. Batteries are like UPS for a desktop computer.

Have you tried running Affinity products via Wine? I've heard good things. I personally ditched Adobe years ago for Affinity on Windows & Mac. Only people I know still using Adobe for photo or vector work at a company that doesn't blink at paying for it.

Depending on what you are doing, if you don't fancy Gimp, then maybe one of: Krita, Darktable, Inkscape?

Have you tried Photoshop's online version that runs in a Web browser?

(it uses wasm)

So? It is still a pretty popular and useful piece of software even if your circle doesn't use it.

One of the big barriers to having more people use Linux is having the software packages they use to actually do work available on the platform. Image editing is the most popular software type that isn't really available on Linux with an equivalent to the commercial package that everyone uses.

This post does examplefy what we’re seeing, a general indication of some swelling of momentum but I bet it’s still going to be from 2% to maybe 3 or 5% at most until Linux can fix a few things about the community, issues with install difficulty such as dual booting and other issues, and the technical knowledge barrier to entry until more distribution with hardware comes along. Although of course system 76 and steam deck are great moves in this direction they’re still relatively niche for now.

There will never be a “year of the Linux desktop” the same way that there has never been a “year of the Mac desktop”, it’s just a slow building of users over time anyway.

Regarding the Steam Deck, Linux is _already_ 3% of Steam users: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey, while MacOS is under 2%.

I think it's also maybe worth pointing out that "non-enthusiast desktop OS user" is a segment that is shrinking. A lot of the people that aren't going to Linux are just going to smartphones only rather than buy a new laptop for Win11.

Steam users represent well the pc gaming crowd, but they don’t represent well the majority of the mac or Linux user crowd, of course.

But you raise a good point that some users will stop using windows without ever picking up another desktop os at all. Not many that don’t already not use desktops, but some for sure.

Ever tried to get answers from "the Windows community?"

https://github.com/hahndorf/Set-Privacy

Still not the year of the Windows desktop.

Windows doesn’t really have an enthusiast community, it just has users.

s/users/hostages/

Your describing the impact Steam Deck is having without SteamOS being available to easily install on a custom built machine. The tipping point is going to come this year when people who are building new machines have the option to install Windows or SteamOS. A lot of people are going to pick SteamOS.

Sure, they’ll gain more of the gaming enthusiast segment for sure this way, and it will be a tipping point for those users. I just hope that there are ways beyond the gaming sphere to create converts though, as enthusiast gaming is still a smaller segment than people realise, and it will take a long time if this is only something people really consider with new builds, especially with today’s hardware prices! I wish I could run steamos myself reliably, but I get issues with my old nvidia pascal card still and it causes crashes for me on many games, so I can’t commit until I buy new hardware I don’t think.

Most charts I've seen indicate Linux already passed 5% usage worldwide.

Depends on how you count it

Not quite: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...