Holy fucking shit this isn't just a meme, wtaf is going on at Microsoft.
The FOSS aficionados of Lemmy will probably be quick to tell me it's always been shit, but this seems like a marked increase in bad decisions in the past 5-10 years
If you go back to an older version of Windows, it becomes clear how bad Microsoft has become. Try Windows 95 and you'll be surprised how clean it is. How few distractions the OS is showing into your face. How tidy the menus are and they also give you little hints for the keyboard shortcuts
little hints for the keyboard shortcuts
FYI, those are called menu mnemonics. 😊
I look forward to a glirchy vibe coded OS that uses embeded AI for everything, yet some people still manage to turn into a demented semi-functional ecosystem. Probably mostly run by seniors and computer illiterate consumers who just "want latest tech" for bragging rights.
I used to do V Dash contracts for MSFT.
I knew that the Xbox 360 3RR, red ring of death problem... was so bad, that it actually would have been more cost effective for MSFT to give each buyer two 360s, instead of one, at the same price, because of how mismanaged the RMA process was... I knew a whole bunch of such details a almost a decade before the documentary on it came out.
Yay NDAs.
...
I was also there during the Windows 8 rollout.
Shut down basically everything for a month, because MSFT 'dogfoods' all their software: Every MSFT worker is beta/alpha testing all MSFT software all the time.
We spent weeks just, unable to have more than 3 windows open at a time, half the tools we used on a daily basis just not working.
We asked them to let us go back to 7, asked them if therr was some way to return to a 7 like GUI.
For weeks they said nope, impossible, Win 8 is an entirely new GUI, totally new OS, the Win 7 GUI isn't there.
Oh then uh, weeks later, yeah, yeah it actually is there, you just have to follow this arcane override proceduren to see and use it.
... And then they just relented, put the non tablet UI fully back in, and called that Windows 8.1.
...
Windows is now layers upon layers upon decades of insane spaghetti code.
Even in Win 10, which was the last version I ever used... there are like 3 or 4 different eras of UI, for various settings menus, which people sometimes need to actually use... but they are considered legacy and thus not important.
Sometimes some newer era UI menus will have some of the options from some of the more buried stuff, but not all of them.
It is a gigantic fucking mess.
My favorite detail on the 3RL saga was when I took my second bricked unit to the local UPS store and they had a special bin for boxes that perfectly fit the 360 for shipping them back.
Oh how I miss the beautiful simplicity of Win95/98/NT UIs. It seems as our screens have become larger, they found more shit to put on them that I don't want to see.
Boiled lobster effect at work.
If you bought a top of the line computer in 1990, it would barely have been able to run Win95. It wouldn't have been able to run Win98 at all. Conversely, even with Win11 obsoleting a lot of systems due to TPM, there are plenty of 7 or 8 year old systems that will still work with it just fine.
Win95 was a leap in complexity compared to Win3.1/DOS 6. It replaced a sloppy, manual memory management system with a sloppy, automatic memory management system. It created the registry system as we know it, and instantly got a reputation as a fast way to ruin your system.
Do you like files named "big long name.txt"? Because sometimes that will come out as "biglon~1.txt" or something like that. It was still using the same shitty FAT system, now with 32-bit extensions that technically allowed long file names, but had to shorten them for compatibility with older stuff.
Win98 added Active Desktop, which made your desktop part of IE. This meant that every time IE crashed, your whole desktop went with it. Didn't necessarily need to reboot to fix it, but it cleared out your background and a toolbar thing. In a way, it was an attempt to do what Electron apps do now, except with Microsoft proprietary web stuff.
Oh, and once it got USB support, it sucked ass. It had to reinstall drivers if you plugged your keyboard into a different USB port than you usually did.
Neither Win98 or ME would fix its memory management issues. That had to wait for Microsoft to get off their ass and release a home version of NT with WinXP (sorta Win2k, but that's complicated). This memory management issue was the root cause of most BSODs at the time.
People hated Windows at the time for exactly the same fundamental reason they hate it today: it's a clunky piece of shit. Win 7/8/10 was actually an attempt to simplify things in many ways, but Microsoft has fallen back to what they did before.
Business majors.
Same as everywhere else, management wants random shit done chop chop chop, fires actual developers who tell them they're the dumbest pieces of shit they've seen in this lifetime and hire random bros who say "whatever dude, just wanna get paid" then copy-paste google results because bing sucks.
Oh, but it absolutely is true. Microsoft really did decide to use React Native for parts of the Windows 11 Start menu. They're also using it in sections of the Settings app.
The technical reality is even more absurd than the meme suggests. Microsoft is currently maintaining eight different UI frameworks for Windows, including their own .NET MAUI and WinUI 3 that were specifically built for their OS. Yet somehow they thought, "You know what this native operating system needs? A JavaScript framework originally designed for mobile apps."
The CPU usage spikes aren't necessarily from React Native itself being particularly heavyweight, but rather from the fundamental architectural choice of running a web-based rendering engine for core system UI elements. Every time you click Start, you're essentially launching a mini web application just to display a menu.
What's particularly galling is that Microsoft has acknowledged WinUI's performance issues for years, to the point where they recommend their partners use the older WPF for performance-critical applications. So instead of fixing their native framework, they decided to add another layer of abstraction.
This is what happens when corporate development teams prioritize "developer experience" and trendy frameworks over system efficiency. Richard Stallman's expression in that image perfectly captures the appropriate level of technical horror at this decision.
The old world built operating systems. The new world builds web apps that pretend to be operating systems.
I have a Windows laptop for the first time in well over a decade for a project I am working on. Even though it is overpowered (i7, 64gb ram), and it is currently "idle", the cooling fans are working overtime because the damn OS is always busy doing some random shit when "idle". This is AFTER I ran a debloat script. It was near impossible to use before then.
EDIT: I found the cause of the fanning issue and different behavior between Win 11 and Linux (Pop!_OS). Even though the laptop comes with an Nvidia RTX 4000 series GPU, Windows 11 set the global default GPU to be the integrated graphics (Intel UHD). The same laptop under Pop!_OS automatically set the default GPU to Nvidia. As soon as I dug this up and switched the settings to Nvidia, the laptop stopped fanning full speed nonstop.
Seriously? Got a link for that? (Not in a “I don’t believe you” way, but more of an “I’m curious to learn more” way)
Somehow this is hard to google, so sorry for linking to reddit, but here's a thread where people are discussing it.
(edit: looks like someone found a better source elsewhere in the comments)
Not to mention the memory leak and how the "Start" process in Task Manager increase RAM usage every time you click that.
LOL
Fuck JavaScript in all its forms.
Ok, in a browser is fine. But HARD pass on electron and all this bullshit
Ok, in a browser is fine.
JavaScript was never fit for purpose even in a browser. We could've had Python or Scheme in the browser instead, but nooooo, Brandon Eich had to be fucking incompetent.
Recently something has changed and the start menu likes to search for apps in its browser (not my default app). I used to press windows key then type "snip" for the screenshot tool, now half of the time is does the wrong thing ...
Also here's a link to post talking about react in the start menu https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30384494
Yeah. It's quite obnoxious how bad they've made their OS and it's obvious they are FARMING searches on bing with these tactics lmao
It's why I'm gonna change to Linux permanently come the end of Win10.
And it's a terrible app, at that. No organization, just either some random application links, or one giant list with no categories or organization past alphabetical.
Don't they have like 9 graphics libraries and frameworks accross 4 languages already?
Switched to Linux at the beginning of the year. Still have a lobotomized local windows 11 boot for gaming/VR still though. Can't wait for the day I can finally get rid of it totally.
I'm foreseeing a spike in people asking me for help installing Linux.
For what it’s worth, GNOME Shell and its extensions are written in JavaScript too.
This explains so much
AFAIK, React is a Single-Page Web Application that refreshes everytime something changes. It's benefits are fast load times and lower overhead because it ONLY updates things that are changed on re-render, but the downsides are that it relies on other libraries for things like multiple pages, etc.
So for it to be a Windows System application, yes that's fucking attrocious. Did you ever hear how angry people were about the Warcraft 3 update that added a bunch of webapp nonsense and bricked a lot of people's old copies? Well, that's basically what Windows 11 did.
This is hilariously bad. I think it might be time to bring back some of the old "launcher" utils for Windows like Slickrun or Launchy.
Jesus I really need to install linux don’t I?
Is there a distribution that is better at running conversion layers like Wine? I need to run some windows only software (Solidworks, Affinity Suite…)
Remember when discord changed its android app to use react native?
They fixed most of it by now but god it was terrible back then
I can't reproduce the CPU spike, but Windows is overall slower. Strangely, the calendar on the taskbar takes a long time to load the first time that I open it.
People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
