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The Picard Maneuver @lemmy.world

1w ago

Is that bad?

Programmer Humor @programming.dev

Is that bad?

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329 comments

Don't they have like 9 graphics libraries and frameworks accross 4 languages already?
- It's actually at least 13.
  
  I remember people arguing that Linux having two main toolkits were holding it back back in 2000-2010 but then Microsoft invents a few billion UIs just for itself. Even the one big megacorp can't be bothered to keep things consistent.
  
  They need to scrap all this shit and take a massive step back and start over. Absolute bollocks.
  
  What MS needs is a new unifying framework and then they can change everything to that new standard. Call it Framework 927.

it needs to check your license and onedrive files for DRM compliance. every click

Is it really? Does microsoft have no faith in its own user32 UI API?
- Yeah, windows apps, even official ones are just a mix of react native apps.
  https://microsoft.github.io/react-native-windows/
- I used to be with it! (XAML) Then they changed what it is! (WinUI)
  
  WinUI is yet another thing, it's not React native. It's kind of a new version of WPF with additional things and you can still use XAML

Oops I pit my mouse in the bottom left now its loading 50 web pages filled with ads under the guise of being a widget

I had to test it. That is wild.

here’s a bandaid: https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher
- There's also open shell if you like pre-W10 interfaces https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu
  
  This kept breaking with updates I am so glad I wiped it and single booted linux
  
  there’s several, in my comparisons: explorerpatcher looked a lot more actively developed and mature, but i never tried open shell….

Switched to windows 10 a month or so ago just for ease of use with video games and mods. Man does windows suck ass. Wants to open random web pages, use dumb AI tools and give me useless info on every empty inch of screen space . At the end of the day it works but quality of life is low.

I'm no programmer nor coder or such, I call myself advanced user only.
If having part of an app (I refer app as OS here, and start menu as part of an OS) to spike CPU/memory usage, does that means that part is not being used without being called? and leaves resources fully free? Sure big spike happen when the sub-part is called, but without being called?
IF part of an app is not even loaded while not used, isn't that actually good? I mean, depends how often that app part is called and have to load from the void.
I imagine that could be better than having unused part loaded all the time, wasting the resources?
Also, I totally skip part of poorly coded compared to old smooth and optimized code.
- Yes, all things being equal, your understanding is valid. But let's do a car comparison.
  You have your current car. It burns a little gas running idle, and much more when you're using the gas pedal to accelerate.
  Now you buy a new, Windows 11 car, and it not only burns more gas idling, but when you accelerate it sucks down so much gas you can watch the gas meter go down.
  The outrage is that the OS is so badly designed and implemented, something you do a lot causes everything else on your computer to slow down, and costs you extra in your electricity bill, because it is needlessly consuming irrationally huge amounts of CPU power to open a menu.
- Well, yes, in some cases, but the start menu is something you interact with very often. The average user (and I mean office worker in their 40s)doesn't even pin items to the taskbar. As such, the main way to open apps is through the start menu. Think about this way. In this situation on a laptop, you either save ram or battery. Constant cpu spikes aren't good for energy efficiency. This also means hogging your ssd, which might be an issue in specific situations. On the other side, keeping the start menu fully in ram could be perceived as a waste, it really depends on how often you use the start menu and how much you value energy efficiency.
  
  In case of the start menu, the sensible thing would be to optimize it sufficiently so that it doesn't hurt being kept ready constantly.
  
  The crux of the problem is that clicking Start should display a low-resolution background image and 29 low-resolution icons, with some text and links. Bringing it to life should load a couple hundred k of disk into RAM and be imperceptible to the naked eye on the task manager.
  My 12th-gen, 14-core processor that boosts to 3.5GHz should be able to do all that many hundreds of times a second without any serious stress.
  Yet, I can click the start icon repeatedly by hand and hold my computer in excess of 40%
  It's not a direct issue, and any modern computer will have no problem handling the load, but it calls out Win11 for attention to detail problems.
  
  I've been trying to help my parents use Windows since the '90s. They still to this day have no idea what the Start menu is.
  
  It's also pretty common to type Win + NameOfProgram + Enter, which necessarily opens the start menu and spikes the darn CPU. This has been a very common way to interact with the OS since Vista, and, as with so many other things in Microsoft land, has gotten worse.
  WindowsKey -> "fire" -> Enter ==> Firefox is now open!
  
  Much thx for explanation,
  Looks like my understanding is valid - it is situational.
  With a pointing to, I've noted most office workers do have apps pinned, by themselves or IT guy. Often even too many, like 3-4 web browsers lol. Also they rarely work on laptops, but office PCs. At least my country (Europe).
  Also, could guess MS or most big tech companies may want users to make common parts used faster, to make them buy new faster :giggle:.
  
  Reasonably advanced user in my 30s, I interact with it vs pinned icons because I don't like taking my fingers off the keyboard.
- it should take 0.01% of the cpu, instead it uses a lot more than that. any app, or piece of is, that uses much more than it should is wasteful.
  wasting electricity, wasting resources that should be available to other software….
  on top of that, react native is very insecure, so throwing wasteful, insecure bloat into one of the simplest parts of an operating system… and for no reason other than laziness….
  and then they charge you money for it, and actively fight your ability to use other operating systems for critical things….
- Any normal UI framework will unload UI elements when they're not shown. Yes, that means a CPU/memory spike is normal. But on a modern PC, that spike should be much lower than even 1%, which is why you can't typically see it.

ExplorerPatcher https://github.com/valinet
Been using it for a few months, quite happy. Does not seem to spike CPU with my settings

My pc "spikes" from 6% to 11% but was only noticeable when I raised the update speed to high
Is that the spiking, and are other people seeing more?
- Yeah, about 5-6%.

I don't understand what this means, but try and find a single Windows user who cares (assuming everyone here is on Linux).
- It means the start menu is a web browser showing you a webpage, and thus is very slow.
- Basically. The start menu on windows 11 is really poorly implemented so that whenever you open it your CPU has to kick into overdrive for a split second.
  Fun fact: Even windows users hate shitty performance of really basic software.
- assuming everyone here is on Linux
  Why would you do that?
- Well, I'm on Linux, but I don't think everyone here is. In fact, I suspect most aren't, since Linux penetration (uh-huh-huh, he said "penetration") is less than 2%.
  
  Pretty sure everyone in here is on Android so....

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
- Is Growth Mindset. Don’t you have Growth Mindset?
- 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
  
  I have a very feeble 25-year-old computer running Windows 2000 on a low-wattage CPU for embedded systems, and it feels far more responsive than Windows 11 on my desktop with an AMD 5950x. And I dual-boot Linux, which also feels much faster than Windows 11.
  
  Oh man, thank you for this nostalgia trip your image sent me on!
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  Clean and usable. It's not like Windows 3.1 or 68K-era Mac OS - or modern Windows - where everything's flat. Undifferentiated. Lacking visual hierarchy, despite necessary functional hierarchy. Windows 95 managed relief shading and instant on-click skeumorphism in sixteen colors.
  Nowadays they're afraid to put text on buttons. The buttons don't even depict things! You get a field of abstract squiggles, all with the same color and weight.
  And it's not like Windows 95 was built for experts. There's a "click Start" animation on first boot, it offers a "Windows tour" on every boot, and everything sprouts a tooltip if you hesitate. They treated users like distracted idiots - unlike today, where they treat you like a child.
  
  And the consistent ui.
  
  There did not yet exist channels of psyop slop that could pay MS to give them access to their users at their most vulnerable or it would have been in Vista.
  
  After watching Brutalmoose use a native Windows 98 machine to play old 98 games for like 20 hours, I long for the simpler times of Wandows…
  
  A new coat of paint and a spotlight style search and that’s a mighty fine OS.
  Though it does need a lot of work for security, they really underestimated the internet on that one.
  
  ReactOS really is our future, then, visually speaking. And here I thought we'd have to explain it away, but we can pitch it as clean and calm.
- 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.
  
  Middle manglement is the source of nearly all bad decisions once companies get large enough to have it. Upper management is often dog shit, but they usually have an idea of what they want done. Whether that's. Net positive for consumers is a different story, but they don't intend for it to be implemented poorly.
  Middle manglement then takes that, fucks it up putting each of their little stamps on it as it hits every rung on the ladder as it works it's way down to the people that have to implement it.
- Old Windows was bad, sure, but new Windows is bad on purpose.
- I was expecting it t9 at least be a XAML C# app
- Everything is done by vibe coders under the direction of project managers who're just trying to get their name on shit. No one actually cares about the quality of the end product.
- ~2018 to ~2022 was nice, things started to get a little better. But now it's trash.

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.
- React Native doesn't render using a browser instance, it's native code (as the name implies), it's actually a layer over WinUI 3 (Previous versions used WPF/UWP)
  So it's in the same boat as MAUI, which is also a layer over WinUI 3.
  
  They didn't say it was?
- Can't they extract more data from a mobile set-up? I'm assuming that's why they did it, they're trying to take it to a phone experience for the corporations.
  
  Nope.
  The reason you do react native is because it's easier to hire react native devs. Further, there's a plethora of react native libraries that make it easier to make UXes above other UX frameworks.
  The problem MS has is they have spent decades making platform locked UX frameworks because they were deathly afraid someone would use Linux instead of Windows.
  Browser tech won because every major platform needs a browser and basically no organization was investing in multiplatform UX libraries. The likes of both Microsoft and Apple are openly hostile to such frameworks (QT and GTK come to mind).

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.
- Unticking "alow this drive and its contents to be indexed" and terminating the indexing service helps.
  
  And might as well, not like the fucking search works anyway, even with web search disabled. At least on W10.
- From where have you downloaded the script? Was it trustworthy?
  
  This time around I used the Chris Titus Tech one, but there are a few other open source and reputable scripts out there.
  
  Probably the raphire power shell script. Works pretty well, and is widely used as far as I know
- Have enterprise win 11 now and it isnt as bad as that. Its stupid, but not evil.
- I don't get why people exaggerate this much. I have a laptop with a 7840hs and 32gb of ram so it's also "overpowered" but it's whisper quiet and consumes 30-45w while doing simple tasks. Consumption only increases if I'm running code, playing games, etc which makes total sense.
  Windows is not a well optimized os and the telemetry sucks but you're just flat out lying with your claims. It's either that or your laptop has the worst possible cooling.
  
  I have a laptop that I dual boot Windows 11 and Ubuntu on.
  If I leave the Windows desktop idle for >20 minutes the fans will almost always randomly flare up even though I'm doing nothing. On Ubuntu, the desktop usually stays silent, or sometimes the fans come on a little (probably due to bloated browser apps) but never flare up the way it does on Windows.
  
  No exaggeration. I could literally record video at any time to show how it is fanning like crazy. If it is on, it is fanning like a jet plane.
  EDIT: Problem found. Win 11 defaulted to integrated graphics even though the laptop has an Nvidia GPU. The same laptop with a Linux (Pop!_OS) install defaulted to the Nvidia GPU. That's just dumb.

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.
  https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/1ctuz4w/the_recommended_section_in_start_menu_is_actually/
  (edit: looks like someone found a better source elsewhere in the comments)
  
  Can add farside.link/ before reddit, YT, etc. links, for mirrors!
  https://farside.link/https://reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/1ctuz4w/the_recommended_section_in_start_menu_is_actually/
  
  Not to mention the memory leak and how the "Start" process in Task Manager increase RAM usage every time you click that.
  LOL
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMJNEFHj8b8&t=276
  The start menu section starts @ 4:36
- I want to see how that works too!

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.
  
  How about Lua? I don't like Python that much.
  
  There was an older alternative with PS and Tcl from Sun. I don't know if I would like that more.
  
  Gonna be real, Lua would have been perfect for this. I get what you're saying about netscape though,
  
  What are you talking about, giving one of the only programming languages where binary sizes matters a tiny standard library is a great idea!
- Good news: there's been talk to having python be part of the DOM.
  I believe chromium has been working on it but no real thought on when this will happen.

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
- glad I am not the only one. I even disabled the Bing and Websearch bullshit, but somehow in 1 of 5 cases the search result is not the software I am looking for. Even when I type exactly its name.
  
  Only 1 in 5? This is one of my most frequent gripes I run into. Type ‘sq’ and you get ‘SQL Server Management Studio’ and ‘SQL Server Configuration Manager’. The second you type the ‘L’ for ‘sql’ and all those apps disappear…what?

It's why I'm gonna change to Linux permanently come the end of Win10.
- The only realistic answer to the win11 situation. I chose bazzite because I like to game. It's a dream, I never looked back.
  
  I mean there's also 0patch.
- Why wait? Switch now and get used to it.
  I switched last August.
  
  Say what you will but I'm kind of addicted to the PC Gamepass. I have to get through a backlog before I give it up.
- I'm already rocking Manjaro, put my old windows boot drive in a box in case I need it for whatever reason.
  
  Mint + a game-box user myself :-)
  Sometimes there is an old soft inly working on windows, but they are getting more and more rare as they no monger work on windows... Fantastic.
- Do it now. It's great!
- I've been seriously considering switching to Mint or Ubuntu since they're user friendly. The more I hear about win 11 the less and less I want anything to do with it. also, my pc isn't compatible so there's that 😂
  
  I gave up on windows 11 last week after my downloads folder decided to stop opening any more. Every other folder worked fine, and I could use a save dialogue to see and navigate inside downloads, but if I opened the folder run file explorer I was met woth a never ending "working on it.." Screen. Hours of trawling useless Microsoft posts to see its a common issue but none of the suggested fixes worked.
  I installed Pop! OS, which is essentially Ubuntu but Ive heard works very well with games. Few small hiccoughs getting used to the UI paradigm shift but its motoring along now with no problems. My 5 year old desktop is running much smoother with less overall resource use too. Feels snappier.
  
  Just do it, it's a perfectly functional os. Almost all of them.
  
  Download the Mint live CD and give it a shot!
  
  The easiest distro I have used so far it's Endeavour-Os (for my desktop). All my homelab uses debian except the mandatory W11 VM and a WS for veeam.
  
  That's the reason I swapped.
  So far it's been a good switch
- Same same, I just hope I can replace my dying PC before switching
  
  I just did that, using Fedora KDE now, works great

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.

New CPU benchmark: 100 start menu clicks per second.
- Going to need some LN2 for that!

For what it’s worth, GNOME Shell and its extensions are written in JavaScript too.
- Yet using React is a red flag for an OS. You'd imagine Microsoft has the means to make it work with just JS. I doubt they use 10% of the React depency. All for a start menu...
  
  So is using JavaScript. If I find any enduring process running on my computer running JavaScript, I mercilessly hunt it down, murder it, then uninstall it.
  The only application I allow to run JS is the browser, because the modern web is almost unusable without it. No other app needs it, and there's always an alternative that doesn't.
  
  remember that interview with the microsoft chief imbecile that maybe somewhere somehow up to between 20 to 30 % or 10% of all of the projects is written by AI? https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/05/13/if-ai-is-so-good-at-coding-where-are-the-open-source-contributions/ i think it makes sense...shitty copilot is more likely to suggest some react snippets to the intern tasked with making the start buttom than knowing anything about WinUI or other closed source shit. They should turn WinUI into a react wrapper like they did with powershell.... enshittify everything.

I'm foreseeing a spike in people asking me for help installing Linux.
- He you there, totally random person. How do I install Linux?
  
  Well first and foremost find yourself a distro you like, I'd suggest something Debian based if your just starting out but no judgement if you want to so to speak jump in the deep end. After that you'll grab a .iso file from wherever said distro keeps such things and you'll need to learn how to 'burn' that to either a USB drive or a regular disc if you want to do it old school. Then you'll need to learn how to get to either the boot menu or BIOS on your computer in order to get it to start from the new OS you've just plugged in. After that the install menu on the new distro should walk you through the rest. Don't worry, I know it sounds foreboding but I first did it as a kid, it's easier than it looks.
  
  Any experience with blood sacrifices?
  
  Full guide here for Linux Mint. But the tl;dr is:
  Download iso
  Create bootable USB drive
  Boot to that USB drive
  Press next a bunch in the Mint installer
  
  I’ve been experimenting with Linux for a year now running a home server. It’s not that hard, the other person’s comment is exactly what I did.
  I used Ubuntu at first but when I fried it I figured I’d try Mint on my re-install. It’s been on Mint for about 4 weeks now.
  My thoughts as a still relative newbie:
  On both Ubuntu and Mint, user/group permissions are confusing to me even using the GNOME tools app. I wish I there was a better UI to set it up.
  My issues are mostly to do with external drives. First of all, it’s weird that I even have to specify a mount point if I don’t want to have to memorize my drive’s device ID, but I figured that out.
  Then in Ubuntu I’d reboot and my server software would lose access to the drives. If I unplugged them before rebooting and let it boot then plugged them in the server software could read but not write. So I’d have to do a sudo chmod 777 -R /external drives/ after rebooting too.
  I’m having the same issue with reboots in Mint if I don’t unplug them, but if I do it now remembers the permissions now so I don’t have to do the terminal command. This may have nothing to do with the OS. Maybe I messed something up the first time. 🤷‍♂️ Point is: I’m not having fun dealing with external drives.
  Ubuntu didn’t come with GNOME tools but Mint did. (It’s basically a set of apps for all your system settings. Command line is so annoying for this stuff.)
  Aesthetically, Ubuntu reminds me of Mac OS while Mint reminds of Windows. Apparently they’re the same-ish under the hood.
  I’m a Mac user and I’m not ready to switch my daily driver to Linux yet, but I’m sure I will one day.

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.
- The latest Proton update finally fixed VR on linux for me. It's working like a dream now with my index.
- I'm rocking an LTSC 10 until 2027.
- Depending on what games you’re running you might already be able to. https://lvra.gitlab.io/ https://areweanticheatyet.com/ https://www.protondb.com/

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.
- Small nitpicks: The point of react is that it DOESN'T refresh. It maintains a virtual DOM which is faster to update and diff than the regular browser DOM, which you hinted at. No libraries necessary to do routing, but they do make it easier and better.
  This however is a React Native application which doesn't have the same (browser) backend or requirements. It's native code. There is no refresh or routing per se.
  That all said, the start menu is an abomination of the highest order. It just isn't really React's fault. People just love to hate on React and
  <insert current zeitgeist here>
  . React also gets a bad rap because it's so ubiquitous and easy to start using that novices and morons alike can make atrociously slow, bloated web apps with it.
- I'm confused though. The op says "react native", but AFAIK, react native is a mobile app framework.
  Does it work/deploy on desktop now?
  
  React Native can be built for, not only mobile targets, but multiple platforms, such as Windows, tvs,..., or even the web, trying to use as much native implementations as possible. Now, should you?, that's a different discussion...
  
  Yes, there's support for compiling React Native to UWP apps for Windows. No, I don't know why anyone thought that was a good idea.

Oh man that explains so many pains in the ass at work
- Right?
  Doesn't explain why the fucking lock screen does the same thing though and needs a Ctrl+alt+del just to free up resources
  WHY WOULD IT EVER
  WHYWHYWHYWHYWHYWHYWHYWHYWHYWHYWHYWHYWHYWHYWHY

We are living in Richard Stallmans worst nightmare rn

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.
- They have power toys run now which is pretty nice and fast
  
  I love PowerToys Run. The Command Palette is ass compared to it. PT Run is basically KRunner from KDE, and I'm absolutely here for it. Finding things (that you have properly indexed) is so fast and easy!
- I love Launchy, never stopped using it.

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…)
- I've got Wine 9, running on Linux Mint. I mostly use it for older games and a few Windows programs like IrfanView. All my modern games I bought on Steam, run great under Linux. (Steam has a native Linux client and uses it's own Windows compatability layer called Proton to run games).
  I use LibreOffice for productivity, Thunderbird for email and GIMP has a native Linux client, too.
- I tried using vms or wine, which wasn't a good experience. But my computer isn't really the fastest. BUT i got an solution for you. I am using an old computer as a backup with windows. It needs an average gpu like an geforce 970. Then install sunshine and moonlite and connect to it. Its a software like remote desktop, but its so fast that you can play games, which is the original intend. But you can use it for Cad or other programs aswell, Iam still impressed that this works (and its open source)
  
  As someone who has been on Linux (openSUSE Tumbleweed) for almost 6-7 months now, I still don't understand how to get some of my programs running in Wine. I tried Bottles, and that's a little better, but it still leaves MUCH to be desired. I have two SSDs in my computer, one Windows and one Linux, and that's how I do some of my stuff. Lutris works for some things, but I generally don't like having 3-4 programs that are trying to do the same thing, but it only works on 1-2 of those programs. In my opinion, it's a little silly, but I've mainly just given up on trying to make all of that work and just boot into Windows when I need something done quickly without having to jump through hoops. I love Linux, but it is still lacking in some areas.
  The best part about Linux, though, is that we can potentially fix our issues with a little bit of collaboration, whereas with Windows, you're stuck with whatever M$ wants you to have. It's something, at least! :)
  
  I'm saving this comment because our engineering department has been complaining about rdp being too slow for CAD.
- For windows-only software, you can keep a copy of windows as a dual boot. Not the most ideal solution, but minimizing windows usage by any little bit decreases the chances of you getting annoyed at Windows.
  Alternatively, if it's a lightweight software, you could run it in a virtual machine and use something like WinApps to blend it into Linux
- At the risk of saying, "I use arch btw" - I've found CachyOS to be fairly great.
  I'm running it on my Rog Zephyrus M16 purchased in late 2023 (it came with Windows 11). It's great for pretty much all games that I've thrown at it with proton, Heroic games handles Amazon Games, Epic, and GOG stuff.
  You have lots of options (probably too many to be honest) for getting windows programs to run on Linux - ranging from very hands on with no-frills wine to more hand holding things like Lutris or Bottles.
  My wife (who is only a techie from osmosis) switched to CachyOS on her laptop and seems to be fine with it (her game of choice is Last Epoch and it's painless to run).
  
  All of that is not Cachy OS specific, you can use any major distro
- Nah, it's all the same. You can try using Bottles or Lutris to make things a bit more convenient.

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.

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 make my CPU usage jump from next to nothing as it sits on the desktop not doing anything, to 100% usage by just shaking my mouse around like a maniac. 😤

I have heard that Classic Shell is once again functional under Windows 11, but it was critically broken and thoroughly unusable for too long for me, and I have since moved on to StartIsBack, which can do almost everything I found essential with Classic Shell.
- I use StartAllBack (I guess it's the same developer?) and love how it made File Explorer more robust again. :)
- long time startisback user, even paid for it.
  
  Yup, it's great!

Can someone explain what "react native" is?
- React is a Web UI framework. React Native is the same thing but compiles to a native Windows executable (without the performance benefit of native code).
  
  Now can you explain what a Web UI framework is?
- It's a javascript app that uses the react library - which is an open source library originated by Meta. It's supposed to be easier to maintain and port cross platform apps. However it is not as efficient as a native app and given the Start menu is so frequently used it's probably not a very efficient way to program it (or parts of it - I think the start menu has reactive native components rather than entirely made in it).
  
  So, WTF would Microsoft make a core Windows component with Meta libraries? I remember when Microsoft would only use Microsoft libraries.
- FrontEnd™ Enterprise® Pro .NET 2000© Hybrid Native Cloud Edition
  
  It's an old joke, but it still checks out.
  Edit: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k

All the Windows fuckery aside, what's going on with Stallman in this picture? 🥺
- Out of toenails
  
  Oh god, what did I miss on this one... 😬

Every Facebook product is cancer including react

You'll have to pry my Windows 10 launcher from my cold dead hands.
- people have been saying stuff like this since Windows XP came out
  
  This is why I use Open-Shell. Ever since MS decided that the entire program list should be in a tiny little scroll window I've been giving it the middle finger.
- To think what lengths we went to keep the Win7 launcher
  
  Everything since 7 has been a downgrade.

Can I replace Windows with SteamOS directly yet? -Basic Win11 user who is getting sick of Win11. Get off my WinXpLawn
- You can definitely replace it with Linux Mint, I did it 8 months ago and it was seamless, save for a little bit of fussing with my GPU driver.
- You don't need SteamOS, or Bazzite.
  Just get a desktop focused distro that looks interesting and install Steam.
- Yes and yes. Pick anything that is large and actively under development (Mint, Fedora, Arch, etc.) or anything actively in development based on valve's stuff (Bazzite, Nobara, SteamOS** but that is currently focused on handheld devices so desktop support technically comes second place. I'm going to let the official steamOS simmer for another 6 months or so before trying it on a custom build desktop.)
  Valve and AMD have freed Linux gaming by injecting cash into the FOSS ecosystem and giving it enough power to build momentum. Nvidia's monopoly on AI, academic researchers getting budgets for it, and Microsoft's and Apple's refusal to make software that meets scientific quality, have all coalesced freeing us from proprietary drivers never getting ported to Linux.
  The year of the Linux desktop is now, and is so hype inducing that Microsoft used their trillions of dollars and world class research facilities to calculate the exact date for us: October 14.
- As of last week, you can. But Valve isn't officially recommending it as a general purpose OS yet.
  There are some Linux distros that are very similar to steamOS that are very popular right now. I personally ditched Windows for Bazzite early this year and haven't had any regrets about it. I've been using both windows and Linux for decades and this was the first distro that made me confident enough to ditch Windows completely.
  I got a few bugs here and there but only one annoying issue that I had to fix (PC wouldn't wake up from sleep properly). I'm fine with using the terminal on my day to day so I can't say for sure but I think I only ever needed to use it once, to fix that specific issue.
  All games I've tried worked perfectly well, though one of them (InZoi) required installing an external tool (proton-GE). Some older stuff like World of Warcraft were easier to install on it than on windows (and wow doesn't even support it officially).
  Unlike other popular distros like Mint, Bazzite works in a way that prevents programs from messing with each other or with the system itself, so you're much more unlikely to ever break it. And if you do break it, there's a quick option to go back to the last working version. The downside is that if you manage to break it even beyond that, then fixing the issue will probably be harder than it would be to fix a similar problem on Mint.
  
  Unlike other popular distros like Mint, Bazzite works in a way that prevents programs from messing with each other or with the system itself, so you're much more unlikely to ever break it. And if you do break it, there's a quick option to go back to the last working version.
  Most Linux distros running on BTRFS with a snapshot manager like Timeshift or Snapper give you the same functionality, but I do get the appeal of Bazzite/immutable distros, especially for people who are new to Linux.
  
  My Windows PC doesn't wake up from sleep properly anyway. lol
- Probably not a good idea to go for SteamOS. I get the appeal, but I've since come to realize that SteamOS isn't going to work for what we want. It's designed for handhelds, so it's never going to be seamless for desktops.
  Valve's work on SteamOS is open so their work is utilized by a bunch of other distros. So you can actually get the best of both worlds if you expand your options a bit. Pick a popular distro and you'll be fine
- I made a post starting my Linux journey (and I probably won’t start for a while until I can get a new PC) but hopefully you can get some information out of it
- If you have AMD hardware, maybe. If not, definitely will be troubles.

there is massive financial incentives for these companies to write shit code because it makes people have to get newer computers
- Clean code is more expensive than shit. That adds to the problem.

At least my wallpaper transitions will stay smooth.

If its react native it shouldn't slow down. It still does tho, mst be the 30% vibe code.

Question for those who know more than me: how much is different 11 from 10, obviously excluding the desktop theme? I imagine very little but I'm curious.
- It's like a modern version of the worst parts of Vista.
  The UI is a clunky mess. I had to spend a week to make it about usable. Every menu is now a submenu of a new new menu, so you often have to click 3-4 times for stuff you'd have in a top-level right click menu not so long ago. Now they've been doing that for a while now, so some settings are getting quite deep at this point. The whole thing feels unresponsive and sluggish.
- I use windows at work, it's basically the same except for looks. I do development and have a weird setup and it didn't break after I unexpectedly updated to windows 11 by accident (nobody told me I was added to the list of people being updated). File manager is worse imo but you can still get to the old options menu, they're just buried down a layer.
  The system clock no longer shows seconds when you click on it which is annoying.
- The main difference is that it requires TPM 2.0, which allows applications to run in a fully encrypted mode and prevent user tampering.
  
  Oh no! Not the user tampering! 😱
- I mean, for most users there's not much meaningful difference between OS's other than the UI, especially when comparing iterations of the same OS

No "should we." Probably no "can we." Just a "hey AI, how do I..."

Those are definitely words in that sentence.

Does anybody know if photoshop works on linux yet?
- https://github.com/Fmstrat/winapps
  Haven't tried this yet but it looks like it'd be able to handle any Adobe software, might incur some performance loss though.
  
  Epic
- Old version of Photoshop works under wine,try also krita
- TBH I tried Photoshop's most recent version out a little while ago and it was ass. It's like 8 buttons and 5 of them were some kind of AI autofill bullshit.
- No, but GIMP does.
- no, but I heard Putin is coming out with big news soon
  
  ???
- That's all I'm waiting for

that causes a spike in cpu usage
Literally anything you do on a computer does this. That's why turbo boost exists.
- Why would you bother to write efficient code when you can just throw more resources at it? The future is now, old man.
- Any good start menu will have almost the whole start menu loaded into memory and clicking the start button should do nothing more than making it visible and enabling some event handlers.
  I tried spam clicking my Javascript start menu on Gnome Linux (ArcMenu):
  1 click per second: 0.2% increase
  5 clicks per second: 1% increase
  10 clicks per second: 2% increase
  Looking at the reddit thread posted in this discussion somewhere it looks like a single click is 5% on Windows.
  So no. This just shows awful programming by Microsoft and it's not up to the end users to just buy better hardware.
  
  So no. This just shows awful programming by Microsoft and it's not up to the end users to just buy better hardware
  Exactly. Javascript performs just as well as any other JIT scripting language. But taking bets, they are loading the entire engine on every click event instead just keeping the engine running in the background...
- You mean I have to buy that Silverstone case with the turbo button to make the start menu responsive? /s

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