[dangus]

Does the end user care that the system is made with React? What is the tangible negative impact?

My start menu doesn’t have ads, it really isn’t hard to manage that sort of thing.

OneDrive is fully uninstalled, Copilot is fully uninstalled, I find my system to be quite clean.

And if you don’t like the start menu, there are ways to replace the start menu entirely with something else. Good luck replacing entire major elements of the macOS UI.

In contrast, Apple puts advertisements at the same urgency level as critical system updates in the settings. There’s no setting to disable them and they sometimes come back with a new version release, you just have to know the magic actions to get them dismissed.

Haters dog on Windows 11 for various things but it really is the best version of the OS since 7. It has some of the best updates to traditional Windows tooling in years: tabs in notepad, git preinstalled, finally the settings pane is in a good place, brand new command line interface, and Microsoft has had a great habit of putting new features in separate apps that can be installed optionally. (E.g., you can’t uninstall Apple News on a Mac, but you can uninstall ClipChamp on Windows)

[bigstrat2003]

> My start menu doesn’t have ads, it really isn’t hard to manage that sort of thing.

I don't care. It is completely unacceptable to have ads in a product I paid them for. It doesn't matter how easy it is to remove, that doesn't fly.

You act like people are hating on Win11 for no reason, but truthfully you're just ignoring the reasons to hate it.

[dangus]

I haven’t given Microsoft a dime since Windows 7. Users who buy a computer have the OS preinstalled. Millions of people never activate it. The product is effectively free.

It’s a commercial OS but people can’t get over it. There isn’t a single commercial OS out there that doesn’t try to sell you something at some point.

Maybe that is unacceptable to you and I respect you for that. But it’s a commercial OS and always has been.

What gets annoying is when these aspects conflate it to being a bad OS or some monstrously unethical system. Seeing some ads that are easily disabled is treated by a certain community like the Microsoft is selling blood diamonds. The ferver doesn’t match the magnitude of the crime.

[the_overseer]

Preinstalled OS doesn't mean free OS. You already paid for it when you bought the computer. You shouldn't see ads. Ever.

[dangus]

The software on the computer would cost more if it was ad-free and consumers have made the clear choice that they prefer not to pay for OS updates. We know this because the updates used to cost money. Apple was charging over $100 just for a point release, and they charged hundreds for updates to bundled software like iLife and iWork.

Everyone would love it if the NFL had zero ads but most NFL fans wouldn’t pay $XXX/month to watch the games.

OEMs pay pennies on the dollar for Windows and in some cases $0, the retail license is $200 but you can buy a mini PC for the same cost with a legitimate Windows license.

I dislike ads as much as the next person and use Linux myself for my main machine, but I’m not completely lacking in pragmatism on this subject. Commercial operating systems fund their development through paid services and App Store revenue sharing.

I think the status quo is relatively reasonable and, again, I find the commercialization to be very easy to dismiss and disable.

We are spending more time debating this subject than it took me to disable all forms of advertising in Windows.

[the_overseer]

You forgot about the spyware. It's not just the advertising....

[pavon]

Windows 11 is much slower for me than Windows 7 or 10. A noticeable sub-second delay to bring up the start menu and respond to typing, about 3 seconds for file explorer to load, 5-20 seconds to start a screenshot. I wouldn't be surprised if antivirus is to partially to blame (only use Windows at work where it is required), but it is the same antivirus we used on Windows 10 and it wasn't this bad.

[dangus]

“A noticeable sub-second delay” lol. I guess you never ran Windows 98 on a pentium 2 like I did. If I had a dime for every sub-second delay I experienced on that machine…

Settings > Accessibility > Animation Effects > Off

5-10 seconds to start a screenshot, yeah man now you’re just lying. You sure you didn’t leave the delay timer on?

Are we going to gloss over the fact that the screenshot interface in old windows versions basically didn’t exist? There was no keyboard shortcut to open snipping tool by default in Windows 7. You had to know to use your print screen key correctly and to paste the image into Paint, and there was no visual feedback. Of course that performed fast because there was no UI!

[pavon]

> I guess you never ran Windows 98 on a pentium 2 like I did.

If you have to compare to a 20+ year old processor to look good, your system has problems. But since we are comparing old computers, Finder opens quicker on a 30 year old Macintosh 512k than Explorer opens in Windows 11.

> 5-10 seconds to start a screenshot, yeah man now you’re just lying.

Nope. I actually just updated that number up to 20 seconds after testing, because I thought my memory was exaggerating. This started in Windows 10 when they introduced "Snip & Sketch" to replace the old Snipping tool, but it was easier to go back to the old one in Windows 10.

Edit: Oh, and I just remembered another detail. Our library folders are mapped to network shares at work. Again, this has been the case for 15+ years now, and performance has just recently cratered. It would not surprise me if most Windows developers today assume everything is on SSD, and don't think about slapping low-importance file I/O in critical sections.

[dangus]

After this discussion I looked it up and the original sources that made a claim that the Windows 11 start menu is written in react aren’t even confirmed accurate, and allegedly the components involving react are using react native for windows and are therefore compiled to native code - no web views are involved: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44124688

So even this base assumption that a slow heavy bloated experience is on offer is just hearsay. The only section that uses React is the allegedly recommended section, the one that can be disabled entirely with a single settings toggle.

Anyway, again, the 5-10 second screenshot thing, I’ve been testing it live and could never get it to be slower than 2 seconds between invoking the shortcut key to file on the disk. Keeping in mind that this includes me physically reacting as quickly as possible to click after the shortcut keys to initiate the capture. It’s about one second between clicking capture and observing the file appear in file explorer. My CPU is 5 years old, my RAM is DDR4, and I use an off brand nvme SSD, for your reference.

I will also add to this that the main competitor to Windows, macOS, adds an intentional delay to their screen capture where the screenshots aren’t added to disk until after the little preview disappears or is manually dismissed. In Windows the preview notification and file being written to disk happen simultaneously, and the system automatically copies the image to clipboard which Apple doesn’t do, saving further time.

Your network share issue could be something misconfigured at your work, I have no way to verify whether that’s something your IT department messed up. My personal Windows and Linux systems are both connected to my SMB shares at all times through their graphical file managers and I don’t notice any difference in performance.

Last rebuttal: your finder experience in Macintosh classic (System 3.0 when the 512k debuted) is fast because there’s no multitasking, when you are at the desktop of a Macintosh the only application open is Finder and it’s already in RAM. Open any other application and then close it. You’ll notice a relatively long delay (10 seconds in my testing, although I don’t have real hardware) after closing the application before the desktop and finder are responsive again. You can try this on your preferred Macintosh emulator online.

[the_overseer]

I care that it's made with React/React Native or other garbage web frameworks. By definition adding layers between native C/C++ Native Win32 will make it slower and use more RAM.

Stop justifying laziness and mediocrity. Microsoft does this just so they can hire cheap javascript monkeys out of colleges. AKA people who shouldn't be writing code and the reason a chat application now uses 1GB of RAM and nobody seems to care or understand why such waste is both bad and stupid.

[dangus]

First off, this claim that the start menu is written largely with web frameworks isn’t even verified:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44124688

It is supposedly still mostly Windows native XAML. Allegedly, even the components that use react are using react native for windows and are therefore not rendering any sort of resource-wasting web view.

I wrote my own react native phone app and it’s only a 30MB download. Your random comparison to a bulky chat app with an extensive feature list (the most popular culprits like Slack and Discord are not written in React Native, by the way) consuming a GB of RAM is irrelevant. Have you measured the start menu consuming 1GB of RAM? Unless you have, your argument is a whataboutism.

If you think it’s bad that Microsoft is using stuff that makes it easy for them to develop windows you should explain to me how it would be better for them to have extreme difficulty in making improvements like how the old control panel basically couldn’t be updated with any reasonable development cadence for decades while macOS ran circles around Windows for their clean settings experience, versus the new settings pane that Microsoft can actually iterate on and improve.

You can criticize the new settings panel for maybe not having 100% of what you want in it but you can’t criticize being a scary nightmare for novice users like the old version.

It is in the users’ benefit if Microsoft can actually hire people who are real humans and not just myths.

[the_overseer]

I am wasting my time, you are arguing in bad faith. I have installed windows 7 in a VM and everything takes less RAM not just the start menu and for most things it performs much much better. Start menu actually searches my files instantly, not with delay, not presenting web results, not presenting wrong results. It's doing its job.

Task manager opens immediately. Windows Explorer the same.

Those applications and the OS were written by real humans, not by myths. With your terribly bad argument it seems those OSes never happened since it required "extreme difficulty". No, it didn't require Einsteins. It required non-monkey coders.

You say you wrote your own react native phone app and it only takes 30MBs. So what? You forgot the most important part: what does it do? If it's a basic text editor then yes it's extremely bloated garbage.