[drysart]

It's tempting to look at it that way; but that's being over-reductive. UIs of today are not the UIs of 20 years ago. Users expect much more from today's UIs, and UI toolkits necessarily get more complex as a result in order to deliver on those increased expectations.

And if you don't agree, this is Windows we're talking about. Nothing's stopping you from creating your application with Win32 except for the fact that it's going to look and feel like an application from 20+ years ago.

[vintagedave]

What do they expect that WinUI provides that classic WinAPI UIs don't?

This is not a rhetorical question. I do see some things, like antialiased drawing, etc (GDI is outdated, but I'm not convinced newer drawing could not be added.) But in general the classic ones work, including with accessibility, and are highly functional and batle-tested.

[markus_zhang]

> Users expect much more from today's UI

This is funny. You know, users also want games to be ridden of DRM but I don’t think the big companies cared about that for a long time. Users also want a lot of things that they never got, like a visible scroll bar sometimes.

And since Windows is primarily OEM or enterprise, I don’t know what users are going to do if Microsoft sticks to say Windows 7 UI? Like, uninstalling Windows and switching to Linux? Oh yeah, they are doing that right now.

Sure users want A or B, but that’s not important. What’s important is some idiot VP saw something and decided to push on, and other managers jumped in to grab the pie.

[Citizen_Lame]

> Users expect much more from today's UIs

Are these users in the room with us. If anything, today's UIs are dumbed down, mobile first abominations.

[imtringued]

20 years ago was 2006. Back in those days the vast majority of UI paradigms have already been explored for decades and the standard window pane UI has existed since the 80s. The biggest difference between back then and today is the eye candy and the fact that browser based UIs took over.

[ChrisRR]

Do they really though? I understand wanting to be able to use a common layout between mobile and PC devices, but even when you factor those things in there's no reason that we should've gone from something snappy at a few 100MHz to sluggish on multicore GHz processors

[Kadecgos]

> it's going to look and feel like an application from 20+ years ago.

This is simply not true. You can built completely modern apps in WPF if you want. There is nothing about the framework that says your app is going to look 'old' except if you are just using default styles, and if that's the metric here then... we got bigger problems.

[pjc50]

> Users expect much more from today's UIs

.. and get much less. Especially in accessibility. We've lost things like ubiquitous accelerator keys and even basics like "being able to tell where the edges of controls are or which is the active window".

The only real advantage WinUI has over WinForms is "responsive" resizing and display scaling.

[card_zero]

> much more

Specifically?

> look and feel

Oh right so.