I am sus. Optimistic but sus. I am hoping for some combo of:

  - MS doing what they say here. (Uphill battle given the perverse incentives others have mentioned) My gut says Windows is going to be *worse* vs better, and I am willing to settle for stagnating...

  - Linux desktop makers taking UX, ABI/linking compatibility, and "just works" seriously.

It's like you could take the good from both and discard the bad, but it hasn't happened yet.

▲ itopaloglu83 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It sure looks like a PR campaign to take the attention away from how bad the things are, and I need to see it to believe it.

Also, why couldn't they make this announcement as they release the taskbar change. Taking away the most basic features and bringing a few back doesn't mean things are improving, it means things are getting petty.

There is no reason for the start menu to take 2 seconds to show up on a computer with 8 CPUs running at 4GHz. We all know that they're completely half-assing everything now.

	▲	the__alchemist 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yea concur. "Here's a patch and here are the notes" vs "Here are the notes for future efforts" would be more credible!

▲ yjftsjthsd-h 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Linux desktop makers taking UX, ABI/linking compatibility, and "just works" seriously.

Would you settle for 2 out of 3? UX is improving, and things get more polished every year, but we've mostly settled on shoving things into some sort of package (container, flatpak, snap) alongside all its dependencies specifically so we don't have to actually stabilize any sort of ABI

	▲	the__alchemist 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yep. Will take what I can get! Re the flatpacks, snaps, docker etc. Yea... I don't like those much more than the Apple/Google/MS app stores. They don't have the perverse incentives, but are still setting up friction points vs being able to just have an executable work, expect to work in 5-10 years, and work on diff distros. (This is something MS actually does right; possibly the best thing about Win) I was coincidentally just updating old softare I wrote, and I just ripped out the snap, RPM and Debs because I can't be bothered to maintain all of them.