Wow, they are actually starting to care about quality. Color me surprised.

Almondsetat 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Don't worry, once enough people come back, they'll roll back in the ads and the intrusive performance-killing features and the cycle will repeat all over again

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JamesStuff 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You can always really on the MBAs

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brokencode 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Microsoft has long had a tick tock cycle for Windows.

98: great. ME: bad. XP: great. Vista: bad. 7: great. 8: bad. 10: great. 11: bad

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qzw 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe “great” is going a bit far for some of those. “Not bad” vs “bad” seems more realistic.

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contextfree 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A fundamental problem with this is that "8" is two different releases (8.0 and 8.1), "10" is about 9 different releases, and "11" is three different releases so far (21H2, 22H2, and 24H2). It doesn't make much sense to lump all of them together because they share the same marketing name; technically there's no difference between going from 8.0 to 8.1 or from 22H2 to 24H2 and going from Vista to 7 or 10 20H1 to 11 21H2

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kristianp 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I mean, apart from killing the start button and all the touch first applications, windows 8 felt really satisfying to me by eliminating transparency effects and having simpler, clearer window decorations. I hate the transparency effects in windows 7, and performance was improved in Win 8.

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kelvinjps10 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

10 was bad 11 is a little better but no enough. With win10 they started with more annoying ads and the start menu with apps and the click bait news in the start menu

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Levitating 7 hours ago | parent [-]

still leaps better than windows 8

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thewebguyd 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It was, eventually. In the beginning 10 was literally just Windows 8.1 (it even ran the same NT6 kernel) but with the classic UI slapped back on. They called it 10 to get away from the Windows 8 branding that everyone hated.

I recall it being pretty mediocre at release, just a reskinned 8.1. 10 started to come into its own much later after NT10

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sunaookami 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Aside from the start menu no, not really. Windows 8 is the most performant operating system. No laggy animations (thanks to DirectUI), fast boot time, especially fast on older systems. Windows 10 started the whole lagfest.

	▲	donkeylazy456 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		exactly! I don't understand why people hated it so much. It was snappy, clean OS. I've always thought it was better than Win7. Of course, absent of start menu was terrible choice. And I meant 8.1, not 8.
	▲	bigstrat2003 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		"aside from the start menu" is one hell of a caveat. When you screw up one of the main UI elements as badly as they did, it really drags the whole experience down.

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hypercube33 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Windows 8 was ultra stable. I've seen uptime well over multiple years on it. The original UX was beyond awful and 8.1 made it ok but the core of the OS was solid.

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CrimsonCape 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Maybe Windows 12 will be the promised "last Windows" which 10 was supposed to be.

I'd love to know the exec who ordered Windows 11. It stinks of "I need a product on my resume that I launched because being Windows 10 "maintainer" sounds so pathetic on a resume."

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runjake 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I can't downvote this comment, because I've observed exactly this practice happen, again and again, over the past three decades.

I still remain naively hopeful and cheer them on, however.

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dgellow 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Anyone who tried to do serious native windows dev has been burnt so often by Microsoft. I really wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt with WinUI 3 but I really cannot anymore. Until proven otherwise I expect absolutely nothing to improve meaningfully. It’s extremely sad for those of us who were dumb enough to think Microsoft take on modern GUI would be interesting to follow closely, we are in 2026 and WPF is still the way to go IMHO.

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Rohansi 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> we are in 2026 and WPF is still the way to go IMHO.

Why not Avalonia? It's not Microsoft but it is a spiritual successor to WPF, cross-platform, and open source.

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dgellow 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Sure, Avalonia is fine. I meant specifically Microsoft offering

	▲	Rohansi an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Why limit yourself to Microsoft's offerings? They've dropped the ball on all of their UI frameworks I don't see why anyone would trust them to build software on. Give it a few more years and MAUI will join the list of abandoned UI frameworks and another one will pop up

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jimjimjim 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yep, it's 2026 and I'm still 8 hours a day in win32.

	▲	mrec 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		What kind of thing do you write? I'm still amazed at how much functionality is packed into tiny binaries like the sysinternals tools, and depressed at how acceptable 50MB todo apps have become.
	▲	Traubenfuchs 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		May I ask what kind of work you do at what sounds like a dream job to me?

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pjmlp 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Nah, mostly marketing.

The only people that still buy into this are folks that never developed anything with WinUI, aka WinUI 3.0.

Since Windows 8, they messed up the development experience so bad, that they managed to turn many advocates like myself into vocal critics.

We avoid anything WinRT unless there is no way to do the same with Win32, classical COM (WinRT is an evolution of COM), or regular .NET (Forms/WPF).

And also post regularly about the actual state of the tooling unlike Microsoft's marketing posts.

Example, they keep mentioning about WinUI being supported in C++, but never mention how bad C++/WinRT dev experience has become, or that the framework is in maintenance, and has been superseded by WIL.

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iknowstuff 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Their recent post about explorer performance was “we raise clocks when you launch explorer” rather than an actual fix