Apparently, 80% of recent laptops are engineered for web browsing and very light office workloads, even regardless on their price. Despite the CPUs are generally good, they don’t usually install enough RAM in them. It started to change recently, half of the new ones have 16GB RAM which is good for development at the moment. But that wasn’t the case in 2016 when Intel released Kaby Lake CPUs the OP has.
> agreeing with OP that the situation is awful?
I looked at WinUI3 not long ago, and didn’t like it too much. I wouldn’t call the situation “awful”, but it’s not good either, neither for OP nor Microsoft.
The Windows GUI software I develop for living is often based on WPF. I think it’s superior despite much older: amount of bugs, quality of tools, binary size, etc. Fortunately for the OP, WPF is still supported in latest versions of .NET and Visual Studio, and is very likely to stay that way.
Here’s a third-party project with styles and templates implementing GUI similar to Win10: https://github.com/Kinnara/ModernWpf Their approach seems correct, and the screenshots looking nice. I never needed that library BTW, my clients who need good GUI usually provide professionally-made design which is unrelated to Windows controls.
Also, here’s a relevant GitHub issue https://github.com/dotnet/wpf/issues/5793 which currently says “.NET 7.0 milestone”, however the 7.0 is scheduled for November 2022, i.e. in about 1 year, and they may or may not deliver by then.
> Your experience is expected for the framework.
This is worded like a defense? But agreeing with OP that the situation is awful?