I thought they just rewrote Start in Rust?

Dear God, I hate the way the Windows 11 Start Menu takes slightly too long to open - long enough that I often accidentally close it again. You can actually watch CPU usage increase if you toggle it.

Never use the start menu anymore with CmdPal in PowerToys.

macOS spoiled me.

> You can actually watch CPU usage increase if you toggle it.

Not any more, I kept windows 11 around for gaming but I binned the partition, how they managed to make a 7950X3D/7900XTX feel "clunky" is astounding given that I live in KDE which has a reputation for been a "heavy" DE and yet it it feels instantaneously fast in every dimension compared to windows 11.

KDE is a "heavy" DE! Compare its startup time to -say- Windowmaker.

Full disclosure: I use KDE almost exclusively.

Anyone remembers Active Desktop?

Windows still has Active Desktop, doesn't it?

I believe that went out with Internet Explorer. You certainly can't set your desktop to a web page any more.

They main purpose of active desktop was to claim IE was an inextricable part of windows

This is wrong. The "recommended" section of the start menu is written with React Native but compiled to native XAML and not running web technologies. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44125217

Wait.....why develop that small part so differently than the rest?

Classic case of shipping the org chart

(in case anyone needs a reminder of Microsoft's org chart: https://www.globalnerdy.com/2011/07/03/org-charts-of-the-big...)

> in case anyone needs a reminder of Microsoft's org chart: ...

To be a little glib:

As someone who has worked for a few Big Software Companies, I guarantee that Microsoft's org chart has changed significantly at least once in the last fourteen years.

Re-organizations aren't referred to as "shuffling the deck chairs [on the Titanic]" by the rank and file for no reason, yanno?

At every large company I worked at, they began planning the next org change right after the last one concluded.

My impression from the outside is that the biggest change is that there are now a lot more and smaller circles pointing guns at each other

But maybe that impression is wrong and they now cooperate better. After all since some Windows 10 update the Windows Explorer can even create files and folders starting with a dot (which from a kernel, fs and cmd perspective was always valid)

> But maybe that impression is wrong and they now cooperate better.

Based on my experience with Blasted Corporate Hellscapes, I find it very unlikely that they cooperate better. Middle-ish management lives to stab each other in the back, belly, and face.

> ...Windows Explorer can even create files and folders starting with a dot...

That's progress! Does Windows Explorer still shit the bed when you ask it to interact with a file whose name contains the '|' character? That's always been valid in NTFS, and I think is valid in at least a subset of the Windows programming interfaces.

Kind of related, but a lot of designers only understand a react point of view these days. Which is why you will see react, specifically, turn up in the most random fucking places.

Every place I've worked which did not use react had steady pushback from UI/UX to move to react. It took active resistance to not use react, even though it didn't make any sense to use.

Is that's why on a system where I removed widgets and web search results windows keeps msedgewebview2 active?

I don't think that the activation of this process is tied to the enabled-state of any features and the recommended section/start menu in general does not even use a Webview. It may be active all the time because various parts of the OS use it (I think the settings app for MS account stuff and the Explorer for some Office 365 features?) and it's faster keeping it active instead of starting it constantly.