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

You can always really on the MBAs

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

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

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

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."

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

still leaps better than windows 8

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

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.

"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.

Well most people just press the Windows key and type to open a program which works exactly the same on Win8. And personally I loved the start screen. And how often do you really need the start menu?

That's the most brain dead take I've seen in a while. Yes, forget about start menu and lets just search everything or use giant pictorials designed for 'blind' people.

Not what I said.

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.

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.

Idk, I literally skipped Windows 8.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Sure, Avalonia is fine. I meant specifically Microsoft offering

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

I was specifically talking about my frustration with Microsoft. MAUI was indeed pretty much on arrival, what a waste of the Xamarin name…

That's the one I use now. But it still feels laggy to me.

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

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.

May I ask what kind of work you do at what sounds like a dream job to me?

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

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.