- cross-posted to:
- programmer_humor@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- programmer_humor@programming.dev
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Oh, but it absolutely is true. Microsoft really did decide to use React Native for parts of the Windows 11 Start menu. They’re also using it in sections of the Settings app.
The technical reality is even more absurd than the meme suggests. Microsoft is currently maintaining eight different UI frameworks for Windows, including their own .NET MAUI and WinUI 3 that were specifically built for their OS. Yet somehow they thought, “You know what this native operating system needs? A JavaScript framework originally designed for mobile apps.”
The CPU usage spikes aren’t necessarily from React Native itself being particularly heavyweight, but rather from the fundamental architectural choice of running a web-based rendering engine for core system UI elements. Every time you click Start, you’re essentially launching a mini web application just to display a menu.
What’s particularly galling is that Microsoft has acknowledged WinUI’s performance issues for years, to the point where they recommend their partners use the older WPF for performance-critical applications. So instead of fixing their native framework, they decided to add another layer of abstraction.
This is what happens when corporate development teams prioritize “developer experience” and trendy frameworks over system efficiency. Richard Stallman’s expression in that image perfectly captures the appropriate level of technical horror at this decision.
The old world built operating systems. The new world builds web apps that pretend to be operating systems.
React Native doesn’t render using a browser instance, it’s native code (as the name implies), it’s actually a layer over WinUI 3 (Previous versions used WPF/UWP)
So it’s in the same boat as MAUI, which is also a layer over WinUI 3.
They didn’t say it was?
The CPU usage spikes aren’t necessarily from React Native itself being particularly heavyweight, but rather from the fundamental architectural choice of running a web-based rendering engine for core system UI elements.
I suppose i lack an understanding of whether React Native is a web based rendering engine or not but i figured they could also be referring to edge implementation in the same feature.
Like saying coffee isn’t hot because of the mug it’s in but the brewing machine it came out of.
Oh, the pedants have arrived. How delightful.
Yes, technically The_Decryptor is correct - React Native doesn’t literally spin up a Chromium instance like Electron does. It transpiles JavaScript into native calls. But they’re completely missing the forest for the trees here.
The fundamental architectural absurdity remains unchanged: Microsoft is using a JavaScript framework - originally designed for mobile apps - to render core operating system UI elements. Whether that JavaScript gets compiled to native calls or interpreted in a browser engine is irrelevant to the core criticism.
Your coffee analogy is actually closer to the mark than The_Decryptor realizes. The performance issues aren’t just about the final native calls - they’re about the entire abstraction stack Microsoft has built.
You’ve got JavaScript -> React Native bridge -> WinUI 3 -> whatever underlying Windows API calls. Each layer adds overhead, complexity, and potential failure points. The_Decryptor saying “it’s in the same boat as MAUI” isn’t the defense they think it is - MAUI has its own performance issues precisely because of similar abstraction layers.
This is exactly the kind of technical bike-shedding that lets corporations get away with architectural disasters. Everyone argues about implementation details while the Start menu still stutters when you click it.
The old world would have written the Start menu in C++ and called it a day. The new world creates dependency graphs that look like spider webs and then argues about whether the spider web is technically made of silk or polyester.
Heel yeah now that’s the clarification I’m here for! (Actually honest, cheers and thanks!)
Can’t they extract more data from a mobile set-up? I’m assuming that’s why they did it, they’re trying to take it to a phone experience for the corporations.
Nope.
The reason you do react native is because it’s easier to hire react native devs. Further, there’s a plethora of react native libraries that make it easier to make UXes above other UX frameworks.
The problem MS has is they have spent decades making platform locked UX frameworks because they were deathly afraid someone would use Linux instead of Windows.
Browser tech won because every major platform needs a browser and basically no organization was investing in multiplatform UX libraries. The likes of both Microsoft and Apple are openly hostile to such frameworks (QT and GTK come to mind).
The likes of both Microsoft and Apple are openly hostile to such frameworks (QT and GTK come to mind).
Funny thing, the OneDrive client app that ships with Windows, uses Qt
Holy fucking shit this isn’t just a meme, wtaf is going on at Microsoft.
The FOSS aficionados of Lemmy will probably be quick to tell me it’s always been shit, but this seems like a marked increase in bad decisions in the past 5-10 years
Business majors.
Same as everywhere else, management wants random shit done chop chop chop, fires actual developers who tell them they’re the dumbest pieces of shit they’ve seen in this lifetime and hire random bros who say “whatever dude, just wanna get paid” then copy-paste google results because bing sucks.
Middle manglement is the source of nearly all bad decisions once companies get large enough to have it. Upper management is often dog shit, but they usually have an idea of what they want done. Whether that’s. Net positive for consumers is a different story, but they don’t intend for it to be implemented poorly.
Middle manglement then takes that, fucks it up putting each of their little stamps on it as it hits every rung on the ladder as it works it’s way down to the people that have to implement it.
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I was expecting it t9 at least be a XAML C# app
Is Growth Mindset. Don’t you have Growth Mindset?
~2018 to ~2022 was nice, things started to get a little better. But now it’s trash.
Everything is done by vibe coders under the direction of project managers who’re just trying to get their name on shit. No one actually cares about the quality of the end product.
New CPU benchmark: 100 start menu clicks per second.
Going to need some LN2 for that!
Fuck JavaScript in all its forms.
Ok, in a browser is fine. But HARD pass on electron and all this bullshit
Ok, in a browser is fine.
JavaScript was never fit for purpose even in a browser. We could’ve had Python or Scheme in the browser instead, but nooooo, Brandon Eich had to be fucking incompetent.
How about Lua? I don’t like Python that much.
I wasn’t idly speculating about languages that I personally happen to like better; I was listing the two languages that Netscape was actively considering at the time before they decided to glom on to the Java hype. When I say “we could’ve had Python or Scheme,” I mean Netscape almost picked Python or Scheme.
If it makes you feel any better, I get the impression that Scheme would’ve been the more likely of the two. Also, this was happening in 1995, so Lua was less than two years old at the time and, according to this page, not internationally known yet (that would happen in 1996).
Gonna be real, Lua would have been perfect for this. I get what you’re saying about netscape though,
What are you talking about, giving one of the only programming languages where binary sizes matters a tiny standard library is a great idea!
Good news: there’s been talk to having python be part of the DOM.
I believe chromium has been working on it but no real thought on when this will happen.
Is it really? Does microsoft have no faith in its own user32 UI API?
Yeah, windows apps, even official ones are just a mix of react native apps.
I used to be with it! (XAML) Then they changed what it is! (WinUI)
WinUI is yet another thing, it’s not React native. It’s kind of a new version of WPF with additional things and you can still use XAML
Recently something has changed and the start menu likes to search for apps in its browser (not my default app). I used to press windows key then type “snip” for the screenshot tool, now half of the time is does the wrong thing …
Also here’s a link to post talking about react in the start menu https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30384494
Yeah. It’s quite obnoxious how bad they’ve made their OS and it’s obvious they are FARMING searches on bing with these tactics lmao
glad I am not the only one. I even disabled the Bing and Websearch bullshit, but somehow in 1 of 5 cases the search result is not the software I am looking for. Even when I type exactly its name.
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It’s why I’m gonna change to Linux permanently come the end of Win10.
Do it now. It’s great!
I’ve been seriously considering switching to Mint or Ubuntu since they’re user friendly. The more I hear about win 11 the less and less I want anything to do with it. also, my pc isn’t compatible so there’s that 😂
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That’s the reason I swapped.
So far it’s been a good switch
Download the Mint live CD and give it a shot!
That is a great idea. And since my desktop is old as a dinosaur it still has a cd burner. So I’ll take it as a win LOL
I gave up on windows 11 last week after my downloads folder decided to stop opening any more. Every other folder worked fine, and I could use a save dialogue to see and navigate inside downloads, but if I opened the folder run file explorer I was met woth a never ending “working on it…” Screen. Hours of trawling useless Microsoft posts to see its a common issue but none of the suggested fixes worked.
I installed Pop! OS, which is essentially Ubuntu but Ive heard works very well with games. Few small hiccoughs getting used to the UI paradigm shift but its motoring along now with no problems. My 5 year old desktop is running much smoother with less overall resource use too. Feels snappier.
The smoother part sounds very appealing. I will look into this distro. Thanks.
The easiest distro I have used so far it’s Endeavour-Os (for my desktop). All my homelab uses debian except the mandatory W11 VM and a WS for veeam.
Why wait? Switch now and get used to it.
I switched last August.
Say what you will but I’m kind of addicted to the PC Gamepass. I have to get through a backlog before I give it up.
The only realistic answer to the win11 situation. I chose bazzite because I like to game. It’s a dream, I never looked back.
Same same, I just hope I can replace my dying PC before switching
I just did that, using Fedora KDE now, works great
I’m already rocking Manjaro, put my old windows boot drive in a box in case I need it for whatever reason.
Mint + a game-box user myself :-)
Sometimes there is an old soft inly working on windows, but they are getting more and more rare as they no monger work on windows… Fantastic.
And it’s a terrible app, at that. No organization, just either some random application links, or one giant list with no categories or organization past alphabetical.
Switched to Linux at the beginning of the year. Still have a lobotomized local windows 11 boot for gaming/VR still though. Can’t wait for the day I can finally get rid of it totally.
Depending on what games you’re running you might already be able to. https://lvra.gitlab.io/ https://areweanticheatyet.com/ https://www.protondb.com/
I’m rocking an LTSC 10 until 2027.
Oops I pit my mouse in the bottom left now its loading 50 web pages filled with ads under the guise of being a widget
I have a Windows laptop for the first time in well over a decade for a project I am working on. Even though it is overpowered (i7, 64gb ram), and it is currently “idle”, the cooling fans are working overtime because the damn OS is always busy doing some random shit when “idle”. This is AFTER I ran a debloat script. It was near impossible to use before then.
EDIT: I found the cause of the fanning issue and different behavior between Win 11 and Linux (Pop!_OS). Even though the laptop comes with an Nvidia RTX 4000 series GPU, Windows 11 set the global default GPU to be the integrated graphics (Intel UHD). The same laptop under Pop!_OS automatically set the default GPU to Nvidia. As soon as I dug this up and switched the settings to Nvidia, the laptop stopped fanning full speed nonstop.
Have enterprise win 11 now and it isnt as bad as that. Its stupid, but not evil.
I don’t get why people exaggerate this much. I have a laptop with a 7840hs and 32gb of ram so it’s also “overpowered” but it’s whisper quiet and consumes 30-45w while doing simple tasks. Consumption only increases if I’m running code, playing games, etc which makes total sense.
Windows is not a well optimized os and the telemetry sucks but you’re just flat out lying with your claims. It’s either that or your laptop has the worst possible cooling.
I have a laptop that I dual boot Windows 11 and Ubuntu on.
If I leave the Windows desktop idle for >20 minutes the fans will almost always randomly flare up even though I’m doing nothing. On Ubuntu, the desktop usually stays silent, or sometimes the fans come on a little (probably due to bloated browser apps) but never flare up the way it does on Windows.
Again, the most common problem in those cases are crappy drivers/fan curves. I have a laptop with W11 on it and fix/maintain laptops for friends as well and this is not an issue with any of them. The only time I had this problem was with a specific laptop.
Honestly, of all of the things you could criticize about windows (and there are lots), this is the one thing that is simply not an inherent OS problem.
No exaggeration. I could literally record video at any time to show how it is fanning like crazy. If it is on, it is fanning like a jet plane.
EDIT: Problem found. Win 11 defaulted to integrated graphics even though the laptop has an Nvidia GPU. The same laptop with a Linux (Pop!_OS) install defaulted to the Nvidia GPU. That’s just dumb.
Unticking “alow this drive and its contents to be indexed” and terminating the indexing service helps.
And might as well, not like the fucking search works anyway, even with web search disabled. At least on W10.
Everything by VoidTools is a million times better than the Windows search, it indexes every file and then actually finds it right away when you search for it.
Question for those who know more than me: how much is different 11 from 10, obviously excluding the desktop theme? I imagine very little but I’m curious.
The main difference is that it requires TPM 2.0, which allows applications to run in a fully encrypted mode and prevent user tampering.
Oh no! Not the user tampering! 😱
Ostensibly it’s to protect things like credit card information. In reality it’s to make sure Microsoft has more control over your computer than you do.
It’s like a modern version of the worst parts of Vista.
The UI is a clunky mess. I had to spend a week to make it about usable. Every menu is now a submenu of a new new menu, so you often have to click 3-4 times for stuff you’d have in a top-level right click menu not so long ago. Now they’ve been doing that for a while now, so some settings are getting quite deep at this point. The whole thing feels unresponsive and sluggish.
I use windows at work, it’s basically the same except for looks. I do development and have a weird setup and it didn’t break after I unexpectedly updated to windows 11 by accident (nobody told me I was added to the list of people being updated). File manager is worse imo but you can still get to the old options menu, they’re just buried down a layer.
The system clock no longer shows seconds when you click on it which is annoying.
that causes a spike in cpu usage
Literally anything you do on a computer does this. That’s why turbo boost exists.
Why would you bother to write efficient code when you can just throw more resources at it? The future is now, old man.
Any good start menu will have almost the whole start menu loaded into memory and clicking the start button should do nothing more than making it visible and enabling some event handlers.
I tried spam clicking my Javascript start menu on Gnome Linux (ArcMenu):
- 1 click per second: 0.2% increase
- 5 clicks per second: 1% increase
- 10 clicks per second: 2% increase
Looking at the reddit thread posted in this discussion somewhere it looks like a single click is 5% on Windows.
So no. This just shows awful programming by Microsoft and it’s not up to the end users to just buy better hardware.
So no. This just shows awful programming by Microsoft and it’s not up to the end users to just buy better hardware
Exactly. Javascript performs just as well as any other JIT scripting language. But taking bets, they are loading the entire engine on every click event instead just keeping the engine running in the background…
I’ll take the bet and say “user clicks start so we must startup copilot” .
This explains so much
Jesus I really need to install linux don’t I?
Is there a distribution that is better at running conversion layers like Wine? I need to run some windows only software (Solidworks, Affinity Suite…)
I’ve got Wine 9, running on Linux Mint. I mostly use it for older games and a few Windows programs like IrfanView. All my modern games I bought on Steam, run great under Linux. (Steam has a native Linux client and uses it’s own Windows compatability layer called Proton to run games).
I use LibreOffice for productivity, Thunderbird for email and GIMP has a native Linux client, too.
At the risk of saying, “I use arch btw” - I’ve found CachyOS to be fairly great.
I’m running it on my Rog Zephyrus M16 purchased in late 2023 (it came with Windows 11). It’s great for pretty much all games that I’ve thrown at it with proton, Heroic games handles Amazon Games, Epic, and GOG stuff.
You have lots of options (probably too many to be honest) for getting windows programs to run on Linux - ranging from very hands on with no-frills wine to more hand holding things like Lutris or Bottles.
My wife (who is only a techie from osmosis) switched to CachyOS on her laptop and seems to be fine with it (her game of choice is Last Epoch and it’s painless to run).
All of that is not Cachy OS specific, you can use any major distro
For windows-only software, you can keep a copy of windows as a dual boot. Not the most ideal solution, but minimizing windows usage by any little bit decreases the chances of you getting annoyed at Windows.
Alternatively, if it’s a lightweight software, you could run it in a virtual machine and use something like WinApps to blend it into Linux
