This explains a lot about why the Start menu has felt sluggish compared to Windows 10.

The React → WinUI migration is the most technically interesting detail imo.

If MS really wants its users back, many of which have left for Linux and Mac, it should seriously consider going back to the Win7 era UI, or at least restore the Windows Classic theme.

If you can't make it better, make it worse, it seems.

Besides examples like this one.

The amount of issues on Github across all WinUI related tools, keeps increasing all over the place, there is almost no visible activity, the community calls have been a disaster with Q&A being ignored, team rotation, whatever.

Native AOT still cannot do what .NET Native did (there is a CsWinRT 3.0 that supposedly is going to fix that). Additionally it requires all classes to be marked partial classes.

C++/CX was killed, replaced by C++/WinRT without any Visual Studio tooling, meaning using it is similar to using ATL during the Visual C++ 6.0 days. The experience promised at CppCon 2017 never came to be.

Additionally hidden in a comment thread on its Github repo, the original devs that are now working on windows-rs, mention that C++/WinRT is in maintenance mode, it won't be further developed.

Ah, and they are open sourcing WinUI, guess how many devs are still left to work on this.

Really, from someone that used to advocate using WinRT back in the Windows 8.x/10 days, stay away from any technology that is somehow related to WinUI.

Microsoft themselves can do whatever they feel like with WinUI, it comes with the job, the rest of us, better use Win32, Forms, WPF, Avalonia, Qt,...

EDIT: I forgot to mention in its present state, the application identity and COM reference counting required by WinUI, makes the "blazing fast C++" components actually run slower than typical .NET applications. The irony from the folks that kind of sabotaged Longhorn efforts, and went ahead redoing the ideas in COM.

React is just a framework for declaratively defining components and reactivity, the end result can be whatever you want. That’s what react-native is for mobile apps, and as another commenter pointed out, in this case it was using React Native for Windows[1], which apparently calls native Windows APIs in the background.

I like to jump on the MS hate train as much as the next guy, but React itself is not the reason the start menu is bad.

[1] https://microsoft.github.io/react-native-windows/

Since then they have largely lost the AI race (you can argue they were never in it as they never had a SOTA model and are piggy backing off OpenAI).

Now I read that Win11 is based on React, even a junior developer can tell you that running React natively on any platform will always suck.

With that said, I really like C#, even if I can't stand some of the directions it's grown into, and I think that the start menu could have been written in C#, WinForms, and have been far less troublesome.

Macbook Neo announced. It has been known a low cost MacBook will come, but I dont think anyone realistically think it was really going to be $599. And even $499 for Education. Now that it is real, how many new macOS user will Apple gain? Cooperate, Education and Business Sector have longed wanted an "affordable" Mac. There are plenty of organisations that are currently paying $499 or $599 for PC and would happily paid $699 for an Apple solution. Unforuntaly that product just didn't exist. Now it is here it will hit the M$ user most.

Unless Apple did something really stupid I could see Neo easily attract an additional 100M PC user across to the Mac.