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Comment by torginus | Hacker News Reader

This is the funniest thing, considering it lacks 90% of the features included freeware text editors written in some student's spare time back in the 90s.

It's basically a fancy textbox.

Microsoft's own people can't use the toolkits they write, as evidenced by the React component in the start menu(!)

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They can, the problem is that apparently they aren't able to hire people nowadays with Win32 development experience, so they get interns that have grown in US universities with macOS and Linux, which sundenly have a Win32 developer role.

That is how you end up with web garbage in what was supposed to be native code, or .NET.

I think this is also a reason why WinUI efforts went down the drain.

They laid off a lot of people with Win32 experience in the past couple of years. If that was really a problem they could just hire some of them back (or, I dunno, keep them in the first place).

Keep them?? But how else would you keep devs working hard if there are no mass layoffs to be afraid of all the time??

Get them working on interesting projects building things customers/users/peers will value.

What are you, some kinda communist?

> building things customers/users/peers will value.

AI. Customers want AI, users want AI, peers want AI. If anyone says otherwise, they’re a Luddite and possibly a dangerous political radical.

I'm no longer at MSFT, but according to the people that are, the leadership is straight up saying that anyone who doesn't like AI coding has no place in the company now.

Unfortunely, they are making people like myself, that in general tend to have comments more pro-Windows, starting to consider the alternatives yet again.

Even .NET and C++ tooling getting spoiled with AI no matter what, see latest set of DevBlog announcements.

Agreed, or I don't know, actually promote internal trainings for the folks that lack the experience.

The problem isn't hiring people that only know macOS/Linux, we always argue about how bad HR hiring processes are in our field.

The problem is apparently the lack of management motivation to bring those peoples up to speed, and is confortable pushing for Web widgets instead.

I do not know what is up with people and their aversion to help people be better (or at the very least more useful) at their job. Not just in IT, but even hard / physical labor-type jobs or w/e.

In a culture obsessed with individual success, helping someone else does not have any obvious upside, but plenty of clear downsides - what if he gets so good that I look worse in comparison? What if he stays the same and I look like a bad mentor? Why would I sacrifice my time for no practical reward? Etc etc.

Yeah I understand that and I was thinking the same things, but it honestly sucks. I have been in a position where I was supposed to be taught the work on the spot but instead they expected me to know everything and do what I have never done before and it is such a bad experience. :/

It costs money. You're paying that person to be doing something other than working. If you're not squeezing maximal productivity out of your workers, then you have failed as a manager and will not be getting that sweet bonus this quarter

It's weird that Linux people are still seething to this day that the reason for Linux's lack of success on the desktop comes from the unfair pushing of Windows, when it's clear that Microsoft has been barely putting any effort into Windows, and gutting development save for AI stuff.

I'm sure Microsoft would be perfectly fine ditching Windows as long as they could keep pushing Teams, Azure AD and Office 365 to companies.

It's crazy how no one actually competently working towards a shared goal is invested in the desktop OS game any more.

Linux people still have some fire left in them, but lack organization and shared vision to deliver a high quality product in a timely manner. macOS is the best contender, but other than pushing weird mobile-driven UX design and locking down the OS, the macOS of today hasn't changed that much from the OS X of 20 years ago.

I'm a Linux user but I don't understand the drive of Linux users for it to be a mainstream OS. If it would be mainstream it would be more commercial, the users having less agency, having no choice in desktop environment and tied to commercial services. Because once it's big, big companies will want to make big bucks off the people using it. And most consumers actually like big tech companies taking them by the hand and choosing for them.

So in other words, Linux on the desktop will be a Linux I will hate. The closest thing to Linux for the mainstream we have is ChromeOS and I'm sure we all hate it. I sure do because I want nothing to do with Google services.

In other words, be careful what you ask for.

I personally think this is a symptom of tech companies hiring leetcoders.

> this is also a reason why WinUI efforts went down the drain.

That may be, but there is PLENTY of people with the expertise to develop WinUI apps -- IMO, the glaring problem would be that Microsoft can't get their head straight on which UI to support in the first place!

Win32, Windows Forms, WPF, even MFC, I do agree.

WinUI, only Microsoft employees on the Windows team, and fools that aren't aware of all the WinRT tooling reboots since Windows 8 was introduced, buying into WinUI marketing of how great it is.

As one of the fools that thought WinRT was a great idea, what .NET 1.0 should have been, I doubt there are many of those left.

WPF wasn't brought back into active status at BUILD 2024 by accident.

Can you write or point to some more insights about the problems / critique of these most recent approaches?

This comment should provide a good overview of the current chaos,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40843252

Then check the feedback on the latest community call,

https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/discussions/1...

>> they aren't able to hire people nowadays with Win32 development

They can hire pretty much anyone. They choose to not hire people with Win32 experience. They choose to implement hiring process which results in hire other kind of people.

Do you honestly think you could hire a staff a project (requiring hundreds) with young(ish) people of at least decent skills who all know Win32/COM/C/C++?

But who is letting interns with no experience take architectural and technological decisions for a core feature such as the start menu? These are the people that should be blamed.

Do they hire from US universities?

I thought most work is outsourced now.

Yet Apple can find decent developers to work with their Apple-specific tools+tech.

Yeah, there's been complaints about some Apple's old polish and consistency being lost, but it's usually very nitpicky stuff, nothing compared to the complaints about Win11.

Have you actually tried out Tahoe with Liquid Glass?

It's my daily driver. I have zero problems with it. I don't mind the Liquid Glass UX. I'm not blindly anti-Apple though, neither am I a fanboi. I've just legitimately not had any problems. There have been minor bugs, etc., but nothing broken. Definitely night and day from Win11....

You're only half right, a lot of these devs probably use Windows but since JSwhatever is the current lingua franca of programming it's easier to hire for

> It's basically a fancy textbox.

That was the lure.

But the real Notepad has been decommissioned and there is some bloated one now.

Is notepad++ still a thing? I only use Windows as a dumb terminal now.

yeah, and it's still one of things in Windows that is a pleasure to use when you need it.

If it comes down to FOSS/freeware stuff I am actually quite fond of Windows ecosystem.

Foobar2k, Paint.NET, Notepad++, IrfanView, WizTree, Ditto, TotalCommander, NAPS2 etc.

Linux has many options for any of those, but I always had a feeling that those options have less polish, or are less stable, or their UI is an afterthought etc. On Windows you have basically a single option for each application that most people go for, so documentation and online help is plentiful.

> Foobar2k, Notepad++, IrfanView, TotalCommander

Without those, especially last one my productivity at my corporate work would be half at most. Editing a file in an archive within another archive directly, doing quick file comparisons of 2 files, syncing different dirs, fulltext recursive search... all with much better UI than Unix console counterparts (which I use too). And much more.

Simply the best tools on the whole market for me in given category, period.

I forgot about 7zip as well.

There is something magical about those specialized, no nonsense tools using WINAPI, not chasing cross-platform, and maintained for decades, some of them since 90s. Snappiness, intuitiveness, stability, discoverability etc.

MPD, Krita, Vim/Emacs/Scite,NSxiv with scripts, any diff tool since the 90's, any file manager since Midnight Commander and so on...

Less stable? MPD supported damn state supported popular science radio streaming channels in Spain like nothing...

Also vidir, entr and jimtcl/awk scripts p0wn your setup any time... I can just remote-mount FS's anywhere and use any local tools as if they where there. I can just spawn builds on directory changes and spawn an editor with a REPL in miliseconds. GUI? Everything it's composable. I can use a mega-complete GUI for MPD that makes Foobar2k blush. I can output audio to an streaming socket (or to plain Icecast) from MPD and plug any audio FX' and whatnot with MPD plugins.

I can push the whole graphical environment down and I could keep playing my music and control the whole music daemon from my phone. Add songs, add radio stream, play/skip, volume up and down... from my damn bathroom.

And OFC I can still code under VTY's and even read PDF's/CBZ's/EPUB's and even watch videos play any game or emulator which uses SDL (a ton of source ports, emulators like mednafen, Doom/Quake ports, Scummvm, DOSBox, PCSXR, PPSPPP)...

That without touching a mouse or switching between GUI's. No RSI, no headaches, no remote GUI tools to mount any crap requiring thousands of click and hurting your wrists and forearms. Everything it's under a directory and managed as it if were part of my hard disk filesystem.

I can edit directory listings with my text editor with the vidir tool, they will show up as a text file. You delete a range of lines, these files are gone. I can search and rename files at crazy speeds and, well, I can spawn any tool with find and iomenu and have a quick search for a file. File managers? Forget it, you keep typing and the fuzzy-finding tool with match the file in milseconds and open the registered tool for that extensions. And this is done with tools that could probably run in the 80's and early 90's. Go figure, I'm computing as if it was in 2040 but with 'prehistoric' tools.

Ah, don't forget that most CLI and TUI tools are scriptable... so you can just forget of even using a computer, 90% of the tasks can complete themselves via cron, the time scheduler under Unix.

I am not sure why you've put so much effort, but thank you for confirming my views on Linux people.

Is not about Linux, I don't use that Unix branch. I don't click neither on menues nor buttons. It's about usability and automation, something utterly lacking under Windows. Once you can use any remote or local filesystem seamlessly with your own scripts spawning at events, you are 90% done.

I've switched all my machines to linux in the past couple years.

I say with confidence that you will never be able to do file operations as quickly in a terminal as you could in a good GUI, like the Explorer from Windows 2000.

Yes, happy user and donations contributor over here.

> donations contributor

A.k.a. donor.

Yeah, thanks.

Yes.

The two applications i miss on my linux boxes are notepad++ (though Kate is a good substitute) and GitExtensions

Notepad++ works pretty well with Wine, too.

https://github.com/dail8859/NotepadNext for a reimplementation

Out of curiosity, what does notepad++ have that kate of other texteditors does not?

Looking at the features there does not seem to be anything special, but a lot of people seem to love it so there is clearly something special about it.

For me it's the TextFX menu and the MIME Tools plug in. They offer very easy access to lots of handy features like changing case (upper, lower, proper, sentence, invert), remove/swap/replace quotes ('/"), removing trailing spaces, non-printable characters, and blank lines (or just extra blank lines), base64/URL/HTML/ROT13/UU encoding/decoding, all kinds of decimal/hex/binary/octal/text conversions, add/remove escapes, etc.

Having so much there in just a couple clicks is very nice!

Ye about the only app I miss on my Debian systems.

Uninstall bloated version and the AI-less stock version of Notepad returns.

It's not even a competent textbox. Try to scan barcodes into it for example, or use it with Autohotkey. It has some sort of buffering issue and lags horribly whenever characters are input faster than a human.

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