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Comment by andai | Hacker News Reader

A little while ago I ran Windows XP in a VM, inside Windows 10.

I noted that when I pressed the start key, the start menu opened.

I noted that when I pressed Win+E, an explorer window opened.

Fully rendered. After a single video frame.

On Windows 10, the same thing happens, only several hundred milliseconds later, and then you get to enjoy watching the UI elements get painted in one at a time.

Twenty years of progress.

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I'm forced to use the Microsoft ecosystem at work and the sluggishness of it is a major source of procrastination. I find myself putting off small tasks forever, because waiting for word files to open, browsing folder structures in Teams, etc. are all mildly painful experiences. I suspect a lot of people do this, and maybe all of them don't even realize why they are doing this. The effect of sluggish user interfaces on overall productivity is probably well underestimated.

The same goes to some extent to anything with a web interface, for example Databricks.

I wrote this, I find it spectacularly hilarious. It is a desktop text editor in a self contained html file. (50 lines)

https://text-edit.go-here.nl

You put it on your desktop and (assuming you have a browser running) instantly brings up a text editor that can only load and save.

If you feel you need some feature you edit the html file and add the code yourself. (Preferably using text-edit)

Unlimited capabilities:)

> at work

A lot of performance issues are down to MDM software.

Windows Explorer taking multiple seconds to load and often a bright flash of a white background during the load was exactly what pushed me over the edge to Linux.

Few years back I was complaining to a coworker: "I just love opening Teams and watching it draw its subwindows in one by one, like a Windows 1.0 app on an 8086."

First flat design, now sluggish window redraws... Windows is getting retro hipster. Will 26H2 take away overlapping windows?

Presumably that's to keep hardware sales up, e-waste be damned. You won't notice it taking 8 times longer when you have 8 times as many cores, or whatever.

No I think it's a consequence of so much of the industry abandoning caring about the craft in favor of just shipping whatever garbage checks off their Jira tickets. This is the same attitude that leads to vibe coding. It's the idea that the code doesn't matter and the only thing of any importance is the business attached to the product.

It's stupid and shortsighted, but the entire industry seems pretty damned nearsighted these days.

It's mostly the result of hiring too many stupid product managers and engineers that don't give a shit.

Even if you didn't read the code if you cared even an ounce you wouldn't ship this crap.

The problem is that there are more of those, than those who care. And when money pours in, it’s a lost fight. When there is wealth, it’s beneficial for you in the short term to just grab from it as much as possible, than to improve things, if you’re not good in your job. And hell, most people are not especially good.

There are still pockets, where if you don’t push it, you loose. But you need to search for it. Average developers won’t ever work at such places. They won’t ever encounter them, because almost no developer jobs needs that.

Btw, you can make such positions in every company. I did it, several times. And it’s very beneficial even salary wise.

> It's mostly the result of hiring too many stupid product managers and engineers that don't give a shit.

If It Ain't Broke Don't Fix it.

Except, they hired all these people and expect them to do Stuff. What are they supposed to do?

Tell that to my Citrix guy.

But it's still just as slow on current hardware. Windows 11 has that latency everywhere and it grinds my gears. At my workplace I got a very recent beefy machine and every click in explorer, start menu, etc. feels like walking through mud.

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