Electron apps are ruining the Windows 11 experience, and even the JavaScript creator has warned against ‘rushed web UX over native,’ but it doesn’t look like that will change Microsoft’s plans. In a post on X and other places, Microsoft reaffirmed its commitment to AI in Windows 11 and encouraged Electron developers to consider using AI in their apps.
This quote from the article is fucking hilarous:
Discord has also openly admitted that its Windows app is a resource hog, and it has rolled out a feature that allows the app to restart itself when RAM usage exceeds 4GB.
Why is my Electron “Hello World” app 10Gb?
I’ll never understand “installing” a website. Just open the damn site in Firefox.
sooo ist that a memory leak, or what has to happen for that being the solution?
Today it took almost 30 seconds for the context menu to appear when I right clicked on a file in windows explorer. I mean ffs, if I wanted everything to be a browser, I’d use a chromebook.
(Inb4 “install linux”, it’s a work computer and I don’t get a say in OS)
Dude. Same. Windows 11 at work is fucking awful.
My laptop idles at 12 out of 16 gigs of RAM free.
Right clicking takes dozens of seconds, especially on a network share.
Did IT remove a letter mapped network drive? Haha! Fuck you! Windows hangs indefinitely if you open Windows explorer. You gotta fuck around in the registry to remove that shit.
The only good thing about windows 11 is tabs in Windows explorer. Which MacOS and Linux have had for a gazillion years.
Microsoft don’t care about file shares anymore anyway, they want you to sign up for OneDrive :(
All our network shares are Azure hosted, so Microslop is getting corporate $$$ regardless. And I think that bug has been around since forever.
I can’t even type normally anymore in teams. Since it will hang my business laptop during typing. It’s so awful.
Really Teams is the worst product.
This reminds me that many years ago, there was a small market for better file managers in Windows. Most were more like “side grades” that were better in some ways, but worse than others, but there was one that was way better than all of them called Directory Opus. It was silly expensive for the time (I want to say like $80), and most others were free, but holy shit was it feature filled, including tabs, and just really good. It was also a bit heavy compared to explorer back then. Now it probably runs insanely fast and is still way better. I just looked and it still exists at basically the same price, but any sane person considering it should just leave Windows.
I use a Norton Commander clone (Total Commander) lol. Having a huge list of bookmarks in a drop-down menu with subfolders is super helpful for my work.
NC and Total Commander are honestly great and probably greatly preferrable to Windows Explorer these days.
Tell corporate to give you more RAM or let you choose a lighter operating system 🤷♀️
Even in Edge, Outlook (a Microslop web app running on a Microslop browser) sometimes takes up to a minute to load on refresh. HOW!? God I hate that company.
Lmao yup, the desktop app ‘new’ outlook takes up to 30 minutes to load sometimes
I’ve never had outlook take long, always done in about 5 seconds. Firefox too, which would be the last to optimise for.
Install linux
Just like the good old days of running Windows 3.1 on an Intel 386sx. We’ve come full circle.
Win 3.1 wasn’t even that slow on a 386sx (yay, 386 buddies! o/), its nothing compared to Win 11 on midrange and lower laptops these days. Then again, those CPUs usually came in PCs with Win 3.0, so Win 3.1 was definitely noticeably heavier. MS also wasn’t nearly as large and well funded back then, there is no excuse for this other than pure incompetence.
When I started at my last job, I asked for a mac; I worked on Linux, Windows (wsl), and wanted a change. Most of my collegues (in the dev team) initially asked for a windows PC, but literally everyone ended up on Mac.
Windows is only usable when the WSL is set up and then you basically work exclusively on that VM lol, I literally cannot understand how anyone puts up with this OS. Any other OS is excellent just by comparison.
It’s not really a matter of preference. I’m a mechanical engineer, not a developer, and several industry-standard programs are only available for windows. Bugs that come from running in WINE or another emulation layer are unacceptable when they can potentially cause delays in production, scrap parts from a misprint or miscalculation, or lead to a part failure that kills someone.
Oh yeah I’m aware that some professionals are essentially locked to a single platform (same goes with accounting and Excel), I can only hope that the industries this affects start taking Linux more seriously (or Mac, but tbh once you’re running on Mac it’s less of a leap to work on Linux)
It doesn’t make sense to stay locked into the Mac environment unless the hardware is incredible or you need to develop iOS applications.
MacOS doesn’t really lock you at all though, and you’re free to dev for pretty much any software there, iOS or not
As long as you’re getting paid for those 30 seconds, it’s the shareholders’ problem. Keep your blood cool, take a sip of coffee and sit back. Twiddle with a thingamajig on your desk.
If your supervisor asks what you’re doing, say “waiting for Windows to load”. Because that’s what you’re doing, and if they don’t like it then they should let you use a different OS.
Me every day at work.
It’s even worse working in the company’s network drive.
But damn, it often takes ages for a right click to appear in the goddamned downloads folder (which is in its default C drive location…)
I feel you pain friend.
Oh god don’t even get me started on our network drives lol. Searching for part drawings can take HOURS
Look into cleaning up your context menu shell extensions: just a single bad one will freeze your context menu exactly how you described it.
Unfortunately, I have literally zero control over what’s installed on my computer at work
Do you have access to HKEY_CURRENT_USER in the registry? You can usually edit this even without admin rights.
I went back to the old Win10 right click menu by this method on my work PC, which sped things up substantially
I actually have a batch script (might be a powershell script?) with this and some other stuff in it for when I’m doing a fresh install on my pc.
My work pc is locked the fuck down though, I can’t even change my wallpaper or the color of the taskbar lol.
work computer, Win 11, here. I need to lock my PC when I leave my desk. Over the last month or 2 (maybe more?) when I 3 finger salute to lock, it used to open in a moment, now I can count to at least 4 before the screen comes up
Windows+L locks it directly, fyi
Oh, nice, tks. too bad they have destroyed many of our trust. Thankfully there is no win 11 at home on any pc and only 1 win 10 that I do not maintain. GF and I are both on linux
Theres another windows+L shortcut as well, windows+ctrl+shift+alt+l. It opens linkedin. Because why not
Oh man I forgot about that one. Dumbest shit ever, I love it
Win 11 feels like i replaced by SSD with an HDD. I’m half convinced that they’re making it as awful as possible so when the whole OS as a service thing arrives, it’ll feel super snappy.
I will say that LTSC runs way smoother than regular windows, but that’s almost certainly because it’s got a lot of the bullshit stripped out.
Find a new job
Lmao. Are you offering pay my bills and provide health insurance?
Yes. Can you send me the link to your onlyfans?
deleted by creator
What do we say?
MAKE… IT… SHITTY.
Sure, I love it when a 50KB app takes 50MB because some cunt designer only knows HTML.
I remember when 16 GB was for high work-load workstation tasks, it was not that long ago. Now it keeps getting used up by one single instance of firefox when it is open for too long. Screw javascript bullshit, i just want to use lynx and netsurf already.
bloated garbage code infests everything nowadays even before AI, there should be no excuse for a lot of these sites, i always feel like im in another world when im on a site that just works buttery smooth without delay or hiccup.
I’ve been wondering about using Firefox with a www<>gemini protocol<>gemini protocol<>www for a funn-er way of showing my middle finger to most websites, but my www dread hasn’t reached the level required to do it. Yet.
Work laptop: MS Teams is taking 1.2 gigabytes of fucking RAM just to exist. I’m not in a call. I’m not transferring files. Just the basic interface with chats (which still somehow manages to suck more than chat inferences from decades ago).
-> push software that needs tons of ram
-> cause ram shortage
-> ???
-> …profit?
At least for Enterprise where the real money is, “???” seems to be https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-365/windows-365-enterprise
This isn’t some grand plan 5d chess. The people running these companies are dumb as hell and lucky. They get convinced from one silicon valley thought leader’s blog post that ai and electron are the future and then direct the entire company in that direction thinking they’re a great leader who will be remembered for pushing the company in a novel direction at just the right time. They attend a talk by a different thought leader who talks about a future of ai cloud computers that anyone can access from anywhere with more computational power than could ever fit into the shitty laptop they’re accessing it from, then they go to the board meeting the next day with their bright new idea to do cloud personal desktops.
These companies are entirely responding to (nonsensical) market forces and the whims of high ranking individuals within their ranks. It’s painful and ridiculous.
To be clear, there are some benefits to provisioning enterprise devices in a tightly controlled cloud environment, but we’ve all seen ideas with “some benefits” get shot down by managers and CEOs who “don’t get why anyone would want that” so I’m not keen on giving Microsoft too much credit.
-> …profit?
They’re already hitting the storage side of things pretty hard.
Buy up all of the hardware on the planet to have a monopoly on compute/storage -> rent the compute/storage to everyone who can’t buy it.
See also: Housing
I’m so glad I bought my laptop when I did recently, with plenty of RAM and storage. Just in time before that stuff becomes impossible to find or impossibly unaffordable.
This generation of hardware will probably be the plateau. The decline and fall is just around the bend. Maybe another generation of CPUs before those go for bust, too. They can rent out GPUs, RAM, and storage, but as far as I’m aware the CPU needs to be local on the device. At least, a CPU needs to be on the device…
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this trend is occuring just as NPUs are starting to hit the market. Those chips are too powerful to let the plebeians own and use without restriction, in the corpo’s view.
Whether a better system replaces this one after it falls, or we enter an era where consumer hardware is a thing of the past, remains to be seen. Maybe when the AI bubble bursts, tech companies will have to liquidate their data centers and secondhand servers will become cheap. That would do wonders for the fediverse and the decentralized web…
Posting scammy Amazon links feels like cheating when having these discussions, but I kinda get where they’re coming from. The fact that people can try to sell a laptop with only 64gb disk is absolutely mental to me, because that’s not even enough to let the BASE OS run normally and update reliably. And that’s before you start doing anything on it.
Repeat with me.
INSTALL LINUX!
with me.
INSTALL LINUX!
-
Not really surprising considering Windows seems to be increasingly swapping their native shell components for Web Views (you can tell because sometimes they fail to load (: )
-
You know it’s bad when Brendan fucking Eich is the reasonable one
Why is settings getting so bad, its like using a nonfunctional electron app.
Ah that explains so much.
They turned themselves into users of their own zero code solutions for shitware.
-
Hi, uh- just incase Slopya Nadella of Microslop happens to read the comments here one day,
Slopya- please take your sloperating system, print the slop code on A4 paper, fold it until it’s all corners. When done, insert rectally.Once again, Microslop is a strong contender for Linux Marketer Of The Year award
Inner-platform effect in full swing. Windows exists only to run Chrome. Chrome is the new OS layer.
Turns out absolutely everybody hate Windows, including Microsoft.
Lack of constraints has killed everything. I hope all the RAM and storage becomes unusable people are forced to work with 3mb again.
Nah, they’ll just push for streaming compute power and charge you once more!
I’m just waiting for their reaction when everyone is supposed to use cloud desktops and the average application assumes the user has 128 GB of RAM.
You mean when care was taken while coding and an OS could "run on 1GB but suffice with 2GB? I know everyone hated Win 8 but it was a welcomed change plus no bullshit on it at the time.
Real men remember when windows vista launched like shit because it assumed there were way more brand new high memory machines out there than there actually was
Can thank Intel for that, they pressured MS to lower the documented requirements so they could sell more low-end hardware.
Of course, MS executives also gladly went along with it, not like they’re innocent in any way.
Also Nvidia and their drivers caused issues, as usual.
It was also a mess as there was a lot of confusion around “64-bit” and “32-bit” systems that even most retailers weren’t sure how to describe. Dude it was entertaining talking to best buy his who weren’t even sure how to explain it all and the compatibility issues.
I didn’t like Vista myself, but 8 seemed to be modernized enough and get away from Aero icons and glassy things.
Vista is the reason I started using Linux.
Unix was the reason I started using Linux.
I wouldn’t call Win 8 welcome, most people rather hated it. Then again, following Windows 7, which I the best of the bunch, couldn’t have been easy. MS just bet that the future of Windows was tablets and the world replied “lol no”.
I grew up with Windows 95 and later XP…
I remember watching the slow downfall ever since Office 2004 (or maybe that was the last one I liked, can’t remember if it was that or 2000) when they changed from primarily using toolbars with submenus to hiding everything in different tabs.
Like, I could find everything I needed to on the classic toolbars. The tabs, I never got used to…
I’ve hated enshittification since before there was even a word for it.
I strongly considered using Mate when I switched to Linux, but KDE is so sleek and I’m settling into it quite nicely. Plus, LibreOffice lets you choose your toolbar style, so I already have the classic version.
All my life I thought I hated computers, until I finally tried Linux. Then I realized I just hate Windows (and Mac, I tried Mac and hated it too).
I think I put off trying Linux for so long because I thought I was incompetent based on my experience with Windows, so I didn’t think I could learn Linux. I was wrong, and some of the beginner-friendly distros make it so easy.
I wonder if Windows does that on purpose, like an abuser who gaslights their victims by telling them they couldn’t make it on their own, that they need them, when they’re the ones holding them back…
Meanwhile the real future was smartphones and MS was like “lol no”.
I remember having a conversation with an MS salesman whose job was to plug Windows Mobile 6.5 … after the iPhone had come out. He had that sad quaver in his voice that people get when they know their task is futile.
Yeah, 8.1 took like 800 megs ootb, while 10 wanted about 3 gigs to itself (not sure about earlier versions, tho; mb enshitification happened gradually)
Since the mid 2000s desktop OSs haven‘t done anything fundamentally new until AI integration. Hardware accelerated compositing was the last big step. That was done with a couple of MBs on the graphics chip and less than 1 GB of RAM.
Microsoft also make the one app that actually shines in electron: vs code. It’s really quite optimised. But somehow they didn’t bother learning lessons from that and keep rolling out terrible slop like teams and new outlook.
It’s weird how one company can do things right and also be do incompetent at the same time.

It’s missing the arm that has the gun pointed at themselves.
I just realized I’ve been staring at this picture for over a minute, trying to figure out what it means. What does this picture mean?
Even thought Microsoft is one company, all the internal teams are separate, don’t communicate and usually do what they want with no regard to anything else the other teams are doing. Been an issue with Microslop for years, and its especially noticeable in their office/email divisions.
Ahh. That seems suboptimal and makes the picture make a lot more sense, thanks.
Part of a old joke about various big tech org charts. Microsoft divisions are purported to be in not only fighting with each other but also within themselves.
Tbf vscode has opensource contributors and they had the code for atom text editor (by developers of electron and github) to look as reference code.
Rip Atom, it’s a shame microsoft bought github and ended your development to promote their IDE. Who could have known they have no morals.
Atom was indeed very good. There are still forks out there.
I can’t stand VScode, whoever decided a text editor should be written in HTML/CSS and JavaScript deserves to be shot
Isn’t VS Code open-sourced? Can those optimizations be contributed to the wider community of electron experts?
I guess my point is VS Code works well because the users can fix it and they have the ability to do so. The same cant be said for Teams & Outlook. No one can fix that PoS.
And code is stolen from atom. But yes.
It’s weird how one company can do things right and also be do incompetent at the same time.
The way MS is structured internally, this is like being surprised that some NFL teams win the Super Bowl and some teams are the Cleveland Browns.
The next step in app delivery is shipping a full VM with the operating system and the app.
Docker?
Minesweeper as a Docker container.
Snap/Flatpak basically (I know containers are not exactly VMs)



















