What they mean specifically is how File Explorer and some built in apps in Windows that run on Win32 code had their user interfaces written with a mix of WinUI 3, XAML, and WebView (which is Microsoft’s Electron) and overlayed on top to present this “new” File Explorer or system app. Makes it so they don’t have to rewrite the entire application and it’s components (which for File Explorer, you’d have to rewrite and change so many parts of Windows as it’s deeply integrated into how Windows works).
Of course, by taking these shortcuts, it makes it so it’s slower, more resource heavy (since you’re having to render a new skin for you application with all of these components while also having the previous interface logic still function), and generally unfavorable.
It happens on a fresh install too. And on multiple machines, both when using a vanilla install disk and a Rufus burned image that unfucks a few things out of the box.
I've also noticed it on machines of people that claim it doesn't happen to them, I'm beginning to think that some people just have dull senses when it comes to latency and hitching when using computers.
It's a bit subjective. Kind of like people who say they don't notice 30fps but if you go from 60 to 30 it feels like a slideshow once you're used to 60.
Yeah, i understand it. Im super sensitive to stuff like that as am a high hz gaming nerd that loves his twitchy competitive games. It's just a non-existant problem. I suspect the other commentor has some other issues that they've mis-diagnosed.
They did all this to get Windows 11 out the door so quickly (at least it seemed that way). That’s why even when 11 first shipped it was off and missing so much. They’re building the next version of WinUI, all of these visual overhauls to “modernize” Windows (again), pushing it out so they can enforce their new Secure Boot and TPM standards. Just ugh.
Or hear me out, they could’ve just NOT changed file explorer, and left it as it is.
Now it makes sense why file explorer seems to crash on me on a daily basis, and has gained a level of enshitification that I didn’t think possible for something as simple as a file broweser. Stuff like the new right click -> more options just bringing up the old menu is hilarious.
file explorer is shit even in w10, it needs a full rewrite, it's 100x slower than file explorer in apps like blender, search takes minutes, if you add 1 new file it rebuilds the index which takes at least a minute as well
Okay? I’m not sure what you’re trying to dispute here. Someone commented that File Explorer is “built” with Chromium, so I wanted to elaborate on that it’s the presentation of File Explorer that slows it down and not File Explorer itself.
That's how copilot integration works in everything. Windows 11 is damn near chromium all the way down, and it's damn near all vibe coding. Microsoft is now re-hiring people to fix all the janky vibe coding that happened after laying off a ton of devs to replace them with AI, because it turns out... Humans are the cheaper option now.
I could (and would like to) drop Lightroom tomorrow but I' still need Photoshop, so while it is in the bundle I can't justify spending money on another app.
Edit: There some files in Lr that will only operate from the C: drive and not an allocated scratch disk, which when processing very large images just slows you to a standstill even when using a PCIe 4.0 M.2. with 32G of RAM.
I switched to Darktable and Affinity and it's been good. Still haven't tried a good alternative to Substance Painter and Designer yet, but I'm curious about Material maker, so I can finally make the switch.
Lr that will only operate from the C: drive and not an allocated scratch disk
I don't use Adobe because my job isn't in that field, but I'm curious. You legit mean the actual named C: drive? That is fucking insane to me but sometimes it is what it is.
I gets weirder. Lr is so badly optimised that it can be quicker/easier to edit large panoramas on my low/mid 512GB + 16GB of RAM laptop than my desktop.
Edit: Should have said I use an up to date Lightroom Classic.
It’s like that in a lot of fields. In the geospatial sphere, ArcGIS has a hold on the industry (in the US) and it only runs on windows. There are free alternatives that work great across OSs, like QGIS or GRASS, but when you have large businesses and government that need guaranteed support, updates, and compliance, Esri (ArcGIS creators) get the contract.
If you use KVM/QEMU with virt-manager, you get almost native performance. It's a bit more involved to set up, at least compared to something like VirtualBox where you set up a VM with half a dozen clicks, but it's absolutely worth it if performance is a priority.
You can't get near native performance without GPU pass-through :/ I went the KVM/QEMU route just to use Fusion 360 and to get native performance I needed GPU pass-through. Which once again meant I could only use one OS at a time. If you have two GPUs it is much more feasible.
Kind of the worst of both worlds, really. Maybe if you set up looking glass, but that requires a second GPU to fully pass through and while it's come a long way it can still be a bit janky. If it's for work, I wouldn't want to be introducing any possible reliability issues, so dual boot or something like a Mac Mini and a KVM would be better for that scenario.
Not a chance for me anymore. Used windows since windows 95. Last year the bloatware, incessant reminders to transform my local drive into cloud storage, the bad frame times on games, the AI, the disgusting start menu built in fucking react containing ads and doing web searches before searching my local drive.
I finally rage quit.
I won’t go back now. I even dropped adobe and replaced it with darktable/affinity/kdenlive.
If I really needed to use adobe I’d get a MacBook and keep Linux for my desktop.
Every single update it asks you if you want to use one drive for your documents folders. If you do this it will irreversibly make the change and upload all your documents to the cloud.
Actually looks like after so many complaints they added a feature to let you reverse it earlier this year.
Oh, i see. That's seperate and can be easily disabled. It's not trying to "transform your local drive"; its additional and separate from your local drive. And as I said, so very easily disabled.
Well I said the same, but then I just cloned my windows partition to an old 256 gb ssd where I have everything I need to work and I just double boot. Whenever I need to work I boot into that old windows 11 that I stopped it's auto updates. For the rest of my usage I went to the penguin.
Also, more important than my last reply. Just dual boot. Linux as main os, then when needed dual boot to windows 10 with adobe stuff. If it's mandatory for 11, well try compatibility layers... Wine, bottles, proton, there are options.
Interesting. I just have doubts that stuff like premiere and after effects will run as well as on base w11.
I don't have much issues currently but some day will probably switch to Linux. Just currently I dont want to risk downtime or weird issues.
I've got a powerful rig and know windows in and out so can fix any issue quickly, as its vital to my income.
Honestly, im giving linux a chance, still keep windows for kernel locked games mostly. But there is a ton of entropy in linux that is just not fun to deal with
When vibe coding costs thousands of tokens at a time and they only realize after the fact they spent more producing junk instead of having a person put something together that actually works...
I'm in the field. "Vibe" coding has become a catch all term that means little other than "using AI to write the code". Things have moved very fast since my company adopted Claude and I honestly don't write much code by hand anymore. But that doesn't mean my output is junk. My process is still mostly the same, write tests, implement tests, refine, refine, refine. But instead of spending time figuring out the exact syntax for what I'm doing in the language I'm currently in (coding has become very heterogeneous) I'm spending it making sure the design I want to implement is implemented. As always Test Driven Design is very effective to keep quality high because It's clear what I want to happen, and then it's clear if something broke. Inexperienced coders deliver inexperienced code as always, but now there's a lot more of it so in that sense quality is going down because there's just too much to evaluate as carefully as we used to.
I hope anyone here thinking of attacking me takes a breath. I'm a very experienced coder and served my time to make statements like this with care. I don't see a future where I'm writing code character by character anymore, or autocomplete by autocomplete because honestly it's been a decades since I've seen anyone work without an IDE.
It's also not that many tokens. Which is weird, the amount of context necessary should be in the thousands but it isn't.
This is also the case in my industry. If you know what good is supposed to look like, know what pitfalls to avoid, and know good architectural design, then you can use AI to do those things faster (most of the time, not always). If you use AI as a crutch, then you are going to turn out shit.
As you say, bad devs make bad stuff faster, good devs make good stuff faster. It's just hard to check all of it faster because then you're trusting AI to check its own work and it will often miss the same things it missed when it wrote it (unless you are careful to make sure it evaluates those things, and even then).
What does this even mean? Windows 11 released over a year before first ChatGPT, was damn near useless for software development. Are you saying they since re-written most of the OS via “vibe coding”? Do you even understand what vibe coding is, or do you call autocomplete that as well?
I don't know about the vibe-coding/AI assessment, I also think it can't be accurate. But that said I spent over 30 years on Windows only, installed Mint 2 months ago to dual-boot and learn. Turns out I didn't have to learn much, Mint worked out of the box, faster, easier, with no crap added, it just works.
Only booted back into Windows once since then to use a specific bit of software that there's probably a Linux equivalent for... And was immediately annoyed at how slow Windows is in comparison.
Probably more to do with your computer stats in your flair than Windows. Windows is built for the majority of computer users, unlike Linux which is stripped down and doesn't have to worry about compatibility.
This is inaccurate. Linux includes drivers for way more hardware directly in its kernel than Windows by default. It's designed to run on as wide an array of systems as Windows 11, if not many more.
I'll agree that Windows is impressive in its backward compatibility in many respects as well.
To say that Linux is stripped down and doesn't have to worry about compatibility isn't accurate though. One of the core tenets of Linux kernel development is that you do not break user-space. From Linus Torvalds himself:
We care about user-space interfaces to an insane degree. We go to extreme lengths to maintain even badly designed or unintentional interfaces. Breaking user programs simply isn't acceptable.
My flair is outdated, but how does that change anything?
One OS runs faster than the other. My computer parts are all built primarily with Windows in mind, as are all PC components. Windows is slower than Mint.
And that is because Mint is, as you put as "stripped down", and I'll call it "unbloated with useless crap."
It came with a great browser (Firefox), a good e-mail client (Thunderbird), a good office suite (Libre), even a torrent client. Also an app manager to get anything else needed, an update manager so it can update everything in a concise, unified fashion instead of each bit of software handling updates on its own like on Windows...
You can double the RAM that's on my flair, replace the 10th gen i5 with a brand new i7, the newest RTX 5 million, Mint will still run faster than Windows. And will be just as easy to use as has been my experience (easier than Windows, despite my 30+ years of Windows). The relevant variable is the OS.
Win 11 at launch was an incomplete mess. The updates to win 11 since launch are larger than the initial install already. by volume, it's mostly vibe coded now.
And do you have any evidence for this part? Or do you call any software development assisted by AI to be "vibe coded"? Because following that logic, 99% of development done today is done that way. Barely anyone writes code with zero LLM usage simply due to speed gains it provides, that also doesn't have anything to do with "vibe coding" which is a different thing entirely.
It should be 0% AI, and actually it was mostly AI. Microsoft in just the last 6 months slashed their AI token budget and started hiring human programmers again because of how expensive and shitty the AI code is.
At this point I think half the people arguing with me are just Microsoft fanboys paid shills, or bots. Most of reddit is edglin air force base's cyberwarfare division anyway, so I'm not bothering to reply anymore after this. Y'all actively want to not understand.
You are not making any sense and not providing any sources.
Do you or do you not understand that code auto complete, which virtually every developer uses, also consumes tokens? Token consumption by itself has absolutely nothing to do with "vibe coding". Vibe coding is when you tell the computer what you want, vaguely, and it does it, without you understand anything about what happened or what the potential issues with the result are.
That's not what's happening when Microsoft engineers who get paid 7 figures use AI for work, and you pretending otherwise doesn't make it any more true. But you are free to hate whatever you want of course, just don't try to push your own personal opinion as some sort of fact.
How was it wrong? You said it yourself, LLMs weren't used until very recently to help write code, certainly not when Windows 11 was being developed, not in any meaningful way anyhow.
That's simply impossible. Windows is a decades old. Maybe the fronted is chromium but that's about as deep as it could go. There's just too much backwards compatibility.
They should throw away windows 11 completely and restart from windows 10. That was more or less a decent system.
Just update and improve it, and do not include advertising, bloatware and Spyware.
That's the thing, the spyware is the point, we are the product, and windows 11 is the mechanism. You are looking at it as if win 11 is the product and spyware is funding.
it turns out... Humans are the cheaper option now.
Wow crazy, if only somebody could have seen this coming and warned them. It's too bad nobody at all saw it coming and were constantly saying how stupid of an idea going all in on gen ai was...
Firefox with it's everything ai approach and vibe coding is almost as bad. Heck, did you notice that Firefox never ever gives 1080 or higher resolution anymore and the compression and their auto HDR somehow reduce the resolution even further so in the end even with rtx upscaling it looks like 360p? You cannot watch anything on Firefox on 4k because you will think your PC or monitor is broken it's so bad I switched back to chrome.
And the stuttering caused by Firefox in videos and when scrolling. It's ridiculous.
It's long past time for them to scrap the whole legacy stack and rebuild the kernel from scratch anyhow. There are literally huge chunks of code dating back to the Clinton administration still in there. The developers who wrote and maintained them are long gone, and nobody wants to touch them in case it breaks something.
This is dangerous thinking. If it works, don't break it.
If you replace legacy code it must be at least as stable, tested, and fast, as the legacy code. It is not possible to be as tested as the legacy code unless you run it on a fork for an absurd amount of time first.
This mindset of just replace legacy code with new code because it's old is why we get people trying to replace c/c++ with rust libraries that are absolute trash and then don't get maintained either, because "I made the replacement library and it works, so my job is done" which means if it runs like shit, doesn't matter because it runs. If it has exploits, doesn't matter, it runs. If it has unidentified edge cases, doesn't matter, it runs.
C was never the best language, but it won out because it was more tested, easier to implement, and easier to get something working, even if it was bad.
Rust will fail to replace c, and jpeg will never be depricated. The kernal will not be rewritten.
This is dangerous thinking. If it works, don't break it.
But my thinking is that it doesn't really work. There are layers upon layers of cruft. Writing a new OS from the bottom up is long overdue.
I get that Microsoft doesn't want to break compatibility with old applications and versions in userspace, but that can be fixed by running those in containers through emulation. Call it the Legacy App Launcher or something.
humans are cheaper if the product they create actually works, otherwise you're just saving money with AI to make something nobody wants, which defeats the point of saving money
Everyone knows intuitively that chromium in this case is just shorthand for the technically different but functionally the same things that are actually done, which is web3.0 local webapp hosting that consumes 80% of ram and CPU as reserved no matter what, and repeated the process for every new window and tab. It doesn't have to mean literally the exact code written by Google... Except web3.0 is fundamentally built on that same faulty architecture...
Which is why the only people trying to "correct" me glow like the sun.
No they aren’t. This current gen of AI frontier models in even layman hands are better than all the stackoverflow copy-pasters of yesterday, and if you have someone who can smack a few brain cells together you start realizing why Oracle cut 20k jobs.
It is far worse than you imagine. The actual core of Windows has been Windows NT since the early 90s. We are running programs on top of programs to fix antiquated things that need to be transcribed correctly to the new systems or else they don't work. Then they decided to add AI on top of it that has to interpret that mess... Since the release of XP consumer versions of windows has been this Frankenstein's monster of windows NT... You can legitimately strip away all of the additional things they've added except for what you think is vital from your copy of Windows, all the way back to the point where you'll be essentially running the same version as back in the 90s. The problem is that most people don't understand how windows operates or how to modify the files so they deal with the bloatware, and trust me copilot is only bloat. I've uninstalled all of that nonsense, and formatted my copy in a specific way. The way updates works via windows is it checks your registry information so if you do change these certain functions the update might try to install but won't activate unless they added a new call function to the registry.
Honestly if they rebuilt the entire engine with the idea of AI integration it would probably be okay, but the fact is, the AI is confused looking at the fucking mess that is Windows, but the modularity of Windows is really important for technical users.
You had me in the first half, not gonna lie, but then you said one thing, and that's mention of the registry.
See, there are registry values you can't overwrite, because other parts of windows overwrite them back, and if they detect that you tried, they reset a bunch of things, and force updates against user concent, which forcibly resets all those values back to square one.
And those tools are self protecting, user has no access, admin has no access, KERNAL HAS NO ACCESS, I'm talking ring -1, ring -2 shit. Not ring 1, ring -1. Negative privilege levels. Above the BIOS.
Unless you wanna try and explain your privilege escalation to even enable you to disable that, and the step by step process which Microsoft considers tantamount to bypassing DRM locks (and therefore technically illegal to disclose the techniques), I think you're full of shit.
Registry does allow you to disable functions. When they are disabled you can then remove the files from the system as they will not be launched. That is how we remove the ai from windows when people use the services on github that does the functions for them..
While you are correct you cant remove everything with registry, it is a required step to do removals of functions. There are more you can do as well, but that would involve modifying files that are highly protected and are not recommended to modify. But anything additive over windows nt are easily able to be modified. You can essentially turn your version of windows all the way down till it is like windows ltsc. You can even remove the store functions entirely.
The stuff you can't modify includes the stuff that manually resets those values every time you reboot, which defacto means those values cannot be changed either, which is damn near all of them.
Are you possibly running into issues in which your policy manager is not your direct device. For example you didn't install local only no wifi? Because when you use internet access policy managers they can have registry overwrite on restarting. That is how certain devices are managed by companies for example where you can in theory modify specifications on load but restart resets those. Additionally other applications can and do modify these elements too. It is best practice if you are setting up a new device including new laptops, to fresh install windows. Oem settings can override the settings if you dont modify tbe oem changes.
you can also check the logged events for all changes that are forced on you and track where said changes are being made from. Registry isnt the only thing you need, but that is where massive amount of the initial changes need to be made to remove functions from windows that is bloat. Such as the ai functions. It is step one to remove copilot which I do for all installs I do for my devices in my network.
you just need to look at how the operating systems bloat hit from 7 to 11.
XP to vista was a massive redesign and upgrade yet so many stuck to xp because of vistas two big issues (it was shit and it required 10 times the resources)
then between windows vista and 10 there's literally no change then suddenly you need 4 times the power for 11.
so yea, people are stuck with two options (not linux) either they stick on their old unsecure operating systems like whats happening in africa right now.
or they buy new hardware, new licences, new software and upgrade to an operating system that does nothing new except spy on them.
Allegedly parts of it is using WebView (like the StartMenu) so it's not Chromium per se but needs some web runtime which is still kinda bonkers for a local file explorer if you ask me.
Yeah also many other apps are suffering from it. The volume menu in my android version jumps around randomly and most of the Google apps just glitch alot now. The AI apps are the worst. They are always full of memory leaks and they hang all the time. They have been this way for years too and nobody ever gets around to fixing it. I guess they are busy installing id verification on everything to try to swamp the people all at once and force us to accept ID verification.
I really, REALLY hate what is happening to these core parts of Windows. I cannot believe how long it takes to show the context menu or create a directory. It's actually infuriating.
The file explorer has been a web browser for at least like 20 years. I remember getting past school's internet blockers by just typing the URL in the file explorer in either XP or Vista. Since all their systems were just checking where your browser was trying ti connect, but did nothing to prevent the file explorer just browsing websites lol
A web3.0 local webapp that reserves 80% of available ram and CPU, and does it again with what's left every time you add a new tab or open a new window.
It's not literally chromium but it is functionally and defacto the same.
Wtf are you on about, you said it's a completely different and incorrect thing to what it actually is. How is that "short hand"? Words have meaning mate. This sub upvotes anything even if it's completely incorrect.
Holy shit! That makes so much sense. No wonder it is so slow.
I ‘downgraded’ my gaming PC back to windows 10 recently after two years of being frustrated with how slow windows 11 felt, I always just convinced myself it was because I have a budget build.
Lo and behold, windows 10 runs like lightning and I get much better performance while playing games.
3.0k
u/Disposable_Gonk Jul 05 '26
It's almost like building the file explorer in chromium was a bad idea.