Recently I was helping a relative do something on their Windows 11 machine and I asked them to press Windows key + R, type calc, press Enter. And I was astonished at the result. Literally: Mouth agape, frozen in astonishment for about 10 seconds.
I knew about the ads and tracking and the local account bullshit, but I didn't realize just how bad the Windows experience has become.
I decided in the end it was pulling down stuff from the web - in tiles it displayed beside the start menu. If you were on a fast network and had a good internet connection the problem mostly went away. The feature was inherited from WinPhone, I think. So it wasn't that the underling OS or video had got slower, it was them bolting on irrelevant crap to the menu. I later got smarter and deleted all the tiles, so only the menu was displayed. That improved things considerably. I remain gob smacked at them crippling their product like that.
I'm try to avoid Windows now, and am mostly successful. But I read these stories about them adding AI and ads into the mix. If they bolted them into basic window functions like the start menu in the same idiotic way, I could well believe Microsoft has release the slowest Windows ever despite it running on the fastest hardware the planet has seen.
What happens is the calculator window pops up ~immediately, but the entire contents of the window are a stupid logo--for at least 5 full seconds--until the UI elements actually load and you can actually use the calculator to calculate things.
The most basic thing our PCs do is they calculate. The Intel 4004 was designed... for a calculator. calc.exe, that erstwhile snappy, lightweight native Win32 application is now apparently some Electron abomination with a footprint the size of Windows 98 and a launch time to match.
The lack of quality in Windows is simply astonishing. And the new start menu and taskbar are terrible. Quite how a company can transform a product into such a mess in just a few years is incredible.
It obviously knows what I'm trying to do (Bing search recommendation is for "Add or Remove Programs"), yet refuses to surface the actual shortcut to that settings page (or "app", or whatever Microsoft calls it this week). Even better: some days it pops up immediately after typing "Add" and other days I'm wrestling with it like I'm training a stubborn animal, clicking the result in the hope that the OS will "learn" that yes, this is what I want when I type "Add".
Most of the time I just give up and dig through the Settings menu like it's 1999.
Hah, I guess the Internet really is like a sewer, you have to have good protective equipment to wade in it...
And to think on all "modern" OSes you can't even do that. Neither Android nor IOS let you do this in any way shape or form. Even with portable webapps it doesn't work, as webapps go offline. And microsoft clearly wants to create this situation too (last brute force attempt was windows home)
you can also "add to homescreen" on iOS/android and it acts like a native app & works offline. symbolic math - computer algebra system, integration/differentiation, finance app in rom, 3d graphs.
(emu is not my work, i only packaged it for PWA and host it for myself to use, but you are welcome to as well)
