The user experience of WinUI 3 isn't the worst I've seen but the developer experience is absolutely awful. I tried to make a simple app with it and the number of hacks I needed to get it to look and feel the way I almost wanted was horrible. And the documentation sucks. I had to read the system level implementations of controls in order to figure most of it out. It's great those implementations are available to read, at least, but OH MY GOD
Is there any reason I would use this over something cross-platform like EGUI? I am kind of over software being OS-specific; this is one of the biggest compatibility mistakes we've made. Along with the related process of making drawing pixels on a display a complicated process!
Will any of this translate to Windows programs like File Manager? Whatever their Image viewer is even called? For some ungodly reason, on my last remaining Windows Device, which is a Surface Book 2 (a Microsoft made laptop!) with very vanilla configurations, everything slows to a crawl in the file manager and if I try to view images on a directory and do the "right arrow" for next or "left arrow" key for previous. It baffles me how something that never had so much slowness can be completely FUBAR'd I miss when Windows had standard apps that were very optimal and didn't slow and ruin my experience. I find myself opening that laptop less and less, and one of these days I might just slap Linux over it.
>Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
Don't worry, once enough people come back, they'll roll back in the ads and the intrusive performance-killing features and the cycle will repeat all over again
A fundamental problem with this is that "8" is two different releases (8.0 and 8.1), "10" is about 9 different releases, and "11" is three different releases so far (21H2, 22H2, and 24H2). It doesn't make much sense to lump all of them together because they share the same marketing name; technically there's no difference between going from 8.0 to 8.1 or from 22H2 to 24H2 and going from Vista to 7 or 10 20H1 to 11 21H2
10 was bad 11 is a little better but no enough.
With win10 they started with more annoying ads and the start menu with apps and the click bait news in the start menu
It was, eventually. In the beginning 10 was literally just Windows 8.1 (it even ran the same NT6 kernel) but with the classic UI slapped back on. They called it 10 to get away from the Windows 8 branding that everyone hated.
I recall it being pretty mediocre at release, just a reskinned 8.1. 10 started to come into its own much later after NT10
Aside from the start menu no, not really. Windows 8 is the most performant operating system. No laggy animations (thanks to DirectUI), fast boot time, especially fast on older systems. Windows 10 started the whole lagfest.
"aside from the start menu" is one hell of a caveat. When you screw up one of the main UI elements as badly as they did, it really drags the whole experience down.
Anyone who tried to do serious native windows dev has been burnt so often by Microsoft. I really wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt with WinUI 3 but I really cannot anymore. Until proven otherwise I expect absolutely nothing to improve meaningfully. It’s extremely sad for those of us who were dumb enough to think Microsoft take on modern GUI would be interesting to follow closely, we are in 2026 and WPF is still the way to go IMHO.
Is there any reason I would use this over something cross-platform like EGUI? I am kind of over software being OS-specific; this is one of the biggest compatibility mistakes we've made. Along with the related process of making drawing pixels on a display a complicated process!
But it is used to implement various parts of Windows, such as the File Explorer, so any improvements are helpful for general system performance.
I also wish that they’d make WinUI work on macOS as well similar to Avalonia, but I think they probably won’t.
Did you not read the thread? That's literally stated as an explicit goal.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
98: great. ME: bad. XP: great. Vista: bad. 7: great. 8: bad. 10: great. 11: bad
I recall it being pretty mediocre at release, just a reskinned 8.1. 10 started to come into its own much later after NT10
I still remain naively hopeful and cheer them on, however.
Why not Avalonia? It's not Microsoft but it is a spiritual successor to WPF, cross-platform, and open source.