> Alignment with Microsoft Goals
> We are being thoughtful about resourcing. This effort is happening alongside other critical responsibilities like security, platform stability, and support for existing products. Our current focus is on foundational work that unlocks value for contributors and increase transparency. We are aligning this work with Microsoft’s broader business priorities to ensure long-term support and impact.
I don't sense any benevolence in their words. They are just pulling off their resources and dumping the framework on the public, hoping passionate losers will contribute.
> passionate losers
This is unduly meanspirited. Your passion projects are not even considered to probably the vast majority of the world; that doesn't make you a loser.
I have zero interest in the Win11 UI, and am even on board with the cynical view that this is purely a bean counter cost savings for MS rather than some benevolent outreach.
But I respect the people that take this on and want to keep it going.
> Your passion projects are not even considered to probably the vast majority of the world; that doesn't make you a loser.
Not OP but I understood this as "contributing for free to a project owned by a corporation worth more money than you could realistically spend in a lifetime is what makes you a loser".
what if that contribution benefits me personally in any way whatsoever?
That is the self-interested feeling that Open Source preys on.
And I do mean "prey" with a negative connotation. One of the biggest perks of Open Source from a company's perspective is that you can get developers to work on your project for free without paying them. However, those same developers have very little say in the direction of your product, and any forking of your project would have to compete the economies of scale that come from being a company. The only downside is that you have to worry about being out-scaled by a bigger company, as the developers of ElasticSearch, Redis, Docker, and others found out first-hand.
This is distinct from Free Software, which has different dynamics that are much more friendly to mutual benefit, collaboration, and forking, especially if there's no CLA that pools all of the copyright into one corporate or non-profit entity. But then again, this sort of Free Software moralizing is expressly the reason why Open Source was created as an alternative in the first place. The OSI even used to admit as such on their website:
https://web.archive.org/web/20021001164015/http://www.openso...
That’s great for you, but don’t underestimate the asymmetric value here. You’re giving them free labour, and they get _way more_ out of that than you do - especially in aggregate.
And? If I get value, I get value. If someone else gets MORE value, that doesn't diminish the value _I_ get.
Viewing ones gains only through the lens of how it affects others seems like a hard way to live.
You need to ask OP, I don't know what they meant, just how I personally understood it.
> I have zero interest in the Win11 UI [...]
As has the rest of the world, and we will just put it on the list of UI frameworks Microsoft did not completly implement, fully support or considering "the default".
So we stay stuck with the status quo: There's no official UI for Windows, still.
There is Win32, that has made us company for several decades, is kind of ok, definitely much better than Motif, the official UI for much UNIXes, before Linux took over.
In Motif, i can set the shadowThickness as much as i want. /s
I rather not deal with Xlib C API.
I mean, Apple gets a lot of flak for changing things and deprecating old frameworks, but I’ve lost count of the number of post-win32 UI frameworks?
Thanks for calling it out. I get OPs passionate disdain for Microsoft but one must remember that the world is built on contributions from such people. Take the whole Linux and GNU ecosystem for example. We’d be lost without them.
Maybe the biggest beneficiary will be AI/LLMs - which will become way better at creating Windows UX after this.
I don't know if that's quite what you meant, but I believe that this is the first time that I've heard of AIs being treated as a beneficiary and an "end" in themselves.
>This is unduly meanspirited.
No it's not? It's accurate.
>Your passion projects are not even considered to probably the vast majority of the world; that doesn't make you a loser.
A Windows UI project is not a "passion project" and the only """person""" that really benefits here is Microsoft.
>But I respect the people that take this on and want to keep it going.
Contribute to something else that doesn't only help the bottom line of a mega global corp?
Why are you defending this?
It's sad how OSS enables predatory practices by the mega corps. It's definitely not just Microsoft, Google, Amazon at least also behave the same way, and the worst part is how the audience is captive - if they're stuck on any platform (since all the platform owners behave the same way), despite paying for it, the only way to fix broken parts of the platform is to fix it yourself.
For any time a legitimate bug gets a "we always accept pull requests" comment from a $XXXK paid engineer, I really wish I had control of an orbital laser, or a deathnote with eyes that work with text.
My favorite one was when the docs and helm template of Grafana was broken and I sent an email about it, I was told that they only have a single person working on the docs and that they were out of office, and that I would be free to do a PR
Then I learnt that this company is valued at >$6 Billion
I don't get it.
People do what they want to do, and might get enjoyment out of it. It can be as simple as that. That MS gets benefit from it, sure, and that's probably even their goal, but to say "I'm not going to do a thing that I enjoy, just because someone else might get benefit from it" is just a spiteful, mercenary way to go through life. If that's what keeps you going though, more power to you.
> No it's not? It's accurate.
Ah, that settles it then I guess. <eye roll>
I think you're missing a few steps there buddy.
This is definitely corporate speak for "no guaranteed support, no planned further updates beyond critical security bugs, you are on your own".
Apache Windows when?
More seriously, a desktop UI toolkit is hardly a moat by now, especially a Windows toolkit, Windows having 3-4 very different look-and-feels mixed and shipped with the official distribution.
OTOH security and stability are things that Windows critically depend on to stay on the laptops and desktops in medical, governmental, and financial institutions, and on devices of executives.
This feels like Windows itself is no longer producing enough growth for Microsoft relative to its other efforts. Even the enterprise sales lock-in isn't compelling enough for the cloud/AI-centric future Microsoft envisions. So Microsoft is slowly pulling resources that it can instead invest into Azure and AI and other high-growth business units.
I don't watch Windows too closely. Have there been any other signals of waning investment into Windows? Has Nadella or the other leadership admitted to this?
Hasn't Microsoft also been pulling back from Xbox? IIRC, haven't they been trying to consolidate and use gaming to lionize Windows as a platform? After spending billions on multiple AAA studios? That would seem counter to a Windows pullback strategy. Is this a case of the left hand not talking to the right hand?
> Have there been any other signals of waning investment into Windows?
Wasn't there a story some while back about them crawling the web for PWAs and putting them on the Microsoft Store (or is it Windows store?) to make it into less of a ghost town? And if you go to their official website, browsing vaguely in the direction of UI development, you will see them advertising PWAs as first-class citizens of the Windows ecosystem. I also vaguely remember that Windows+Edge offers special APIs to PWAs for things like file system access and so forth that are unparalleled on other platforms.
I take this push for PWAs (combined with their own lack of dogfooding -- Office is not written with Win UI) as them basically throwing in the towel on Windows-native desktop software (outside of games, maybe).
But, to be fair, native desktop development has seen a lack of investment on all desktop platforms. JavaFX is a ghost town too.
All of that could change, depending on what happens next with Chrome, Bing, and Mozilla. -- The future of each of those seems to be hanging in the balance at the moment.
The web could become a mere implementation detail of the Google monopoly, rather than the open thing it is today. Couple that with a government-level push for digital sovereignty in the E.U. and other places (certainly China). Then, maybe, you will see renewed interest in desktop GUI apps.
On a side note: I think it's amazing what has happened in the open-source space with Rust-based UI frameworks (iced, egui, slint) and COSMIC. The future for cross-platform desktop UI development hasn't looked so bright, maybe since the introduction of Java Swing (was that in the early 00s?)
Qt and VCL/FireMonkey are pretty much alive, as 3rd party .NET like Avalonia and Uno.
Apple is also doing just fine.
It is Microsoft that went south, as Satya apparently sees no value on Windows.
Note the drama on XBox, the console not the Microsoft Games Studios brand, as suffering from the same lack of interest from Microsoft's management.
> Qt and VCL/FireMonkey are pretty much alive, as 3rd party .NET like Avalonia and Uno.
Last time I looked into Uno, it seemed to me more like a mobile-first play (similar to Flutter), but maybe I missed something there.
Qt is still joined at the hips with C++, and I'm finding it hard to imagine that the next generation of developers will go in for C++ over alternatives like Rust. There is a QML/JavaScript story. But why, on earth, would you go there, if history hasn't forced your hand, as it did with the Web.
I hear good things about Avalonia, but: Why throw out the baby with the bathwater and build something "open" within a monopolist's walled garden.
> Apple is also doing just fine.
But "lack of investment" is still not entirely improper as a characterization of how they prioritize desktop versus mobile.
> the next generation of developers will go in for C++ over alternatives like Rust.
The next generation will not choose a language that is even more cumbersome to use and ugly.
> the next generation of developers
are not going to write code.
...the amout of code we've been writing has increased with the progress of technology, just comparing what it was like to write desktop UIs with Delphi in the 90s versus the amount of code it takes for an equivalent app in 2025. Low-code and vibecoded software from the 2020s are going to be the unemployment insurance for all those greybeards who will still know how to code in the 2030s :-)
That’s wishful thinking. Just because things haven’t changed in the past doesn’t mean it won’t change in the future.
I don’t doubt that the amount of code will not reduce, it’ll just be easier and easier to get AI to fix it.
We are still less than two years into widespread use of this technology, and it’s surprising how good it is.
I am a ‘greybeard’ compiler guy and modern LLMs fix compiler bugs better than me, to a large extent. And it keeps slightly getting better every few weeks.
As compiler guy, how do you see direct machine code generation?
I firmly believe having LLMs generate code for current languages is a transition step, just like Assembly devs had to be convinced optimising compilers were generating the same kind of code they would write themselves.
They are not there yet, but the day will come.
LLMs’ design is around novelty and creativity. It was the missing left brain of computation. We should stick to traditional styles of computation for compilation.
Presumably this would need some advancements in formal verification to make sure the results are correct.
But ignoring that for now, LLMs can already do better than modern compilers when it comes to optimizing code.
It has become a neat way of finding opportunities to implement in a compiler.
Give the LLM a compiler generated piece of assembly and it will sometimes spit out a slightly better version. Then you try and figure out if it's possible to implement it in the compiler. This works really well for blind spots in compilers like generating good vectorized code.
Sure, it took only what, 40 years of intensive hardware improvements* for assembly to move to the fringe? And we still reach out to it more often that I would like to because reasons?
Yep, I guess you can train an LLM on a bunch of binaries to get it to mimic a SotA compiler with some accuracy, which may or may not improve over time, but come on. Times where there were free performance increases are gone, and this is not the area where shipping any bullshit real fast will get you any sort of advantage.
* Which are unlikely to happen again in the foreseeable future.
> I think it's amazing what has happened in the open-source space with Rust-based UI frameworks (iced, egui, slint) and COSMIC
Do you mean it is amazing how poor is an experience and how many features, widgets and controls they lack when compared with something like FPC/Lazarus and Qt?
Rust is a nice thing, but its UI ecosystem simply cannot even compare.
Qt and Lazarus had much longer time to grow and mature, and Lazarus can also take a number of pages from the Delphi components book.
What's interesting is the speed at which Rust UI toolkits develop and maybe even mature.
Rust is - by design - antithetical to pretty much every idea of rapid application development paradigm Delphi/VCL and to lesser extent Qt adhere to.
It doesn't matter how many of Rust UI toolkits there are. Consider that there are a lot of Rust game engines, and pretty much zero games written in it, because even C++ gives you better trade-offs in that particular space.
IMO it's not ideal for Rust to have only Rust specific toolkits (at least they need to have other language bindings)
I've tried using Qt (non QML, using rust-qt) last week... initially things were looking fine (despite unsafe everywhere)... but I found quickly that I need unsupported things (deriving from C++ classes), and the project isn't really maintained anymore, so I'll need to so some low level work myself if I want to proceed.
Linux desktop share is up 20-35% in the past year, depending on sourcing. Still only 5-6% total for US at least, but definitely a shift. MS is almost definitely making more money for o365 and Azure than Windows (though I don't follow shareholder releases).
From google's ai result Windows ($25b) is 1/2 the size of Office (54.9b) and 1/3 the size of Azure ($75b) in terms of revenue.
Windows is definitely not the cash cow for Microsoft it once was.
Usually I get why companies release their UI frameworks. I've strongly considered using Atlassian's and AWS's frameworks in the past to build web apps because if it's good enough for Jira/AWS, it's probably good enough for my B2B saas app.
But I personally don't know why anyone would reach for this framework. Maybe if you're building a Windows app and you want a very consistent look and for your app to feel "native", but aren't there better options out there for doing this already?
Yeah, WinUI has been a disaster.
> hoping passionate losers will contribute.
Offloading the work to their victims. Maybe they will even make it usable again.