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Microsoft wants devs to build Electron AI apps on Windows 11, says no need of native code, despite RAM concerns
(www.windowslatest.com)
Repeat with me.
INSTALL LINUX!
this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2026
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with me.
INSTALL LINUX!
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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 (: )
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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.
Every damn fucking time MSFT is mentioned: Install Linux, Problem Solved.
FYI for those who don’t know what electron is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_(software_framework)
[…] desktop applications using web technologies (mainly HTML, CSS and JavaScript […])
Sure, I love it when a 50KB app takes 50MB because some cunt designer only knows HTML.
Can someone explain what an electron app is?
Basically, you know how Spotify allows you to use the version you access on the web as if it's an app (all the features are there)? That's called a Progressive Web App (PWA). Basically, Electron apps open up their own browser to run a PWA. Why is this bad? 2 Chrome tabs already take up a lot of memory. Now imagine 3.
That was a fantastic explanation. Thank you.
I would actually be for keyboards having a dedicated AI key, because then I would always have a key to remap to my voice PTT without loosing anything useful.
this solidifies two of my predictions from 15-20 years ago.
- Microsoft is moving to an "internet required" OS, likely meaning cloud based OS
- all apps will become web apps
my final prediction from then was subscription based access to your operating system, apps, and data. you own nothing. your data is constantly consumed and used to train their products. you will never be able to extract your data and will be forever locked-in to their product. this also means that you will have to pay extra for app use. need to use Photoshop? that's an extra fee. need to use 3D rendering software? thats the ultra package with GPU fees per hour.
most of this is actually happening under the covers, but nothing is locking us in.
I would say we have about 5-7 years before the above happens and there's no way back.
-> 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.
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-> …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
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Javascript creator thinks they are rushing things.
Javascript creator thinks they are rushing things.
One can learn from their mistakes
the worst thing about electron apps besides everything about election apps are the fact that there's no shared libraries so you basically have to have a billion of the same node modules on your system for every electron app that you have.
Once again, Microslop is a strong contender for Linux Marketer Of The Year award
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.
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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 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.
I can't stand VScode, whoever decided a text editor should be written in HTML/CSS and JavaScript deserves to be shot
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.
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We could view this as "MS pushes for stupid direction that clued-in tech people are opposed to," or we could view this as "MS gives up on native apps because everyone else of consequence already has." I hate it but I have eyes.
If AI enhanced coding is really so great, we might expect to see a Renaissance of small, efficient native apps, even on platforms like Android. I'm not holding my breath, though.
Renaissance of small, efficient native apps, even on platforms like Android.
Verifiable programming (which tends to involve lower level languages) is much "better" with LLMs. Take this recent one, for example:
https://huggingface.co/mistralai/Leanstral-2603
Leanstral is the first open-source code agent designed for Lean 4, a proof assistant capable of expressing complex mathematical objects such as perfectoid spaces and software specifications like properties of Rust fragments.
The next step in app delivery is shipping a full VM with the operating system and the app.
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Move to Linux while you still can (unless you are living already in California and it's forbidden)
Stares nervously at waybar's memory usage
It's nowhere near the electron level, but we have bloat here as well. 62 megs to show a plain line of text, 5mb to append text to a file, 20mb to query dns, another 20 to reconnect to wifi, etc, and it adds up. I used to host sites on 32mb ram, play 3d games on 64mb ram, now even fitting just a bare terminal system on 128mb cloud slice is problematic.
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