“start menus made with React Native, control-alt-delete menus that are actually just webviews”
Haven’t used windows in five years or so but I’ve kept hearing bad things. This really is the icing on the cake though. Yea the AI stuff is dumb but if a OS manufacturer can’t be bothered to interact with their own UI libraries to build native UIs something has gone horribly wrong.
Microsoft has a history of creating new UI frameworks. IMHO it's the result of Ballmer's "Developers, developers, developers!" attitude, which I think is a good thing at core (court the developers that add value to your platform!)
But this results in chasing a new paradigm every few years to elicit new excitement from the developers. It'll always be more newsworthy to bring in a new framework than add incremental fixes to the old one.
React has had tremendous success in the web world, so why not try and get those developers more comfortable producing apps for your platform?
(Tangentially, see also the mixed reaction to Mac native apps switching from AppKit to SwiftUI)
From the outside looking in one wonders why this is allowed to continue. Microsoft’s old school “developer tools for money” business is slowly dying (because Visual Studio proper is less popular than its ever been since so much is targeting web), you would think they’d reorganize and move .net and GitHub and stuff into their cloud team and yeet whatever toxic leadership is preventing Windows from using Microsoft’s own frameworks.
IIRC .NET was banned from core Windows components after longhorn died, but its been 20 years. .NET is fast now, and C++ is faster still. Externally developed web frameworks shouldn’t be required for Windows.
It’s a largely dysfunctional org creating largely dysfunctional software, I.e. Conway law. Dysfunctional orgs tend not to be capable of fixing themselves, especially without external threat. Satya Nadella, like many CEOs, seems mostly interested in impressing his peers and these days that means fancy AI, before that it was Quantum chips.
Microsoft has produced some great technology and when I was last there I was definitely focusing on getting as much of the good stuff out into open source as possible.
Back in the early V8 days the execs imagined JavaScript would keep getting exponentially faster, I tired to explain with a similar investment anything V8 could do dotnet could do better as we had more information available for optimization.
> React has had tremendous success in the web world, so why not try and get those developers more comfortable producing apps for your platform?
Because web stuff utterly sucks for making UIs on the desktop. Microsoft either doesn't know this (bad sign), or is choosing to use the trendy thing even though it'll make their software worse for customers (a worse sign). Either way it's a very bad look from MS.
probably trying to repro the crazy success of vscode, surely electron is the magic sauce and not the dream team of devs. azure data studio should've proved that you can't just sprinkle electron dust and get a winner.
sadly I loved azure data studio despite its being afflicted with electron, but it became so bug infested they had to completely abandon it.
Whenever web dev comes up, we got people saying it's fad-driven development where a new framework comes out every week. Those people have never done real native development. React and Angular have been the solid stable bedrock of web frontend for ten years, and the churn is nothing compared to Windows, OSX, Android, and iOS UI dev.
AFAIK the Start Menu itself is still C++ and XAML however only the Recommended section is build with React Native [1].
Funnily or rather sadly, they seem to be quite proud of using it as seen in the video.
Microsoft dropped the ball with Universal Windows Platform framework, I worked on one project using this framework and it was one the best. Our codebase run on both phone and desktop Windows 8. This was 2014-ish if I remember, and then Windows phone got killed.
I still have my Nokia Lumia around. Best phone I ever had.
And I say this hating everything about Microsoft and Windows. That phone clicked just right with the tile design and overall usability. Of course, MS having pulled the plug, it's basically a DRM brick now.
Truly an underrated phone, this was my wife's phone when we met. Developing for Windows 8 was one of the best imo, I don't know any C# prior to it but it was just so easy, native and fast.
I agree but that's because both iOS and Android are pretty bad in several ways.
MeeGo from Nokia was pretty amazing as well and I'm sure it could have launched Linux phones into actual competitors to iOS and Android - if only Microsoft and Elop didn't manage to kill Linux at Nokia.
Pretty standard for Microsoft lately. The old stuff is still there, we're adding a completely new stack adjacent to it so now you can live with the worst of both! The Windows 8 tablet interface and the Win11 wtfever that is still sometimes kick out a dialogue box unchanged since Windows XP.
One can only imagine what the product managers of like .NET think of all this.
> Pretty standard for Microsoft lately. The old stuff is still there, we're adding a completely new stack adjacent to it so now you can live with the worst of both! The Windows 8 tablet interface and the Win11 wtfever that is still sometimes kick out a dialogue box unchanged since Windows XP.
At least in Windows 10, there was even still the occasional Windows 3.1 file picker hanging around in the really dusty locations
Am I missing something, or hasn't Microsoft done this since Windows 9x with apps like Explorer and Control Panel heavily using web views internally rather than "native" WinAPI GUIs?
But those weren't entirely done with a webview. They were just embedding views where it made sense, like rendering a section that looks like a document (with fancy hyperlinks woooo) or render a preview of the file you selected in the main (native) view of explorer.
Now we are talking about entire apps being built with that stuff, down to the window border (or lack of it). It's impossible to have a consistent looking and working OS with this approach. It's impossible to share code between these things and the actual native apps, and often things have to be written from scratch and end up using 10x memory than the native solution.
Typing "Visual Studio" into the new start menu may randomly trigger a Bing search for "Visual Studio" instead of running it, but on the other hand that makes Bings KPIs go up so it's impossible to say if it's bad or not.
Objectively it wastes developer time making the OS in a non linear way more expensive for companies. Its like a minthly subscription for ever more minutes.
Long time ago, I read a blog about how the user must absolutely trust the dialog boxes for Ctrl+Alt+Delete and Adminstrator passwords and why they were tricky to get right..
Then I hear that now ctrl alt delete is a webview. Its difficult to believe. Do you have a reference?
The windows problem is every other OS release has included new UI libraries. Over the last 10 years they've made something like 5 different new ways to make native windows UIs. And, of course, they support all of them. You can use the classic Win32 API or you can use the newest WinUI 3
what has gone horribly wrong is the native UIs. they are completely worthless, across all OSes - difficult to use, limited, and in general suck compared to HTML/CSS.
I've worked with all major GUI frameworks, from MFC to Qt, they all suck compared with React/Vue
I generally agree with you, but it does entirely depend on the type of application you want to make.
If you need a lot of graphical elements and customization to get a look and feel that matches what you want, then yeah, nothing really beats html/css/js for both it's flexibility and available ecosystem.
But if what you need is an application with a button that does magic things when you push it, or a text box or table that allows for customization of the text color, then all the other types of UX frameworks work just fine. You just can't expect to do something like make a pretty chart.
SwiftUI on macOS 26 still has issues but it’s finally starting to evolve into something usable. In particular it seems like the long standing performance problems are being addressed.
Every single web or mobile app does his own custom thing nowadays. As a user I couldn't care less how it's implemented, what I want consistency in behavior and style across the board.
It feels like this has been completely lost, even on platforms like mac where consistency used to be important.
I'd take MFC everything over random behavior if I could.
> It feels like this has been completely lost, even on platforms like mac where consistency used to be important.
There are two kinds of consistency: across apps within a platform and across platforms within the same app. As someone who uses multiple platforms regularly, I have forever been annoyed when eg keyboard shortcuts change when I switch to a different computer, especially when I’m using the same app.
Apps like Discord, Spotify and VSCode are consistently the most pleasurable to use because they are largely the same.
For a unique piece of hardware like the old iPod, it made more sense to do your special custom UX as a unified product. But we’re talking about general purpose computers. The ”platform” shouldn’t be special imo, it should simply be predictable and stay out of the way. They mostly provide the same thing, like copy paste and maximizing a window, yet have different controls. This differentiation adds no value, at least to me.
and yet the Telegram Desktop App, written in Qt/C++ is the only goddamn desktop messenger app that actually feels smooth and feature rich rather than the webclient wrapper abominations of everyone else that eat half a gig of ram on startup and randomly hang on searches
The Win11 start menu used to have a fun bug where pressing Ctrl-Minus would open search with the phrase "zoom out". No other shortcut did this. Just Zoom Out. No idea how a bug like that happens.
I'm honestly not sure Microsoft even cares about Windows anymore, to me it's felt like they burned everything internally during Windows8 and the ValueAct battles sealed it .. hell they even entirely removed the Taskbar back then
I've always wondered what things would be like the Microsoft break up went though, I really do think personal computing would be better off and the people involved would probably have even more money to boot
I can’t speak to windows since it’s been at least a decade since I have had to use it, but I really don’t understand the hate on the new Apple OSs. I haven’t found them to be a measurably different user experience than their respective prior versions. So when you say “horribly wrong” it makes me wonder exactly what you mean, specifically.
>OS manufacturer can’t be bothered to interact with their own UI libraries to build native UIs something has gone horribly wrong.
I honestly think that has way less to do with Microsoft, more of a representation of "software engineering" practices these days.
For example, Gnome shell has bunch of javascript in it, GTK has layout and styling defined in some flavour of CSS, etc.
I'm of opinion if you start writing OS userland in either javascript or python (or both),
you should be fired on the spot, but I don't make the shots.
Most technical decisions aren't really driven by what makes a better end-user experience or a better product, it's mostly defined by convenience and familiarity of substandard software developers - with mostly and primarily web-slop background.
But the difference is that none of the CSS or Javascript usage in gnome is tied to a webview. They are all binding in some way to GTK and much simpler rendering routines.
Cosmic (from the PopOS folks) is getting rid of the crappy javascript from GNOME Shell. And the CSS in GTK+ themes is just for the sake of syntactic convenience.
Cosmic is quite nice. There's some polishing left to do, but it's already pretty solid. The app store is a bit of a turd, but I bet that's just because it's by nature connected to the internet. More could surely be done with caching and pre-loading, but not sure if I want my computer to pre-load app store content all the time just in case I open it.
Compared to Windows it's of course absolutely unreal.
The software industry has always had more juniors than seniors so this issue of juniors calling the shots is not a new one but it does feel like it's been getting worse and worse... Now it's basically AI slop vibe coders calling the shots about coding best-practices.
It is inconsequential, until it isn't. In front of me I've got a 2017 lenovo thinkpad running the latest Fedora+KDE, as well as a 2025 HP elitebook running "last corporate-friendly-stable version of W11". I can pop open the lenovo, key in my session password and hit enter, and I'm instantly productive, with shortcuts like meta+E giving me a working file explorer within milliseconds. On the Windows' side, there are several seconds of delay between typing my password and the on-screen feedback. Once finally unlocked, I've got a laggy environment where OS-essentials like the start menu and file explorers take whole seconds to render and respond.
It's a shame, if you ask me, that a dozen-or-so CPU and "general hardware" generations between those two devices got to waste due to poor software engineering and practices. And I'm not even talking about quality/reliability which is another sore point for Windowses of late.
If this wasn’t HN, I would swear that my personal recommendation algorithm has gotten Linux desktop-pilled and that’s why I’m seeing so many posts like these every day. But in reality I think there is a groundswell of momentum happening here, and with component prices rising, I only see this continuing as more people look to breathe new life into older hardware.
I've been seeing it a lot on reddit as well, with a lot of non-technical users asking "how do I get started with linux?"
I think this is a real thing and I think a combination of MS demanding everyone get new hardware and Valve really polishing a lot of linux has gone a long way to get non-technical users to start seriously considering linux.
It's a huge added bonus that old hardware simply flies with linux. I have a 5 year old laptop that feels about 10x more responsive since I killed the windows install and put linux on it.
And I know that laptop will continue to fly because, unlike windows, it's never going to get any sort of serious bloatware added on as I update it.
Indeed, it's the Linux super power. I've mentioned this before but my favorite linux adventure was, being a borderline penniless college student, having broken Toshiba Tecra 8000 from 1998 with a dead hard drive. But it had a working CD drive and USB port, so I got Puppy Linux 4.0 on a CD, booted from a CD, and installed to a 1gb USB stick and set it to boot from USB.
I had Dillo for a web browser, a stripped down version of VLC that could play 360p Youtube videos without issue, downloaded via Youtube-DL. I had XMMS which looked just like Winamp, and Sega/Nintendo emulation and even Duke Nukem 3D. For programs I had epub/pdf/djview readers, xpaint which is like classic MS Paint, feh as a hyperlightweight all purpose image viewer and background manager, a super lightweight RSI break popup program, and even a fully functional web server stack. It also had a window manager (JWM) that handled multiple desktops more intuitively and effortlessly than Windows does now.
If Microsoft could make me move to Linux, they will be getting a lot more people to switch. I was very into Microsoft's OS since v3.0, I used Outlook for all my email for decades. I recently moved over to Linux Mint and Firebird for email and have not looked back. All my Windows VMs are now Linux VMs. All of Microsoft's invasive "AI" was the last straw. I don't like the direction they are headed.
i think its just that its new year and year of the linux desktop is a meme (in the actual definition of the word kind of way) and the meme is growing over time
I strongly agree on this. I mained Windows for the last few years and got to the point where I was comfortable doing development similarly to how I would on Linux (text editor and command line build tools, cl, ml64, batch, etc.). I did that mostly so I could game and develop on the same machine. I learned a ton doing it but it has just gotten too awful to carry on.
It was faster to rg to search files, drop into WSL and run find for file name searches. The start menu was laggy, explorer was laggy (open up a folder with a couple dozen OGG files and it won't render for a solid minute). Mystery memory usage from privileged processes I had little control over. Once I realized that the one game I play (Overwatch) ran on Linux I decided to swap back.
I installed Linux Mint earlier this year and I've been extremely happy. The memory consumption is stable and low, and if something is broken I have the control to fix it. It just feels so much less hostile. This is largely possible thanks to the work Steam has done with Proton. The last real barrier is kernel level anti-cheat which prevented me from trying out this years Call of Duty. Oh well!
“They've managed to take some of their most revolutionary technological innovations (the NT kernel's hybrid design allowing it to restart drivers, NTFS, ReFS, WSL, Hyper-V, etc.) then just shat all over them”.
Well said. I wonder what the kernel team thinks about it.
It will take few more years before people start abandoning W10 due to security concerns(somehow "hackers" always find some insane backdoors and bugs in old windows, it must be a pure coincidence), hardware upgrade or just need to reinstall. But indeed, it looks like Linux is finally taking over. I'd say that beside Microsoft being so bad at their job, it's Valve and gaming on Linux in general. It's actually doable. What a miracle!
> At the very least, when something goes wrong on Linux you have log messages that can let you know what went wrong so you can search for it.
It is hilarious how accurate this is. When something crashes on Windows you better hope it has its own logs you can find because the OS itself will tell you nothing. Event Viewer can't hold a candle to journald!
This post does examplefy what we’re seeing, a general indication of some swelling of momentum but I bet it’s still going to be from 2% to maybe 3 or 5% at most until Linux can fix a few things about the community, issues with install difficulty such as dual booting and other issues, and the technical knowledge barrier to entry until more distribution with hardware comes along. Although of course system 76 and steam deck are great moves in this direction they’re still relatively niche for now.
There will never be a “year of the Linux desktop” the same way that there has never been a “year of the Mac desktop”, it’s just a slow building of users over time anyway.
I think it's also maybe worth pointing out that "non-enthusiast desktop OS user" is a segment that is shrinking. A lot of the people that aren't going to Linux are just going to smartphones only rather than buy a new laptop for Win11.
I've been using a system 76 laptop for the past 3 years. Runs perfectly, no surprises. Unfortunately, I need a mac for work because the laptop service folks do not know what to do with linux and do not have a relationship with a vendor like system76.
Pros: The best development experience you can have. Everything is native linux. There is no beating that. This of course will be a problem if hobbies/work use windows. I've never been a windows person. So I've never missed it. Power and peripherals work on the system76 seamlessly.
Cons: Battery life. Runs out in about 2.5 hrs but its an AMD not an ARM.
I did run linux on a tower exclusively while I did my PhD. Did everything on it - code, writing my thesis in LaTeX, store data, connect to dropbox for backup, watch netflix, etc.
I'm in my 60's and have never run Photoshop. Nor my wife, my kids, none of my relatives I'm aware of for that matter. Come to think of it, of all the people I know, no one runs PhotoShop that I'm aware of.
I'm giving Apple the benefit of the doubt until macOS 27 (but I'm still on 15.7.4 hehe).
Mac OS X and Aqua wasn't very well received either at launch.
A similar thing happened with the flat design of iOS 7.
Apple's pattern is initially going overboard with a new design and then scaling it back slowly like a sculptor.
I think they're happy with this method, even if things miss at first the big changes usually create a lot of hype and excitement for the masses.
The vast majority of users don't care about the finer things, Apple knows that the nerds can sweat it out until they straighten things out at which point everyone is happy in a hero's journey kind of way.
I just hope this pattern stays true and that this isn't an inflection point.
Saw a fascinating talk on gui and ui development today, lamenting the stagnation at M$ and apple when it comes to desktop computing (including browsing).
" there simply is nothing for open source to copy but ux-decline" and that sentence rings like a bell of all the problems.
I'll toss in my 2 cents: 1. people that have no business whatsoever now know what linux is ie sales dawgs that only touch a computer for the occasional spreadsheet. 2. 70 year old man fed up with windows, moved to linux.
it looks great, its fast and responsive let's make this happen.
I made the switch as well. For many years I dual-booted Ubuntu and Windows, hanging on to my familiarity with Windows and love for Visual Studio. Finally October 2025 some update made games laggy on Windows while they still worked fine on Ubuntu. I attempted to fix this by reinstalling Windows 11 and found I could not figure out how to remove advertisements from the start menu. So I finally transferred all my files from ReFS to ZFS and committed to 100% Linux.
Something has gone wrong in Microsoft in the product management organization where they are more concerned with chasing advertising dollars and upselling OneDruge than building a good product. It is depressing because all the Microsoft engineers I’ve interacted with in open source work have been excellent.
Yeah. I feel the same way. If not for the fact that my gaming PC pulls double duty as a work PC, I'd seriously consider ditching Windows 11 for Bazzite.
I worry that we are edging closer and closer to a similar phenomenon with macOS as well. Apple seems intent on squandering every bit of stability and sanity that macOS used to represent. Maybe now that Alan Dye is gone, we will at least see the abomination that is Liquid Glass fixed…somehow.
I run Kubuntu on this gaming machine (AlienWare) and I run it on my 16 year old Dell laptop I used for work back then. Runs great and with RAM prices high and people looking to make their older machines useful instead of trashing them, there's a really good chance they can run Linux.
Funnily enough today windows pissed me off with a random breaking bug (no login screen yay) so now only have Ubuntu installed. Only one application I use that's windows only anyways and can use a VM for that, so sayonara...
I do think Linux is accessible to many more people, but I would not say it is ready for the masses. The terminal is going to be a non-starter for your average computer user.
But, with that said, I started seriously using Linux for the first time in 2025. I bounce between Debian, Windows 11, and MacOS, and Debian is probably the most refreshing to use. I don’t find Windows 11 as oppressive as other seem to, but I have turned off most of what people cite as the issues. I find MacOSs Liquid Glass redesign to be more aggressively bad.
>I don’t find Windows 11 as oppressive as other seem to, but I have turned off most of what people cite as the issues.
So you debloated your windows but at any update you have to spin your wheels and try to remove any crap they put back in. At any time there’s the possibility you can no longer remove x or y. The vast majority don’t have the energy to play this game or don’t know how to.
I agree, it is bad and I don't like it, but I think it is bad in a way most users won't care about. I have not really considered a version of Windows to be good since...Windows 2000...maybe 3.1.1. They have all had major issues, so I just kind of shrug off the issues when I use Windows. The enshitification of MacOS is relatively new and so still stings a bit.
I think where Microsoft is playing with fire is that while most users will not care about some of these changes power users do. And the 5% of power users ultimately make the decisions and provide the recommendations for the other 95%. With so many apps and SAAS services going web or web app only there will be less and less reason to need to stick with Windows and that is where Microsoft will start to lose control.
Windows has been my main operating system for the last 35 years (from version 2). I've used Linux and to a lessor extent BSD and Mac as well, but my main desktop has always been Windows, as it ran most of the apps that I needed.
Windows 11 UI and spyware are so bad, that Windows 10 is where my 35 years of using Windows as my main OS has ended.
I've used Fedora on my laptop for over a decade. I switched my main home workstation to Fedora in 2023, and haven't looked back since.
My workstation runs Kinoite[1], an immutable/atomic version of Fedora. I started with Fedora 38, and now am running 43. Flawless major-release upgrades. I develop using distrobox[2] (pet containers) on podman. It "Just Works".
Nearly 99% of my Steam library is playable on Fedora too. Many games even have native Linux support these days - the rest run under Proton. The only games that won't play have windows-only kernel-level anti-cheat. For some of those games, it's a developer choice (there's apparently a checkbox to enable Linux support on EasyAntiCheat - and some don't "check" it).
I use Flatpaks to install many GUI apps, such as FreeCAD, KiCad, Darktable, Steam, Reaper, and a lot more.
Welcome...1998 was my year of the Linux desktop. Valve seems to have been dredging all of the "maybe"s over the last few years on a few different fronts. Big ups to them (not that they don't get enough praise...still!)
I only really ever play one game, so that's not a blocker for me.
I would have switched by now but film and audio production software, including VSTs, don't seem to be greatly supported on Linux. I'd love to hear from someone if you are successfully doing this.
> I only really ever play one game, so that's not a blocker for me.
I play loads of games; its mainly AAA multiplayers that aren't able to run on linux due to kernel anti-cheat - nearly everything else runs well with minimal effort using proton via steam (either installed via steam or imported as a non-steam game).
I’d love to be a fly on the wall at Microsoft right now, to see if they are in red alert to get users back, planning subterfuge by breaking APIs used by Wine or what have you, or if they are taking it as a loss.
I recently jumped to Debian/KDE as a daily driver, and it feels great. I am coming after many years of running Linux via cli on my home server. I am also unironically enjoying wobbly windows.
Consumer Windows for those that care is an almost worthless business. Nobody will pay what was once paid for a windows license anymore. They will squeeze existing users who know no different in ways 2006 adware purveyors could dream of and monetize it that way. For the rest of non enterprise users, they don't care.
> to see if they are in red alert to get users back
I don't think they much care, long gone are the days of consumer Windows being a cash-cow. And if you buy a machine with Windows on and put Linux over the top, they still have that little bit of money from you via the manufacturer. Adverts on the start menu and such, is not an action that would be taken by a company with any real pride in their OS.
Europe has shown themselves to be completely unwilling or unable to regulate the giant. So they stopped caring. They crank out cheap crap and charge top dollar because no one can stop them.
Very much this. I bet the Xbox/games division would be up in arms about it, but they got told to spend less money and also not to bother the important people. The Windows people might care, but with how bad they've been shepherding the OS I'm not so sure.
Nadella is focused on AI and Azure. Bet he could hardly care less.
Honestly I get the Xbox apathy. There's not that much profit in being what, third or fourth place? After Steam, Playstation and Nintendo? Depends how you define it, I guess, but to me they're in fourth place. Microsoft needs to either cut their losses or invest a ton of money. It looks like they will pick some weird thing in the middle, keeping Xbox on life support. Probably some unhappy compromise internally.
I'll still be a Windows/Unix dual user. But then again I don't do the Windows "Home version" experience so many here seem eager to humiliate themselves with over and over.
This rings true...outside of users that play competitive FPS...the anticheat continues to be a challenge
As a side note - if you're in that venn diagram overlap group of linux and gaming...check out "beyond all reason" RTS if you haven't. High chance it'll tickle you:
As someone who plays competitive FPS at quite a high level (I compete in the Contenders division in Valorant's Premier tournament system, lots of fun!), honestly even that's not the biggest deal. I'll eventually get to a point where the only reason I have a Windows install at all is for Valorant. Everything else will be Linux.
my 2017 mac air is getting real long in the tooth. I'd definitely considering switching to *nix with it but everything I keep reading is that process is not so easy.
I've been on linux since 2014; I'm an ocassional user of windows, booting into it with much regret to deal with client's issues. I generally dislike working with MacOS... but for someone used to macOS I see no meaningful degradation of the kind there is with windows - your time is better spent earning/buying/setting up an m series mac air.
People loudly declaring they are switching to Linux feel to me like people loudly declaring they are leaving Twitter. That's nice? I've had my home machines on Linux since forever and it's fun. I like trying new distros about once a year to see what people are up to. It's been possible to run a basic setup for normies for a solid decade now, it's unfortunate that it took Microsoft waging UX war for some techies to notice.
But more seriously, it's pretty ironic to see all of these posts on HN, a supposed "tech" community, about switching to Linux, especially the comments describing how it defied their low expectations (tacitly revealing their own lack of prior first-hand experience). You never would have seen this on Slashdot 20 years ago, where dual booting Linux (or some BSD, despite it dying) was the minimum "geek cred" to not be seen as a poser.
And this was at a time when distros were far less user-friendly and had far more hardware compatibility issues and far less support for running Windows software.
I have to use Windows sometimes at work, and of all indignities, this is surely a small one, but it is an indignity. Everyone complains about ads, which is a real issue, but to me the biggest issue is how blatantly suboptimal everything is. Nobody has put any effort into making Windows good for a very very long time. The terminal and/or powershell is incredibly slow - ls should not take perceptible time to execute. The settings menus are made with 3 to 5 different layers of UI frameworks and design guidelines. Forced OneDrive. The pestering about copilot... I even like LLMs, but my user experience is so clearly subordinate to some KPI that it annoys me anyway. I'm sure I could come up with more if I had touched it recently, but I thankfully haven't.
I love the fact that there are different Linux distros optimized for every person.
I started using Linux almost a decade ago; starting with Ubuntu, then I moved to Kubuntu and now I'm on Omarchy which is even more optimized for developers.
I feel very comfortable recommending Linux to people now though I would recommend a different distro depending on who is asking.
IMO Ubuntu is the simplest general-purpose one. Kubuntu is the same but more customizable slightly more developer-focused. Omarchy (which is a fork of Arch Linux) is very developer-focused.
I am one full page ad away from deleting Windows 11 forever. I will struggle through infinite driver compatibility issues before I sit through a single ad while trying to work. That is my redline.
For me it was the OneDrive ads on the lock screen. And, when I accidentally clicked "enable OneDrive" (a few years ago, this might have changed), IT TOOK OVER MY DOCUMENTS FOLDER AND TOLD ME THERE WAS NO WAY TO REVERT IT!
I've been using Linux as my desktop since 2020, I switched because I wanted to play games and maintain a development environment I'm familiar with (having run Linux servers for ~15 years at that point) that would be stable. I had long used a Windows machine for gaming and a Mac laptop for development. My Mac was stable enough, but Windows was not-- it wasn't blue screens it was constant unpredictable updates (sometimes erratically running when I didn't want them to). I had an SSD in the machine with Windows, but after installing Pop_OS! (as a happy accident) I never found a compelling reason to use Windows again.
Steam has worked perfectly, clicking install and then hitting play, no futzing with drivers or weird updates. The only games I haven't been able to play are League of Legends and some of the new AAA shooters. I'm okay with that because I don't particularly care at this point, and it's not worth maintaining a Windows install to periodically play for an hour or so.
Linux has been unbelievably stable. This year, I fully upgraded the system and planned on reinstalling but I didn't even need to. On first boot, my old install was picked up and mostly just worked. On Windows I've tried that before, and it was an unrelenting shit show (that resulted in having to nuke the old windows install).
The only hitch I've had was installing conflicting NVidia drivers (open source vs proprietary); which, I was able to fix by booting into the command line then nuking both sets of drivers via apt remove and installing the one I wanted. Took me less than five minutes and my system was working. It also wouldn't have happened if I hadn't tried being too clever (and Pop_OS! having some quirks).
I recently setup a MiniPC to use while traveling to game on and this time I tried Arch. To my surprise the install was ridiculously easy. The most recent installer makes it a breeze. My only mistake was not noticing I'd installed a few desktop environments and the default wasn't what I wanted so things seemed broken. After selecting KDE from the login menu et volia! It worked perfectly. I'm considering switching my primary rig to Arch, but I'll give the most recent Pop_OS! release a try to see if the newer LTS version gets me access to some new packages first.
Linux is great folks. If you stick with a major distro you're likely going to love it. It's really low maintenance and just works. 11/10 would recommend to anyone.
> If you stick with a major distro you're likely going to love it.
Even the smaller ones are unironically pretty fun to work with now-a-days. I'm currently rocking Gentoo on my stuff. After the painful setup, it's actually quiet easy to maintain.
Very observant of you. The comment you replied to mentioned “non-obtrusive ads at the bottom” so they noticed that too. IMO “non-obtrusive” is a fair description, given that it doesn't seem to be doing excessive tracking (I didn't spot any extra cookies or other storage, so it is presumably logging little, if any, more than web server logs did in the 90s/00s, which is better than the stalking done by most adtech these days).
macOS is particularly annoying and gets in the way more than an OS should. Windows can be tamed and the Linux experience can be perfectly smooth depending on distro and hardware. I assume macOS can be tamed as well, but it seems like much more of an uphill battle.
To me, Windows has been the best experience with gaming (yes, including the stupid bullshit anti-cheat software that shouldn’t exist in the way it does, the devs making it truly only support Windows), the desktop experience has been tolerable, especially with PowerToys and FancyZones in particular and that one registry change to restore classic context menu. Still feels like fighting against the OS but passable.
Linux has been the best experience for regular computing and software development, especially since a lot of the software I deploy runs in Docker containers, so getting more or less the same user land is nicer than subtle Windows incompatibilities (e.g. bind mount permissions, line endings, crap like that). Also package managers are just nice and some desktops out there are really good for daily driving (personally I like Cinnamon, but KDE and XFCE and others all have their place).
Apple stuff has been the best in regards to the hardware integration and coherence (e.g. the experience of using a MacBook or iPhone and everything working without any driver issues on other OSes), having a pretty polished desktop experience, but also super weird things such as no proper AA on generic external monitors (e.g. 1080p), limited hardware ports, oddly locked down ecosystem and odd support choices (e.g. the dance you gotta do to install development apps, the PWA situation) and just weird choices in regards to keyboard layout and how the mouse feels compared to both of the other OSes. Okay development, not great gaming situation, worse than Linux at this point.
I like my iPhone (reduced Liquid Glass transparency) and MacBook Air (great for notes or travel), but daily drive either Windows or Linux. Tried FreeBSD for one of my servers too but hardware support wasn’t wide enough, not sure what the desktop situation there is like.
>>Tried FreeBSD for one of my servers too but hardware support wasn’t wide enough, not sure what the desktop situation there is like.
Hardware support is plenty wide enough. Just buy the hardware that supports FreeBSD and that's most of it. Same with the desktop and I've run servers and desktops for 25 years using easily found, common, name brand hardware that runs FreeBSD.
This is the biggest pickle for me. Mx Macbook Airs are pretty amazing, but Asahi is just not there, and I don't think it will ever be without Apple playing ball a little bit unfortunately. (I'm currently on a t2/intel macbook and it's got more quirks that I care to deal with...but it was free so gotta do what I gotta do)
I’m going from macOS to linux currently. It was the hardware obsolesence that kicked things off but I definitely wont miss the constant nagging about my iCloud being full
Just turn off iCloud sync for the things you don't use and you won't fill it up. I sync passwords, notes, find my, calendar, contacts, and safari. Currently using 800MB of the free 5GB.
`apt-get update` bricked your system multiple times? How, by filling up your disk? That doesn't install or upgrade any software. It just updates the local cache of the registry. I believe you that there was a real problem I'm just confused about how it happened.
I've been unable to login after filling my disk before, I wouldn't call the system bricked because I was able to fix it by mounting the disk on another computer and freeing up space, but I wouldn't quibble over the term either.
My main problem with Linux is that I have to trust all the applications that I install (unless I am willing to do an extreme amount of sysadmin which I am not). On a smartphone at least I can easily assign permissions to each app.
GUI apps often come in Flatpak[1] these days - which are sandboxed[2] like you are expecting. Flathub[3] is the primary place to get GUI apps, but many distros also have their own app store too.
Flatseal[4] is a GUI that allows you to mange the sandboxes/permissions. You can also manage them via cli if you prefer.
For CLI apps, you can use distrobox[5] or toolbx[6].
Flatpak breaks certain expectations. For example that if it runs on my office PC, I can run it over VNC on my home computer. This is not the case and I get strange errors like:
Note that the directories
'/var/lib/flatpak/exports/share'
'/home/amelius/.local/share/flatpak/exports/share'
are not in the search path set by the XDG_DATA_DIRS environment variable, so applications installed by Flatpak may not appear on your desktop until the session is restarted.
This is totally unexpected since I can run programs like xterm and xeyes just fine, both locally and over VNC.
> On a smartphone at least I can easily assign permissions to each app.
Those permission categories are so coarse grained as to be useless. In order to pause a media player when a call comes in I have to give the media player access to the phone app. Pure madness.
Haven’t used windows in five years or so but I’ve kept hearing bad things. This really is the icing on the cake though. Yea the AI stuff is dumb but if a OS manufacturer can’t be bothered to interact with their own UI libraries to build native UIs something has gone horribly wrong.
But this results in chasing a new paradigm every few years to elicit new excitement from the developers. It'll always be more newsworthy to bring in a new framework than add incremental fixes to the old one.
React has had tremendous success in the web world, so why not try and get those developers more comfortable producing apps for your platform?
(Tangentially, see also the mixed reaction to Mac native apps switching from AppKit to SwiftUI)
IIRC .NET was banned from core Windows components after longhorn died, but its been 20 years. .NET is fast now, and C++ is faster still. Externally developed web frameworks shouldn’t be required for Windows.
Microsoft has produced some great technology and when I was last there I was definitely focusing on getting as much of the good stuff out into open source as possible.
Back in the early V8 days the execs imagined JavaScript would keep getting exponentially faster, I tired to explain with a similar investment anything V8 could do dotnet could do better as we had more information available for optimization.
Basically you have tight OS integration vs developer friendly cross platform.
Because web stuff utterly sucks for making UIs on the desktop. Microsoft either doesn't know this (bad sign), or is choosing to use the trendy thing even though it'll make their software worse for customers (a worse sign). Either way it's a very bad look from MS.
sadly I loved azure data studio despite its being afflicted with electron, but it became so bug infested they had to completely abandon it.
1: https://youtu.be/kMJNEFHj8b8?t=4m47s
And I say this hating everything about Microsoft and Windows. That phone clicked just right with the tile design and overall usability. Of course, MS having pulled the plug, it's basically a DRM brick now.
MeeGo from Nokia was pretty amazing as well and I'm sure it could have launched Linux phones into actual competitors to iOS and Android - if only Microsoft and Elop didn't manage to kill Linux at Nokia.
One can only imagine what the product managers of like .NET think of all this.
At least in Windows 10, there was even still the occasional Windows 3.1 file picker hanging around in the really dusty locations
Now we are talking about entire apps being built with that stuff, down to the window border (or lack of it). It's impossible to have a consistent looking and working OS with this approach. It's impossible to share code between these things and the actual native apps, and often things have to be written from scratch and end up using 10x memory than the native solution.
But you don't. So it doesn't.
(I've pinned Visual Studio to the start menu.)
Then I hear that now ctrl alt delete is a webview. Its difficult to believe. Do you have a reference?
how the OS implements what is displayed is irrelevant
windows has all kinds of virtualizations today, it can literally run web views in separate (invisible) VMs for security purposes
I've worked with all major GUI frameworks, from MFC to Qt, they all suck compared with React/Vue
If you need a lot of graphical elements and customization to get a look and feel that matches what you want, then yeah, nothing really beats html/css/js for both it's flexibility and available ecosystem.
But if what you need is an application with a button that does magic things when you push it, or a text box or table that allows for customization of the text color, then all the other types of UX frameworks work just fine. You just can't expect to do something like make a pretty chart.
Every single web or mobile app does his own custom thing nowadays. As a user I couldn't care less how it's implemented, what I want consistency in behavior and style across the board.
It feels like this has been completely lost, even on platforms like mac where consistency used to be important.
I'd take MFC everything over random behavior if I could.
There are two kinds of consistency: across apps within a platform and across platforms within the same app. As someone who uses multiple platforms regularly, I have forever been annoyed when eg keyboard shortcuts change when I switch to a different computer, especially when I’m using the same app.
Apps like Discord, Spotify and VSCode are consistently the most pleasurable to use because they are largely the same.
For a unique piece of hardware like the old iPod, it made more sense to do your special custom UX as a unified product. But we’re talking about general purpose computers. The ”platform” shouldn’t be special imo, it should simply be predictable and stay out of the way. They mostly provide the same thing, like copy paste and maximizing a window, yet have different controls. This differentiation adds no value, at least to me.
I've always wondered what things would be like the Microsoft break up went though, I really do think personal computing would be better off and the people involved would probably have even more money to boot
With SwiftUI you’ve been able to pick and choose where to integrate it over the years, it’s not like you had to go whole-hog.
I honestly think that has way less to do with Microsoft, more of a representation of "software engineering" practices these days.
For example, Gnome shell has bunch of javascript in it, GTK has layout and styling defined in some flavour of CSS, etc.
I'm of opinion if you start writing OS userland in either javascript or python (or both), you should be fired on the spot, but I don't make the shots.
Most technical decisions aren't really driven by what makes a better end-user experience or a better product, it's mostly defined by convenience and familiarity of substandard software developers - with mostly and primarily web-slop background.
Compared to Windows it's of course absolutely unreal.
The software industry has always had more juniors than seniors so this issue of juniors calling the shots is not a new one but it does feel like it's been getting worse and worse... Now it's basically AI slop vibe coders calling the shots about coding best-practices.
It is inconsequential, until it isn't. In front of me I've got a 2017 lenovo thinkpad running the latest Fedora+KDE, as well as a 2025 HP elitebook running "last corporate-friendly-stable version of W11". I can pop open the lenovo, key in my session password and hit enter, and I'm instantly productive, with shortcuts like meta+E giving me a working file explorer within milliseconds. On the Windows' side, there are several seconds of delay between typing my password and the on-screen feedback. Once finally unlocked, I've got a laggy environment where OS-essentials like the start menu and file explorers take whole seconds to render and respond.
It's a shame, if you ask me, that a dozen-or-so CPU and "general hardware" generations between those two devices got to waste due to poor software engineering and practices. And I'm not even talking about quality/reliability which is another sore point for Windowses of late.
I think this is a real thing and I think a combination of MS demanding everyone get new hardware and Valve really polishing a lot of linux has gone a long way to get non-technical users to start seriously considering linux.
It's a huge added bonus that old hardware simply flies with linux. I have a 5 year old laptop that feels about 10x more responsive since I killed the windows install and put linux on it.
And I know that laptop will continue to fly because, unlike windows, it's never going to get any sort of serious bloatware added on as I update it.
As I wrote on HN just yesterday, I've been working on the Linux desktop for 20 years and the momentum has never been higher. 2026 will be fun.
I had Dillo for a web browser, a stripped down version of VLC that could play 360p Youtube videos without issue, downloaded via Youtube-DL. I had XMMS which looked just like Winamp, and Sega/Nintendo emulation and even Duke Nukem 3D. For programs I had epub/pdf/djview readers, xpaint which is like classic MS Paint, feh as a hyperlightweight all purpose image viewer and background manager, a super lightweight RSI break popup program, and even a fully functional web server stack. It also had a window manager (JWM) that handled multiple desktops more intuitively and effortlessly than Windows does now.
It was faster to rg to search files, drop into WSL and run find for file name searches. The start menu was laggy, explorer was laggy (open up a folder with a couple dozen OGG files and it won't render for a solid minute). Mystery memory usage from privileged processes I had little control over. Once I realized that the one game I play (Overwatch) ran on Linux I decided to swap back.
I installed Linux Mint earlier this year and I've been extremely happy. The memory consumption is stable and low, and if something is broken I have the control to fix it. It just feels so much less hostile. This is largely possible thanks to the work Steam has done with Proton. The last real barrier is kernel level anti-cheat which prevented me from trying out this years Call of Duty. Oh well!
Well said. I wonder what the kernel team thinks about it.
It is hilarious how accurate this is. When something crashes on Windows you better hope it has its own logs you can find because the OS itself will tell you nothing. Event Viewer can't hold a candle to journald!
There will never be a “year of the Linux desktop” the same way that there has never been a “year of the Mac desktop”, it’s just a slow building of users over time anyway.
I think it's also maybe worth pointing out that "non-enthusiast desktop OS user" is a segment that is shrinking. A lot of the people that aren't going to Linux are just going to smartphones only rather than buy a new laptop for Win11.
Pros: The best development experience you can have. Everything is native linux. There is no beating that. This of course will be a problem if hobbies/work use windows. I've never been a windows person. So I've never missed it. Power and peripherals work on the system76 seamlessly.
Cons: Battery life. Runs out in about 2.5 hrs but its an AMD not an ARM.
I did run linux on a tower exclusively while I did my PhD. Did everything on it - code, writing my thesis in LaTeX, store data, connect to dropbox for backup, watch netflix, etc.
You're not missing much by dumping windows.
There is a desktop webview of PhotoPea, but it's not the same.
Mac OS X and Aqua wasn't very well received either at launch.
A similar thing happened with the flat design of iOS 7.
Apple's pattern is initially going overboard with a new design and then scaling it back slowly like a sculptor.
I think they're happy with this method, even if things miss at first the big changes usually create a lot of hype and excitement for the masses.
The vast majority of users don't care about the finer things, Apple knows that the nerds can sweat it out until they straighten things out at which point everyone is happy in a hero's journey kind of way.
I just hope this pattern stays true and that this isn't an inflection point.
" there simply is nothing for open source to copy but ux-decline" and that sentence rings like a bell of all the problems.
(Similarities to smoking cessation are neither coincidental nor intentional, but unavoidable.)
Something has gone wrong in Microsoft in the product management organization where they are more concerned with chasing advertising dollars and upselling OneDruge than building a good product. It is depressing because all the Microsoft engineers I’ve interacted with in open source work have been excellent.
I worry that we are edging closer and closer to a similar phenomenon with macOS as well. Apple seems intent on squandering every bit of stability and sanity that macOS used to represent. Maybe now that Alan Dye is gone, we will at least see the abomination that is Liquid Glass fixed…somehow.
But, with that said, I started seriously using Linux for the first time in 2025. I bounce between Debian, Windows 11, and MacOS, and Debian is probably the most refreshing to use. I don’t find Windows 11 as oppressive as other seem to, but I have turned off most of what people cite as the issues. I find MacOSs Liquid Glass redesign to be more aggressively bad.
So you debloated your windows but at any update you have to spin your wheels and try to remove any crap they put back in. At any time there’s the possibility you can no longer remove x or y. The vast majority don’t have the energy to play this game or don’t know how to.
I think where Microsoft is playing with fire is that while most users will not care about some of these changes power users do. And the 5% of power users ultimately make the decisions and provide the recommendations for the other 95%. With so many apps and SAAS services going web or web app only there will be less and less reason to need to stick with Windows and that is where Microsoft will start to lose control.
My wife is the average computer user and has used Linux apps for years and never opened a terminal once.
Windows 11 UI and spyware are so bad, that Windows 10 is where my 35 years of using Windows as my main OS has ended.
My workstation runs Kinoite[1], an immutable/atomic version of Fedora. I started with Fedora 38, and now am running 43. Flawless major-release upgrades. I develop using distrobox[2] (pet containers) on podman. It "Just Works".
Nearly 99% of my Steam library is playable on Fedora too. Many games even have native Linux support these days - the rest run under Proton. The only games that won't play have windows-only kernel-level anti-cheat. For some of those games, it's a developer choice (there's apparently a checkbox to enable Linux support on EasyAntiCheat - and some don't "check" it).
I use Flatpaks to install many GUI apps, such as FreeCAD, KiCad, Darktable, Steam, Reaper, and a lot more.
It's a great, extremely stable system.
[1] https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/kinoite/
[2] https://distrobox.it/
I would have switched by now but film and audio production software, including VSTs, don't seem to be greatly supported on Linux. I'd love to hear from someone if you are successfully doing this.
I play loads of games; its mainly AAA multiplayers that aren't able to run on linux due to kernel anti-cheat - nearly everything else runs well with minimal effort using proton via steam (either installed via steam or imported as a non-steam game).
I recently jumped to Debian/KDE as a daily driver, and it feels great. I am coming after many years of running Linux via cli on my home server. I am also unironically enjoying wobbly windows.
I don't think they much care, long gone are the days of consumer Windows being a cash-cow. And if you buy a machine with Windows on and put Linux over the top, they still have that little bit of money from you via the manufacturer. Adverts on the start menu and such, is not an action that would be taken by a company with any real pride in their OS.
Nadella is focused on AI and Azure. Bet he could hardly care less.
As a side note - if you're in that venn diagram overlap group of linux and gaming...check out "beyond all reason" RTS if you haven't. High chance it'll tickle you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wxwIxz4PaY
edit: not affiliate to linked yt - organic enthusiastism
Linux has got better but not yet there.
But more seriously, it's pretty ironic to see all of these posts on HN, a supposed "tech" community, about switching to Linux, especially the comments describing how it defied their low expectations (tacitly revealing their own lack of prior first-hand experience). You never would have seen this on Slashdot 20 years ago, where dual booting Linux (or some BSD, despite it dying) was the minimum "geek cred" to not be seen as a poser.
And this was at a time when distros were far less user-friendly and had far more hardware compatibility issues and far less support for running Windows software.
I started using Linux almost a decade ago; starting with Ubuntu, then I moved to Kubuntu and now I'm on Omarchy which is even more optimized for developers.
I feel very comfortable recommending Linux to people now though I would recommend a different distro depending on who is asking.
IMO Ubuntu is the simplest general-purpose one. Kubuntu is the same but more customizable slightly more developer-focused. Omarchy (which is a fork of Arch Linux) is very developer-focused.
Wider man on street, less sure
As for me - having a good time on linux
Steam has worked perfectly, clicking install and then hitting play, no futzing with drivers or weird updates. The only games I haven't been able to play are League of Legends and some of the new AAA shooters. I'm okay with that because I don't particularly care at this point, and it's not worth maintaining a Windows install to periodically play for an hour or so.
Linux has been unbelievably stable. This year, I fully upgraded the system and planned on reinstalling but I didn't even need to. On first boot, my old install was picked up and mostly just worked. On Windows I've tried that before, and it was an unrelenting shit show (that resulted in having to nuke the old windows install).
The only hitch I've had was installing conflicting NVidia drivers (open source vs proprietary); which, I was able to fix by booting into the command line then nuking both sets of drivers via apt remove and installing the one I wanted. Took me less than five minutes and my system was working. It also wouldn't have happened if I hadn't tried being too clever (and Pop_OS! having some quirks).
I recently setup a MiniPC to use while traveling to game on and this time I tried Arch. To my surprise the install was ridiculously easy. The most recent installer makes it a breeze. My only mistake was not noticing I'd installed a few desktop environments and the default wasn't what I wanted so things seemed broken. After selecting KDE from the login menu et volia! It worked perfectly. I'm considering switching my primary rig to Arch, but I'll give the most recent Pop_OS! release a try to see if the newer LTS version gets me access to some new packages first.
Linux is great folks. If you stick with a major distro you're likely going to love it. It's really low maintenance and just works. 11/10 would recommend to anyone.
Even the smaller ones are unironically pretty fun to work with now-a-days. I'm currently rocking Gentoo on my stuff. After the painful setup, it's actually quiet easy to maintain.
> The AI Agent that gets your codebase Copilot & Cursor letting you down? Try Augment. Install Now
To me, Windows has been the best experience with gaming (yes, including the stupid bullshit anti-cheat software that shouldn’t exist in the way it does, the devs making it truly only support Windows), the desktop experience has been tolerable, especially with PowerToys and FancyZones in particular and that one registry change to restore classic context menu. Still feels like fighting against the OS but passable.
Linux has been the best experience for regular computing and software development, especially since a lot of the software I deploy runs in Docker containers, so getting more or less the same user land is nicer than subtle Windows incompatibilities (e.g. bind mount permissions, line endings, crap like that). Also package managers are just nice and some desktops out there are really good for daily driving (personally I like Cinnamon, but KDE and XFCE and others all have their place).
Apple stuff has been the best in regards to the hardware integration and coherence (e.g. the experience of using a MacBook or iPhone and everything working without any driver issues on other OSes), having a pretty polished desktop experience, but also super weird things such as no proper AA on generic external monitors (e.g. 1080p), limited hardware ports, oddly locked down ecosystem and odd support choices (e.g. the dance you gotta do to install development apps, the PWA situation) and just weird choices in regards to keyboard layout and how the mouse feels compared to both of the other OSes. Okay development, not great gaming situation, worse than Linux at this point.
I like my iPhone (reduced Liquid Glass transparency) and MacBook Air (great for notes or travel), but daily drive either Windows or Linux. Tried FreeBSD for one of my servers too but hardware support wasn’t wide enough, not sure what the desktop situation there is like.
Hardware support is plenty wide enough. Just buy the hardware that supports FreeBSD and that's most of it. Same with the desktop and I've run servers and desktops for 25 years using easily found, common, name brand hardware that runs FreeBSD.
I've been unable to login after filling my disk before, I wouldn't call the system bricked because I was able to fix it by mounting the disk on another computer and freeing up space, but I wouldn't quibble over the term either.
Flatseal[4] is a GUI that allows you to mange the sandboxes/permissions. You can also manage them via cli if you prefer.
For CLI apps, you can use distrobox[5] or toolbx[6].
[1] https://flatpak.org/
[2] https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/basic-concepts.html#sandb...
[3] https://flathub.org/en
[4] https://flathub.org/en/apps/com.github.tchx84.Flatseal
[5] https://distrobox.it/
[6] https://containertoolbx.org/
Those permission categories are so coarse grained as to be useless. In order to pause a media player when a call comes in I have to give the media player access to the phone app. Pure madness.