Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)

answers.microsoft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 492 posts

Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)

#191

Post by mdekkers »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #177
easytiger wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a linux user since the 90s, googling for basic issues on Windows is an unmitigated disaster. For linux I have always got a correct answer.

Bullshit If you were a Linux user in the mid-90's, then about the only place to get "help" was #linux on EFnet. Collectively, I don't think I've suffered more abuse on the internet than in that forum. And, yes, I'm still bitter. It was NOT a noob-friendly place. The best place -- ever -- to get Linux help was, and will always have been, the Gentoo forums, but that didn't take off till the early 2000's.

The best place -- ever -- to get Linux help was, and will always have been, the Gentoo forums

True! However, obligatory "Gentoo is rice" link: https://fun.irq.dk/funroll-loops.org/

Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)

#192

Post by Spooky23 »

cookiecaper wrote: post #111
ht85 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I very much doubt this was intentional. If this was a small company targeting unsavvy users to try and upsell them something, sure. In this case the payout might be worth the fallout once people inevitably figure it out. In this case, I doubt someone thought "hey, let's mess with Linux users and serve them a bunch of garbage, it'll encourage them to move to Windows".

The only reason I would hesitate to say it's intentional is Microsoft's relationship/experience with the DOJ. Maybe that's far enough in the past and the landscape has changed sufficiently that it's no longer a matter of concern for them. If the only change necessary to improve speed is to update a string in the UA, I would say that's pretty hard to do accidentally. In theory, it could be an artifact of some internal…

I doubt it's a conspiracy like this. More like having to support all of the legacy IE crap out there.

My guess is that they whitelist javascript or other things based on specific browser strings.

Onedrive for Business is a real shitshow product. IMO, the people supporting it scramble to make it perform at all.

Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)

#193

Post by krylon »

ConceptJunkie wrote: post #133
ht85 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I very much doubt this was intentional. If this was a small company targeting unsavvy users to try and upsell them something, sure. In this case the payout might be worth the fallout once people inevitably figure it out. In this case, I doubt someone thought "hey, let's mess with Linux users and serve them a bunch of garbage, it'll encourage them to move to Windows".

Why not? It's not officially supported. It's not like Microsoft hasn't been doing this kind of thing to their competitors for the last 30 years.

But I doubt somebody would switch from Linux to Windows because OneDrive is faster there.

Also, the percentage of desktops running Linux is still tiny relative to Windows. The last time I saw any numbers (about two or three years back), it was ~90% Windows, ~7.5% OS X, ~1.5% Linux, so there is little incentive for Microsoft to care about Linux desktops.

Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)

#194

Post by sdenton4 »

endisukaj wrote: post #156
gjjrfcbugxbhf wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about that - with (especially desktop) Linux one has to be quite specific to get an up to date solution. There's been a lot of churn in the stack in last decade (i think the stack is much improved as a result).

I've been using Linux for the past 6 years (on and off only the first two of those) and I have never had this happen to me. Maybe when I was using Ubuntu it was harder to find good answers that were not specific to someone else's usecase because of the nature of Ubuntu forums.

Back in the day I chose Gentoo Linux entirely based on an evaluation of its forums. It didn't disappoint: In five or so years of heavy use, I only ran into one issue that wasn't explained in great detail in the forums. The ridiculously high bar to entry seemed to do wonders for discussion quality.

Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)

#195

Post by youareterrible »

krylon wrote: post #188
Endy wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Windows user since the 90ss, when I tried using Linux for a week or two on a spare machine while my primary laptop was in the shop... Trying to find any information on Linux that didn't involve books' worth of text saying 'compile this', 'write this program in C', or 'do this incredibly arcane commandline operation' became an exercise in futility. Whenever I have a specific problem in Windows, I can Google it an…

> 'do this incredibly arcane commandline operation' I have seen my fair share of this in the Windows world, too. Edit registry keys you never even heard of, use that (mostly undocumented) command invocation (I'm look at you, SharePoint!), edit that XML file that sits in a place where it does not even make sense... On Linux (and other Unix systems), at least you have man pages, on Windows I cannot recall a single inst…

Powershell has man too. It's an alias for get-help.

Man get-command

Get-help get-help

Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)

#196

Post by ng12 »

rsweeney21 wrote: post #185

"Don't assume bad intentions over neglect and misunderstanding." - Hanlon's razor I worked as a Microsoft employee on the xbox.com website from 2007-2010. We didn't officially support any browsers on Linux because it represented We supplied a list of officially supported browsers to the customer support team. Any bugs on non-supported browsers would never get reported back to our team, so we'd never hear about them.…

Sure, but Microsoft also spent a decade developing a different dialect of JavaScript to force vendor lock-in. You can't discredit malice either.

Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)

#197

Post by Psilidae »

adsfqwop wrote: post #100
morinted wrote: post #9

Unhelpful catch-all responses that don't display a shred of effort or care are the bane of my customer support experiences. Nothing hurts my opinion of a company like being brushed off like a bug.

Whenever I google a problem with a microsoft product, and the search ends up on one of these answer.microsoft.com pages, I always click on the link with an enormous feeling of dread. I don't think I've ever seen a usable answer on that site.

I hate that they rarely seem to even read the post. I once had a bad issue with one of my Windows PCs, so I dug through the internet and read all of the support docs I could find. Unfortunately none of them were working. In desperation, I turned to asking on the MS support site. I explained my issue, and explicitly stated "I have already tried XYZ, as per other support pages, and it is not working." Naturally, the first and only response was "Please try doing XYZ".

Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)

#198

Post by kbenson »

Keverw wrote: post #135
glogla wrote: post #6

I have to admit, the whole exchange is pretty funny: > Hello, Onedrive for Business open is very slow on Linux (Chrome/Firefox) but with very fast with a "Windows" user-agent. > Hi DL, As Office 365 for Business services(e.g. SharePoint Online, including OneDrive for Business, Exchange Online) are not supported on Linux as shown below, for the best experience, we recommend the operating system listed in the article.…

I found that interesting too. I'm not familiar with office 365, but isn't it web based? So why does it matter what browser or OS you use?

Well, it used to be that MS used ActiveX extensively, as with the original Outlook Web Access, to achieve things that weren't possible in the browser. It's entirely possible they try to use advanced features only available in IE depending on the User-Agent header.

Keep in mind, XMLHttpRequest was introduced by MS in IE, and then was adopted by other browsers. It's likely that some Google products use Chrome specific extensions if they detect Chrome. If you can provide a better experience, it's often worth doing so.

Unfortunately there may occasionally be problems where falling back to standard features may be buggy, or development has continued assuming the existence of proprietary features that has led to designs where the fallback to standard features isn't just a little slower, but massively slower, because it might be a less checked test case.

In other words, I think this is far more likely to be an oversight because of a poor testing regime than a purposeful action.

Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)

#199

Post by emodendroket »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #155
glogla wrote: post #6

I have to admit, the whole exchange is pretty funny: > Hello, Onedrive for Business open is very slow on Linux (Chrome/Firefox) but with very fast with a "Windows" user-agent. > Hi DL, As Office 365 for Business services(e.g. SharePoint Online, including OneDrive for Business, Exchange Online) are not supported on Linux as shown below, for the best experience, we recommend the operating system listed in the article.…

It may be funny, but at the same time it's great to see this kind of feedback directly from the customers to the company. If someone listens up there, sooner or later they'll realize there is more money in the subscription business than in one-time OS purchases, and they will put the money where the mouth is.

I'm guessing (especially when you consider that OS X is in there) that it has more to do with the support burden and small number of people using Linux as a desktop OS than trying to get people to buy Windows.

Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)

#200

Post by krylon »

sqeaky wrote: post #141
0942v8653 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if it's not supported, they can't pass it on to the tech team; that would be against policy. Changing policy to make companies support unsupported software is a hard sell.

Why does a web app care about my OS? "Supported" in this context is clearly "we want more money from your despite you already having paid the agreed amount for this product".

I was wondering, too. Firefox is Firefox, no matter what OS it runs on. If OneDrive works well with Firefox on Windows, why wouldn't it on Linux or any other operating system?
Post reply on HN