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Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

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Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#261

Post by jeroenhd »

geekifier wrote: post #242
jajko wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only slow... it has tons of accepted bugs and nobody seems to care. Yesterday I was using Outlook 365, there was one URL in one of the emails and I needed to find other emails containing it. Trivial and one of main use cases, right. Put URL in search box, 0 finds (including email I just copy&pasted it from). Mkay, maybe non-alphanumeric chars are messing with some internal regex or similar, stripped those into bar…

I use Mail.app on macOS as my daily these days, and it’s somehow even worse than this. Especially the search function, which works in even more bizarre ways. It’s truly amazing that we have seemingly regressed in basic desktop functionality since the early 2000’s.

I think people overestimate 2000s desktop functionality. macOS's mail application is still the good old crap app that it was since its inception. Outlook Express, Windows Live Mail, and the Windows 8/8.1/10 mail apps are all terrible in their own ways. Thunderbird looks like a skinned version of a late 2000s mail client and works exactly like it. Search is quirky and unpractical, but in completely different ways Outlook's and Mail.app's are!

Just for fun, try installing an old OS in a virtual machine. Marvel at how fast the old OS runs at modern SSD speeds. Get frustrated at the random hangs, freezes, glitches, and plain bad behavior of the programs you know and love, because the slowness of computers at the time hid it all. 20 cores of unused CPU power, dozens of gigabytes of RAM laying at the ready, disk I/O hitting dozens of megabytes per second, but still loading screens everywhere.

I once tried to go back, for nostalgia's sake, just doing the things I do on an old OS for fun. The grass wasn't much greener back then, I just had lower standards.

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#262

Post by _cenw »

tossandthrow wrote: post #244

Over the next 6 months I need to decide on the platform we roll out for our small startup. Windows is categorically left out. Funnily, it is probably going to be Valve that will be the death of Windows. All my Steam games runs better on Bazzite / Steam OS without any Windows interruption. At some point, this will spread like a wild fire in the gamin community - teaching people about alternatives to Windows. The next…

I've ran Linux on my laptops since 2012, but avoided it for my desktop. I made the jump last week, and it only took slightly modifying my NixOS config (unlocking amdgpu for instance) for everything to just work. Oblivion Remaster runs noticeably better. Most multiplayer games also just work. And I'm no longer dealing with Windows search randomly not working, SMB connections stalling, random sleep issues... it all just works.

I had to invest a little into getting Sunshine to work with virtual displays (like Artemis), but even that took like a day and it'll be easy to set up if I ever need to reinstall.

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#263

Post by promiseofbeans »

rafaelmn wrote: post #253
PuppetSoup wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Linux desktop is getting better but I still wouldn't daily drive it, I'm genuinely interested what Linux is missing for you? I've been daily driving it for years and do all my work and gaming on it. Is it specific software or?

It's just general polish. Like I was daily driving fedora last year and : - fractional scaling did not work in Gnome with Wayland for X11 Apps - I still cannot use my LG C4 as a monitor in full capacity because AMD on Linux does not support HDMI 2.1 - Screen sharing was very buggy - in Slack especially - it would constantly crash the slack app during calls, ditto for camera, but even in Google meet and Chrome I've ha…

If you're happy to dip your toes into another DAW, Reaper has excellent first-class Linux support, works with all your plugins, and has a 60 day trial* for you to get used to it.

* The free trial is enforced as heavily as WinRAR's, and it's pretty cheap (~$60) to buy a licence if the nag screen makes you feel bad enough

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#264

Post by Mashimo »

o11c wrote: post #160
pizza234 wrote: post #109

Libreoffice/Openoffice have been doing this since quite early on (reason is that the ancestor StarOffice was designed as monolith, always loading the full suite of programs, and splitting it is probably very hard), so it seems to be an unofficial standard. On the other hand, it's disappointing, since I remember early M$ Office version being blazing fast (but again, I suspect that there was some preloading going on).

This does not appear to be the case for LibreOffice in my tests.

I think you can choose to use the feature on installation. I don't know if it's on or off by default. But it is a thing that exist (with the windows installer)

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#265

Post by kettleballroll »

rafaelmn wrote: post #187

At this point I view Windows as a legacy/compatibility OS, all the news about Windows is how they are making it worse for everyone. And using it now and then it feels like that too. Windows 10 Mail app had integration with system calendar, you would get itsycal built into the OS. Windows 11 removed that and made the OS Mail app spam infested shit, and they expect me to pay a subscription for something that comes bund…

> outside from very specialist professional software (AutoCAD and Photoshop come toind), I think this is mostly about getting over the hump of inertia. Both myself (software Dec and ai) and even my parents (browser machine) use Linux for ages without hickups.

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#266

Post by bArray »

taurath wrote: post #228
bArray wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use LibreOffice for 99% of documents completely fine, and generate my own documents via Pandoc. The setup has served me really well so far.

I can’t stand libreoffice - between tons of bugs (waiting for printers on startup is a default..), extremely janky UI from 20 years ago, poor performance, exceptionally slow load times, and bad formatting issues and incompatibilities.. it’s just an awful experience overall.

> between tons of bugs (waiting for printers on startup is a default..),

Never had issues with printers to be fair, but it sounds like something that could be done in a background thread.

Bare in mind that we are contrasting this with Office, which is itself incredibly slow to start.

> extremely janky UI from 20 years ago

I love this about Libreoffice, everything can be located super reliably.

> poor performance

For a Java application I think it's crazily fast?

> and bad formatting issues and incompatibilities

It's certainly not a 100% drop-in replacement. A lot of the formatting issues I have experienced is because a Office user did something that assumes a perfect renderer - something we don't even get in browsers. Like people pressing enter multiple times to create a new page and not just CTRL+ENTER.

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#267

Post by sensanaty »

rafaelmn wrote: post #187

At this point I view Windows as a legacy/compatibility OS, all the news about Windows is how they are making it worse for everyone. And using it now and then it feels like that too. Windows 10 Mail app had integration with system calendar, you would get itsycal built into the OS. Windows 11 removed that and made the OS Mail app spam infested shit, and they expect me to pay a subscription for something that comes bund…

I just installed Pop!_OS about 4 days ago since I had some money to spend and managed to get a new SSD on the cheap, dual booting with Win10 (I would rather get beheaded than ever use W11 again, I don't care if I get ransomwared every day for the rest of my W10 life once support ends).

Honestly, there's literally nothing missing from the experience for me. Dev tooling works way better (obviously), it feels much faster than both W10 and especially W11, I can still play Factorio and most other games in my 900-game Steam library (minus MP games with rootki- err, "advanced" anticheats), GPU and CPU drivers were a non-issue and bundled with the install, speakers work, bluetooth works, Wifi works (I'm on LAN but still).

The only thing is that it's kinda ugly (personal taste, I actually like W10 aesthetics :p), but one GNOME Tweaks install later and I got it looking more like how I like it, plus they're (System76) working on Cosmos or whatever they're calling it and it's looking promising. Also text is a bit blurry/hard to read for me, but it could also just be my shitty monitors (and me being used to the excellent Macbook screens)

Now, if you have some software you rely on like the Adobe suite, understandable, but I think for most people it's honestly the superior OS compared to Windows. I'm sure the experience on other friendly distros like Mint are similar, too.

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#268

Post by rafaelmn »

kettleballroll wrote: post #265
rafaelmn wrote: post #187

At this point I view Windows as a legacy/compatibility OS, all the news about Windows is how they are making it worse for everyone. And using it now and then it feels like that too. Windows 10 Mail app had integration with system calendar, you would get itsycal built into the OS. Windows 11 removed that and made the OS Mail app spam infested shit, and they expect me to pay a subscription for something that comes bund…

> outside from very specialist professional software (AutoCAD and Photoshop come toind), I think this is mostly about getting over the hump of inertia. Both myself (software Dec and ai) and even my parents (browser machine) use Linux for ages without hickups.

I don't know - it's way more unstable in day to day use than say MacOS. The amount of times I had Slack crash on me or Chrome lock up in windows during calls is too frequent for daily use IMO. You could say that's a Slack or Chrome problem, but I don't have those issues on MacOS.

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#269

Post by jasode »

bambax wrote: post #231
jasode wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Office 2003 still works absolutely fine It works fine if the user is ok with the features from 2003. E.g. Excel 2003 is limited to smaller spreadsheets of 65536 rows by 256 columns but Excel 2007+ can handle larger worksheets of 1048576 rows by 16384 cols. I also recently used Excel's new LAMBDA() function which was introduced 2020. In earlier versions, it required writing a VBA UDF to accomplish the same task of as…

You're right about Excel; however, I think big data files should be handled in a db rather than in a spreadsheet. And sqlite can query Excel files (with an extension), and it's super fast and you can use any function you want, or write your own.

>; however, I think big data files should be handled in a db rather than in a spreadsheet. And sqlite can query Excel files (with an extension)

A lot of normal users of Excel are not users of database software like SQLite or MS Access. That's too cumbersome. E.g. they download a csv file that has ~100000 rows (which really isn't that "big") and clicking on it gets them an instant visual grid as a GUI in Excel. Slicing & dicing and pivoting data is way faster in Excel than coding SQL WHERE GROUP BY statements. I've commented previously on why databases are not substitutes for the workflow ergonomics made possible by spreadsheet tools : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30987638

It's similar to reasons why Python/R or Jupyter notebooks are also not substitutes for Excel for the typical users of Excel.

The low row count of 65536 in Excel 2003 was just a legacy limitation of 1980s 16-bit computing that was carried over into 32-bit computing for many years for backwards compatibility reasons. Spreadsheet users don't really want to switch to databases or Python just to get more usable rows than 65536.

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#270

Post by aniforprez »

worik wrote: post #116
bhouston wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switch to Google Docs/Sheets/Presentations many years ago as my primary tool and I haven't installed any type of local office in 6 years. Google Workspace has built in digital signature tools and the change tracking in Google Docs is also really good.

I find Google docs very frustrating. What blows my mind is how dreadful search is in Google docs. The thing that should be really good is really bad. Strange days

Now that even Google search is garbage, can't really claim they're good at search. It's also always been true that their search at anything aside from the main search product is horrible. YouTube search is its own level of colossal uselessness and has always been that way and has only gotten worse over time. These days it doesn't even show you 10 videos related to your search before going out of its way to show other "related" categories.
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