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

pcworld.com

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

#281

Post by BarryMilo »

bigfatkitten wrote: post #255
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 really want to like GNOME, but GNOME's developers have almost as much arrogance and contempt for their users as Microsoft. As an example, the power button can no longer be configured to power off the machine, because this is "too destructive". I'm not talking about defaults -- they removed the ability for me to make this choice for myself. Not even Microsoft has done that. https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id…

As much as I'm a diehard Linux defender, Gnome can get bent. XFCE does everything I want, which is to say, almost nothing.

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

#282

Post by scq »

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…

- Fractional scaling: That's because X11 itself does not support it. Many older Windows apps also have problems with fractional scaling.

- HDMI 2.1: The HDMI Forum blocked it, as they don't want the details of HDMI 2.1 publically available. If you can, use DisplayPort, which is an actual open standard, and is better anyway. Nvidia works because they implemented it in closed-source firmware instead. https://www.phoronix.com/news/HDMI-2.1-OSS-Rejected

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

#283

Post by SietrixDev »

skc wrote: post #215

I just opened Word and Excel after a cold start of the OS (Windows 11) Both opened fully in a second. So just how much faster should these apps actually open? I suspect this is aimed at Enterprise installations where the machines are gunked up with corporate spyware.

I have a different issue. First window of Excel starts fast, but try to open another file and you'd think that I just didn't click on it. 10 second wait times and I'm on a private machine without any corporate bloat.

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

#284

Post by kuschku »

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…

> Right now I upgraded my GPU to 9070XT - I'm still not sure if that would work on Linux yet because of driver support delay

You can install AMDs driver from their repo directly, it works just fine (using it every day).

> I still cannot use my LG C4 as a monitor in full capacity because AMD on Linux does not support HDMI 2.1

That will never be possible. To prevent pirates from breaking it (lol), HDMI has decided to keep HDMI 2.1 secret. No open source version of HDMI 2.1 can exist.

That said, AMD's driver repo includes both the open source drivers and some proprietary versions of the driver, maybe that'll work for you.

Another option would be using a displayport output and a DP to HDMI converter, as e.g. Intel is using for their GPUs.

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

#285

Post by frainfreeze »

BarryMilo wrote: post #281
bigfatkitten wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really want to like GNOME, but GNOME's developers have almost as much arrogance and contempt for their users as Microsoft. As an example, the power button can no longer be configured to power off the machine, because this is "too destructive". I'm not talking about defaults -- they removed the ability for me to make this choice for myself. Not even Microsoft has done that. https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id…

As much as I'm a diehard Linux defender, Gnome can get bent. XFCE does everything I want, which is to say, almost nothing.

XFCE is wonderful. I wish it got more dev time

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

#286

Post by SietrixDev »

milch wrote: post #80
mrandish wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At installation Chrome, Edge browser and Acrobat Reader all silently add multiple background tasks to Windows startup which will then run at every boot and log on. Those tasks check for updates, pre-load and ensure their usage analytics get dutifully reported. Because I only use those apps on rare occasion, I go remove all those tasks. And each of those apps checks to see if its tasks are still there on every run or…

Adobe is the worst offender. I just checked and I have no less than 8 Adobe processes running on my macOS machine, without any Adobe apps running, and with all of the settings to run in the background or sync stuff turned off. I even have a script to nuke all of the services they install that I run every once in a while, but they just come back after a while. It's literally malware. If Photoshop and Lightroom weren't…

I never was a pro at Adobe stuff, but recently I bought Affinity Suite and it seems nice. The only downside for me is lack of Linux support.

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

#287

Post by plaidfuji »

Surprised there’s no mention of Google Workspace here. I’ve been using Workspace exclusively for probably 5 years now. It’s obviously faster to open, the interface has remained clean and simple, and they’ve steadily closed the feature gap with Word, Excel and PPT.

The only major gap remaining, IMO, is on Sheets - performance as sheets get large or have lots of formulas, and plotting. If Google would take that product a little more seriously (rather than trying to turn it into a Notion databases clone), they could become a real alternative.

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

#288

Post by cheschire »

_cenw wrote: post #250

It feels like different teams at Microsoft don't work with each other; they work against each other. I've noticed that too with Edge, it seems to be a competition at which team can put short term metrics (shopping and "creator following" vs privacy, shouldersurfing other search engines vs setting your search engine to bing) over respecting the user or engineering a coherent product. Maybe stack ranking does create te…

Microsoft hasn’t used stack ranking for over a decade. I guess the team level competitive culture has persisted though.

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

#289

Post by BarryMilo »

jeroenhd wrote: post #240
krembo wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so shitty and slow because it's a bloatware. Lucky for MS they are kind of a monopoly in the corporate world.

Office is like Jira: taken on its own, it sucks, but there are no real alternatives to it.

It's crazy to me how because 1% of Excel users need pivot tables or something we're all stuck on it. LibreOffice is enough for the vast majority of use cases.

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

#290

Post by frainfreeze »

skissane wrote: post #278
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?

Our 12 year old recently switched from Windows to Ubuntu… and now I’m constantly getting these complaints “I can’t get screen capture to work under Wayland… I switched from lightdm to sddm and I can’t work out how to switch back… I accidentally started an i3 session and I can’t work out how to log out of it.” It makes me kind of miss Windows, in a way. It is good he’s learning so much. But the downside is Linux gives…

Put him on debian stable with xfce and no sudo if he is such a bother. Sounds to me this is a people problem, not Linux problem. Do you miss windows or do you miss not having to spend time with kid on things that bother you?
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