Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup • Hacker News Board

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

#381

Post by bigfatkitten » Thu, May 01, 2025, 11:43 AM UTC

ohgr wrote: post #336

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…

No Linux desktop delivers what the user wants, needs or expect. Only what the developers think they need and find interesting to fix. It's more fun reinventing wheels badly than fixing shit generally. Some people are lucky this aligns with their needs, but for most it doesn't. It's jarring and unproductive. It needs corporate (or government!) drive behind it or that won't change. I'm not talking about Redhat either w…

Some of the more influential developers are Red Hat employees, and Red Hat has retasked them with other work in recent years.

That might be enough to prompt a change in direction, I guess time will tell.

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

#382

Post by sgarland » Thu, May 01, 2025, 11:44 AM UTC

alliao wrote: post #340

barrkel wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I came here looking for this. It's an old idea, from the days when spinning rust was the limiting factor - precache the binaries. If you ever tried Office 97 on a PC of 10+ years later, it's amazing how fast and lightweight it was. Instant startup, super snappy. And those apps were not lacking in features. 95% of what you need out of a desktop word processor was in Word 97.

some of the modern software is slower because someone made a poor decision to fetch something from the network on the critical path of main functionality... kills me

It’s because modern devs by and large have zero concept of latency differences. I had to explain to people yesterday why an on-disk temporary table in MySQL was slower than an in-memory one. “But the disk is an SSD,” was an actual rebuttal I got. Never mind the fact that this was Aurora, so the “disk” is a slice of (multiple) SSDs exposed over a SAN…

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

#383

Post by bardak » Thu, May 01, 2025, 11:44 AM UTC

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…

My favorite GNOME developer's hill to die on is their refusal to implement a system tray or work with the rest of the Linux desktop community to create an alternative to the system tray. Don't get me wrong there has been a abuse of the system tray but the refusal to acknowledge that there is a use case for persistent notifications or status indicators is ridiculous. there suggestion is that notifications are the solution is so inadequate. It's pretty telling that their arguments aren't sound when they have chosen to implement traditional system tray items such as a battery indicator and volume indicator as built in items on the task bar but they dismiss the idea that a chat app status indicator would be useful.

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

#384

Post by dimgl » Thu, May 01, 2025, 11:44 AM UTC

Windows is bafflingly bad. It's gotten so much worse in the last four years, but it's always been bad. I've never gotten bluetooth to work correctly on Windows. Apps randomly crash. Three different versions of settings pages, and they crash. Snipping Tool only works half the time. I had to run a debloater on my system because searching for something in the Start Menu would never give me the results I wanted. Xbox ads during gameplay... I mean the list goes on.

I'm done with it. I've switched to Ubuntu and I haven't looked back. I only boot up my Windows installation when I need to do game development on Unreal or use an incompatible program. But for now, MacOS and Linux are covering everything.

I used to be a big gamer but I've basically given up on playing games that don't work on Linux. The selection of games is steadily growing and some games work at launch (like Oblivion Remastered).

I know there's a lot of animosity for GNOME, but it's the best Linux desktop in my opinion. In terms of polish it's definitely the closest to MacOS.

Application installs are still an absolute pain, but it's gotten better. At the very least I can now go through the Ubuntu App Center to get the most common apps. There's the occassional app that doesn't work (like VLC) and then I'll have to look into Snap or Flatpak or whatever other variation of app packaging Linux devs decide to unleash on the masses... but then it works and I don't think about it again.

One last gripe for me is the lack of HDR support in Ubuntu. I can't use my LG C2 with it. But I've switched to using two Dell monitors with DisplayPort and now it doesn't matter... and I use the LG C2 with something else.

For the average user this experience sucks. But for me, I'm okay putting up with this pain if it means never using Windows again.

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

#385

Post by bnolsen » Thu, May 01, 2025, 11:44 AM UTC

bgro wrote: post #233

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…

Linux is working great for me. AMD supposedly works better but my nvidia driver doesn’t crash for videos like windows does and games seem to be working fine. Possibly except kernel anti cheat games. I have dual boot available as a backup.

I had a 3060 12g in my daughters computer. It would freeze every couple of weeks for who knows what reason. Swapped out her mobo/CPU/ram with mine and it still froze. Put in an rx5709xt and it's all good now. The 3060 is now in a server. I would have gotten the card if someone at work hasn't sold it to me for 100$. What originally made me leave Nvidia was because of how quickly Nvidia dropped driver support for not very old cards but I can't remember what card I had at the time.

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

#386

Post by MSFT_Edging » Thu, May 01, 2025, 11:45 AM UTC

ohgr wrote: post #352

skissane wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My Linux desktop experience... I started with Linux installing it from floppy disks in about 1996. In 1995, I was back on Windows 95 within a week because I needed to get something done. In 2000, I was back on Windows 2000 within a week because I needed to get something done. In 2005, I was back on Windows XP within a week because I needed to get something done. In 2012, I was back on Windows 7 within a week because…

I've wasted like 8 hours in the last two days trying to upgrade windows 10 to 11 so my motherboards wifi drivers can be installed.

It just worked in Linux. I don't get where this comes from, because every time I hit a problem in Linux, there's a solution.

In windows, you get a vague hex error code that leads you to a support page where the error could be caused by one of a dozen reasons.

And on top of that, MS is constantly hostile to any user who just wants a basic OS to use their computer with.

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

#387

Post by AnonHP » Thu, May 01, 2025, 11:47 AM UTC

I use LibreOffice for my personal needs, which is spreadsheets (I also donate to Document Foundation to support it). Sadly, even LibreOffice has suffered from being slow to start up, is bloated and sluggish (on Windows and macOS; I have tried it on Linux for a very long time).

It seems like all Office-like apps are cursed to be slow and bloated. It also seems like 32GB should be the bare minimum amount of RAM for a Windows machine today (even the “new Teams” app is sluggish nowadays and takes up quite a bit of memory or crashes often).

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

#388

Post by nfriedly » Thu, May 01, 2025, 11:48 AM UTC

PuppetSoup wrote: post #221

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…

> 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?

Not the OP, but hibernate support is one thing that sent me back to windows on my Framework laptop.

In windows, I can just shut the lid and not worry about it, because it will sleep first, and eventually hibernate. Ubuntu would just sleep until the battery dies.

I found instructions for enabling hibernate in Ubuntu, and they did make it show up in the power menu, but it didn't seem to work. (Which is presumably why it was hidden to begin with.)

I also tried NixOS, but I couldn't even get it to boot the installer.

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

#389

Post by geodel » Thu, May 01, 2025, 11:48 AM UTC

Seems at this point any low level code they concern them with is security because it can have legal consequences, or porting to new CPU versions, archs as it can have financial consequences. So C++ is slow? very well write some Typescript/ReactJS frontend. It is slower? No worries, now you can run that in cloud. Anything else is to be taken care AI and crap. Problem solved.

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

#390

Post by bluGill » Thu, May 01, 2025, 11:49 AM UTC

sgarland wrote: post #344

skissane wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Ubuntu Well, there’s your problem ;-) This is great, though, really. I broke our computer so many times growing up, I couldn’t possibly count. I don’t think I ever lost anything of import, other than some savegames of mine. I keep telling people who ask, “how do I learn Linux?” that they need to use it, tinker with it, break it, and fix it, ideally without anything other than man pages and distro docs. It is a shoc…

There is more to learn / do than anyone has time. My kid is supposed to spend an hour on his violin, half an hour an fitness, then some time on chess, then eat - including clean up and/or cook. somehow he needs to fit some free play in too. He doesn't have time for more.

It isn't that he could do that, but what else to give up?