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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

#401

Post by noisy_boy »

bflesch wrote: post #121
noisy_boy wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LibreOffice should have provided a theme/icon pack "Office Icons" - half the time I can't tell what an icon is for because most of us have been raised on MS Office. Also, it would do well with a "Simple" mode ala Google Docs that is sufficient most of the time for most folks. Otherwise it works fine, haven't had any issues with the documents it produces and I particularly like the direct export to pdf feature.

LibreOffice has several themes that makes it look like MS Office (e.g. ribbons, modern UI, etc). Select TOOLS > OPTIONS > ADVANCED > Enable experimental Options (WARNING this is experimental and may be unstable) > OK and then RESTART LIBREOFFICE. On restart VIEW > TOOLBAR LAYOUT > NOTEBOOKBAR. You can then play with the options with VIEW > NOTEBOOKBAR > CONTEXTUAL GROUPS/ CONTEXTUAL SINGLE / TABBED.

It is actually View -> Toolbars -> Customize -> Notebookbar but within that there is only "Tabbed" option which doesn't really show a way to change themes.

This is a perfect example of actions that make adoption harder. This should have been at most 2 clicks and prominently displayed assuming LibreOffice wants to be a great alternative to MS Office and make the transition easier. I have been using Linux daily for over 20 years now and it is not intuitive to me - it doesn't make me very optimistic about the experience for a new user.

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

#402

Post by arccy »

bflesch wrote: post #117
Ferret7446 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The workspace admins can disable Gemini, among many other things. Google also does not "steal" your data if you read the ToS; any training is strictly scoped to that workspace. If you thought for a few seconds, you would realize that companies with big legal teams would not sign a contract that would give Google the right to their data.

Yeah google does not steal your data and that's why companies like amazon dont even send you full details of your online shopping order so google can't crawl what you bought and what price you bought it for.

my recent amazon order emails actually came with a full itemized list with prices

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

#403

Post by arccy »

ptx wrote: post #364
Ferret7446 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The workspace admins can disable Gemini, among many other things. Google also does not "steal" your data if you read the ToS; any training is strictly scoped to that workspace. If you thought for a few seconds, you would realize that companies with big legal teams would not sign a contract that would give Google the right to their data.

> any training is strictly scoped to that workspace Are they really doing training separately for each workspace? I thought LLM training was enormously expensive and needed lots of data, which wouldn't make sense to do separately.

they're no so much training as providing context just when you invoke it

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

#404

Post by johnisgood »

pjmlp wrote: post #363
johnisgood wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LibreOffice can be set to open on Windows startup So, Windows only, and "can be set", probably not the default?

The installer enables it by default unless you go through custom installation.

That sucks. This is the expected behavior for most programs on Windows, at least in my experience.

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

#405

Post by netruk44 »

bjackman wrote: post #211
kilotaras wrote: post #119

Team X is responsible for feature Foo; feature Foo is slow; team X introduces Foo-preload, metrics go up, person responsible gets a bonus. Multiply that by tens (or even hundreds) of teams and your app startup (either on desktop or mobile) is now a bloated mess. Happened to Office, Facebook iOS and countless others. One solution is to treat startup cycles as a resource similar to e.g. size or backend servers.

> One solution is to treat startup cycles as a resource similar to e.g. size or backend servers. The only way to achieve performance metrics in a large org IMO. Google Search is still fast because if you degrade p99 latency an SRE will roll back your change. Macbooks still have good battery life because Apple have an army of QA engineers and if they see a bump on their Ammeters that MacOS release doesn't go ahead. Ev…

As an ex-Microsoft SDET who worked on Windows, we used to test for those things as well. In 2014.

Then Microsoft made the brave decision that testers were simply unnecessary. So they laid off all SDETs, then decided that SDE’s should be in charge of the tests themselves.

Which effectively made it so there was no test coverage of windows at all, as the majority of SDE’s had not interacted with the test system prior to that point. Many/most of them did not know how to run even a single test, let alone interpret its results.

This is what Microsoft management wanted, so this is what they got. I would not expect improvement, only slow degradation as Windows becomes Bing Desktop, featuring Office and Copilot (Powered By Azure™).

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

#406

Post by cess11 »

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.

It does a lot of things, though many are somewhat subtle, like screen locking timeout and stuff with networking and a bunch of utility programs and so on. I like to start off Xfce Debian and plaster i3wm over it, it's the best 'power user' setup I've come across.

I wouldn't hesitate to put a 'regular' computer user in front of Xfce, it strikes a nice combination of simple and discoverable with very few annoyances. It's also where I go when I want to use some many-windowed application that doesn't fit into tiling.

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

#407

Post by horsawlarway »

nfriedly wrote: post #388
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?

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 i…

Just have it suspend to disk and shutdown on lid close.

I do this for arch Linux on my framework and it's fine. Startup time is under ten seconds, essentially zero battery drain, right back in your session with all apps/docs open.

Hibernate is definitely better but still finicky even on Mac/Windows, machines can and do fry themselves, or require a hard reset if you unplug a device at the wrong time. Or unexpectedly continue draining the battery.

It's a terrible, funky, poorly documented, exception filled world down in the low power states for hardware.

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

#408

Post by Cthulhu_ »

barrkel wrote: post #328
amiga386 wrote: post #241

What's old is new again. Microsoft introduced the "Office Startup Assistant" or "Office Startup Application" (osa.exe) in Office 97, it sat in the system tray and loaded the main office DLLs at startup: https://web.archive.org/web/20041214010329/http://support.mi... OpenOffice.org (predecessor of LibreOffice) copied this feature, which they called "QuickStarter", I don't know exactly when, but no later than 2003: htt…

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.

I wish companies would go back to building fast apps, but alas. Everything is feature-packed and requires you to download half the internet.

My intellij license just expired so today I'm back using Sublime Text, and honestly it's a breath of fresh air / relief - and it's not even the fastest editor, iirc it uses Python under the hood. I've installed Zed but getting plugins and keyboard shortcuts all lined up is always challenging. That one took ~2-3 seconds to cold start.

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

#409

Post by graemep »

wltr wrote: post #369
graemep wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly games and photoshop. Libre Office is more than sufficient for most people. > gui configurability A bit confused by that. Linux desktop environments tend to be more configurable, and you can configure most things end users want to configure in a GUI with the major DEs. Do you mean the sysadmins cannot configure as much in a GUI? I think that probably is a major barrier as it means a lot of retraining. Also, whe…

What you mean by sysadmin GUI things? Linux is so much simpler, you don’t need any GUI to configure it. And probably there’s no point in that. Actually, there is a way to configure it using code (see Ansible), which is better (I’d say). I believe this way of configuring is much more efficient. Yes, you have to learn some new things, probably even new paradigm. But once you done, it stays mostly the same for long year…

> Actually, there is a way to configure it using code (see Ansible), which is better (I’d say).

It may be better, but it needs change and retraining.

> I am, being Linux user for circa 15 years, see administrating Windows with dread.

Me too. I do not much like using Windows either and it seems to be getting worse.

> they react like it’s some hidden obscure knowledge they have to spend ten years studying it.

Partly FUD (lots of people make claims like "you have to compile your own software to use Linux") and partly because people hate change, and partly because it took them 10 years to learn Windows (many years ago) and they expect the same again.

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

#410

Post by prox »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #370
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…

Oh wow, that Nocera is great, correcting spellings to be passive-aggressive. > Review of attachment 312719 [details] [review]: >> gsd > gnome-settings-daemon. >> no-longer > Don't think that's in the OED >> gsd no-longer facilitates users overriding power key actions > And include references about when this happened. >> This is rather unfriendly and considerably more effort than editing logind.conf > I don't like the…

I really dislike these turf sitting devs. They try to just defend their throne rather than looking at the merits.
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