Still amazes me that people support Microsoft in anything in this day and age.
Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)
121–130 of 492 posts
Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)
#122This is not a new thing. Decades ago when Verizon contracted with Microsoft to "upgrade" their web portal, it was no longer usable from any browser other than IE. I had been using it from Netscape on various SPARC machines and from my mobile device (PalmOS). The web page html source had no exotic platform specific language elements. It was obviously a "business decision". I wrote the VP at Verizon a letter pointing o…
Behold the "new" Microsoft, same as the old Microsoft.
Microsoft's cash cow has always been Windows, and secondarily, Office. That directed their decisions then and it directs their decisions now.
The landscape may change such that Microsoft feels it is beneficial to release things like .NET Core as open-source, but this doesn't reflect a change in what Microsoft values ("A PC on every desk running Microsoft software" and the associated revenue streams), it reflects a change in what they believe is necessary to secure their goals.
Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)
#123Considering that there are places in the world where government employees must use Linux due to regulations, and Microsoft is moving ever closer to cloud delivered services, one would think that they want to support Linux as an OS. [0] [0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2009/03/frenc...
Maybe it's just expensive to support
Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
"thanks for reporting this, I'll pass this to the tech team" It's not something they can say. The product is unsupported and the "tech team" won't care.
Much like how Netflix monitors torrents to find out how popular movies/shows are, Microsoft could tabulate these reports to find what OS their customers want to use with OneDrive. But if they don't get recorded, there's no info to learn that from.
Much like how Netflix monitors torrents to find out how popular movies/shows are,
Wait what? Really?? What are they monitoring, seed ratios from trackers? That's an interesting/novel way of researching demand-makes sense given the service Netflix provides.
Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)
#125Tangentially related, but Netflix also do some similar User-Agent sniffing logic for Linux users browsing with Firefox. Firefox does indeed support Widevine, but unless you pretend to be Chrome Netflix refuses to work.
I got brushed off in much the same way as this user did when I tried to discuss the matter with customer support. In the end I carpet bombed a bunch of executives by guessing the email address format, and only then did I get a response from someone who knew what they were talking about and understood my complaint.
I think front-line support being unhelpful like this (and furthermore being unwilling to escalate the issue to someone technically adept) is a widespread issue and I'd agree with some of the other posters here: I've encountered maybe 1 helpful post from answer.microsoft.com after numerous visits when troubleshooting Windows issues.
Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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).
Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Not supported" is an acceptable first half of a response, but all you really have to add is "I'll pass this on to the tech team" and the tone changes entirely.
But they are deliberately throttling this, in an effort to get people to have to use Windows.
That's an assumption. There exist other explanations that are just as valid.
Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
then how else would such behaviour be explainable? I thought about reasonable explanations but i doubt a little background process that notices a unsupported user agent would act up like this
I don't know if MS has earned the benefit of my doubt, but it's conceivable that the software could have implemented platform-specific behavior or optimizations that ended up slowing things down for some reason.
Yeah after reading some other comments (also on reddit) the idea that they push fixes platform specific and linux just defaults to a state with many missing fixes sounds like a reasonable option.
Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
I was born in the '90s...
but with Linux, the case for me is that given enough time, I can usually find all the information I need to figure it out. With Windows it's Google for 10 minutes then throw my hands in the air and figure out a workaround.
I'm not sure which is better for my productivity: realizing that I accidentally screwed up my DNS resolver and spending the next hour hunting through forum posts and man pages before finding the snippet that explains what I was supposed to do and reconfiguring my resolved.conf symlink or figuring out the quickest, crudest workaround on Windows.
Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)
#130my 1$ hypothesis - partner company to which Onedrive UI project outsourced didn't had any Linux machine and all developers/QA working for this partner company were Windows users, to improve compatibility matrix they had kept few Mac machines in the office to run tests. Moreover this team might not received proper spec about the backend API at the initial stages of the project development, would have receive only at last stage of the development. So they try to get it working only in one or two platforms to make the release happen :)