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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

#421
post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but my experience with Linux is that seemingly absurd usability issues just keep piling up the more you use it and at some you just kind of give up and abandon any expectation of even a decent level of common sense from whoever is developing the system. I've listed some of which I encountered on Mint here https://www.virtualcuriosities.com/folders/273/usability-iss... Among them: AppImages just don't run unle…

Not to argue with you, but is that Linux Mint specifically? I never used it, and its DE looked very unprofessional to my liking. Personally, I prefer modern Gnome, but I also like KDE. Everything else looks very unfriendly to an average user, I won’t ever install it. I’d go Gnome for Mac users and KDE for Windows refugees.

This is why Linux will always be a terrible OS. Every time someone says "Linux is bad because XYZ" someone will tell you "actually that's your distro, if you used distro ABC you wouldn't have that problem." But ABC has a different set of problems, which if you wasted 2 months to realize them and start complaining about, someone would just direct you to distro JKL.

The fragmentation of Linux leads to a ping-pong of responsibilities. Linux can never be a bad OS because it isn't an OS.

On Windows, if the file manager is bad, that's Microsoft's fault. Period. Nobody tries to say "actually..." it's Microsoft's fault. Period. The same goes for the taskbar, for the control panel, for MS Paint, for even Microsoft Office. If Microsoft will fix it or make it worse depends on them, but nobody denies who is to blame and everyone know where the blame lies. Meanwhile I don't even know if the basic utilities that my distro distributes are under the responsibility of Mint's team or if they will just direct me to some random open source project's issue tracker if I start complaining about Celluloid or the "Drawing" app.

You can't talk about Linux thinking only about the good parts, or you aren't inviting people to try Linux, you're inviting them to try your distro. "Linux" means the whole ecosystem, including all of its problems.

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

#422

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…

At some point, the GNOME folks are going to have to hire people to go door-to-door and take hardware away from people, because they won't have any software left to remove features from.

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

#423

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…

>At this point I view Windows as a legacy/compatibility OS I literally thought about that yesterday as my Windows computer I was using for a legacy application froze/slowdown to the point of unusability. Not the first time this has happened. And nearly every day I have a UI issue with some programs not maximizing and staying behind old windows. I've had embarrassing moments when my OS/MS teams crashes during a meetin…

The bottom left button can be turned off by going into the taskbar settings (by right-clicking on the taskbar) and disabling taskbar widgets. Too bad if you have widgets that you do want to use.

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

#424

Between Office's increasingly bloated size, slow booting and super annoying CoPilot icon right where I'm working (which still can't be turned off in OneNote) - I'm on the edge of dumping Office. I pretty much only use OneNote and a little OneDrive (3% of the included storage plan) to sync files between machines and I run Word and Powerpoint less than a dozen times a year combined. Even as a paying customer, all the O…

If you go the Syncthing-Route anyway, take a look at Softmaker Office [1], it's an almost-drop-in replacement for MS Office and would set you back 50 EUR/year for 5 devices.

We evaluated it for our migration away from MS software and would have gone with it, but it lacks an office server for Nextcloud integration.

[1] https://www.softmaker.com/en/products/softmaker-office

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

#425
Maybe I'm an out-of-touch nerd who needs to touch grass, but I would love to see a world where Markdown has supplanted this glorified suite of XML editors.

Markdown has docs, slides, tables, diagrams (via Mermaid), and can be read on any system that has a text editor. It's simple, non-proprietary, and future proof.

This repo says it all: https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown

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

#426
As a lay person, apps like Office feel like they stay the same between updates and somehow manage to get fatter and slower.

(I'm sure they've got some new improvements tucked away but I don't notice them.)

Or every time I update my OS it's like a 10GB download. What did I just get for that 10GB? I honestly can't tell.

Even my smartphone. Seem often where I'm asked to install a 2GB update aaand it's same as before but slower?

Anyone else have this sentiment?

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

#427

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…

That sounds amazing, well not for you but for your kid :) It has been very valuable for me that I messed around windows and linux as a kid

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

#428

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…

12-year-old me installed Linux on an old desktop tower and I also broke things constantly. The difference is my parents were both humanities majors and I knew full well there was no point in asking them for help. Even at the time, the resources were all there for me to teach myself to Linux. Sure, I spent many many hours troubleshooting things instead of doing whatever it was I had as my end goal, but I was a kid—learning is the point!

It's harder as a parent to know that you're capable of solving their problem and still say no, but by age 12 that's pretty much your primary job: to find more and more things that they can start doing for themselves, express your confidence in them, and let them figure out how to adult bit by bit. Breaking a Linux install and fixing it again is among the lowest stakes ways that dynamic will play out from here on.

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

#429

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…

That's because you're not the target audience: both Windows and GNOME primarily target the computer illiterate. If you know what you're doing and understand how the computer works, these desktops at best are a nuisance and more than likely to get in your way.

My go-to comparison is power tools: there's a consumer line that's underpowered but pretty easy to use by anyone, and then there's the professional tools for people that know how to handle these tools properly: more power, versatile, and user serviceable.

Smartphones take this to the extreme: on both Android and iOS every user is illiterate, because the OS is deliberately opaque to the user.

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

#430
post #384

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…

LibreOffice, the most popular office suite available for Linux, is comparably slow and bloated.
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