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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

#451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Desktop linux doesn't even have anything close to things like group policies. And if by magic that function would appear tomorrow, it would disappear again the day after tomorrow. Sure active directory and group policies have their flaws but its ease of use and tight integration blows everything else out of the water.

You're bringing up an important point. However: As far as I can tell, Linux can very well be integrated into an Active Directory setup.[0,1] Also: If you want to avoid Active Directory altogether, there seem to be plenty alternatives?[2] [0]: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/linux-active-directory [1]: https://documentation.ubuntu.com/server/explanation/intro-to... [2]: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/333/what…

There are no enterprise alternatives to Active Directory. Just like there are no enterprise alternatives to Exchange.

They're simply too well integrated, too easy to manage, and have more features than their competitors.

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

#452
post #349

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…

The toolkit inconsistency between apps drives me crazy more than it should. Loading up a GTK app and switching to a Qt app is jarring, especially with basic things like a file picker. Daily driving desktop Linux feels like you are living in a lower-middle income family. Yes, you have some nice things, but you can usually tell they are cost-cut versions that have filler plates or missing features present on higher-end…

Yeah but on the flip side if your usecase is not blessed by daddy Apple - or you're not a fan of their hardware design - there is zero variety in the ecosystem and full lockdown. Like iPad is great hardware - but they will never let you run unlocked OS on it because it cuts into their profit source. In fact I suspect they will try to push MacOS into that direction more.

So I'm hoping to be able to transition out of the ecosystem because I hate their model and like choice. But at the same time I have work to do and last time I tried it wasn't there yet. It was better than it was 3 years ago, and that was better than 5 years ago, etc. I would say not a lot left and the momentum is building, I just don't have the 20 year old energy to be the early adopter anymore :)

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

#453
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.

Oh it absolutely is, but at least it’s free

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

#454
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.

Au contraire, I would say that Mint is probably the closest to stock Win11/macOS experience right now. Gnome, on the other hand, looks utterly alien and non-discoverable

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

#455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Desktop linux doesn't even have anything close to things like group policies. And if by magic that function would appear tomorrow, it would disappear again the day after tomorrow. Sure active directory and group policies have their flaws but its ease of use and tight integration blows everything else out of the water.

Silicon valley is able to shoehorn their Macbooks into "compliance" but somehow it'd be a problem to do the same with linux desktops? > And if by magic that function would appear tomorrow, it would disappear again the day after tomorrow. That's incorrect. > ease of use and tight integration blows everything else out of the water. Agree to disagree.

macOS has MDM tooling like Microsoft's InTune, or JAMF, and I'm sure a few others. macOS is designed for MDM profiles, just like iOS is.

This is what makes Mac manageable.

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

#456
post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 alway…

I don't think these apps were ever built to be fast, they were built with the resource constraints of the time. Moore's law is what's making these apps fast.

[deleted]

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

#457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It's crazy to me how because 1% of Excel users need pivot tables or something we're all stuck on it.

Finance and insurance industries are full of Excel powerusers.

> LibreOffice is enough for the vast majority of use cases.

Often (from my job experience I can at least attest this for the finance and insurance sectors), Excel is an integrated part of many large workflows. Changing from Excel to LibreOffice would mean rewriting important parts of central business applications, so you better have a really good reason why you want to do the switch from Excel to LibreOffice.

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

#459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Makes perfect sense. It recently became clear to me (e.g. [2]) that it's not a cohesive concept but to me personally this is the meaning of POSIWID [1].

Basically making Windows a good desktop OS is not in any meaningful way the "purpose" of that part of MS. The "purpose" of any team of 20+ SWEs _is_ the set of objectives they measure and act upon. That's the only way you can actually predict the outcomes of its work.

And the corrolary is that you can usually quite clearly look at the output of such an org and infer what its "purpose" is, when defined as such.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_w...

[2] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comment...

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

#460

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…

Microsoft is never gonna give up on Windows NT "technology" no matter how bad it is and continues to be. They will continue to kick that dead horse until the company no longer exists. They genuinely port their UI (not the Windows 11 UI, it's horrible) and their apps to Linux. Release a Linux based OS, call it some shit like Windows Ultra not-shit edition. Accept Windows lost to Linux. God I hate Microsoft.

The under-the-hood NT stuff is the best thing about Windows.
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