Live data from Hacker News

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

pcworld.com

551–560 of 1001 posts

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

#551

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…

What Linux distribution can be recommended to someone who wants to try out a desktop OS with experience as close to Windows as possible?

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

#552
post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That is what happens when your dev learnt it from an online course instead of going to college or through proper education. "Anyone can code!"

Maybe you should skip bashing modern devs and people who learnt from online courses when the parent poster is the one in the wrong. Unless InnoDB has a particularly bad implementation of disk backed temporary tables almodt all disk IO should be done in the background so the latency cost should be small. I recommend benchmarking on you particular workload of you really want to know hur big it is.

I am an old-school developer with a computer engineering degree but many of the old famous devs were self taught. Yes, if you learn how to code through online courses you will miss some important fundamentals but those are possible to learn later and I know several people who have.

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

#553

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…

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.

I've always joked about the eventual evolution of the GNOME desktop converging to a single login screen followed by a full screen button labeled LOGOFF because they will claim anything else is too confusing for their users.

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

#554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotlight search on macOS is in general kinda…spotty. Now that we have super fast SSDs it should be instantaneous very reliable. How hard can this be? BeOS seem to have figured it out 30 years ago. Apple missed a chance to fix this once and for all when APFS was developed, but they are fat and happy, no fire in their guts. Craig Ferengi must go.

What’s infuriating is, `find` and `grep` are snappy, they find everything you need in microseconds per gigabyte, and they have no index! If the macOS or Windows searches were just wrappers for find/grep, it would already be an improvement!

IIRC, VSCode packages a rg binary and uses it for search.

Probably explains why it's something that works well and works fast.

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

#555

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.

> from the days when spinning rust was the limiting factor

How did we get back to this though? We have gigabytes/sec with NVMe and stupid fast CPU's with at least 4 cores in even low end models. Yet a text editor takes so long to load we need to load it up on boot... Such a frustrating field to work in.

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

#556

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…

Weird, I'm using the latest stock fedora with gnome and the option is there to use the power button as "power off" command.

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

#557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mea…

I mean, it's not as if Libreoffice was created yesterday. Its predecessor OpenOffice is now 25 years old. Your question becomes: Why did you choose the expensive version where you never know what it will cost next year in the first place?

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

#558
post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am personally so glad Gnome does not have a system tray, on every other DE its a disgusting mess of differently scaled and styled icons.

That sounds like an issue that could be solved by forcing icons and sizes for the tray.

Just give users the ability to pin the icons they care about and hide the others in a pop-out panel like Windows does.

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

#559

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.

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…

> and it's not even the fastest editor, iirc it uses Python under the hood

The majority of the app is written in C++. Python is used for plugins.

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

#560
post #383

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…

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 solu…

GNOME is open to adding a system tray. There are even designs for it.

There is just no one working on the technology. TingPing, an Igalia employee and GNOME contributor, was working on a new D-Bus protocol for it, but the work stopped. There is a PR up on the freedesktop xdg-specs repository.

Post reply on HN