Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup • Hacker News Board

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

#691

Post by dingdingdang » Thu, May 01, 2025, 4:14 PM UTC

2Gkashmiri wrote: post #316

os2warpman wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am extremely experienced with Linux. Every single one of my servers is running RHEL/Rocky. I daily drove Linux back in the early 2000s. I have spent more time in sysctl.conf testing tunables than I have spent with my family, so it seems. 1. My capture card doesn't work reliably in any distro. I'm not a gamer so I can't use a cheap and ubiquitous USB V4L card, I capture retro computing screens at weird resolutions a…

Use kdeconnect. It is a universal app and works seamlessly

Or Signal app.. it works well for this sort of thing!

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

#692

Post by rafaelmn » Thu, May 01, 2025, 4:15 PM UTC

commoner wrote: post #362

rafaelmn wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just general polish. Like I was daily driving fedora last year and : - fractional scaling did not work in Gnome with Wayland for X11 Apps - I still cannot use my LG C4 as a monitor in full capacity because AMD on Linux does not support HDMI 2.1 - Screen sharing was very buggy - in Slack especially - it would constantly crash the slack app during calls, ditto for camera, but even in Google meet and Chrome I've ha…

> When I switched to KDE/Plasma 5 to get fractional scaling it was extremely unstable KDE Plasma 6 made major improvements and has excellent fractional scaling, the best I've seen in a Linux desktop environment and comparable to scaling in Windows 10-11. I encourage you to give it a try.

Sorry I misspoke - I was using Plasma 6, as that was the only way to get fractional scaling in X11 apps

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

#693

Post by zerkten » Thu, May 01, 2025, 4:15 PM UTC

dbalatero wrote: post #532

qwerty456127 wrote: post #490

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> I wish companies would go back to building fast apps It seems fascinating how much more efficient Windows apps were back in the nineties, capable do to almost everything the same today apps do in a similar manner on orders of magnitude less powerful hardware, often performing even faster. The last time I expressed this, probably also here, somebody suggested the performance drop is the cost of modern security - vul…

I think the performance drop probably has more to do with managers & product folks expecting growth and features at all costs at the expense of keeping performance at some baseline. I also wonder if it's just harder to continually monitor performance in a way that alerts a team early enough to deal with regressions? That said, security _can_ impact performance! I work on Stripe frontend surfaces, and one performance…

I think you need to add that many more developers, or even teams of developers, are building these apps. They have their own fiefdoms and it's less common for devs to have a complete understanding of the code base.

Over time decisions are made independently by devs/teams which cause the code bases to get out of alignment with a performant design. This is exacerbated by the growth pressure. It's then really hard for someone to come in and optimize top to bottom because there is everything from a bug to a design problem. Remediation has significant overhead, so only things around the edges are touched.

Fast forward a couple of years and you have a code base that devs struggle to evolve and add features to as well as keep performant. The causes are many and we come to the same one whether we complain about performance or maintainability. You probably don't feel this way, but Stripe and other premier engineering companies are way ahead of others in terms of their practices when you compare with the average situation developers are facing.

Independent mobile development is often where I see most attention to performance these days. The situation for these devs is a little bit closer to what existed in the nineties. They have a bigger span of control and performance is something they feel directly so are incentivized to ensure it's great.

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

#694

Post by Vilian » Thu, May 01, 2025, 4:15 PM UTC

ubermonkey wrote: post #535

wkat4242 wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the Outlook search function is... exotic. It's so annoying when I KNOW I sent an email to someone a year ago and I put TO: Their name and it still doesn't come up. Also: Smart folders still don't exist (e.g. a folder that automatically lists every email with a flag on it or some other condition). At least not in the "New Outlook" which we have to use at work. Apple had this back in 2007. Same with OneNote by the…

We are a small software company. We use Office 365 and their hosted Exchange for email. I manage my mail in the native Mac Mail tool; my boss uses Outlook. For commercial exchanges (ie, dialog about sales with customers), we're almost always both on copy. SEVERAL TIMES A MONTH he asks me to find a mail for him, because Outlook search is letting him down, often on bone simple searches (e.g., for something like a speci…

At that point i would switch to thunderbird or something

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

#695

Post by wltr » Thu, May 01, 2025, 4:17 PM UTC

bardak wrote: post #383

bigfatkitten wrote: post #255

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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…

I guess, those of us who actually like the idea should be more vocal. As otherwise the devs would read the comments and decide nobody likes what they do. Personally, I’m super happy about current Gnome. Coming after 10+ years of macOS. I don’t want to see that ugly mess of visual distractions on my screen all the time. Basic vitals like battery is okay for me. Distractions from apps, I don’t need them. They serve zero purpose to me, and being a computer user of 20+ years, I never interacted with those widgets. Even on Windows. So, kudos to Gnome team, I really like Gnome since 42 or when they started this radical simplicity thing. I enjoy the system each and every day I interact with it, and it does not wear off. It’s not like it looks cool, but after a couple of days I understand it isn’t.

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

#696

Post by wltr » Thu, May 01, 2025, 4:22 PM UTC

int_19h wrote: post #454

wltr wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What you mean by Win 11/macOS? I see them as completely different from each other. Or are there some overlaps?

Personally, I like modern Gnome: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43859753

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

#697

Post by MisterTea » Thu, May 01, 2025, 4:25 PM UTC

afavour wrote: post #617

MisterTea wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I know this is such a stereotypical "get off my lawn" statement but we've lost the art of software engineering. It's all about stuffing as many features in as quickly as we can and pushing it out to as many people as possible. Performance is always secondary. Not that I'm that nostalgic for the old days, we would have been doing the exact same thing if we were able to get away with it. But performance restrictions me…

> I know this is such a stereotypical "get off my lawn" statement but we've lost the art of software engineering.

Indeed. I am sure many of us here are burnt out on bloat. I am also sure many of us want to move to smaller stuff but cant simply because of industry momentum. BUT that doesn't mean the dream is dead, only that we must work towards those goals on our own time. I found Plan 9 and haven't looked back. I can rebuild the entire OS in seconds on a fast machine. Even my little Celeron J1900 can rebuild the OS for several supported architectures in minutes. I can share a USB device seamlessly across my network, PXE booted from a single disk without installing anything. Cat(1) is just 36 lines of C.

There's still hope. Just ignore the industry hype noise and put in the effort ourselves.

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

#698

Post by doctorwho42 » Thu, May 01, 2025, 4:27 PM UTC

Tempest1981 wrote: post #611

ubermonkey wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a conversation with a pal yesterday, I realized I had LONG since stopped doing any actual writing in Word. It's just too huge and slow and clunky. I write in a plaintext environment (options vary, but probably Obsidian or emacs). If or when I fire up Word, it's to structure the document and format it for distribution. Word is no longer useful to me for composition. This seems like a bad thing.

Does it still have the smooth-animated cursor as you type? That thing messes with my brain, so that I lose my train of thought.

Every time I reinstall office, I am actively googling how to disable that within 5 minutes of using word. I don't get why all these companies keep trying to add flashy crap to what is essentially a hammer.

It reminds me of that college humor sketch about the CEO of Oreo shouting at his team for trying to innovate on the Oreo... It's a solved problem, we made the perfect cookie 100 years ago. Just stop

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

#699

Post by amiga-workbench » Thu, May 01, 2025, 4:29 PM UTC

rendaw wrote: post #647

amiga-workbench wrote: post #392

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.

So rather than disable the system tray, or use other applications that don't have inconsistent scaled and styled icons, you'd prefer that nobody who uses Gnome is able to have a system tray?

I prefer not having to worry about it at all, and I don't. Its tidy by default and stays tidy no matter what I install. Many other "deficiencies" in Gnome, like the lack of desktop filing, or the austere file manager contribute to this tidiness.

The first versions of Gnome 3 did indeed have a system tray for backwards compatibility, and it was hidden out of the way until you needed it. Eventually it was scrapped once enough software was updated to not rely on it.

If somebody insists on having a messy UI, they can use literally any other DE available for Linux.

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

#700

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 » Thu, May 01, 2025, 4:31 PM UTC

MisterTea wrote: post #555

barrkel wrote: post #328

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.

> 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.

We stopped developing for users/customers and instead added layers to make developer lives easier.

Why the hell are all my desktop apps written in JS now?!