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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

#791

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…

The best UI is one that stays consistent and doesn't change.

XFCE in other words.

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

#792

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ubuntu Well, there’s your problem ;-) This is great, though, really. I broke our computer so many times growing up, I couldn’t possibly count. I don’t think I ever lost anything of import, other than some savegames of mine. I keep telling people who ask, “how do I learn Linux?” that they need to use it, tinker with it, break it, and fix it, ideally without anything other than man pages and distro docs. It is a shoc…

There is more to learn / do than anyone has time. My kid is supposed to spend an hour on his violin, half an hour an fitness, then some time on chess, then eat - including clean up and/or cook. somehow he needs to fit some free play in too. He doesn't have time for more. It isn't that he could do that, but what else to give up?

I think for a lot of us that learned linux this way, it was firmly in the "fun time" category. We would have rather been tinkering than most other things.

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

#793

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…

>I wish companies would go back to building fast apps

My prediction is that we are about to enter a great winter of poor performance across the industry as AI slop is put in to production en mass. Along with bugginess that we have not seen since the early dotcom days.

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

#794
post #615

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…

This has always been the problem with Microsoft. Here is a rant from 2020 about Visual Studio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC-0tCy4P1U and live comparison of performance degradation while loading the same project.

I remember about 15 years ago running Windows + VS in VMWare because I could skip installing Office inside the VM and the system would run noticeably faster.

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

#795
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use LibreOffice for 99% of documents completely fine, and generate my own documents via Pandoc. The setup has served me really well so far.

I can’t stand libreoffice - between tons of bugs (waiting for printers on startup is a default..), extremely janky UI from 20 years ago, poor performance, exceptionally slow load times, and bad formatting issues and incompatibilities.. it’s just an awful experience overall.

I've been using OnlyOffice lately. I'm not a hardcore office user so maybe someone else can comment on how it is compared to Libre/MS Office.

https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DesktopEditors

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

#796

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Mail.app on macOS as my daily these days, and it’s somehow even worse than this. Especially the search function, which works in even more bizarre ways. It’s truly amazing that we have seemingly regressed in basic desktop functionality since the early 2000’s.

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.

> Spotlight search on macOS is in general kinda…spotty. Now that we have super fast SSDs it should be instantaneous very reliable.

Which is maddening because back when it was released on Tiger it was great, and on spinning disks.

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

#797

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.

"eight megabytes and constantly swapping"

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

#799
post #716

My $0.02 with 708 comments ahead of me. I currently use Windows, 10 to be exact, to play games, and in a VM to run an income tax fat app (since the online version is so much more expensive). My game machine cannot upgrade to 11. A mobo upgrade won't be that expensive for the game machine, but instead I'll covert it to a Linux box and run the few games that work on Linux. I believe my Windows days are over as of, say,…

If you make your Windows 11 USB with Rufus you can disable the TPM 2.0 and other hardware requirement checks. You totally should try a Linux install first though!
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