Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

pcworld.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

941–950 of 1001 posts

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

#941

Post by ExoticPearTree »

p_ing wrote: post #754
naikrovek wrote: post #690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

software authors that don't care about performance annoy me (and I am an old man.) The amount of things a computer can do in a single thread are amazing, and computers now have a dozen or more threads to do work. If developers cared about performance, things would easily be 20x as performant as they are today. I'm not talking about "write in assembly, duh" I'm talking about just doing things intelligently instead of…

> The amount of things a computer can do in a single thread are amazing, and computers now have a dozen or more threads to do work. If developers cared about performance, things would easily be 20x as performant as they are today. Why? A good portion of programs are still single-threaded, and often that's the correct choice. Even in games a single-threaded main thread or logic thread may be the only choice. Where mul…

I think what the author wanted to say is that because computers are very fast today developers have no incentive of writing optimized code.

Nowadays you just "scale horizontally" by the magic of whatever orchestration platform you happen to use, which is the modern approach of throwing hardware at the problem in the vertical scaling days.

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

#942

Post by baobun »

cogman10 wrote: post #736
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #700

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?!

> Why the hell are all my desktop apps written in JS now?! Have you seen the state of pretty much every non-js UX framework? That's why. JS/css/html won the UX domain in a way that no other language comes close to. If you look at the most recent most modern UX frameworks, they are often just half implemented poor mimics of the js/css/html stack with approximately 0 devs writing new 3rd party extensions. Intellij uses…

It's quite something that there hasn't been any real successor living up to Delphi or even goddamn Visual Basic for modern desktops.

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

#943

Post by godelski »

joshjob42 wrote: post #935
godelski wrote: post #921

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always say that there's only one reason to use vim over emacs, and that's that vi is on almost every machine you touch. It's an optional POSIX command[0], but it is as common as `more` or `type`. Though that is a bit of a lie. The other reason is that you're more likely to find vim bindings in random programs than emacs :P [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_POSIX_commands

As someone who came from vim, I find evil to be great tbh.

Why go to emacs then? What do you get that vim couldn't provide?

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

#944

Post by bborud »

saratogacx wrote: post #762
bborud wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of what Microsoft does is indeed bafflingly bad. With a few exceptions. The baseline for software from Microsoft appears to be slow, bad UX and very buggy. And it isn't like this is some image thing; Microsoft products are always worse than I could remember when I'm confronted with them after some time away from them. Developers at Microsoft are obviously not rewarded for quality. You have to assume that this is…

> You would think that a company that has deep pockets would be in a great position to do more ground-up re-implementations. And to do so with quality, performance and correctness as the main focus. Why is this always the go-to? The Windows 11 start menu and task bar are exactly that, from scratch re-implementations of what existed before and they are garbage. There is a lot of institutional knowledge in that old cod…

Well, then they are one in four. The other three were quality, performance and correctness. Simply re-implementing something, or writing something that is poor software isn't sufficient.

As for knowledge: yes, it is more valuable than the software. That does not imply the software is the only place where software is stored. In its most useful form it is stored in people. Which is why you should revisit, and rewrite, code that is important often enough to ensure the knowledge is passed on.

However, don't forget to make room for new knowledge and new ideas. That has hardly happened to Office suites for 30 years. They just tend to become "more".

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

#945

Post by tomrod »

godelski wrote: post #922
tomrod wrote: post #890

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neat. I'm interested in your TUI setup. What do you use?

Nothing too fancy. I'm not going to dox myself, I like to (pretend to) keep this account anonymous so I'm not going to drop my dotfiles (though I am pretty proud of them). But I don't do anything too fancy. vim, neomutt, spotify-player, yazi, and tdf for pdfs (not still mixed about this one). I'll also maybe play around with a few for random tools but I usually don't use more than these. Day to day I'm listening to m…

Thanks! Your use case sounds similar to mine (and some the same workload).

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

#946

Post by lizknope »

Lammy wrote: post #842
lizknope wrote: post #837

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember a laptop in the early 1990's that had Microsoft Office in ROM to load faster. I can't find a reference to it right now.

HP Omnibook 300? https://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=123 `Omnibook300Intro-5091-6270-6pages-May93.pdf` https://www.hpmuseum.net/exhibit.php?hwdoc=123 sez: > Built-in ROM applications don't use up disk space - Microsoft Windows - Microsoft Word for Windows - Microsoft Excel - Appointment Book - Phone Book - HP Calculator - Microsoft File Manager - LapLink Remote Access™

That looks like it. I didn't have one but I remember the magazine ads for it.

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

#947

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

dingdingdang wrote: post #329
frainfreeze wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XFCE is wonderful. I wish it got more dev time

XFCE is the Win 2000 UI of the Linux ecosystem, perfectly functional and fine; tweaks are possible if needed.

So is https://www.trinitydesktop.org/

While it may seem overblown, it's absolutely RIDICULOUS how fast it flies on contemporary systems, and even older ones.

One can also omit most of their other apps, with the exception of KWIN, drawing the desktop and its window decorations, and konqueror, the filemanager, and the things managing the menu(bar(s)), applauncher.

Using modern apps for the rest, like anywhere else.

And have them styled, themed however you like. With a few mouseclicks.

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

#948

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

const_cast wrote: post #873
troad wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KDE is great. It gets slept on because of its bad rap circa 2004, but it has low-key become the best DE by far. Sane defaults, nothing tries to fight you, everything is configurable. If you don't have the time or inclination to tinker with things like tiling WMs - and more power to you if you do, but I don't - KDE is the best there is.

I've been using KDE for a good decade or so, and what a lot of people don't know is that not only is the desktop great, the applications are, too. Everyone knows Dolphin is by far the best file manager, but not a lot of people know that Kate is fantastic. Konsole is really good too. The new System Monitor basically replaces a ton of programs. Spectacle is a great and snappy screenshot utility. Filelight is so useful.…

> The new System Monitor basically replaces a ton of programs.

Like what? Running htop or btop++ in Konsole(or whichever terminal emulator you prefer), as I do?¹ :)

Just opened that thing right now, and it gives nothing to me.

Shrug?

¹ On one of 9 virtual desktops, arranged 3x3, usually upper left.

https://postimg.cc/K35Qv6Pg https://postimg.cc/0zGttJMC https://postimg.cc/pyTLRfPp < Itsatrap!

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

#949

Post by _Algernon_ »

eviks wrote: post #918
nine_k wrote: post #917

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Everything" is a filename search engine for Windows. Well, on Linux I have `locate` and `fd` which work really well, doing that very thing, and `ripgrep` does even more. I heard something built-in is also shipped with macOS, it's called something like "Spotlight". OTOH MS Excel for Windows is one and only, the macOS version barely holds a candle to it, and analogs are even further away.

"that very thing" was instant and anywhere (not your irrelevant generic description), which your suggested tools can't do. You're just content with a poor cli substitute.

There are also GUIs for this, though I haven't compared the two directly: eg. https://www.recoll.org/

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

#950

Post by dartharva »

jodrellblank wrote: post #925
BarryMilo wrote: post #289

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.

> " because 1% of Excel users need pivot tables or something " It's crazy to me how often Open Source pushers have the vibe "I don't use computers, I don't know what anyone does with computers, but I'm still dismissive and superior". I almost made this comment earlier today in reply to [1] which was another "You have problems with Linux? I daily-drive Linux for years and I've never had any problems" comment and the i…

Hear, hear!
Post reply on HN