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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

#951
post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've wasted like 8 hours in the last two days trying to upgrade windows 10 to 11 so my motherboards wifi drivers can be installed. It just worked in Linux. I don't get where this comes from, because every time I hit a problem in Linux, there's a solution. In windows, you get a vague hex error code that leads you to a support page where the error could be caused by one of a dozen reasons. And on top of that, MS is con…

So couple of issues there. Never upgrade windows. Fresh install only. Never had a good day upgrading it. Secondly, there isn't always a solution in Linux. I've got one now where something is utterly broken and it's 5 layers of maintainers down and no one gives a shit.

Windows 11 has begun making it a lot harder to install with local logins. They just disabled the typical method for enabling local only.

I want to upgrade in order to retain that local account.

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

#952

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That exchange is what happens when CADT and therapy language collide head first.

Not familiar with CADT, and Google wasn't any help for anything that seemed relevant.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250429170348/https://www.jwz.o...

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

#953

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A recently discovered that Apple has something called "Pages" and "Numbers" - simple apps that serve as alternatives to Word and Excel. They're so straightforward and intuitive that they require no learning curve. They just work. And yet, weirdly, macOS comes up with absolutely no image editor of any kind. There's no equivalent of MS Paint. It's infuriating.

They just purchased Pixelmator ;)

I assume we should wait and see whether they'll roll up their software into next macOS right?

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

#954

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…

My god the amount of projection in your comment. It seems you've mistaken me for everyone who ever commented in favor of migrating off of Excel.

I"m aware that there are things I'm unaware of. Perhaps I don't know how to use Excel, I'm "no true Excel user" if you will, and therefore my opinion is invalid. Like you I'm baffled not by the technical side of things but by our reaction to it. People say "it powers 10% of the world's economy" but not "and it's a problem".

It's a problem. My point is not that LO is better, it's that we should work to remove our dependency on closed-source software for universal office work. Governments should be doing that. But no, let's just say "the other one sucks" and continue to act like depending on a single for-profit company for all our economies is a good thing.

Not sure how my other comment relates to this. Is it arrogant to have preferences?

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

#955
post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LibreOffice, the most popular office suite available for Linux, is comparably slow and bloated.

I haven't used the office tools on Linux for years, but since they are based on the same 30 year old idea of an office suite, would you expect them to be much better? I don't think it is productive to choose among equally antiquated and poor quality alternatives. It isn't going to advance the status quo. In terms of word processing (which is perhaps an archaic term by now) I would ask people to look at what Visual St…

What you might be thinking of is Notion and its cohort: capacities, miro, (maybe) craft, etc

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

#956
post #934

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If you're happy to dip your toes into another DAW, Reaper has excellent first-class Linux support, works with all your plugins, and has a 60 day trial* for you to get used to it. * The free trial is enforced as heavily as WinRAR's, and it's pretty cheap (~$60) to buy a licence if the nag screen makes you feel bad enough

The problem is not only the DAW support, but the support of low-latency audio interfaces in Linux. Audio interface makers rarely create a Linux driver, and a low-latency setup on Linux is its own hell, with real-time kernel patches. On MacOS and Windows, it works out of the box.

rt patches are upstream since about a year ago. You might need to swap to rt Kconfig, sure, but not patches.

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

#957

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My personal theory is there is a threshold of performance. Below the threshold the experience is bad enough it affects revenue so getting the program up to speed becomes a priority. Above the threshold only features are prioritized to drive more revenue. That's why despite computers getting orders of magnitude faster computer programs seem to run about the same speed.

I think the threshold is more about how much more rent can we seek to collect from users, and making things more performant or ergonomic doesn’t do anything to allow sales to add another 10% to the per-user subscription pricing (I assume this is a product with per-user subscriptions, even though it’s almost certainly unnecessary).

But adding yet another gateway to ChatGPT’s API…that’s a $15/mo/user add-on right there, and not just a monkey, but one of the slower intern monkeys, could write the code for such an incredibly innovative and, there’s no other word for it, powerful new feature that everyone should be thrilled to pay for at a 200-300% (or more!) markup. So guess who gets that VP of New Bullshit Development position, and guess what kind of choices get reinforced?

(EDIT: grammar)

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

#958
post #325
post #266

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> between tons of bugs (waiting for printers on startup is a default..), Never had issues with printers to be fair, but it sounds like something that could be done in a background thread. Bare in mind that we are contrasting this with Office, which is itself incredibly slow to start. > extremely janky UI from 20 years ago I love this about Libreoffice, everything can be located super reliably. > poor performance For…

> For a Java application I think it's crazily fast? LibreOffice isn't written in Java. It can optionally use Java for extensions and for some database reporting features: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Faq/General/015

I believe you're correct, I saw some error message on start-up and always assumed it was a Java application.

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

#959

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…

My workplace has two Windows 10 machines, one in daily use, and the other is mostly idle. Both are extremely slow. The one in daily use takes at least 15 minutes to become usable after boot. The other is not much better. They are domain-controlled so not much we can do to improve. In contrast, we still have a 20+ years computer, which has an IDE hard drive, running Windows 2000 with MS Office to operate an instrument, and it is much more responsive.

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

#960

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because.. it’s slow. My team used to do VDI engineering. We could reduce boot times by 30% with optimized and tweaked out configurations, but it was still slower than my out of the box MacBook Air.

can you come up with any other reasons why an out of the box mac might be faster than something involving vdi engineering?

Less sequential and dependent operations.

Windows has alot of stuff that runs in sequence that takes awhile to churn or times out. It’s much better than it was, but Apple is way ahead.

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