[HN Gopher] Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load a...
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Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows
startup
Author : airstrike
Score : 721 points
Date : 2025-05-01 00:06 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.pcworld.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.pcworld.com)
| cebert wrote:
| For all the ESG virtue signaling that Microsoft does, you'd think
| they'd be concerned about the climate impact of this and why
| their applications are so inefficient.
| dylan604 wrote:
| There's an old quote about "why would I pay to have the code
| written more efficiently when processors are constantly getting
| faster and harddrives are constantly getting bigger?" that
| always comes to mind about MS software. I don't know the
| validity of that quote to be any more accurate than the 640k
| memory one, but it always just had the feel of authenticity by
| everything you see as circumstantial evidence
| Retric wrote:
| The underlying issue is MS software is running on customer
| machines so it's not part of their bottom line. They have
| little incentive to care as long as it's not so slow their
| monopoly breaks.
| nomel wrote:
| My tinfoil hat told me that they're in cahoots with the big
| PC manufacturers, and use it as a part of planned
| obsolescence.
| gosub100 wrote:
| Additionally, I suspect there's 4 decades of legacy
| backward compatibility hacks that doing anything
| intelligent to help UX is impossible. It might break some
| peanut butter factory in Indiana that is paying for
| support.
| RedShift1 wrote:
| They have been breaking things left and right for quite
| some time now, I don't think they care about this
| anymore.
| dbg31415 wrote:
| It feels like they've always taken the approach: "Why rewrite
| anything when we can just add more virtualization?" In the
| short term, that might help ensure compatibility with older
| versions with minimal testing. But after 40-something years,
| it's clear that it's become a mountain of technical debt--one
| that Microsoft has no real plans to tackle any time soon.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| The point of the virtue signaling is that it's cheaper than
| actual virtue while retaining much of the same benefit.
| Practicing virtue signaling and not virtue is pretty natural.
| Dwedit wrote:
| The real impact is in Microsoft making people throw away
| perfectly good computers by ending Windows 10 support.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| They don't care about the climate impact. They care about the
| green washing PR. Probably decided that the cost of fixing this
| outweighs the potential PR benefit.
| kotaKat wrote:
| It's funny that they give you a whole Greenpeace lecture in the
| Settings app now about carbon footprint and how Microsoft is
| committed to lowering it and that you're a terrible person for
| having your brightness at 100%, but then spins around on this
| and shoves Office in boot...
| gibibit wrote:
| I still can't believe how slow MS Word is to load a .docx
| document of about 150 pages of text, you can watch the page count
| in the status bar grow over a period of 10 seconds or more as it
| loads/paginates it.
|
| On the plus side, it's nostalgic and reminds me of the old MS
| Word 6 on Windows 95 (or Windows 3.1?) so that's nice.l
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| It's essentially a giant XML file, so it's not going to win
| awards for speed or efficiency.
| int_19h wrote:
| Modern hardware can parse XML with speeds measured in
| hundreds of megabytes per second.
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| I often wish Word from around 2000 back. Back then the software
| was straightforward and did what it was supposed to do without
| much fuzz. And the speed on modern hardware would be crazy.
|
| The latest Word version does all kinds of weird stuff around
| formatting and numbering. I often get documents with messed up
| heading numbers or lists and I have no idea how to fix them.
| Nothing works.
| nine_k wrote:
| I'd say that Office 97 was the pinnacle. I think you can
| still reasonably use it if you happen to have a copy.
|
| This is of course problematic if you receive documents from
| other users :(
| dcan wrote:
| Try reading a 40+ page document with track changes enabled (and
| 100+ changes) - it pins a full CPU core for 5 seconds when you
| go to the next page!
| ghurtado wrote:
| I'm more surprised that this is news than anything else.
|
| If you had asked me a minute ago, I could have sworn it's already
| a well known fact that they do this. They've been doing it since
| Windows 95 and explorer. At least.
| coliveira wrote:
| Maybe they're only now making this public so people will
| believe that Office will start faster!
| conductr wrote:
| What exactly does this mean given I definitely sit there
| staring at a loading / app launch screen when opening Excel if
| the app isn't already opened. If it's opened already, opening
| another file is much much faster.
| SietrixDev wrote:
| For me it's exactly other way around. First window is fast,
| another file is slow.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It changed with O365 a few years ago. Basically office is a big
| virtual app these days.
| rappatic wrote:
| Why on startup? Windows startup is already so painfully slow,
| especially compared to Apple silicon machines, and adding Office
| to it would only compound this problem. I think this problem can
| be avoided, while also still helping pre-load Office, if Windows
| just detects when resource utilization is low and loads Office in
| the background then.
| ghurtado wrote:
| > Why on startup?
|
| Because Windows is usually a lot less optional than Office, for
| the average user.
| zamadatix wrote:
| > When Startup Boost is active, the scheduled task will not run
| immediately at login to avoid slowing down your PC -- it will
| wait 10 minutes to ensure the system is in a steady idle state.
| Additionally, Startup Boost will be disabled when Energy Saver
| mode is active. Startup Boost only runs if you have launched
| Word recently, and if you have not launched Word recently it
| will automatically disable itself.
|
| If you meet the hardware requirements threshold and recently
| have used Office then preloading it 10 minutes after login is
| extremely unlikely to impact your startup.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| That makes me wonder how many corporate office drones start
| an Office app within 10 minutes of logging in, because this
| feature would be useless for them.
| mr_toad wrote:
| Is this just a fancy name for (re)starting the application in
| the background?
| EGreg wrote:
| Windows Startup is slow, so Microsoft makes Windows start up
| silently in the background even when computer should be powered
| off.
|
| Oh btw every joke has a grain of truth (sigh)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28712108
| NoPicklez wrote:
| I disagree, my Windows machine loads into the OS quicker from
| login than my Mac.
| spicybright wrote:
| I'm actually not sure why so many people are saying it's
| slow.
|
| For me login screen pops up maybe a few seconds from the
| bios, then everything is fully loaded after I enter my
| password.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| If you measured with a stop watch I'm sure it would take
| more than 2 seconds but to be accurate it is perceptibly
| brief whereas others startup is perceptibly to them slow.
| Why?
|
| When fast startup is enabled shutting down does a reboot
| and then a hibernate so that it can wake up from hibernate
| when you start up but with the same effect as a fresh
| start. This is generally much faster than a full startup.
| This should and in many cases must be disabled to dual boot
| another OS.
|
| Different hardware takes longer to initialize which may
| delay startup. This is especially true of failing hardware
| which may whilst in bad shape continue to work after a
| fashion but take far longer to initialize.
|
| Some hardware is MUCH slower than others.
| spicybright wrote:
| Oh, I didn't even know fastboot was a thing. That's
| pretty clever.
|
| Does it still need to be disabled if you're dualbooting
| and not interacting with the windows partition?
|
| And yeah, I have a desktop computer. I bet hardware
| failure rates are much higher in laptops. All good
| points.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| The answer is a definite maybe because some hardware will
| keep state when hibernated and will be unusable if this
| isn't disabled. For instance the WiFi won't work in the
| other OS. Also sooner or later you are going to need a
| file you received on windows or indeed on any fs mounted
| on windows.
|
| Best just disable the feature.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| 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.
| jpalawaga wrote:
| can you come up with any other reasons why an out of the
| box mac might be faster than something involving vdi
| engineering?
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Probably a corporate machine vs personal desktop divide. My
| corporate windows laptop has so much
| security/keylogger/spyware crap that time to unlock is
| ridiculous.
| milch wrote:
| I just timed it, my personal Mac takes 10s to the login
| screen and then 4 seconds to the desktop after putting in
| my password. My work Mac takes 3+ min. All of the endpoint
| monitoring stuff they put on there really takes its toll.
|
| My windows gaming PC starts up in about 30s from a cold
| boot (though it's not encrypted...), so I would at least
| put the personal Mac and the Windows machine in the same
| ballpark. I couldn't have told you which one is faster
| without timing it. The work machine laptop is clearly
| noticeably slower.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I don't like Windows. And it is baffling to me that startup
| speed is a figure-of-merit nowadays given how absurdly fast
| drives have gotten.
|
| With those caveats aside, I must unfortunately acknowledge
| that Windows startup is perfectly fine (Linux is faster, but
| again this competition is pointless. Unless you are some
| compute infrastructure supplier and need to boot a million
| VMs a day or whatever).
|
| Sometimes when people post with baffling Windows performance
| problems, it is because their experience comes from corporate
| laptops with some mandatory spyware from IT.
| mrandish wrote:
| > Windows startup is perfectly fine
|
| No... it's not fine. I don't reboot all the time for work
| or run a zillion VMs, I'm just a regular user. But
| sometimes when I'm rebooting - I need to get to necessary
| information quickly. Waiting 40+ seconds is an eternity
| when standing at an airport immigration counter pulling up
| a pre-filed form that they said I did not need to bring but
| which they're now demanding (because _their_ machines are
| rebooting).
|
| I'm glad you feel it's fine for you. Not all of us agree.
| I'm especially annoyed because much of the new bloat
| slowing my life down during startup is stupid and
| unnecessary shit I don't even use much (or ever) - like
| initializing CoPilot, Edge, and now, Office.
|
| Note: I even upgraded my SSD to an expensive Samsung 990
| Pro, reportedly one of the fastest available. It's still
| >40 secs - and I've already gone through and thoroughly
| pruned all the unnecessary services, tasks and autoruns
| that I can. It's a top of the line >$3000 laptop that's
| less than a year old.
| gh02t wrote:
| Weirdly for me I don't have much trouble with startup,
| but shutting down windows seems to take an impossibly
| long time, especially on my work laptop. Like several
| minutes. Probably some misbehaving program and maybe not
| windows' fault, but I have no idea what it's doing just
| sitting there at the final screen after its killed all
| remaining tasks for eternity.
| sentientslug wrote:
| Something is wrong with your computer if it takes 40
| seconds, I have a similar samsung SSD and it takes like
| 20 seconds maximum from a cold boot to desktop on Win11
| probably_wrong wrote:
| > Something is wrong with your computer if it takes 40
| seconds
|
| Yes, he just said it, it has Windows on it.
|
| But more to the point: Windows slow boot has been a
| constant ever since the times when I would boot up
| Windows ME and go make myself a tea. If anything, Windows
| has always stayed one step of the technology that would
| bring its boot times down, to the point where I'd guess
| (as this article suggests) that it's company policy to
| dump slow components there.
| pohuing wrote:
| Yeah my ~1000EUR Lenovo Yoga 7 Pro takes 18 seconds from
| cold boot(power button press) to signed in via windows
| hello. And that's with Bitlocker and myself having
| installed a whole bunch of background utilities.
| mikaelsouza wrote:
| I think the way macOS and Windows loads stuff after login is
| a bit different though.
|
| Since most macOS installations use FileVault by default, the
| login screen looks like it loads only stuff related to the
| login screen and not anything from the OS. Windows on the
| other hand, seems to load more stuff in the spinning thingy
| screen that appears before the login screen.
|
| For instance, if you disable Filevault on macOS, the OS seems
| to load before the login screen, and then when you input your
| login and password, it loads to the desktop instantly. That
| would be a better comparison to a Windows machine, I think.
|
| That said, I am not sure if this is how things really works,
| but that's how it looks like to work for me. Sorry if I
| spread any misinformation here :)
| p_ing wrote:
| That would be an implementation deficiency. If Windows can
| be FDE and load faster than macOS, then the way macOS has
| implemented the FDE solution is suboptimal, if startup time
| is your primary measurement.
|
| I personally don't have issues with startup times on my M2
| Air or 5800X3D/Win11, both encrypted.
| jcotton42 wrote:
| The way File Vault works nowadays, as I understand it, is
| that your user data (and maybe even much of the OS) isn't
| decrypted until you've put in your password on the login
| screen. This means that even if you devised a way to
| hijack the login screen, or sniff the keys coming out of
| the secure enclave, you'd still be stuck without the
| user's login password.
|
| Windows, by contrast, unlocks the entire OS drive before
| you get to the login screen. So, a hypothetical login
| screen hijack would let you get to everything, or cold
| boot attacks/sniffing keys coming from the TPM to the
| CPU.
|
| I'd argue the macOS version is better from a security
| aspect, but it has a necessary downside of being unable
| to load as much before the user can put in their
| password.
| herbst wrote:
| From login I have basically zero load time on Linux and still
| a faster boot.
|
| I see some people think they have fast booting windows PCs
| but I am sure also they know that's not the case for the
| average PC
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| I don't know what is different on your system, but my Windows
| startup experience is that it's blazing fast. Granted, that's
| on a gaming rig with a decent CPU and it's Windows 10, not 11,
| but I don't remember having to do any custom de-shittification
| and it boots _way_ faster than Linux, short enough to not
| really perceive the boot process as an interruption.
| chneu wrote:
| That's funny cuz my Linux boot up is so fast that multiple
| coworkers and even my girlfriend have commented on how much
| faster it is than their windows installs.
|
| Linux is blazing fast when configured properly. But in
| reality we're talking about 2-3 seconds of difference here.
| How long a machine takes to POST is usually the biggest part
| of bootup nowadays.
| ykonstant wrote:
| I have observed that; why is time to POST so high? Does
| anyone know?
| indemnity wrote:
| Love the AM5 memory training two minute POSTs that make you
| think you didn't assemble it correctly!
| cm2187 wrote:
| Out of the box ubuntu server boots super slowly, and with
| terrible defaults, like if a NIC is connected but not
| configured it will hang on boot.
| herbst wrote:
| Recently needed windows for a single piece of software (I hate
| myself for it) and used a PC I had around (dell Wyse 5070)
| manjaro Linux Bootet in about 9 seconds.
|
| Windows 10 on the other hand takes nearly a minute to get to
| login and it hasn't stopped booting then, another 20 seconds or
| so after login it's not responsive.
|
| And only if it doesn't decide to update or do system repairs
| for 5 minutes, or more if it goes into one if it's restart
| update loops.
|
| It's not a little more, it literally killed at least an hour of
| productivity in just a few weeks
|
| (That's not counting the productivity killers once the system
| is running)
| marcodiego wrote:
| That's is not a new idea. I think Office 97 had an accelerated
| startup that made windows take a little longer the boot but
| faster the start office.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| From memory, Office 97 had that dedicated Office shortcut bar
| on the desktop that it inherited from Office 95, but that was
| more of a proto-Quick-Launch-bar than a startup accelerator.
| Though because the bar necessarily needed to load some Office
| DLLs from disk I can see how that would have given
| Word/Excel/etc a modest startup boost.
| michaelt wrote:
| Back in 1997, most developers would show a 'splash screen' as
| their application loaded, because of course it takes time for
| applications to load.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| Now we have web apps that show spinners and throbbers,
| sometimes forever.
| SauciestGNU wrote:
| Consult a physician if your web app displays a throbber for
| longer than four hours.
| snkzxbs wrote:
| Just to be clear current Office applications have a splash
| screen.
| o11c wrote:
| To be even more clear, LibreOffice also has a splash
| screen.
|
| I haven't run it this boot, and I just timed myself taking
| 7.5 seconds to start Writer, close the welcome popup, and
| quit. By feel, about half of that was waiting for the
| loading bar and the other half was figuring out how to
| dismiss the welcome popup.
|
| On a hot start, with several attempts it takes between 2.1
| and 2.5 seconds to start and quit it. For some reason the
| welcome popup has disappeared.
|
| These experiments were performed using LibreOffice 7.4.7.2
| 40(Build:2) - wow, are they also copying version numbering
| from Microsoft? - on the cheapest 120GB SSD I could find in
| early 2019.
| windward wrote:
| LibreOffice also sucks in this regard.
|
| 'Hey, I'm loading! I'm going to steal focus from whatever
| else you're doing and make your taskbar flash! No, that
| doesn't mean you can give me any input yet'
|
| I'd really like to own a device that can multitask, one
| day.
| mcv wrote:
| I have this issue with lots of applications: taking focus
| away from something I'm using, but not being ready to be
| usable. Apps shouldn't take focus until they're ready.
| coherentpony wrote:
| It shouldn't be "an idea" at all. Profile the application, find
| the hotspots, understand what the performance limiter is, and
| fix it.
|
| Granted, this is all Hard Work. I understand that. But it's the
| right thing to do.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| It was rumoured to have such a thing but, iirc, did not (or at
| least it didn't depend on one to start fast). Such rumours got
| started during the Slashdot era when people were comparing the
| performance of open source office suites like
| StarOffice/OpenOffice to MS Office and wondering why there was
| such a huge gap. The rumours went away when Wine started being
| able to run Office well enough to be usable, and people
| discovered it started just as fast on Linux as on Windows. The
| secret was a special in-house linker but that was a trade
| secret until many years later, I think.
|
| Back then there was much less understanding in the software
| industry of why 90's Microsoft was so successful. A lot of
| people couldn't work it out and - combined with their anti-
| trust moves against Netscape - just assumed the whole thing was
| built on cheating. In reality it was a combination of really
| buying into GUIs and their own Windows platform early (not an
| obviously successful move back then), combined with having some
| truly wizard-level systems hackers. It's hard to understand
| these days because clever hacking is hardly ever a competitive
| advantage now, outside of maybe game engines. It can even be a
| disadvantage, as it causes you to focus on micro-optimization
| whilst your competitor is shipping another useful feature.
|
| Windows 95 was a massive hit, but it didn't have any
| particularly unique killer features from the end user's
| perspective. Apple had similar features in theory. The gap was
| the quality of their kernel and toolchain. Windows made the
| transition from being a cooperatively multi-tasked single
| address space system running on a driver-less "OS" (barely more
| than a fancy library), to being a pre-emptively multi-tasked OS
| with a wealth of loadable hardware drivers, and they managed
| that architecture shift in a way that preserved the hard work
| of their ecosystem's developers. Apple failed the same
| transition completely and Microsoft's other competitors were
| big iron UNIX vendors who delivered the same stability and
| features only through very expensive proprietary hardware.
|
| This new story is emblematic of Microsoft's trajectory over the
| years. Their apps used to beat everyone on startup time by
| using tricks so clever everyone assumed they'd cheated, and now
| their hacking is so un-wizardly they actually do resort to
| cheating. These days the wizard level systems hackers are all
| at Apple. Oh how the wheel turns.
| p_ing wrote:
| The Office Startup Assistant was a thing and did improve
| startup times. I'm not sure where you're making up this
| rumour stuff from.
|
| https://www.betaarchive.com/wiki/index.php?title=Microsoft_K.
| ..
|
| > The OSA initializes the shared code that is used by the
| Office 97 programs. The benefit of using the OSA to
| initialize shared code is that the Office 97 programs start
| faster.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| That app didn't fully load the Office apps despite the
| name, and if you removed it Office 97 still started way
| faster than its competitors. As it did on Linux.
|
| The rumours were (that I remember) that Microsoft had a
| secret/invisible way to hook Office into Windows startup.
| Otherwise, how did it start so much faster than StarOffice,
| which appeared to have similar functionality.
| p_ing wrote:
| Was it not obvious from what I posted that it didn't load
| the "entire" application? These solutions generally don't
| do that.
| dankwizard wrote:
| It's a great idea and the reason Microsoft are the biggest in the
| game. Kudos to them, I tip my hat! Here here!
| sherdil2022 wrote:
| Nothing new and closing Office applications don't necessarily
| terminate some of the Office processes - notoriously Outlook.
| naikrovek wrote:
| Fucken genius.
|
| Fix the problem? No way, Jose; We'll move the problem somewhere
| else.
|
| I would like to know how we got to a place where any application
| taking more than 0.5 seconds to start is acceptable in _any way_.
|
| I have text editors which have visible input lag, even to my
| untrained eye. How in the HELL does that even happen?
|
| All of you hustlers out there making story cards and calculating
| velocity: stop doing this shit! Performance is fucking important.
|
| "CPU is cheap" -- fuck you it is. If your application takes more
| than 0.5 seconds to start on any computer than can run Windows
| 11, you are either doing something wrong, or you are relying on
| someone that is doing something wrong and you need to work around
| that thing _even if it is dotnet._
|
| Developer productivity is absolutely dwarfed by the aggregated
| productivity loss of your customer base. Application performance
| and customer productivity (think of these as "minimizing the
| amount of time the customer spends waiting on the computer") are
| paramount. _PARAMOUNT!_ -- that means they're one of the, if not
| the only, most important thing to consider when making decisions.
|
| This world is going to shit so fecking fast
| ipcress_file wrote:
| Given that Office ran on my 486 and Word and Excel did
| everything back then that I still need them to do today, a slow
| startup time on modern hardware is ridiculous.
|
| Office should be modular with a lean core and extensions for
| those who need them.
| spicybright wrote:
| I wish libreoffice was better. I've tried replacing office
| with it and every time it has the weirdest stuff going on.
|
| UI is clunky, importing/exporting office made docs is
| glitchy, and I've even run into actions that don't get pushed
| to the undo stack.
|
| I know this stuff always gets slowly ironed out, and the devs
| are working really hard, but it's just a shame it's never
| been a viable alternative for so long.
| ipcress_file wrote:
| I bought Softmaker Office last year. The Textmaker word
| processor is better than LibreOffice Writer. It's more MS
| Office compatible, so I don't get complaints about
| formatting issues from co-workers.
| skydhash wrote:
| I moved to Linux and use real editors. Problem solved! /jk
|
| Jokes aside, I did buy a 2019 dell latitude laptop, and it's an
| old CPU, but it's still amazed me how well it's working. The
| iGPU is aweful for anything 3d heavy (Gnome's compositor), but
| still good for anything else.
|
| I also have an MBA and it's quite fast, but all those "you
| should do this the Apple way" is frustrating.
|
| After a long look at my computing activities, I do not need
| much other than Emacs, Librewolf, and a video player. I still
| use the MBA for rare usage like Balsamiq and important video
| calls.
| CuriousRose wrote:
| I've not had the greatest relationship with Apple software
| lately, however seeing every "great idea" that comes out of the
| Microsoft development team is quite possibly the only marketing
| Apple needs going forward.
| spicybright wrote:
| You're not wrong, I don't know anyone that likes all these new
| features.
|
| I wonder if it even matters though. Corporations are always
| going to use it, and the cheapest laptops will always come with
| it.
| _--__--__ wrote:
| I genuinely don't know if it was a bug or intentional behavior
| like TFA, but on the last win10 machine I used Edge would leave
| several of its background browser engine processes running
| indefinitely after the application was closed. Seems like they're
| just happy to let their users make unwitting sacrifices for their
| convenience of their devs.
| RiverCrochet wrote:
| Chrome would do that too unless the setting "Continue running
| background apps when Google Chrome is closed" is turned off.
|
| https://superuser.com/questions/269385/why-does-google-chrom...
|
| Now I never understood why the chrome.exe's would hang out when
| I didn't install any "background apps" - anyway I suspect a
| similar setting in Edge is buried in there somewhere.
| hinkley wrote:
| I have a vague recollection of that being related to embedded
| browsers in apps, and I think it was related to performance not
| child processes for unknown client apps.
| whyoh wrote:
| That's not Edge the browser, but a separate app called Edge
| WebView2.
| whyoh wrote:
| Both behaviors are intentional and (for now)
| configurable.[1][2]
|
| [1] https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/167068-how-enable-
| disabl...
|
| [2] https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/160140-disable-
| continue-...
| moralestapia wrote:
| Hmm, wonder if this could trigger another antitrust lawsuit?
| spicybright wrote:
| How? Any other office suite or program could do the same thing.
| nomel wrote:
| Related, long ago I replaced the windows shell with hl.exe,
| so my computer booted straight into Half Life rather than
| explorer. With my one core system, it was a noticeable
| improvement.
| spicybright wrote:
| Lots of people keep a windows machine around for that one
| game that doesn't run on linux. Might make a come back!
| moralestapia wrote:
| You made me go back and read TFA, I don't think that's the
| case.
|
| Where did you saw that?
| moralestapia wrote:
| Update: nowhere, xi was just making stuff up.
|
| Many such cases.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| All I'm hearing is prefetch was put into new packaging and MS is
| calling it a new feature.
|
| Management: Tweak prefetch and call it a new feature.
|
| Dev1: Superfetch!
|
| Dev2: We already did that.
|
| Dev1: Superfetch for Office!
|
| Management: Yes.
|
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/all-right-gentlemen
|
| https://windowsground.com/what-is-superfetch-windows-10-shou...
| bitwize wrote:
| This is one of the things that made people hate Vista. By default
| it was set to preload things into RAM in the background, gobbling
| up memory and potentially slowing the system down, both during
| the preload procedure and if you happened to want to run a
| program that the preload procedure didn't account for.
|
| Windows 7 was so good because it was Vista without (much of) the
| bullshit.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| Windows 7 did the same thing. Windows 7 was perceived as better
| than Vista, in part because hardware and drivers had improved
| in the meantime.
| maximus-decimus wrote:
| At the end, my windows 7 machine would take an hour to boot
| if I remember right because Windows used 100% of my hard
| drive to do god knows what. Windows 7 at the end was
| literally unusable without an ssd.
| gerdesj wrote:
| MSO defaults to "load at startup". LibreOffice will if you let it
| (there is a small difference in propriety here).
|
| The worst offender by far is Outlook (which isn't really MSO but
| looks like it is, or is it?)
|
| Against an on prem Exchange, I get way better performance from
| Evolution (Linux) than Outlook (Windows).
| geor9e wrote:
| Fine with me. If 100% of my RAM isn't in use at all times for low
| priority speculative cache, then it's not doing what I want. So
| long as it frees up the RAM instantly the moment anything
| actually requests it.
| everdrive wrote:
| Ah, the oldest trick in the book. Luckily, I'm sure that no on
| else will think to try this trick, and Windows will continue to
| load quickly.
| nashashmi wrote:
| I think Adobe PDF reader loaded incredibly slowly and they used
| a preloader
| cosmotic wrote:
| My understanding is that Chrome has been doing this for years.
| ChatGPT agrees and links to
| https://ihaveapc.com/2024/10/understanding-chromes-continue-...
| mrandish wrote:
| At installation Chrome, Edge browser and Acrobat Reader all
| silently add multiple background tasks to Windows startup
| which will then run at _every_ boot and log on. Those tasks
| check for updates, pre-load and ensure their usage analytics
| get dutifully reported.
|
| Because I only use those apps on rare occasion, I go remove
| all those tasks. And each of those apps checks to see if its
| tasks are still there on every run or update and, if not, re-
| adds them. I've even tried getting clever and leaving the
| tasks in place but just changing the run frequency to once
| every month or something, but they check for that too and
| change it back.
|
| Anyone know of a way to override this so _I_ can decide if
| apps I don 't use for weeks at a time need to be always
| silently running, updating and phoning home?
| milch wrote:
| Adobe is the worst offender. I just checked and I have no
| less than 8 Adobe processes running on my macOS machine,
| without any Adobe apps running, and with all of the
| settings to run in the background or sync stuff turned off.
| I even have a script to nuke all of the services they
| install that I run every once in a while, but they just
| come back after a while. It's literally malware. If
| Photoshop and Lightroom weren't the best at what they do
| I'd be gone, but sadly they are.
| amarcheschi wrote:
| At least with a fuji camera, and for my tastes ofc, I
| prefer capture one over lightroom
| SietrixDev wrote:
| I never was a pro at Adobe stuff, but recently I bought
| Affinity Suite and it seems nice. The only downside for
| me is lack of Linux support.
| eviks wrote:
| I'd also like an app that ran on schedule and reverted
| everything to the state you want.
|
| Don't know the solution, but one idea - is it possible to
| change task permissions so that those Chrome update
| processes will fail to update tasks?
| mrandish wrote:
| Installers seem to run with the permission level of
| "Trusted Installer" which is even higher than admin as
| far as I can tell.
| mistercheph wrote:
| Not to be that guy, but at some point, if you ever decide
| that fighting a war with Microsoft to have control over
| your own computer and not be surveilled stops being worth
| it... linux. Yes, there's an upfront cost you pay to learn,
| and there are ongoing costs as defaults and tools change
| over the years.. but at least the relationship is not
| adversarial.
| crazygringo wrote:
| That Chrome feature has nothing to do with loading Chrome
| quickly.
|
| On my Mac, I can't find any kind of launch item or background
| process. Chrome doesn't launch anything until I launch
| Chrome.
| Dma54rhs wrote:
| Safari does it in Mac, not sure about Chrome.
| mrandish wrote:
| Between Office's increasingly bloated size, slow booting and
| _super_ annoying CoPilot icon right where I 'm working (which
| _still_ can 't be turned off in OneNote) - I'm on the edge of
| dumping Office. I pretty much only use OneNote and a little
| OneDrive (3% of the included storage plan) to sync files between
| machines and I run Word and Powerpoint less than a dozen times a
| year combined.
|
| Even as a paying customer, all the Office apps and services are
| now so aggressively pushy it's gone beyond "Rude", is now passing
| "Annoying" and accelerating toward "Yeah, I can't do this." I
| just want to ask Satya "How much _more_ do I have to pay you to
| simply STFU and let me NOT use (and not even know about) services
| I already pay for but don 't need?"
|
| I bought three 12 month Office subs for $49 each on a black
| Friday blow-out three years ago. The last one will expire in
| January and if it doesn't get better, I'll be ending my 30 year
| Office relationship. I'll probably go to Libre Office and replace
| OneDrive cloud storage with SyncThing + my own server. I'd be
| fine to keep paying $50 a year for the 5% of Office I actually
| use - but only if I can use the exact Office I had around three
| years ago before it was so annoying.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| You'll be back. LibreOffice is so visually gross it's pretty
| hard to use.
| mrandish wrote:
| Oh, that's too bad. I haven't checked it out in a long time.
| However, in recent years the Office UX has been getting
| increasingly worse for me too. Not ugly, just bigger and
| fatter, taking up more screen space to show less info.
|
| If open source alternatives aren't suitable, my fallback is
| to get whatever the last retail box versions were of the few
| Office apps I actually occasionally use and then never update
| them. There hasn't been a single new Office feature I care
| about added in about ten years.
| bflesch wrote:
| OpenOffice/Libreoffice lets you choose between multiple UX
| styles, which rearranges the buttons like old office, the
| ribbon stuff, and many more. I was amazed when I first
| noticed this (kind of hidden) feature. You should check it
| out.
| ptx wrote:
| LibreOffice also does this.
| bflesch wrote:
| Correct. Thanks for the hint. I keep mixing up openoffice
| and libreoffice even though I only use libreoffice on my
| system.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| LibreOffice should have provided a theme/icon pack "Office
| Icons" - half the time I can't tell what an icon is for
| because most of us have been raised on MS Office. Also, it
| would do well with a "Simple" mode ala Google Docs that is
| sufficient most of the time for most folks.
|
| Otherwise it works fine, haven't had any issues with the
| documents it produces and I particularly like the direct
| export to pdf feature.
| bflesch wrote:
| LibreOffice has several themes that makes it look like MS
| Office (e.g. ribbons, modern UI, etc).
|
| Select TOOLS > OPTIONS > ADVANCED > Enable experimental
| Options (WARNING this is experimental and may be unstable)
| > OK and then RESTART LIBREOFFICE. On restart VIEW >
| TOOLBAR LAYOUT > NOTEBOOKBAR. You can then play with the
| options with VIEW > NOTEBOOKBAR > CONTEXTUAL GROUPS/
| CONTEXTUAL SINGLE / TABBED.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| It is actually View -> Toolbars -> Customize ->
| Notebookbar but within that there is only "Tabbed" option
| which doesn't really show a way to change themes.
|
| This is a perfect example of actions that make adoption
| harder. This should have been at most 2 clicks and
| prominently displayed assuming LibreOffice wants to be a
| great alternative to MS Office and make the transition
| easier. I have been using Linux daily for over 20 years
| now and it is not intuitive to me - it doesn't make me
| very optimistic about the experience for a new user.
| bflesch wrote:
| Nope, it's actually Menu -> User Interface:
| https://postimg.cc/sMhhFvC1
|
| Then this dialog appears: https://postimg.cc/YhVWyQVJ
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Found it - thanks! I wish this was more easily accessible
| to new users - it actually makes a difference in terms of
| organization of icons and ease of finding things.
| gtech1 wrote:
| Check out Only Office
| al_borland wrote:
| For the occasional user, various online office suites are
| also an option.
|
| On my personal computers, I haven't use MS Office in close to
| 20 years.
|
| I use it at work, because that's what we're given to use, but
| 95% of my usage is opening CSV files in Excel. I find
| documents are rarely written in Word anymore, and the use of
| PowerPoint is actively discouraged at this point.
|
| If the parent commenter only uses Office a dozen times per
| year, they should quite easily get by with something else.
| Google Docs, iWork, a simple text editor... there are options
| beyond LibreOffice. Which specific options would depend one
| what those dozen uses actually are.
| maccard wrote:
| My work pays for a full O365 subscription for me. The web
| apps are more than I'll ever need as someone who basically
| uses Excel and Word as an interchange format.
| tpm wrote:
| MS Office is much harder to use for the casual user not
| already used to it - the interface is very disorienting.
| chneu wrote:
| To be fair, office is also hot garbage. It's just that most
| people are used to that kind of hot garbage.
|
| As someone who hasn't used office much in the last 15 years,
| it's nearly unusable for me. I have to Google how to do basic
| things because everything is confusing, ugly, and hidden(or
| hard to find amongst the huge number of icons).
| chewonbananas wrote:
| It's not as bad as it was 5 years ago. It's closer to the
| flat office design.
| ptx wrote:
| It probably depends mostly on what you're used to. I find
| that LibreOffice looks fine - no worse than most apps, and
| much better than Microsoft's UI.
| KronisLV wrote:
| > LibreOffice is so visually gross it's pretty hard to use.
|
| I don't know, I quite like it, reminds me of the old Office
| look.
|
| Plus, there's at least a bit of customization that you can
| do, which is pleasant: https://imgur.com/a/libreoffice-
| ui-80hwOp0
|
| Very much seems like a matter of preference.
| bhouston wrote:
| I switch to Google Docs/Sheets/Presentations many years ago as
| my primary tool and I haven't installed any type of local
| office in 6 years. Google Workspace has built in digital
| signature tools and the change tracking in Google Docs is also
| really good.
| 486sx33 wrote:
| Google workspace is awful , it's super dooper awful with
| Gemini shoved up my ass all the time , which is impossible to
| disable, and trains on all my data. Gsuite makes office look
| good !!
| Ferret7446 wrote:
| The workspace admins can disable Gemini, among many other
| things. Google also does not "steal" your data if you read
| the ToS; any training is strictly scoped to that workspace.
|
| If you thought for a few seconds, you would realize that
| companies with big legal teams would not sign a contract
| that would give Google the right to their data.
| bflesch wrote:
| Yeah google does not steal your data and that's why
| companies like amazon dont even send you full details of
| your online shopping order so google can't crawl what you
| bought and what price you bought it for.
| arccy wrote:
| my recent amazon order emails actually came with a full
| itemized list with prices
| pavlov wrote:
| Is it reasonable to assume that individuals and small
| companies get the same friendly terms as companies with
| big legal teams and expensive contracts?
|
| That may be the case, but I wouldn't count on it.
| Probably it can change with one email from Google that
| has "oh btw we're changing some contract terms, you have
| 14 days to opt out, no big deal" buried deep down.
| ptx wrote:
| > _any training is strictly scoped to that workspace_
|
| Are they really doing training separately for each
| workspace? I thought LLM training was enormously
| expensive and needed lots of data, which wouldn't make
| sense to do separately.
| arccy wrote:
| they're no so much training as providing context just
| when you invoke it
| worik wrote:
| I find Google docs very frustrating.
|
| What blows my mind is how dreadful search is in Google docs.
| The thing that should be really good is really bad.
|
| Strange days
| aniforprez wrote:
| Now that even Google search is garbage, can't really claim
| they're good at search. It's also always been true that
| their search at anything aside from the main search product
| is horrible. YouTube search is its own level of colossal
| uselessness and has always been that way and has only
| gotten worse over time. These days it doesn't even show you
| 10 videos related to your search before going out of its
| way to show other "related" categories.
| packetlost wrote:
| I've been pretty happy with OnlyOffice. I'm pretty sure it's
| based on Libre or OpenOffice but looks much more similar to
| 2012~ era MS Office.
| n3storm wrote:
| OnlyOffice is not based on LibreOffice. CollaboraOffice does.
| jfyi
| nguyenkien wrote:
| No. It's js, render in qtwebengine.
| polotics wrote:
| you use OneNote? I had text search randomly stop working in
| that thing, no explanation just nothing found. For me this was
| the Microsoft last straw.
| bArray wrote:
| 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.
| esperent wrote:
| I do this too, however there is considerable formatting
| issues when you're working collaboratively on documents with
| other people who use MS Office.
| ohgr wrote:
| There are considerable formatting issues when you're
| working collaboratively on documents with other people who
| use MS office when you are using MS office too.
|
| We gave up for large documents, assigned an editor and just
| send them chunks of text.
| bArray wrote:
| True, I had a large contract recently with this issue, but
| it worked out in the end.
|
| The problem is that we thought "let's switch to the online
| MS Word editor", which then proceeds to delete your text as
| you write [1]. Bare in mind that my company pays an Office
| subscription per employee for that crap.
|
| [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Office365/comments/11be6wd/fir
| efox_...
|
| [2] https://answers.microsoft.com/en-
| us/msoffice/forum/all/how-c...
| taurath wrote:
| 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.
| bArray wrote:
| > 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 a Java application I think it's crazily fast?
|
| > and bad formatting issues and incompatibilities
|
| It's certainly not a 100% drop-in replacement. A lot of the
| formatting issues I have experienced is because a Office
| user did something that assumes a perfect renderer -
| something we don't even get in browsers. Like people
| pressing enter multiple times to create a new page and not
| just CTRL+ENTER.
| ptx wrote:
| > _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
| inversetelecine wrote:
| 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
| n3storm wrote:
| I was a hardcore desktop LibreOffice user both Calc and Write,
| but I have been using Write exclusively online through
| CollaboraOffice in a Nextcloud Instance and did not have any
| issue in two years. I know it was buggy before because I have
| been checked every two or three releases.
| bambax wrote:
| Office 2003 still works absolutely fine and is free if you
| bought a licence some time in the past. It doesn't have the
| stupid ribbon or any other annoying new feature.
|
| I recently wrote a macro so that Word could call an AI API to
| do AI-assisted translation, works like a charm.
| tomatocracy wrote:
| Although I agree about the ribbon and UI, I think Excel 2003
| in particular feels quite limited today - it can deal with a
| max of 255 columns in a sheet and is missing some of the most
| useful functions (SUMIFS and XLOOKUP spring to mind
| especially but also the newer array functions like SORT).
| bambax wrote:
| Sumif (without the s) worked in Excel 4 (1992), you just
| had to enter it with CTRL+Enter and use curly braces IIRC.
| I used it to build dashboards. Not sure what problem sumifs
| solves beyond sumif.
|
| XLookup sure is useful but again you can probably replace
| it with a combination of vlookup and hlookup (or index
| match).
|
| Regarding the size... If you're dealing with huge
| spreadsheets it's really better to use a proper db. Or even
| manipulate data with sqlite. sqlite can query xlsx files
| directly (with an extension), it's extremely fast and
| stable.
| tomatocracy wrote:
| The problem with the column limit is not so much about
| huge datasets as limiting flexibility in how you can lay
| things out - 65k rows and 16.7m cells are plenty and I'd
| be wanting to use a database well before I got there. But
| 255 columns does feel quite constraining.
|
| And whilst you can work around lack of XLOOKUP or SUMIFS
| using the older functions, again it constrains how you
| lay things out (eg VLOOKUP needs you to presort your
| table by the lookup column if you don't want an exact
| match) and this can often result in sheets which are much
| more unwieldy and slow to calculate.
| jasode wrote:
| _> Office 2003 still works absolutely fine_
|
| It works fine if the user is ok with the features from 2003.
| E.g. Excel 2003 is limited to smaller spreadsheets of 65536
| rows by 256 columns but Excel 2007+ can handle larger
| worksheets of 1048576 rows by 16384 cols.
|
| I also recently used Excel's new LAMBDA() function which was
| introduced 2020. In earlier versions, it required writing a
| VBA UDF to accomplish the same task of assigning a temp
| variable with a ephemeral value to calculate on intermediate
| values. VBA is a workaround but LAMBDA() is nicer to use
| because Excel will throw up scary security warnings whenever
| the xls file containing VBA macros is opened.
|
| I might be able to get by with Word 2003 more than Excel
| 2003.
| bambax wrote:
| You're right about Excel; however, I think big data files
| should be handled in a db rather than in a spreadsheet. And
| sqlite can query Excel files (with an extension), and it's
| super fast and you can use any function you want, or write
| your own.
| jasode wrote:
| _> ; however, I think big data files should be handled in
| a db rather than in a spreadsheet. And sqlite can query
| Excel files (with an extension)_
|
| A lot of normal users of Excel are not users of database
| software like SQLite or MS Access. That's too cumbersome.
| E.g. they download a csv file that has ~100000 rows
| (which really isn't that "big") and clicking on it gets
| them an _instant visual grid as a GUI_ in Excel. Slicing
| & dicing and pivoting data is way faster in Excel than
| coding SQL WHERE GROUP BY statements. I've commented
| previously on why databases are not substitutes for the
| workflow ergonomics made possible by spreadsheet tools :
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30987638
|
| It's similar to reasons why Python/R or Jupyter notebooks
| are also not substitutes for Excel _for the typical users
| of Excel_.
|
| The low row count of 65536 in Excel 2003 was just a
| legacy limitation of 1980s 16-bit computing that was
| carried over into 32-bit computing for many years for
| backwards compatibility reasons. Spreadsheet users don't
| really want to switch to databases or Python just to get
| more usable rows than 65536.
| bambax wrote:
| From your linked comment:
|
| > _The scenario of "I just sent you an xlsx where the
| rows highlighted in red are problems and if you can just
| add your notes to column K, that would be great. Thanks!"
| -- is not easy in other tools that are not spreadsheets._
|
| There are no words to tell how much I hate that!!! ;-)
| Users are too creative. Some will merge some cells and
| not others and boom the file can't be properly sorted
| anymore. Many will use font color, font weight or
| background color to mean wildly different things, which
| is very difficult or impossible to sort or do a sumif
| over. Others will add footnotes, because why not?, and
| links to spreadsheets that never leave their own device,
| or mini-blank-rows for spacing and general layout, etc.
| It's completely insane.
| justin66 wrote:
| > I think big data files should be handled in a db rather
| than in a spreadsheet.
|
| Your side lost completely. Pop a signal flare or build a
| bonfire, maybe someone can rescue you from the island
| you've been living on since the war ended.
| ok123456 wrote:
| duckdb is doing fine.
| bambax wrote:
| I don't want to be rescued.
| pcwalton wrote:
| If Microsoft had adopted this attitude, then by now
| Excel's market share would probably be 0% and Google
| Sheets' would be 100%. Microsoft doesn't add features
| because they like bloated software; they add features
| because the market demands them, and the market demanded
| support for more than 65,535 rows.
| codr7 wrote:
| I've thankfully never had to deal with anything close to
| that size, what kind of super computers are they running?
| threatripper wrote:
| How can it be free if you need to buy a license?
| reddalo wrote:
| I think the user meant that it's "free to keep", it's not a
| recurring subscription like modern Office versions.
| bambax wrote:
| Yes.
| subscribed wrote:
| No subscription. "Free" to use forever once to obtained the
| licence, unliie the current crop.
| reddalo wrote:
| I used to love Office 2003, and I still do. But... just use
| LibreOffice at this point. It has an interface that reminds a
| lot of classic Office, but at least it's more updated and
| probably safer. It also supports newer file formats.
| spapas82 wrote:
| Main problem with office 2003 is that it can't reliably open
| docx and friends making it more or less non compatible with
| anything newer. Being able to open only docs you create
| yourself isn't very useful in a collaborative environment.
|
| The main advantage of office 2003 of course is that it's the
| last office without activation and other crap: you pass the
| serial and own it for life, it won't bother you again.
|
| I wantwd to only use 2003 but after the 10th time I argued
| with a person that sent me a docx for editing I gave up.
| bambax wrote:
| Office 2003 can absolutely open docx and xlsx and pptx
| files. It is annoying because it usually opens those in
| read-only mode, and then you need to "save as" to do your
| modifications. But it works fine otherwise.
| taneq wrote:
| "View" unfortunately isn't the same as "Open and edit",
| and in business you need to do the latter. Otherwise we'd
| be 100% libreoffice from the start. Yep, that's the moat.
| pessimizer wrote:
| It's been a while, but I think what they're saying is
| that you have to "save as" in order to be allowed to
| edit. Office 2003 thinks of the compressed versions as
| export formats rather than internal formats.
| jasode wrote:
| _> I think what they 're saying is that you have to "save
| as" in order to be allowed to edit. _
|
| The issue is that roundtripping between Office 2007+ and
| Office 2003 is unreliable and will often result in
| corrupted files.
|
| Using Office 2003 (with Compatibility Pack add-on to open
| xlsx and docx) is ok for isolated work but can be
| _unreliable for collaborative back & forth editing_
| depending on what features are used. E.g. cell colors
| used in Excel 2007 xlsx get corrupted in Excel 2003 xls.
| im3w1l wrote:
| It's a completely different format. Iirc .doc files are
| basically implementation defined files and consist of
| c-structs dumped to disk. .docx is a properly specified
| format of compressed xml.
| int_19h wrote:
| It's not "C structs dumped to disk". It's
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COM_Structured_Storage,
| which is basically a filesystem-in-a-file. And it has
| been documented for a long time, ever since Microsoft was
| forced to write docs for Office file formats because of
| antitrust:
|
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-
| us/openspecs/windows_protocol...
| bambax wrote:
| Yes that's what I meant. You can edit xlsx in Excel 2003;
| you open, modify and save as. It's a little annoying but
| it works.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| There is an addon for 2003 that enables OOXML support. Look
| for FileFormatConverters.exe.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| I seem to recall some layout issues running on a 4k display,
| or with scaling set to 150% or higher.
|
| I remember Outlook clipping the last character off the email
| subjects, for example. Might have been Office 2010.
| swores wrote:
| This is one of those times when I wish HN still displayed
| comment karma publicly, not only to the author of the comment.
| Because I'm sure various Microsoft employees read HN, and they
| should see what I assume will be a large number of upvotes on
| that comment, especially for this:
|
| > _<<Even as a paying customer, all the Office apps and
| services are now so aggressively pushy it 's gone beyond
| "Rude", is now passing "Annoying" and accelerating toward
| "Yeah, I can't do this." I just want to ask Satya "How much
| more do I have to pay you to simply STFU and let me NOT use
| (and not even know about) services I already pay for but don't
| need?">>_
|
| Office used to be software that justified its cost, it's now
| just consistently annoying to use.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| 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.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| 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.
| doctorwho42 wrote:
| 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
| dfedbeef wrote:
| The windows experience is trash for regular users, it looks
| like a casino now unless you are aggressive about turning
| _everything_ off.
|
| However: raising concerns is a bad career move apparently.
| These ideas... aren't proposed by devs; if that makes sense.
| mkayokay wrote:
| I guess you already know, but you do not necessarily need a
| server for Syncthing if the devices are on at the same time. If
| they are not, a simple low-power rpi-like device would be more
| than enough to implement a star topology, with the pi being
| receive-only.
| peppers-ghost wrote:
| I switched to onlyoffice + joplin for notes and am very happy
| with both.
| rs186 wrote:
| I used to always have an Office installation on my computer,
| whether it's pirated (many years ago)/using my personal
| license/using my school license/etc.
|
| Then I got a new computer without bothering to do the
| installation. It was a _long_ time before I discovered that I
| need any of Word /Excel/PowerPoint. And I was able to get by
| with Google Docs. If that's not good enough, I go to the free
| version of Office 365. In the rare occasions where I need the
| actual, native Office software for compatibility/functionality
| reasons, I do it on another machine I have access to. This has
| worked out surprisingly well.
| Propelloni wrote:
| If you go the Syncthing-Route anyway, take a look at Softmaker
| Office [1], it's an almost-drop-in replacement for MS Office
| and would set you back 50 EUR/year for 5 devices.
|
| We evaluated it for our migration away from MS software and
| would have gone with it, but it lacks an office server for
| Nextcloud integration.
|
| [1] https://www.softmaker.com/en/products/softmaker-office
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| Every program tries to run on windows startup and people wonder
| why their computer gets slower over time.
|
| Download microsoft autoruns from their site to turn off
| everything that runs when windows start to do away with all the
| crap.
| nine_k wrote:
| Office is large and may not load instantly. If you use it all day
| anyway, preloading and not closing it makes sense. The same way I
| preload Emacs and Firefox.
|
| Of course if you do _not_ use Office all day, and are OK to wait
| until it loafs on demand, the preloading should be turned off.
|
| (And, frankly, if you don't use Office, why do you need Windows
| anyway? To play games that don't run on a Steamdeck?)
| eviks wrote:
| > why do you need Windows anyway? To play games that don't run
| on a Steamdeck?
|
| To instantly find any file anywhere, nice productivity boost
| (among many)
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Really? Windows isn't exactly known for the quality of it's
| search. It becoming consistently worse with every Windows
| version has been a meme for at more than a decade.
| eviks wrote:
| But Windows is know for a lot of productivity apps other
| platforms lack. I meant the Everything file search app
| (doesn't exist on Linux/Mac), not the default Windows
| search
| tekla wrote:
| There is a list of software several miles long that does not
| work on non-Windows
| xyst wrote:
| Microsoft Build 2.0 is going to be a massive joke.
| jackconsidine wrote:
| Reminds me of something. I ran a software development agent for a
| while. We were working on a job-seeker / employer match-making
| application; when a job-seeker submitted their resume the system
| would take a few seconds to run a geo search, process data, look
| for related employers and hit 3rd-party endpoints.
|
| The client was initially put off by the 2 second loader, so we
| designed a "fun fact" loader that had a random blurb about the
| industry the job seeker was searching on. The client liked that
| so much he actually suggested we _slow down_ the job seeker
| search so the end user could see it for a bit longer.
|
| We talked him out of it in the end but occasionally suggest
| throttling our servers as a feature of our current company. MSFT
| should look into this
| bflesch wrote:
| They already have the "wallpaper of the day" feature with small
| description text to keep you busy while waiting.
| al_borland wrote:
| I have a habit of uninstalling any programs that take it upon
| themselves to start up on boot without me specifically requesting
| it. Any company with that little respect for the user isn't one I
| want to be involved with.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Well, Libre/OpenOffice does the same, but lets not get that in
| the way of a good Microsoft bashing round.
| vachina wrote:
| One is open source free software, another is paid software
| backed by a billion dollar cap company. It's a miracle
| OpenOffice worked at all. They're not the same.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Only if ignoring history,
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarOffice
| badmintonbaseba wrote:
| I don't see any LibreOffice related processes on my Debian
| machine, but I have it installed. Does it do that on Windows
| only, or distros disable this by default?
| pjmlp wrote:
| https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Faq/General/148
| johnisgood wrote:
| > LibreOffice can be set to open on Windows startup
|
| So, Windows only, and "can be set", probably not the
| default?
| pjmlp wrote:
| The installer enables it by default unless you go through
| custom installation.
| johnisgood wrote:
| That sucks. This is the expected behavior for most
| programs on Windows, at least in my experience.
| snappr021 wrote:
| Microsoft is too slow full stop.
|
| When will there be a viable alternative that runs industry
| standard software?
| lionkor wrote:
| Proton made games run well on Linux, maybe all it takes is one
| big company picking up wine, and making it run all the
| different office software? It cannot be that hard.
| margorczynski wrote:
| I think its harder with "standard" software as it uses the
| Windows UI toolkit and stuff. Games usually only require an
| empty window to render + all the GUI is custom in
| DirectX/Vulkan/etc.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Industry standard software like what, MS Office?
| quaestio wrote:
| Solidworks, RFEM, other niche applications only run on
| Windows...
|
| I made the switch to Google Workspace and Docs years ago...
|
| At a recent company used the Microsoft largely for teams, but
| there are so many unnecessary headaches and time consuming
| log-ins (each taking a few seconds that continually add up)
| that the next paradigm cannot come soon enough...
|
| The best way off Microsoft is via the browser... Vanilla JS
| Webgl etc
|
| Prediction: we are less than a year away from this becoming a
| reality...
|
| Edit: Possible solution: simply boot into a browser, with an
| underlying cloud syncing filesystem with trusted circles of
| sharing...
|
| How many seconds would be required to go from power button to
| accepting input in this paradigm?
| herbst wrote:
| Depending on the industrie there is really nothing holding them
| back other than dirty Microsoft deals and lazy bosses
| bflesch wrote:
| Desktop linux has all standard software. It's just incompetent
| IT teams trying to sugarcoat the fact they keep throwing money
| down the Microsoft drain.
| RedShift1 wrote:
| Desktop linux doesn't even have anything close to things like
| group policies. And if by magic that function would appear
| tomorrow, it would disappear again the day after tomorrow.
| Sure active directory and group policies have their flaws but
| its ease of use and tight integration blows everything else
| out of the water.
| bflesch wrote:
| Silicon valley is able to shoehorn their Macbooks into
| "compliance" but somehow it'd be a problem to do the same
| with linux desktops?
|
| > And if by magic that function would appear tomorrow, it
| would disappear again the day after tomorrow.
|
| That's incorrect.
|
| > ease of use and tight integration blows everything else
| out of the water.
|
| Agree to disagree.
| p_ing wrote:
| macOS has MDM tooling like Microsoft's InTune, or JAMF,
| and I'm sure a few others. macOS is designed for MDM
| profiles, just like iOS is.
|
| This is what makes Mac manageable.
| codethief wrote:
| You're bringing up an important point. However: As far as I
| can tell, Linux can very well be integrated into an Active
| Directory setup.[0,1] Also: If you want to avoid Active
| Directory altogether, there seem to be plenty
| alternatives?[2]
|
| [0]: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/linux-active-directory
|
| [1]:
| https://documentation.ubuntu.com/server/explanation/intro-
| to...
|
| [2]: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/333/what-is-
| the-equ...
|
| Are there any alternatives to ActiveDirectory in the Linux
| ecosystem? Maybe from RedHat?
| p_ing wrote:
| There are no enterprise alternatives to Active Directory.
| Just like there are no enterprise alternatives to
| Exchange.
|
| They're simply too well integrated, too easy to manage,
| and have more features than their competitors.
| rvba wrote:
| 30% of code is written by AI!
|
| The biggest problem is sharepoint. You save your files
| "somewhere" and links between them barely work
| blitzar wrote:
| To be fair to Microsoft, Excel crashes far less frequently than
| it did 10 years ago so that is something I guess. I would put the
| "productivity gains" from that alone at +40%.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| Probably because you have a way better computer.
|
| My girlfriend and I work in the same company, I have an M1 mac
| because I'm a dev and she has a shitty Dell laptop with
| Windows. Sometimes it's easier for her to send me an Excel,
| make the edit for her and send it back, because Excel
| constantly hangs on her laptop.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Companies will buy the cheapest, shittiest PCs/laptops and
| wonder why their slow or people are unproductive. Apple have
| their share of issues, but at least they won't sell you
| completely useless laptops.
|
| The minute someone is using a computer and it's noticeably
| slow their brain will start looking for something else to do
| and they'll lose any momentum on whatever task they where
| working on.
| bambax wrote:
| Excel 2003 never crashes.
|
| It's a little bit limited in number of lines and columns (but
| if you need that many you should probably be using a proper
| db).
| blitzar wrote:
| Gotta have XLOOKUP if you are going to compete these days. It
| might be aimed at the more casual audience and party gamers
| but it is the meta.
| pizza234 wrote:
| Libreoffice/Openoffice have been doing this since quite early on
| (reason is that the ancestor StarOffice was designed as monolith,
| always loading the full suite of programs, and splitting it is
| probably very hard), so it seems to be an unofficial standard.
|
| On the other hand, it's disappointing, since I remember early M$
| Office version being blazing fast (but again, I suspect that
| there was some preloading going on).
| o11c wrote:
| This does not appear to be the case for LibreOffice in my
| tests.
| Mashimo wrote:
| I think you can choose to use the feature on installation. I
| don't know if it's on or off by default. But it is a thing
| that exist (with the windows installer)
| kilotaras wrote:
| Team X is responsible for feature Foo; feature Foo is slow; team
| X introduces Foo-preload, metrics go up, person responsible gets
| a bonus.
|
| Multiply that by tens (or even hundreds) of teams and your app
| startup (either on desktop or mobile) is now a bloated mess.
| Happened to Office, Facebook iOS and countless others.
|
| One solution is to treat startup cycles as a resource similar to
| e.g. size or backend servers.
| threatripper wrote:
| The solution is simple: New OKRs and KPIs in the next cycle
| reversing some of the current ones, then new bonuses for
| reaching them. Repeat.
| taneq wrote:
| "I could do this all day!"
| HPsquared wrote:
| Then the OS team will fight back with options to disable all of
| these startup things. Like the Startup tab in Windows Task
| Manager with an "impact" column and easy button to disable
| annoying startup programs. It's interesting to even see it play
| out within the same company.
| macleginn wrote:
| The only impact values I see on my home machine are "Not
| measured" and "None".
| vasco wrote:
| Office codebase is soon going to probably be older than most
| people that work on it.
| andruby wrote:
| That could already be the case. The initial release is from
| 1990, so the codebase is at least 35 years old.
|
| I don't have a good guess for the average age of software
| developers at Microsoft, but claude.ai guesses the average
| "around 33-38 years" and the median "around 35-36 years old".
| claudex wrote:
| Office was released in 1990, but Excel in 1985 and Word in
| 1983.
| bcraven wrote:
| "but claude.ai guesses"
|
| To my ears this is the equivalent of "some guy down the pub
| said", but maybe I am a luddite.
| n8m8 wrote:
| You're not a luddite, they disclosed it because you're
| _supposed_ to take it with a grain of salt
| gigel82 wrote:
| I'm told from MS friends that there are still files with the
| intact 1987 changelog in Word; as well as workarounds for dot
| matrix printers that were released 40+ years ago.
|
| Also, the Office codebase is significantly larger than
| Windows (and has been for a while), that was surprising to
| me.
| immibis wrote:
| Raymond Chen wrote about this.
| bjackman wrote:
| > One solution is to treat startup cycles as a resource similar
| to e.g. size or backend servers.
|
| The only way to achieve performance metrics in a large org IMO.
|
| Google Search is still fast because if you degrade p99 latency
| an SRE will roll back your change. Macbooks still have good
| battery life because Apple have an army of QA engineers and if
| they see a bump on their Ammeters that MacOS release doesn't go
| ahead.
|
| Everything else (especially talking about "engineers these days
| just don't know how to write efficient code") is noise. In big
| tech projects you get the requirements your org encodes in its
| metrics and processes. You don't get the others. It's as simple
| as that.
|
| Never worked at MS but it's obvious to me that the reason
| Windows is shit is that the things that would make it good
| simply aren't objectives for MS.
| netruk44 wrote:
| As an ex-Microsoft SDET who worked on Windows, we used to
| test for those things as well. In 2014.
|
| Then Microsoft made the brave decision that testers were
| simply unnecessary. So they laid off all SDETs, then decided
| that SDE's should be in charge of the tests themselves.
|
| Which effectively made it so there was no test coverage of
| windows at all, as the majority of SDE's had not interacted
| with the test system prior to that point. Many/most of them
| did not know how to run even a single test, let alone
| interpret its results.
|
| This is what Microsoft management wanted, so this is what
| they got. I would not expect improvement, only slow
| degradation as Windows becomes Bing Desktop, featuring Office
| and Copilot (Powered By Azure(tm)).
| bjackman wrote:
| Makes perfect sense. It recently became clear to me (e.g.
| [2]) that it's not a cohesive concept but to me personally
| this is the meaning of POSIWID [1].
|
| Basically making Windows a good desktop OS is not in any
| meaningful way the "purpose" of that part of MS. The
| "purpose" of any team of 20+ SWEs _is_ the set of
| objectives they measure and act upon. That's the only way
| you can actually predict the outcomes of its work.
|
| And the corrolary is that you can usually quite clearly
| look at the output of such an org and infer what its
| "purpose" is, when defined as such.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system
| _is_w...
|
| [2] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-
| comment...
| alliao wrote:
| make the apps trade with each other using cpu/memory as money
| lol and they earn money by usage
| RegW wrote:
| No. No. No.
|
| Microsoft need to update the spec for all new personal
| computers to include mandatory pre-load hardware. This would
| have a secondary CPU, RAM and storage used for pre-loading
| licensed Office products before your laptop boots. AI would
| analyse your usage patterns and fire-up Office for you before
| you even get to work in the morning.
|
| Perhaps, this could even allow you to have Office on-hand,
| ready-to-use on its own hardware module, while you develop
| Linux application on your main CPU.
|
| Further down the line. Someone see an opportunity to provide
| access to compatible modules in the cloud, allowing re-use of
| older incompatible hardware. But there would be the danger that
| service (without the support of MS), may go bust, leaving those
| users without their mandatory instant access to licensed Office
| products, forcing upgrades to even newer hardware.
| atoav wrote:
| As someone who programs embedded systems the bloat people have
| grown to accept in the userspace is utterly mindbogling to me.
|
| Sure it is a challenge to write performant code, I know that as
| well as any other embedded programmer, but my feeling is that in
| userspace or web programming most people have stopped even trying
| to be performant.
|
| They will give you paginated content with 10 items per page,
| items whose data makes up less than 1% of the javascript they are
| loading. Meanwhile you could literally give people _all_ items
| with no javascript and be faster (if you have the luxury of
| knowing the number of items).
| zifpanachr23 wrote:
| I don't think many of us find it acceptable judging by the
| comments here. Programmers aren't the target audience though,
| the actual target audience probably has no idea how much faster
| these things can and should run.
| shermozle wrote:
| This from the team that brought a tool to recover files corrupted
| by Office, rather than fix the causes of file corruption. Then it
| becomes a "feature" you can trumpet, rather than a bug you
| squashed.
| globular-toast wrote:
| I wonder if other industries could get away with this. Imagine
| a drug company that pedalled both a highly addictive toxin
| _and_ the antidote.
| snackbroken wrote:
| A casual googling tells me Amphastar produces both morphine
| and naloxone. Presumably they aren't the only pharma company
| that produces both a drug and its antidote, they were just my
| first hit.
| bgro wrote:
| What? This is what lobbying is. Intuit TurboTax. Realpage.
| Then entire insurance industry. TSA easy check or whatever
| it's called.
|
| Fully fabricated problems with fabricated solutions often
| becoming legally required to be purchased to avoid the
| problem they cause in the first place.
| globular-toast wrote:
| > Then entire insurance industry.
|
| Could you elaborate? How does the insurance industry create
| problems like bad weather and misfortune?
| bgro wrote:
| Car theft is on the rise. Rather than investigate or
| cooperate with police or policies they can just pay out
| the loss and lobby against crime reduction in a variety
| of ways. Then, because they paid a loss they can raise
| that persons amount they pay due to a rising "risk." Then
| everybody's rates can rise because of this problem.
|
| The larger the cost, the bigger total cash value they can
| get on their percentage based profit.
|
| Playing into the cost, they can cut deals with
| manufacturers directly or in lobbying for parts to be
| artificially inflated to make this problem even worse.
| Plastic fuel valve maybe costs 30 cents to manufacture
| but is sold for $900 and that price is doubled to install
| it. And the car isn't safe to drive without it so
| insurance can demand you pay up or deny all coverage or
| payouts.
|
| Same for medical inflation though that's more commonly
| discussed.
|
| If insurance didn't exist as a service then these
| inflated prices would be dramatically cut down. We see
| this when you don't use insurance at a doctors office or
| pharmacy checkout. Though insurance can sometimes demand
| insurance be used regardless of your consent simply if
| the cashier is aware they have insurance.
|
| Lobbying and passively steering the direction into
| bloating end users cost is massively incentivized
| wherever possible for insurance. Then hiding behind a
| veil of blame to avoid accountability or even just fair
| payouts when you actually need them.
|
| It's like insurance is the IRS who runs a casino and they
| threaten you if you win the jackpot and then threaten to
| "randomly" select you for audit if you proceed to cash
| out for the full amount instead of a $25 Red Robin gift
| card.
| amarcheschi wrote:
| I had a professor who worked for Microsoft with something related
| to coding some parts of driver installation or similar thing.
|
| He literally has Vietnam flashbacks if working at Microsoft comes
| out as a topic when talking
| tacker2000 wrote:
| They should increase the speed of Excel on Mac. Not sure why its
| always so slow when entering data, etc...
|
| There is a noticeable lag when you enter something in a cell and
| then hit enter.
| bgro wrote:
| This is the kind of genius move you get when all your devs play
| leetcode all day and then have leetcode battles as an interview
| service.
|
| Hundreds of millions of hours spent microfussing over leetcode
| and gatekeeping work because your solution isn't copied from the
| top 5 solutions character for character. Only for the same devs
| to just abandon all optimization in the real job where it
| actually matters and implement an o(n^2) fraudulent time metric
| bypass.
| vultour wrote:
| Don't worry, Principal Engineer Copilot will fix all their
| issues.
| cornholio wrote:
| Coding interviews used to be FizzBuzz in the era of Joel
| Spolsky, then Google upped the bar to things like A*, Boyer
| Moore and brain teasers with pirates splitting booty to screen
| for those "real 10x geniuses".
|
| Then everybody jumped on that cargocult because Google is a
| trillion dollar company, so they must be doing something right,
| am I rite, never-mind their immense monopolies and first mover
| advantages. So now everybody was looking for the mythical
| 10xers
|
| It all metastasized into the present where you have poor
| college kids in India grinding Leetcode to get SDET jobs for
| some Bangalore outsource center. I can't even
| windward wrote:
| My knowledge of the subject is entirely second-hand, but my
| understanding is that the kind of interview you refer to
| Google doing used to be called a 'Microsoft interview'!
|
| See ISBN 0316778494
|
| Nevertheless I broadly agree.
| meta-level wrote:
| What a mess..
| xyproto wrote:
| Derp.
| solardev wrote:
| What useful major features had Office even gained since 97?
| yallpendantools wrote:
| I still have an old laptop with a spinning disk, going almost 9
| years now.
|
| It helped me ditch Windows completely because the start-up
| experience for Windows 11 was just atrocious even with the
| smart/cached shutdown thing they're doing (I forgot the official
| name for it). I'm glad to see even some (un)official confirmation
| from this article that hogging resources at start-up is pretty
| much best practice in Windows land.
|
| In Linux land today, FF and Chrome (but Chrome especially) take
| ages to start-up at first but system boot is as smooth as can be
| expected.
|
| I thought I've made myself immune to UI bloat because, like all
| true programmers, I do everything on the terminal (short of
| browsing the web, like TRUE programmers). Until I noticed that
| whenever I invoke my terminal, it takes _ages_ for the prompt to
| even appear, not to mention accept keyboard input.
|
| After much frustration, I figured out that the culprit is---
| drumroll---NodeJS. Don't quote me on this but I think Node
| brought Windows best practices into the Linux terminal.
|
| Fortunately, Linux being Linux, I managed to patch my system such
| that Node doesn't actually do anything unless I invoke it myself.
| The downside is that I have an odd script every now and then that
| relies on Node and these scripts would fail if I run them without
| having ran `node` beforehand.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Node is doing stuff when you just try to open a terminal
| window? How does that work?!
| h1fra wrote:
| I don't like a lot of things about Apple, but one thing I'm sure
| is I'm never going back to Windows
| rahen wrote:
| Headlines like this make me glad that org-mode has almost
| completely replaced Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote for me
| (not to mention calendar notifications and Python notebooks). The
| only exception is spreadsheets with charts, which still require
| LibreOffice.
|
| Granted, I don't work in a corporate environment, so I'm free to
| choose my own tools. Living in Emacs is a blessing in today's
| world of bloat, lack of control, short-lived cycles, and SaaS
| everything.
| Zamicol wrote:
| The Cat in the Hat Comes Back engineering.
|
| Can't fix problems in a project? Increase the scope to make more
| problems elsewhere. Soon tentacles emerge, everything has
| problems, and your project doesn't look as relatively bad.
| frou_dh wrote:
| I think someone said the definition of legacy code is code that
| makes lots of money.
| QuantumSeed wrote:
| I think Microsoft may doing that with Microsoft Edge as well. My
| Windows 11 Registry has an HKCU key called
| MicrosoftEdgeAutoLaunch_[...]
|
| "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Edge\Application\msedge.exe"
| --no-startup-window --win-session-start
| kace91 wrote:
| I haven't used a windows machine for like 15 years, but back
| when I was a teenager I could swear computer magazines included
| all kinds of tips about unchecking things from the auto startup
| menu, some modifying the registry.
|
| Did this pattern stop being a thing and we're back to it now?
| Or was it just "forgotten"?
| abdusco wrote:
| Autoruns utility still exists.
|
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-
| us/sysinternals/downloads/aut...
| fireflash38 wrote:
| I wonder if old rules still apply:
|
| Uncheck one thing. Reboot. Test system.Proceed to the next
| item.
|
| I bet that loop is way faster nowadays than when I was
| messing around as a teen trying to get our new 1Gb hard
| drive desktop to boot faster.
| bgro wrote:
| Startup shortcuts are one thing to manage but it's gotten
| pretty out of control for most standard software now. Perhaps
| it used to be one-off annoying programs like 15 years ago.
|
| Now there's scrolling through hundreds of scheduled tasks
| called dfddg.exe with no title or description and located in
| c:/windows or %appdata%. Disabling the wrong identically
| named one bricks your system or software licenses.
|
| Then you also have to check the registry and group policy and
| environment variables and spot the unwanted item that is
| again often bundled into a critical windows dll. Usually with
| the same name as the dll and its permissions are set as
| SYSTEM so you can't edit it by normal means.
|
| Then after every change you have to do a full rebooting and
| review all steps again. Often, they will regenerate
| themselves if deleted in the wrong way or the wrong order.
|
| After all the startup things are killed there may still be
| kernel level startup recovery processes for things like
| Adobe.
| kace91 wrote:
| Oof. Yeah it definitely wasn't this bad, I remember that
| having an unclearly named app in your startup menu was
| considered a clear tell that you had a malware infection.
|
| This sounds like Microsoft is failing spectacularly at
| enforcing strict limits on what software can do.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Other operating systems do the same. Windows even has a
| dedicated system component built for the hard drive age that
| will load commonly used files of any type into RAM if you have
| some leftover.
| p_ing wrote:
| Safari does the same thing on macOS; it has a launch agent to
| speed the first instance of opening Safari up, as well as a
| process to send notifications presumably from web apps you've
| allowed to do so.
| ohgr wrote:
| It goes really fast if you turn off the connected experiences
| like linked in, the AI crap, the splash screen, all the cloud
| shit and crack it with massgrave.
|
| Like office 97 speed.
|
| There's your problem.
| mrweasel wrote:
| I was going to ask: How much faster would it be if it didn't
| have to communicate with Microsoft servers over the internet on
| start up.
|
| It makes no sense that modern Office won't start faster than
| Office 97. Sure it has more features, it's bigger in any way,
| but it's also not running of a spinning hard drive and 32Mb of
| RAM.
|
| Can Office even start up without an Internet connection, or
| does it just take even longer?
| ohgr wrote:
| It works fine on airgapped networks with Ohook
| https://massgrave.dev/ohook
|
| Office doesn't have to talk to the internet at all other than
| periodic license checks.
|
| I won't run it without Ohook, even though I have a license,
| because the cloud shit has screwed me a couple of times.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Once in a while I'm happily reminded that I haven't had to worry
| about this circus any more since I switched to Linux some 5 years
| ago.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| You can get the same effect by uninstalling Office on Windows.
| In that you don't have a bloated start time anymore, but also
| can't use Office.
| immibis wrote:
| You still have to deal with the rest of Windows.
| bgro wrote:
| Windows update reinstalls office even if you never installed
| it or opened it or own it. It's reinstalled through most
| updates and on reboot.
| Mashimo wrote:
| Odd, I don't have it on any of my computers.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Office? I've never seen that.
| Havoc wrote:
| Office in general is becoming annoying. Like their attempts to
| force users to use onedrive and sharepoint by hiding existing
| features and changing the UI around it regularly to maximise
| confusion. It's the same chaos as their control panel. And the
| constant attempt to ram bing down your throat.
|
| Switched my desktop to Linux last month cause I'm just fed up
| with Microsoft's user hostile bullshit
|
| Alas at work I can't do that
| jhanschoo wrote:
| I don't see an issue with this, provided that this is disabled on
| home PCs by default.
|
| For work devices for office work you want this.
| rafaelmn wrote:
| 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 bundled with the OS I paid for.
|
| Linux desktop is getting better but I still wouldn't daily drive
| it, so MacOS it is until Linux desktop gets to a more reliable
| state. I wouldn't be shocked it gets there - I believe Valve made
| relatively low investments and got a lot out of it, GPU vendors
| have an incentive to support it - for compute workloads and the
| gaming on Linux is becoming a thing. Also for office stuff the
| EU-US hostility could force EU to look for alternative software
| providers and move away from Microsoft.
|
| Actually thinking about this just made me donate some $ to Gnome
| project.
| smackay wrote:
| Microsoft at least sees the writing on the wall...
|
| Microsoft announces new European digital commitments
| https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2025/04/30/europea...
| fakedang wrote:
| Idk, seems stupid, given that Europeans are very aware now of
| the Cloud Act and other similar shenanigans the USG wants to
| pull.
|
| That being said, European bureaucrats are even stupider and
| will largely take these commitments at face value, allowing
| them to have a tighter leash on the market.
| mrkramer wrote:
| "We will continue to protect the privacy of European data."
|
| Our data is up for grabs since at least 2018[0]. There is no
| privacy.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act
| mrweasel wrote:
| > 3. We will continue to protect the privacy of European data
|
| Then stop fucking collecting shit tons of data that you do
| not need.
| stodor89 wrote:
| "We will continue to protect the privacy of European data."
|
| Brother, you're literally the thing we need protection from!
| henry_springs wrote:
| "Microsoft has a demonstrated history of pursuing litigation
| when that has been needed to protect the rights of our
| customers and other stakeholders. (...) When necessary, we're
| prepared to go to court."
|
| This is convincing. Or would be, if the present challenges
| wouldn't extend to the court system itself.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| What is really missing for Linux desktop nowadays? Still
| drivers? And I guess office software and gui configurability.
| graemep wrote:
| Mostly games and photoshop.
|
| Libre Office is more than sufficient for most people.
|
| > gui configurability
|
| A bit confused by that. Linux desktop environments tend to be
| more configurable, and you can configure most things end
| users want to configure in a GUI with the major DEs.
|
| Do you mean the sysadmins cannot configure as much in a GUI?
| I think that probably is a major barrier as it means a lot of
| retraining.
|
| Also, when you do something different from everyone else,
| every problem will be blamed on you for doing that.
| marcusb wrote:
| Games? A good portion of the Steam catalog runs just fine
| on Linux.
| graemep wrote:
| But not all of it, so if you want to play a particular
| game you might be out of luck.
| sgarland wrote:
| Codeweavers Crossover does an admirable job at filling
| the gap (shoutout for making AoE II run like it's
| native), but yeah, there are some that you can't get
| around using Windows for.
| atrus wrote:
| Single player is pretty much fine, it's multiplayer that
| really gets you. No Apex, Valo, LoL.
| resource_waste wrote:
| >Libre Office is more than sufficient for most people.
|
| Buddy, I love Fedora, but this is nonsense.
|
| The UI for Libre Powerpoint(or whatever its called) doesnt
| have text size on the main screen. The reddit mods on the
| subreddit literally ban people for complaining about it.
|
| Libre Office isnt the future.
|
| I just use Google sheets.
| eythian wrote:
| > The UI for Libre Powerpoint(or whatever its called)
| doesnt have text size on the main screen.
|
| I was curious, so opened Impress, typed some text, and
| saw that the font selection and size was by default open
| on the right-hand "Properties" panel, alongside all the
| various text configuration options. So that at least is
| not true.
| wltr wrote:
| What you mean by sysadmin GUI things? Linux is so much
| simpler, you don't need any GUI to configure it. And
| probably there's no point in that. Actually, there is a way
| to configure it using code (see Ansible), which is better
| (I'd say).
|
| I believe this way of configuring is much more efficient.
| Yes, you have to learn some new things, probably even new
| paradigm. But once you done, it stays mostly the same for
| long years, and is dead simple. I am, being Linux user for
| circa 15 years, see administrating Windows with dread. And
| most Windows sysadmins I know personally, when I tell them
| about Linux, and they react like it's some hidden obscure
| knowledge they have to spend ten years studying it. Which
| is vice-versa actually. I cannot imagine what that is, to
| be a Windows sysadmin, especially supporting all this
| mediocre engineering.
| graemep wrote:
| > Actually, there is a way to configure it using code
| (see Ansible), which is better (I'd say).
|
| It may be better, but it needs change and retraining.
|
| > I am, being Linux user for circa 15 years, see
| administrating Windows with dread.
|
| Me too. I do not much like using Windows either and it
| seems to be getting worse.
|
| > they react like it's some hidden obscure knowledge they
| have to spend ten years studying it.
|
| Partly FUD (lots of people make claims like "you have to
| compile your own software to use Linux") and partly
| because people hate change, and partly because it took
| them 10 years to learn Windows (many years ago) and they
| expect the same again.
| wltr wrote:
| It took me many years to accept Unix logic (macOS and
| Linux) too, but mostly because my first system was
| Windows.
|
| For some reason, things like disks, C:\ and D:\ were
| logical to me, while I couldn't grasp why cannot I put my
| files into root directory, and I'm forced to live in a
| subdirectory (/home/user) instead. It takes some time to
| re-learn, but I'm looking back with some dread. Things I
| accepted as simple, are actually unacceptably complex.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| > Linux desktop environments tend to be more configurable,
| and you can configure most things end users want to
| configure in a GUI with the major DEs.
|
| I was mostly thinking about the times I end up needing to
| tweak something through the terminal. I wouldn't expect
| most desktop users to want to do this. But maybe you're
| right that the most important stuff is covered by guis
| nowadays. There seem to be a lack of guardrails for low to
| semi-technical users though. I wonder if something like Nix
| could help with guardrails and being able to backtrack.
|
| Something like nix-gui seems like an interesting approach:
| https://github.com/nix-gui/nix-gui
| pastage wrote:
| Familiarity, Enterprise, last is hardware. If you buy a
| Windows machine first then you always run the risk of Linux
| having to play catch up hardware wise. I have not had a
| hardware problem with a new install since 2004.
|
| Familiarity being used with workflows is the biggest killer,
| and why I become a stupid user on Windows. Enterprise makes
| having Linux installed hard mostly because of checkbox
| security being a thing that favour monopolies
| criddell wrote:
| Software compatibility in general. There's still a lot of
| Windows-only software out there that people rely on.
|
| Also, security-by-default for apps would be nice. Snap and
| Flatpak are great starts but it's still to difficult to
| manage and too easy to install non-sandboxed software. Some
| random weather app should never have access to your photos,
| camera, file system, networking, etc... without the user
| explicitly granting permission.
| chuckadams wrote:
| There's Qubes, but even its enthusiasts are quick to say in
| its current incarnation it's not in any shape to be foisted
| on an end user. The other Linux flavor that sandboxes apps
| by default would be Android, which seems to have a few
| users.
| Tade0 wrote:
| I for one miss HDR support. Sure, there are distros which
| supposedly have it, but that doesn't include mine.
|
| It's coming, but not necessarily this year - perhaps the
| next. Until then I need to break out my Windows laptop to see
| HDR content.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Linux ships with more drivers than the proprietary OS out
| there.
|
| There are office software and I would be interested to know
| what gui configurability do you need that doesn't exist
| already. More often than not when someone ask a question
| about linux in a forum he will gets answers using the command
| line. This is not because you can't do it with a gui. The
| reason is that copying and pasting text is much easier than
| showing people how to navigate into menus using screenshots
| and videos. Text based interface are just superior when it
| comes to support and message boards. People use cli a lot on
| linux because it is convenient.
| fnordsensei wrote:
| I was disappointed that I had to upgrade to Steam Launcher 11,
| since it provided no benefits in launching Steam over Steam
| Launcher 10, or 7.
| amiga386 wrote:
| Windows: What is my purpose?
|
| Rick: You launch Steam
|
| Windows: OH. MY. GOD.
|
| Rick: Yeah, welcome to the club, pal.
| danielktdoranie wrote:
| Best comment on here.
| sgarland wrote:
| How dare you - Steam Launcher 11 makes a pleasant sound upon
| login, harkening back to its forebears, CD-ROM Launcher 95
| and 98.
| PuppetSoup wrote:
| > Linux desktop is getting better but I still wouldn't daily
| drive it,
|
| I'm genuinely interested what Linux is missing for you? I've
| been daily driving it for years and do all my work and gaming
| on it. Is it specific software or?
| rafaelmn wrote:
| 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 had desktop
| crashes
|
| - When I switched to KDE/Plasma 5 to get fractional scaling
| it was extremely unstable
|
| - Right now I upgraded my GPU to 9070XT - I'm still not sure
| if that would work on Linux yet because of driver support
| delay
|
| - Guitar Amp simulator software I use does not support Linux,
| neither does Ableton (which supposedly can run on proton but
| with many glitches)
|
| - The audio DAW situation was way too complicated and buggy
|
| - I spent days to get the distro functional and usable with
| Ardour and it would still crash constantly - I just wanted to
| run some amp sims :(
|
| It's just the little things and rough edges, but for example
| the fractional scaling stuff already improved because more
| apps that I use added Wayland support. And the emulation is
| getting better, with more users I could see larger DAWs
| supporting Linux as well. Not sure about the audio progress -
| JACK was a complete mess.
| promiseofbeans wrote:
| 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
| richrichardsson wrote:
| Alternatively Bitwig has Linux support and wouldn't be
| such a big jump.
| rafaelmn wrote:
| I tried that first but had trouble getting it to launch
| so I decided might as well goo with the OSS option. Boy
| was I in for a fun ride with getting the whole jackd and
| audio subsystems running.
| scq wrote:
| - Fractional scaling: That's because X11 itself does not
| support it. Many older Windows apps also have problems with
| fractional scaling.
|
| - HDMI 2.1: The HDMI Forum blocked it, as they don't want
| the details of HDMI 2.1 publically available. If you can,
| use DisplayPort, which is an actual open standard, and is
| better anyway. Nvidia works because they implemented it in
| closed-source firmware instead.
| https://www.phoronix.com/news/HDMI-2.1-OSS-Rejected
| rafaelmn wrote:
| > That's because X11 itself does not support it.
|
| Strangely enough Plasma was able to handle this
| regardless (guess it was misreporting the resolution to
| X11 app or something like that to make it work ?) it was
| a Gnome/Wayland thing.
|
| DisplayPort isn't an option - the TV only has HDMI in and
| converters suck (they crash constantly, even the
| expensive ones)
| asmor wrote:
| You can also buy active DP to HDMI 2.1 adapters now - if
| you already have an HDMI KVM for instance. Cable Matters
| makes one.
| kuschku wrote:
| > Right now I upgraded my GPU to 9070XT - I'm still not
| sure if that would work on Linux yet because of driver
| support delay
|
| You can install AMDs driver from their repo directly, it
| works just fine (using it every day).
|
| > I still cannot use my LG C4 as a monitor in full capacity
| because AMD on Linux does not support HDMI 2.1
|
| That will never be possible. To prevent pirates from
| breaking it (lol), HDMI has decided to keep HDMI 2.1
| secret. No open source version of HDMI 2.1 can exist.
|
| That said, AMD's driver repo includes both the open source
| drivers and some proprietary versions of the driver, maybe
| that'll work for you.
|
| Another option would be using a displayport output and a DP
| to HDMI converter, as e.g. Intel is using for their GPUs.
| commoner wrote:
| > 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.
| rafaelmn wrote:
| Sorry I misspoke - I was using Plasma 6, as that was the
| only way to get fractional scaling in X11 apps
| asimovfan wrote:
| you can use Carla in linux to run windows VSTs, i do it all
| the time. Works great. Midi and audio routing is also quite
| good. Ableton also runs with Wine.
| pyr0hu wrote:
| Anti-cheats are not really compatible on Linux IIRC. Maybe
| there have been improvements on this front but I think this
| was the main issue for a lot of gamers. This and there were
| cases when they were getting banned for playing through Wine.
|
| I once tried to set up a GPU passthrough setup to a Windows
| VM to play WoW but there were a ton of report that Blizzard
| just banned players for using QEMU VMs because they were
| marked as cheaters.
| wafflemaker wrote:
| Could some game programmer say if it's true that kernel
| level anti cheat is just bad programming?
|
| Primagean recently said that in a video commenting
| PewDiePie's "I switched to Linux" video. While he's
| apparently a good programmer (he worked at Netflix), he
| uses Vim, so I don't trust him. Edit: part about vim is an
| edgy joke.
| dijit wrote:
| Weird reason not to trust someone, and I think prime is a
| decent programmer.
|
| I work in AAA gamedev and have deployed kernel level
| anti-cheats before, and I'm aware how unpopular they are;
| so, sorry for that... you would also accuse us of "bad
| programming" if there was an overabundance of cheaters
| that went undetected and/or uncorrected.
|
| The answer is unfortunately complicated, the kernel level
| anti-cheats themselves aren't _necessarily_ poorly
| written, but what they are trying to do is poorly
| defined, so theres a temptation to put most of the logic
| into userland code and then share information with the
| kernel component- but then it's dangerous for the same
| reason that crowdstrike was.
|
| Not doing endpoint detection is also a problem because
| some amount of client trust is necessary for a good
| experience with low input latency. You get about 8ms in
| most cases to make a decision about what you will display
| to the user, that's not enough time to round-trip to a
| server about if what is happening is ok or not. Movement
| in particular will feel extremely sluggish.
|
| So, its a combination of kernel level code being harder
| in general (malloc, file access etc; are things the
| kernel gives you in user land after all), the problem
| space being relatively undefined (find errant software
| packages and memory manipulation), not being able to
| break out of the kernel level environment for an easier
| programming and iteration experience and trying to not
| affect performance.
|
| Lots of people think they can do it better, I'm happy to
| hire anyone who actually thinks they have a clue, it's a
| really hard problem honestly and the whole gamedev
| industry is itching for something better: even us
| gamedevs don't like kernel level anti-cheat, it makes
| debugging harder for ourselves too and introduces hard to
| reproduce bugs.
|
| PS; sorry if I'm not being eloquent, I am on vacation and
| typing from my phone.
| wafflemaker wrote:
| This is well written and quite easy to understand. (I
| only have cursory knowledge of programming.)
|
| However, what if Primeagen meant that HAVING to IMPLEMENT
| kernel level anti cheat is a symptom of bad programming,
| and not the anti cheat per se? (that is, with good enough
| programming, it could somehow be avoided).
|
| And kudos to you. I appreciate people in game dev, they
| can get a lot done in short time. I haven't played mmo
| fps since battlefield 3, and it wasn't that bad then. But
| I've heard that without kernel level they would be
| unplayable.
|
| Thank you for your time!
| int_19h wrote:
| The reason why you need kernel-level anti-cheat for it to
| be meaningful is because it necessarily needs to sit on a
| level lower than cheats themselves; and cheats can be
| very advanced these days.
|
| Long term I'm kinda hopeful that this is something that
| will be mitigated through AI-based approaches working to
| detect the resulting patterns rather than trying to
| detect the cheat code itself. But this requires
| sufficiently advanced models running very fast locally,
| and we're still far from that.
| daedrdev wrote:
| The cheaters are very good these days. They will happily
| sit in the kernel space to hide from the game if needed,
| because people pay a lot of money to cheat developers to
| be able to cheat.
| troad wrote:
| Good faith question: why is the server not the source of
| truth? With local interpolation for things like character
| movement, reconciled in heartbeat updates?
| dijit wrote:
| FD: Still on a phone on vacation. :)
|
| The reason is the round trip time mainly.
|
| Server corrections will feel like "floaty" or "banding"
| behaviour, we used to do that and people get upset
| because it "feels" wrong.
| looperhacks wrote:
| Not all cheating sends "bad data" to the server. Cheats
| like wallhacks or aimbots are purely clientside and can't
| be detected on the server
| jollyllama wrote:
| > so theres a temptation to put most of the logic into
| userland code and then share information with the kernel
| component- but then it's dangerous for the same reason
| that crowdstrike was.
|
| I don't understand, how could crowdstrike have avoided
| their issues by putting more code in the kernel? Or am I
| misreading your statement?
| dijit wrote:
| The crash was caused by a data parsing issue for the code
| in the kernel (the heuristics database).
|
| If they had not tried to parse data inside the kernel it
| would not have been an issue.
| bnolsen wrote:
| The opposite is true. He uses vim therefore I trust him.
| os2warpman wrote:
| 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
| and refresh rates so I have to use an enterprise-grade
| solution that can handle strange things like sync-on-green
| from 13w3 connectors and extremely rare outputs from UNIX
| workstations from the 80s and 90s.
|
| 2. If someone sends me a link on my phone it is difficult to
| copy and paste it to a Linux system.
|
| 3. Battery life on laptops, despite decades of improvements,
| is atrocious on Linux. If my laptop gets twelve hours of
| real-world use under OS A and six hours under OS B, I've got
| to use OS A.
|
| 4. All of my screens are 4K. Today, in 2025, a full decade
| after 4K became standard, the way various DE/WMs handle
| scaling is embarrassing.
|
| 5. Nvidia. Yeah, it "works" for about 2-3 kernel upgrades
| then you're greeted with a blinking cursor upon boot because
| of DKMS or some random reason like patching the system and
| not rebooting for a couple of days and then patching again.
|
| 6. There's little consistency across devices. When I log in
| to system A I want every single icon, file, and application
| to be the same as system B. iCloud/Onedrive do this. You can
| do this on Linux while on a LAN with remote home folders. I
| don't work exclusively on a LAN. Or I can set up
| puppet/ansible for my non-infrastructure systems and that
| makes me throw up in my mouth.
|
| Almost none of that is the fault of the kernel. That's
| irrelevant.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| Use kdeconnect. It is a universal app and works seamlessly
| dingdingdang wrote:
| Or Signal app.. it works well for this sort of thing!
| archvile wrote:
| Regarding 3. Battery life - I've had a ThinkPad Nano for
| several years that, on Windows 11 would get roughly 4-6
| hours battery, and this was optimized (very few running
| apps, no junk on startup, power saving settings on, etc). I
| switched it to Ubuntu (I was surprised that everything
| worked out of the box too, all of the hot keys and
| everything), and it will get about 8-10 hours doing the
| same tasks (primarily Chrome). So there is something to be
| said about Linux in general just being so much more "light
| weight" so to speak vs windows, which has become such a
| bloated mess. But the main issue I had was your point 4,
| since the thinkpads screen is 2K, everything was either too
| small (with no scaling) or too big (with scaling on).
| NortySpock wrote:
| Regarding 6 You can do this on Linux while on a LAN...
|
| Perhaps Syncthing would partially cover this? Not the
| applications, but the files ....
| sgarland wrote:
| Fully agree that Desktop Linux isn't nearly there. If I
| need a Linux DE for something, I spin up a Debian VM with
| XFCE, because that seems to suck the least, and I already
| have prebaked Debian images.
|
| For headless servers, I want nothing else. For a daily
| driver, as much as it pains me, nothing comes close to the
| Apple ecosystem. Apple Silicon is years ahead of everyone,
| and their interop with (admittedly only their own) other
| hardware is incredible. Universal Clipboard is magic. The
| fact that I can do nothing more than open an AirPod case
| and my phone registers it is magic. Finally, the fact that
| MacOS is *nix is absolutely icing on the cake.
| WorldPeas wrote:
| to me it's such a crime that for all the crowing in the
| world about the need for operational sovergnity, MacOs is
| the only OS that can offer such a high standard of
| operation. I've seen some countries try their hand at
| modifying android to compete but the lack of a
| competitive monolith to them has allowed them to become
| complacent
| sehansen wrote:
| I'll echo archvile here, in that I get excellent battery
| life running Linux. I've been getting 10-12 hours of
| battery life from the assortment of Asus and Thinkpad
| laptops I've had the past 15 years.
|
| To give a very concrete example, I have two identical
| Thinkpad T14 at work, one running Linux (Debian Bookworm
| with KDE) and one running Windows 11. When doing normal
| office work, the Linux laptop easily lasts a whole workday
| with >20% battery left at the end. The Windows laptop runs
| out of battery in less than 2 hours.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| Same here. Linux has been my daily driver for over twenty
| years now, at home and at work. (Not a gamer though.)
| skissane wrote:
| Our 12 year old recently switched from Windows to Ubuntu...
|
| and now I'm constantly getting these complaints "I can't get
| screen capture to work under Wayland... I switched from
| lightdm to sddm and I can't work out how to switch back... I
| accidentally started an i3 session and I can't work out how
| to log out of it."
|
| It makes me kind of miss Windows, in a way. It is good he's
| learning so much. But the downside is Linux gives him lots
| more ways to break things and then ask me to fix them for
| him. And a lot of this stuff I then have to learn myself
| before I can fix it, because most of my Linux experience is
| with using it as a server OS, where desktop environments
| aren't even installed
| frainfreeze wrote:
| Put him on debian stable with xfce and no sudo if he is
| such a bother. Sounds to me this is a people problem, not
| Linux problem. Do you miss windows or do you miss not
| having to spend time with kid on things that bother you?
| pmontra wrote:
| I'd say that screen capture probably works under X11 no
| matter what your graphic card is. However this kind of
| confirm your general feeling: there is no only one blessed
| and enforced way to do things so everything can break
| because of combinations.
|
| Examples (I've been on desktop Linux since 2009): shutdown
| actually reboots except for a few months with some lucky
| combination of kernel and nvidia driver. The brightness
| control keys didn't work for at least half of the years.
| They currently work. All of that has workarounds but I
| understand that some people legitimately fold and go using
| another OS.
| noAnswer wrote:
| Well, don't help him. People(me) grew up without the
| Internet or Smartphones and broke Windows on the family PC
| all the time. In 2000 when I got SuSE it only slowed down
| the breakdowns. He can always fix stuff himself by
| reinstalling the OS. As long as he doesn't format the /home
| partition he will not lose data. And he will learn his
| lessons.
| sgarland wrote:
| > 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 shockingly effective way to learn
| how things work.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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?
| tstrimple wrote:
| 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.
| ohgr wrote:
| My Linux desktop experience...
|
| I started with Linux installing it from floppy disks in
| about 1996.
|
| In 1995, I was back on Windows 95 within a week because I
| needed to get something done.
|
| In 2000, I was back on Windows 2000 within a week because I
| needed to get something done.
|
| In 2005, I was back on Windows XP within a week because I
| needed to get something done.
|
| In 2012, I was back on Windows 7 within a week because I
| needed to get something done.
|
| In 2015, I was back on macOS within a week because I needed
| to get something done.
|
| In 2020, I worked out I'm wasting my time on this.
|
| I watch my colleagues and friend struggling with it. Lots
| of small papercuts. Lots of weirdness. Lots of regressions.
| Plus many years of server-side experience says to me "I
| should probably just use FreeBSD" in that space.
| bnolsen wrote:
| My experience is the opposite. Epgot a hold of a bunch of
| floppies in 1991. Dual booted so I could play Diablo.
| Some time around '98/99 got tired of dual booting.
|
| Steam getting proton was a godsend, all those years of
| games became playable so now I have a huge back catalog.
| LtWorf wrote:
| Meanwhile people who actually get stuff done all use
| linux :D
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| 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 constantly hostile to any user
| who just wants a basic OS to use their computer with.
| ohgr wrote:
| 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.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| > Plus many years of server-side experience says to me "I
| should probably just use FreeBSD" in that space.
|
| Not a bad idea. This is exactly what I do on my daily
| driver.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| > i3 session
|
| Oh he'll figure it out eventually. This kid might be going
| places.
| PuppetSoup wrote:
| That sounds amazing, well not for you but for your kid :)
| It has been very valuable for me that I messed around
| windows and linux as a kid
| lolinder wrote:
| 12-year-old me installed Linux on an old desktop tower and
| I also broke things constantly. The difference is my
| parents were both humanities majors and I knew full well
| there was no point in asking them for help. Even at the
| time, the resources were all there for me to teach myself
| to Linux. Sure, I spent many many hours troubleshooting
| things instead of doing whatever it was I had as my end
| goal, but I was a kid--learning is the point!
|
| It's harder as a parent to know that you're _capable_ of
| solving their problem and still say no, but by age 12 that
| 's pretty much your primary job: to find more and more
| things that they can start doing for themselves, express
| your confidence in them, and let them figure out how to
| adult bit by bit. Breaking a Linux install and fixing it
| again is among the _lowest stakes_ ways that dynamic will
| play out from here on.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| Microsoft Office
| AlienRobot wrote:
| Not OP, but my experience with Linux is that seemingly absurd
| usability issues just keep piling up the more you use it and
| at some you just kind of give up and abandon any expectation
| of even a decent level of common sense from whoever is
| developing the system.
|
| I've listed some of which I encountered on Mint here
| https://www.virtualcuriosities.com/folders/273/usability-
| iss... Among them: AppImages just don't run unless you know
| how to make them run. This could be fixed with literally a
| single dialog box. There is no way to install fonts by
| default other than knowing where to put them and knowing how
| to get there. Every app that uses Alt+Click, e.g. for picking
| a color, won't work because that's bound by default by the
| DE.
|
| These issues may sound small at first but think of it this
| way: did nobody making this OS think about how users were
| going to install fonts? Or ever used an application that used
| the Alt key? Or did they just assume everyone would know what
| to do when they download an appimage and double click on it
| and nothing happens?
|
| And you can just feel that the whole thing is going to be
| like this. Every single time in the future you want to do
| something that isn't very extremely obvious, you'll find a
| hurdle.
|
| I even had issues configuring my clock because somebody
| thought it was a good idea to just tell users to use a
| strftime code to format the taskbar clock. I actually had to
| type "%Y-%m-%d%n%H:%M" to get it to look the way I want. And
| this isn't an advanced setting. This is right clicking on the
| clock and clicking "Configure." When I realized what to do I
| actually laughed out loud because it felt like a joke.
| Fellas, only programmers know these codes. Make some GUIs for
| the normal people.
| wltr wrote:
| 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.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| This is why Linux will always be a terrible OS. Every
| time someone says "Linux is bad because XYZ" someone will
| tell you "actually that's your distro, if you used distro
| ABC you wouldn't have that problem." But ABC has a
| different set of problems, which if you wasted 2 months
| to realize them and start complaining about, someone
| would just direct you to distro JKL.
|
| The fragmentation of Linux leads to a ping-pong of
| responsibilities. Linux can never be a bad OS because it
| isn't an OS.
|
| On Windows, if the file manager is bad, that's
| Microsoft's fault. Period. Nobody tries to say
| "actually..." _it 's Microsoft's fault_. Period. The same
| goes for the taskbar, for the control panel, for MS
| Paint, for even Microsoft Office. If Microsoft will fix
| it or make it worse depends on them, but nobody denies
| who is to blame and everyone know where the blame lies.
| Meanwhile I don't even know if the basic utilities that
| my distro distributes are under the responsibility of
| Mint's team or if they will just direct me to some random
| open source project's issue tracker if I start
| complaining about Celluloid or the "Drawing" app.
|
| You can't talk about Linux thinking only about the good
| parts, or you aren't inviting people to try Linux, you're
| inviting them to try your distro. "Linux" means the whole
| ecosystem, including all of its problems.
| int_19h wrote:
| 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
| wltr wrote:
| 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
| int_19h wrote:
| They have been converging for some time now. The taskbar
| in Win11 is very much a macOS Dock wannabe, for example.
|
| Personally, I find modern Gnome insufferable because it
| is non-customizable to the extent that even macOS only
| dreams of, and it doubles down on the modern trend of
| hiding important UI behind poorly discoverable gestures
| (active corners etc). Except their take on it is even
| worse in general for mouse users because of how much more
| "legwork" it adds - e.g. in a default Gnome setup on
| Fedora, you need to move mouse cursor in the top left
| corner for the dock to show up (so that you can switch
| apps or launch a new one)... but then it shows on the
| bottom of the screen, so now you need to move the cursor
| all the way there across the screen.
|
| But that's all subjective and not really my point. The
| point, rather, is that Gnome looks and behaves very
| different from Win11 and macOS both, in ways that don't
| make it easy for users to migrate (and in fact they
| specifically state that their UX design does not consider
| that a goal).
| bobmcnamara wrote:
| Frontend stability.
|
| I've been through enough KDE, QT, and Gnome API changes. It's
| just not where I want to burn my limited time.
|
| My first GDI programs still compile.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Compile sure, but they really had some bad ideas in those
| days. Remember MDI Multiple Document Interface? Having
| Windows within windows. It was a terrible idea.
|
| OLE? Sure, let every application talk to the DLL components
| of every other application! What could go wrong? Data wants
| to be free right? Spread the love.
|
| Making the desktop into a live webpage? And of course let
| any webpage happily load whatever binaries it wants from
| the internet. Super handy stuff. For some people more handy
| than others (really how this did not cause a mega Wannacry-
| event back in the day I don't understand)
|
| There is a reason this stuff is legacy. The only reason it
| still compiles is because some companies have spent
| millions on custom developments 20 years ago that nobody
| remembers how it still works. Not because you should still
| be using it :)
| nfriedly wrote:
| Not the OP, but hibernate support is one thing that sent me
| back to windows on my Framework laptop.
|
| In windows, I can just shut the lid and not worry about it,
| because it will sleep first, and eventually hibernate. Ubuntu
| would just sleep until the battery dies.
|
| I found instructions for enabling hibernate in Ubuntu, and
| they did make it show up in the power menu, but it didn't
| seem to work. (Which is presumably why it was hidden to begin
| with.)
|
| I also tried NixOS, but I couldn't even get it to boot the
| installer.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| Just have it suspend to disk and shutdown on lid close.
|
| I do this for arch Linux on my framework and it's fine.
| Startup time is under ten seconds, essentially zero battery
| drain, right back in your session with all apps/docs open.
|
| Hibernate is definitely better but still finicky even on
| Mac/Windows, machines can and do fry themselves, or require
| a hard reset if you unplug a device at the wrong time. Or
| unexpectedly continue draining the battery.
|
| It's a terrible, funky, poorly documented, exception filled
| world down in the low power states for hardware.
| zwaps wrote:
| Never had an issue on Mac, never got it to work properly
| on a single of my many linux laptops
| horsawlarway wrote:
| Try unplugging an external USB-C monitor while it's
| transitioning between states.
|
| It won't come back up ok, as recently as 6 weeks ago.
|
| Or the rampant reports of things like this: https://discu
| ssions.apple.com/thread/255642823?sortBy=rank
| WorldPeas wrote:
| the number 1 linux user accessory is the word "just"
| horsawlarway wrote:
| A computer is a tool - learn to use it like a tool.
| People spend far more time learning to drive than they do
| learning to use computers these days, but I'd wager the
| computer matters more.
|
| But too many companies have discovered that a docile
| "user" who's fed constant dopamine hits and has no
| actionable way to use a device other than open their
| wallet and fork over cash to watch more cats dance, or
| shop on more stores is _exactly_ what they want.
|
| Why don't you _just_ click here and pay for Onedrive. Or
| _just_ click there and accept Apple 's new ridiculous
| terms.
|
| If you just want to watch cats dance... you do you. I'll
| _just_ keep doing me over here.
| esskay wrote:
| For me its the UX. It just feels off, amaturish, messy. I
| can't really put my finger on it. I think the frankly crap
| fonts a lot of distro's choose to have as default dont help.
| And then the very "designed by a developer" feel to a lot of
| the UI.
|
| And I know someones franticly typing away right now - yes, I
| am fully aware you can customise things, but out of the box
| it should be pretty damn well polished so that you don't need
| to.
|
| Ubuntu's probably got the closest but it still just doesn't
| quite feel like they've nailed the experience.
| kjellsbells wrote:
| Yes, exactly. To be fair, projects like GNOME and distros
| like Ubuntu do publish human interface guidelines, but I
| dont think there is any enforcement and so jankiness creeps
| in. I suppose it's no different from Windows 11 still
| having programs that have UIs dating from Win2K. But at
| least the icons and colors and window chrome are
| professional looking.
| keyringlight wrote:
| One of the things I wonder about recently is whether
| there's too many distros, which is dividing effort and
| there's less drive to find consensus on certain issues when
| everyone has the freedom to do things their own way and
| experiment to explore their niche. That freedom is the
| point of free software to a large extent, but there's costs
| to it. It also divides the userbase so when something
| doesn't work you may need to dive deeper into the details
| than you'd like to see if there's anything particular about
| your species of the linux animal kingdom.
|
| It'd be interesting if there was a "Ubuntu v2" type effort,
| over 20 years later. Before ubuntu it's not as though
| desktop linux was an impossible dream or there was a lack
| of distros, but Canonical cleaned up a lot of rough edges
| to the extent it became a lingua franca. It's to the extent
| you can rely on ubuntu being in instructions for linux
| software, for example if there's any differences to
| required package names it'll be the ubuntu names over
| debian's.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Not OP but for me it's a solid remote desktop alternative
| that can compete with Windows' remote desktop experience.
| There's been some movement there, so perhaps in 5 years time.
|
| Also I really dislike how out of memory conditions just
| causes everything to grind to a halt for 5 minutes before
| something, typically Firefox, crashes. On Windows at least
| just Firefox gets very slow, but usually I can just nuke the
| process that eats too much memory. Not so on Linux as the
| whole desktop becomes unresponsive.
|
| And every now and then I still need to fiddle with some
| config files or whatnot. Not game breaking but annoying.
| bgro wrote:
| Linux is working great for me. AMD supposedly works better but
| my nvidia driver doesn't crash for videos like windows does and
| games seem to be working fine. Possibly except kernel anti
| cheat games. I have dual boot available as a backup.
| bnolsen wrote:
| I had a 3060 12g in my daughters computer. It would freeze
| every couple of weeks for who knows what reason. Swapped out
| her mobo/CPU/ram with mine and it still froze. Put in an
| rx5709xt and it's all good now. The 3060 is now in a server.
| I would have gotten the card if someone at work hasn't sold
| it to me for 100$. What originally made me leave Nvidia was
| because of how quickly Nvidia dropped driver support for not
| very old cards but I can't remember what card I had at the
| time.
| danielktdoranie wrote:
| Microsoft is never gonna give up on Windows NT "technology" no
| matter how bad it is and continues to be. They will continue to
| kick that dead horse until the company no longer exists. They
| genuinely port their UI (not the Windows 11 UI, it's horrible)
| and their apps to Linux. Release a Linux based OS, call it some
| shit like Windows Ultra not-shit edition. Accept Windows lost
| to Linux. God I hate Microsoft.
| sa-code wrote:
| It would be really interesting for enterprise or gamedev
| software to start supporting steam OS, I know a fair amount
| of people planning on switching from Windows to Steam OS when
| 10 is EOL'd
| int_19h wrote:
| The under-the-hood NT stuff is the best thing about Windows.
| p_ing wrote:
| The NT kernel/executive are the best parts of the OS, better
| than Linux in various places. I wouldn't give those up -- I'd
| give the userland up with a 100% bug compatible Win32 shim.
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| 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=755953
|
| On my machine, the power button is recessed and requires quite
| a bit of force to press. It is impossible to press
| accidentally, but the GNOME developers apparently know best.
| BarryMilo wrote:
| As much as I'm a diehard Linux defender, Gnome can get bent.
| XFCE does everything I want, which is to say, almost nothing.
| frainfreeze wrote:
| XFCE is wonderful. I wish it got more dev time
| dingdingdang wrote:
| XFCE is the Win 2000 UI of the Linux ecosystem, perfectly
| functional and fine; tweaks are possible if needed.
| cess11 wrote:
| It does a lot of things, though many are somewhat subtle,
| like screen locking timeout and stuff with networking and a
| bunch of utility programs and so on. I like to start off
| Xfce Debian and plaster i3wm over it, it's the best 'power
| user' setup I've come across.
|
| I wouldn't hesitate to put a 'regular' computer user in
| front of Xfce, it strikes a nice combination of simple and
| discoverable with very few annoyances. It's also where I go
| when I want to use some many-windowed application that
| doesn't fit into tiling.
| _kidlike wrote:
| Gnome sucks... KDE is awesome :)
| amiga-workbench wrote:
| I don't think that's the case any more. I'm running the
| latest Fedora release.
|
| https://pics.mos6581.com/misc/gnome-power.png
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| Interesting! Hopefully this is part of a broader change in
| their attitude.
| nottorp wrote:
| > the power button can no longer be configured to power off
| the machine
|
| Seriously?
|
| Are they removing ways to access the terminal or you can
| still at least do shutdown -h now?
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| Don't give them any ideas!
| sgarland wrote:
| From your link:
|
| >> gsd
|
| > gnome-settings-daemon.
|
| >> no-longer
|
| > Don't think that's in the OED
|
| >> This is rather unfriendly and considerably more effort
| than editing logind.conf
|
| > I don't like the tone in this sentence.
|
| I am dumbstruck that someone can be so utterly full of
| themselves that they can smugly correct someone's grammar,
| and an obvious acronym, only to turn around and clutch their
| pearls that their victim said mean things in the nicest way
| possible about their software.
|
| I knew there was a reason I haven't liked GNOME for years.
| XFCE is the way.
| DrillShopper wrote:
| That exchange is what happens when CADT and therapy
| language collide head first.
| ohgr wrote:
| No Linux desktop delivers what the user wants, needs or
| expect. Only what the developers think they need and find
| interesting to fix. It's more fun reinventing wheels badly
| than fixing shit generally. Some people are lucky this aligns
| with their needs, but for most it doesn't. It's jarring and
| unproductive.
|
| It needs corporate (or government!) drive behind it or that
| won't change. I'm not talking about Redhat either who appears
| to just be a holding pen for the above.
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| Some of the more influential developers are Red Hat
| employees, and Red Hat has retasked them with other work in
| recent years.
|
| That might be enough to prompt a change in direction, I
| guess time will tell.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Jeez that Bastien Nocera guy's reply
|
| > no-longer
|
| "Don't think that's in the OED"
|
| > This is rather unfriendly and considerably more effort than
| editing logind.conf
|
| "I don't like the tone in this sentence."
|
| What a genuinely horrible person
| swayvil wrote:
| I like Mate. I recommend it.
| jortr0n wrote:
| agree
| anothernewdude wrote:
| The best UI is one that stays consistent and doesn't change.
| Narishma wrote:
| XFCE in other words.
| LtWorf wrote:
| Try plasma.
| procaryote wrote:
| +1 plasma is pretty nice and also lets you reconfigure
| things if you like. The rate of "we broke this and you were
| stupid for ever wanting it" is much lower than for gnome
| rafaelmn wrote:
| Plasma was super unstable and janky, and the whole KDE
| desktop environment feels like developer art.
| LtWorf wrote:
| You last tried it 25 years ago right?
| robotnikman wrote:
| That's what I thought for a long time, until I tried it
| on the Steam deck since they use it for its desktop mode.
| I now use it as my daily driver desktop environment
| const_cast wrote:
| Early days of Plasma 5 definitely can be described this
| way. Although I think we all forget just how fucking ugly
| early gnome 3 was.
|
| But since mid Plasma 5 and on, it's incredibly stable and
| consistent in design. At this point, more consistent than
| gnome.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| Oh wow, that Nocera is great, correcting spellings to be
| passive-aggressive.
|
| > Review of attachment 312719 [details] [review]:
|
| >> gsd
|
| > gnome-settings-daemon.
|
| >> no-longer
|
| > Don't think that's in the OED
|
| >> gsd no-longer facilitates users overriding power key
| actions
|
| > And include references about when this happened.
|
| >> This is rather unfriendly and considerably more effort
| than editing logind.conf
|
| > I don't like the tone in this sentence.
|
| So helpful.
| prox wrote:
| I really dislike these turf sitting devs. They try to just
| defend their throne rather than looking at the merits.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| I've never been big on the Windows UI patterns but I recently
| started using KDE on one of my machines and it feels more
| polished than the Windows desktop. It has a few quirks but
| it's one of the most satisfying out-of-the-box desktops I've
| used, and I primarily use a niche dynamic tiling wm on all my
| other machines.
| troad wrote:
| 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.
| Zambyte wrote:
| Tiling WMs have more up front cost, but they don't
| require continuous tinkering if you don't want to tinker.
| I have been using the same SwayWM config for like 5 years
| now.
| const_cast wrote:
| 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.
|
| There's definitely a few misses, though. kmail in
| particular. But, overtime the applications actually
| improve, both in performance and features. This seems to
| be in contrast in gnome, where apps like Nautilus have
| been getting worse for a long time. And in contrast to
| Windows.
| robotnikman wrote:
| I started using KDE regularly after trying it out on the
| Steam Decks desktop mode. It works great! I had used it
| previously over a decade ago and was not impressed with it
| at first, but now it's my daily driver desktop enviornment.
| bardak wrote:
| 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
| solution is so inadequate. It's pretty telling that their
| arguments aren't sound when they have chosen to implement
| traditional system tray items such as a battery indicator and
| volume indicator as built in items on the task bar but they
| dismiss the idea that a chat app status indicator would be
| useful.
| amiga-workbench wrote:
| 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.
| Saris wrote:
| That sounds like an issue that could be solved by forcing
| icons and sizes for the tray.
| alyandon wrote:
| Just give users the ability to pin the icons they care
| about and hide the others in a pop-out panel like Windows
| does.
| Saris wrote:
| That too, very basic feature that should be in every DE.
| rendaw wrote:
| 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?
| amiga-workbench wrote:
| 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.
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| Mark Shuttleworth (of Ubuntu fame) had quite a bit to say
| about trying to get AppIndicators into GNOME.
|
| https://archive.is/M1MW2
| tristan957 wrote:
| 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.
| wltr wrote:
| 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.
| chuckadams wrote:
| 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.
| alyandon wrote:
| 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.
| chuckadams wrote:
| And clicks the button for you, a la
| https://youtu.be/7OwgyrTnTRM?si=etU_Wk9sUJ-xPx3h
| tremon wrote:
| That's because you're not the target audience: both Windows
| and GNOME primarily target the computer illiterate. If you
| know what you're doing and understand how the computer works,
| these desktops at best are a nuisance and more than likely to
| get in your way.
|
| My go-to comparison is power tools: there's a consumer line
| that's underpowered but pretty easy to use by anyone, and
| then there's the professional tools for people that know how
| to handle these tools properly: more power, versatile, and
| user serviceable.
|
| Smartphones take this to the extreme: on both Android and iOS
| every user is illiterate, because the OS is deliberately
| opaque to the user.
| abrouwers wrote:
| I'm not a huge fan of this statement - just because some
| users prefer simplicity, doesn't make them "illiterate."
| I'm happy to be a pretty tech-savvy gnome user - everyone
| uses a computing device for different purposes (as a tool,
| not a hobby). For example, it's great that KDE offers 2 or
| 3 kick-off menus, multiple clock plasmoids, etc, but just
| because a user is fine with a single, well-refined option,
| doesn't mean they are less "computer literate."
| luckys wrote:
| Weird, I'm using the latest stock fedora with gnome and the
| option is there to use the power button as "power off"
| command.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| I currently use Gnome on my machine (plain vanilla Ubuntu
| with no mods). It's such a love hate relationship. On the one
| hand everything you said and everything the child comments
| mention are totally valid and very annoying. But on the other
| hand (at least in my experience), Gnome has been the only
| solid DE that is "consistent", the only other one that got
| close was XFCE.
|
| I might eventually switch back to XFCE but for now I just
| need a DE that works and gets out of my way so I can write
| code, and for all it's faults Gnome still gets the job done.
| kettleballroll wrote:
| > outside from very specialist professional software (AutoCAD
| and Photoshop come toind), I think this is mostly about getting
| over the hump of inertia. Both myself (software Dec and ai) and
| even my parents (browser machine) use Linux for ages without
| hickups.
| rafaelmn wrote:
| I don't know - it's way more unstable in day to day use than
| say MacOS. The amount of times I had Slack crash on me or
| Chrome lock up in windows during calls is too frequent for
| daily use IMO. You could say that's a Slack or Chrome
| problem, but I don't have those issues on MacOS.
| sensanaty wrote:
| I just installed Pop!_OS about 4 days ago since I had some
| money to spend and managed to get a new SSD on the cheap, dual
| booting with Win10 (I would rather get beheaded than ever use
| W11 again, I don't care if I get ransomwared every day for the
| rest of my W10 life once support ends).
|
| Honestly, there's literally nothing missing from the experience
| for me. Dev tooling works way better (obviously), it feels much
| faster than both W10 and especially W11, I can still play
| Factorio and most other games in my 900-game Steam library
| (minus MP games with rootki- err, "advanced" anticheats), GPU
| and CPU drivers were a non-issue and bundled with the install,
| speakers work, bluetooth works, Wifi works (I'm on LAN but
| still).
|
| The only thing is that it's kinda ugly (personal taste, I
| actually like W10 aesthetics :p), but one GNOME Tweaks install
| later and I got it looking more like how I like it, plus
| they're (System76) working on Cosmos or whatever they're
| calling it and it's looking promising. Also text is a bit
| blurry/hard to read for me, but it could also just be my shitty
| monitors (and me being used to the excellent Macbook screens)
|
| Now, if you have some software you rely on like the Adobe
| suite, understandable, but I think for most people it's
| honestly the superior OS compared to Windows. I'm sure the
| experience on other friendly distros like Mint are similar,
| too.
| resource_waste wrote:
| >At this point I view Windows as a legacy/compatibility OS
|
| I literally thought about that yesterday as my Windows computer
| I was using for a legacy application froze/slowdown to the
| point of unusability. Not the first time this has happened. And
| nearly every day I have a UI issue with some programs not
| maximizing and staying behind old windows. I've had
| embarrassing moments when my OS/MS teams crashes during a
| meeting. Not to mention the literal ads scattered in multiple
| screens that sometimes are impossible to turn off(the bottom
| left button)
|
| My Fedora computer... Every year I have to upgrade it. That
| sucks. But its way better than anything I deal with on Windows.
|
| FYI, Fedora is so solid that I don't even lump it in with
| Linux. Linux has baggage from the Debian/Ubuntu fanboys who use
| a literally outdated OS and have either: No idea its outdated.
| Or confuse the word "Stable" with bug free, when it means
| version locked.
|
| If you havent used Fedora, you don't know where the current OS
| market is at. Fedora stands alone and separate from the rest of
| the Linux Distros. Its literally better than Windows. It just
| works.
| acka wrote:
| The bottom left button can be turned off by going into the
| taskbar settings (by right-clicking on the taskbar) and
| disabling taskbar widgets. Too bad if you have widgets that
| you do want to use.
| prmoustache wrote:
| > My Fedora computer... Every year I have to upgrade it. That
| sucks. But its way better than anything I deal with on
| Windows.
|
| It is just really one long reboot followed by a short one.
| The first one can be done while you are asleep. That is how I
| upgraded my daughters fedora from release 40 to 42.
|
| If you really don't like 6 months or yearly upgrades, there
| are rolling release distros with more incremental updates or
| super long term releases like Almalinux/Rocky, ubuntu LTS or
| ... wait for it ... Slackware!
|
| With flatpak and appimage, running a distro with an older
| kernel, desktop, libc and base libraries version is not that
| big of a deal as you can still use apps in their latest
| release
| TheAmazingRace wrote:
| I can't agree more. Fedora is such an excellent piece of kit,
| and with the now edition-tier KDE variant, you have the most
| premium Linux desktop out there that has a fresh-enough
| update schedule and is rock-solid stable.
|
| I even migrated from Arch to Fedora, just because I was
| getting tired of the occasional rolling update bricking my
| system.
| drooopy wrote:
| At this point you would have to pay me to use Windows or
| Microsoft Office... which is exactly what is happening at work.
| wltr wrote:
| Haha, I'm gonna steal this phrase!
| xattt wrote:
| The toolkit inconsistency between apps drives me crazy more
| than it should.
|
| Loading up a GTK app and switching to a Qt app is jarring,
| especially with basic things like a file picker.
|
| Daily driving desktop Linux feels like you are living in a
| lower-middle income family. Yes, you have some nice things, but
| you can usually tell they are cost-cut versions that have
| filler plates or missing features present on higher-end
| versions of the product (i.e. macOS).
| LtWorf wrote:
| But there's plenty of GTK and QT applications running in
| windows. How do you cope?
|
| Also osx the styling is all over the place, way worse than
| the occasional outlier in linux.
| xattt wrote:
| I've gone to some extent to avoid them.
| rafaelmn wrote:
| Yeah but on the flip side if your usecase is not blessed by
| daddy Apple - or you're not a fan of their hardware design -
| there is zero variety in the ecosystem and full lockdown.
| Like iPad is great hardware - but they will never let you run
| unlocked OS on it because it cuts into their profit source.
| In fact I suspect they will try to push MacOS into that
| direction more.
|
| So I'm hoping to be able to transition out of the ecosystem
| because I hate their model and like choice. But at the same
| time I have work to do and last time I tried it wasn't there
| yet. It was better than it was 3 years ago, and that was
| better than 5 years ago, etc. I would say not a lot left and
| the momentum is building, I just don't have the 20 year old
| energy to be the early adopter anymore :)
| tristan957 wrote:
| Assuming your apps are using the XDG desktop portal, they all
| use the same file picker.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| Explorer in windows 11 is truly death by a thousand needles.
|
| Today I was manually sorting a bunch of files into folders that
| I had opened as tabs.
|
| Drag file over tab, tab move and I now activate wrong tab.
|
| Second try: drag file to where tab isn't, such that the tab
| moves to where my mouse is. I now activate correct tab and can
| move the file to the designated folder. Single click the file
| and select a different file because file ends up at bottom of
| list when released, and then gets sorted after a second or two.
|
| Click F2 to start renaming the file, click left to deselect and
| move cursor to the beginning of file name. Start adding text,
| only for the entire string to get selected and everything
| overwritten.
|
| What a shit show.
|
| /rant
| ptk wrote:
| These issues have been the bane of my existence lately,
| especially your F2 renaming example.
| dmos62 wrote:
| My view is the opposite. Windows has always been a technical
| laggard, but it's getting better. I wouldn't have used it as my
| daily driver 10 years ago, but I do now. Though, I don't want
| to overstate this, it's still archaic, it's just that
| programming ecosystems brought better support for Windows, UI
| got better, and general QoL improvements smoothed out some of
| the roughest edges.
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| Gaming is the beginning of the end. It gets new users
| accustomed to a modifyable system and a downgrade from that to
| windows will become ever harder.
| longtimelistnr wrote:
| Wow yeah you just made me remember the Windows 10 mail app,
| which sure wasn't perfect but was ad-free and relatively snappy
| if I remember correctly. Then absolutely destroyed it and now I
| have to see Outlook 2016 and Outlook (new) as the results when
| I search "mail" from the taskbar
| anal_reactor wrote:
| What Linux distribution can be recommended to someone who wants
| to try out a desktop OS with experience as close to Windows as
| possible?
| tristan957 wrote:
| A distribution that uses the Cinnamon desktop by default can
| be a good starting point. Linux Mint, Fedora Cinnamon Spin,
| etc.
|
| Actually, a KDE Plasma desktop would also work well. I
| recommend the Fedora KDE Edition.
| ozgrakkurt wrote:
| Installing linux is multiple times easier and faster than
| installing windows now too.
|
| You don't need to install drivers one by one.
|
| Don't need to download that huge iso and write it to a usb for
| a long time etc.
|
| Linux just works on both my laptop and desktop just by
| installing it with the gui
| uwagar wrote:
| and you got no say in it. this is why u need an option like
| gnu/linux.
| mythz wrote:
| Abandoning Windows after 25 years for Fedora gets validated with
| every "Windows Innovation"
| croes wrote:
| Is the Office dev team part of the 30% id from AI?
| vjk800 wrote:
| I use Office software at work daily and I don't understand how
| that piece of shit can be so fucking slow. It's a serious
| productivity sink too; I often procrastinate small tasks just
| because I know half of the time doing it is spent waiting for
| various part of the office to load and that is somehow very
| stressful. I realise it is not a huge amount of time per se, but
| the psychological effect of the piece of crap stopping at any
| random time to load some bullshit becomes unbearable after some
| time. A bit like the chinese torture method where they would drop
| single drops of water on your head and over time it becomes
| painful.
| krembo wrote:
| It's so shitty and slow because it's a bloatware. Lucky for MS
| they are kind of a monopoly in the corporate world.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Office is like Jira: taken on its own, it sucks, but there
| are no real alternatives to it.
| BarryMilo wrote:
| 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.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > 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 mean rewriting important parts
| of central business applications, so you better have a
| _really_ good reason why you want to do the switch from
| Excel to LibreOffice.
| ponector wrote:
| We are working on backend for life insurance. They have a
| separate pricing team who creates calculations for
| different insurance products. The results are usually
| presented as excel files with heavy scripting inside.
| Really heavy! Have you seen 100mb excel files? I did!
|
| On the funny note: as powerful excel is, it cannot open
| two files with the same name from different folders! Or
| at least my version can't.
| smallerize wrote:
| Oh yeah, because references to the book name would
| conflict. If you open a new instance of Excel (e.g.
| shift-click the taskbar icon), you can open one file in
| each, but they can't reference each other.
| strongpigeon wrote:
| I used to work on Excel extensibility. I'll never forget
| when we were talking with one of the top 5 insurance
| companies in the US and they showed us this huge VBA
| macro and told us they processed the top 10% of their
| claims using this file. That moment made me realize Excel
| powers at least 10% of the world economy.
| pete1302 wrote:
| I have seen 600mb+ geodata based, script bloated, slow as
| hell, make your MB Air commit sucide type of excel every
| day for 4 months, working on a project.
| hannob wrote:
| 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?
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| Concerning
|
| > Why did you choose the expensive version
|
| Big companies have (sometimes hard negotiated) volume
| contracts with Microsoft, which makes Excel much cheaper
| to them than to, say, small companies. Thus Excel is not
| really expensive for them.
|
| Concerning
|
| > where you never know what it will cost next year in the
| first place
|
| For open source software there exists a similar risk that
| you don't know into which direction the product will
| develop.
|
| In the past, Microsoft has been quite reliable in keeping
| backwards compatible, and continue selling office for
| decades.
|
| In my observation, the zigzag course that Microsoft
| starting doing with Windows (but is now also doing with
| office), and, relatedly, deviating from the course of
| being very insanely dependable in delivering the software
| that companies need from them, is what by now got big
| companies at least have a look at what possible
| alternatives to Microsoft products could be.
| tech234a wrote:
| As a counterpoint, Microsoft is in the process of
| discontinuing Publisher and plans to remove it from M365
| installations next year.
| const_cast wrote:
| Excel is also used and abused. In finance and insurance,
| often Excel isn't used as a spreadsheet and visualization
| application. It's used as a database and application
| engine.
|
| This is really bad for a lot of reasons. Of course it's
| painfully slow, but it's also incredibly brittle and
| foot-gunny. Excel IS NOT a competent database engine or
| application engine. It makes JS and C++ look sane and
| safe.
|
| Excel shouldn't be switched out to LibreOffice. It should
| be switched out to a proper application with a proper
| database. What, finance bros don't know how to navigate a
| database. Tough fucking luck! In the 70s, secretaries
| could do that. They better figure it out. Because these
| existing "systems" are a disaster waiting to happen.
| freeAgent wrote:
| You are vastly underestimating the number of people who
| use pivot tables and even more "advanced" Excel
| functionality like Power Pivot/Query.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Entire departments run on the "pivot table" button. Most
| companies have at least one person who needs some Excel
| feature that isn't available in the common alternatives.
|
| I've worked on software that communicated with other
| software using custom Excel spreadsheets exported by yet
| different software, modified by humans. Every stage of
| the process was specs-incompliant and was using edge case
| features, but this process oversaw transport for goods
| worth millions every day. I tried my very best not to
| reach for a Windows VM, but there was nothing that could
| work on these files.
|
| For the vast majority of times, bikes are good enough for
| the majority of travels, yet there are cars everywhere.
| skrebbel wrote:
| > For the vast majority of times, bikes are good enough
| for the majority of travels, yet there are cars
| everywhere.
|
| Wow that was a _very_ Dutch comment! I wonder whether it
| resonates with the Americans here :D
| kermatt wrote:
| > software that communicated with other software using
| custom Excel spreadsheets exported by yet different
| software, modified by humans
|
| This sums up my entire experience of "Enterprise
| applications".
| Maxion wrote:
| For any modern SaaS to be enterprise grade, it _has_ to
| have an excel export feature.
| Qem wrote:
| LibreOffice has dynamic tables, an equivalent to pivot
| tables, for many years already.
| Nemo_bis wrote:
| They're also just called "pivot tables" in some locales.
| TinkersW wrote:
| I tried using LibreOffice on Windows, and it was super
| slow and kept crashing. It is also so ugly & annoying to
| use that it must be intentional.
|
| I really don't understand how this market is dominated by
| an abusive platform(MS Office) & a broken
| POS(LibreOffice).
| Maxion wrote:
| The only way for a competitor to have a chance at
| breaking in to the market, they need to be able to open
| any xls or xlsx file.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| I'm using OnlyOffice and it's pretty great. Definitely
| better than LibreOffice.
| kgeist wrote:
| Interesting, our company migrated from Jira to Youtrack (by
| JetBrains) and never went back.
| dfedbeef wrote:
| I migrated to a team where you just tell your manager
| what you're doing and they remember it.
| bokchoi wrote:
| Me too! It's been so much nicer not having scrum and
| moving jira tickets around. We still have an issue
| tracker but it doesn't rules our lives.
| msravi wrote:
| Apart from Excel, isn't google docs or libreoffice a viable
| alternative?
| alex989 wrote:
| Depends on what you do. You lose like 85% of the features
| but I bet most users never touch any on them.
| steebo wrote:
| There are alternatives. Loads of them. But using them
| requires thinking about what office software you use, which
| is too much for the vast majority.
| freeAgent wrote:
| The alternatives are honestly not as good.
| MarcelOlsz wrote:
| Linear.app and it's not even close.
| freeAgent wrote:
| It's not an Excel alternative?
| MarcelOlsz wrote:
| No it's a JIRA alternative.
| codr7 wrote:
| Definitely has everything I need and then some, a breath
| of fresh air compared to Jira.
| jeltz wrote:
| Libreoffice has vastly superior CSV support compared to
| Microsoft office. The alternatives often have different
| strengths and weaknesses.
| freeAgent wrote:
| I've never had a problem working with CSVs in Excel, but
| I'll take your word for it. For text operations, I
| frequently find myself using Notepad++ anyway.
| jeltz wrote:
| I had a colleague who did most of his work in Excel but
| used LibreCalc when he had to open a weird CSV and then
| cobtinued working in Excel.
| asdsadasdasd123 wrote:
| There are tons of alternatives, you just need to accept
| that its missing 1 or 2 features you like, because if the
| app supported the 1 or 2 features for everyone, it turns
| into jira/office
| gregmac wrote:
| > It's so shitty and slow because it's a bloatware
|
| Bloatware is unwanted software, usually pre-installed or
| otherwise not installed by the user, that slows down your
| computer and takes up space.
|
| So if a user _wants_ Office, it is, by definition, not
| bloatware.
|
| Even if we do consider it bloatware -- pre-installed,
| unwanted by the user, and using up system resources -- that
| isn't an explanation of why Office itself is slow.
| jajko wrote:
| If only slow... it has tons of accepted bugs and nobody seems
| to care.
|
| Yesterday I was using Outlook 365, there was one URL in one of
| the emails and I needed to find other emails containing it.
| Trivial and one of main use cases, right.
|
| Put URL in search box, 0 finds (including email I just
| copy&pasted it from). Mkay, maybe non-alphanumeric chars are
| messing with some internal regex or similar, stripped those
| into bare hostname, still 0 finds (when searching all
| mailboxes, including body).
|
| Maybe its some exchange settings, who knows, who cares. Pissed
| off fighting such basic tech instead of doing actual work.
| geekifier wrote:
| 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.
| brobdingnagians wrote:
| I am genuinely confused why search is so bad in the major
| email webapps/clients. Search is a well studied feature,
| and it seems like it's something that should just work but
| I can never find the thing I'm searching for in my email
| (especially O365). Knowing the date and then scrolling
| often seems to be the most accurate way of finding
| things...
| pessimizer wrote:
| I think search has been deprecated _in general_ because
| it gives the user too much control over the output.
| Through search, people can quickly find what they are
| looking for, which is bad. The goal has instead become to
| feed people tiny scraps and hints of what they 're
| looking for, while leading them on a long trip past any
| number of sponsors to where the thing they're looking for
| _might be_.
|
| I have to assume that Outlook email searches have already
| been set up to have ads injected into them, when/if one
| day Microsoft decides to flip the switch. Actually, I'm
| so out of touch with Windows they might already be doing
| this.
| gpderetta wrote:
| > The goal has instead become to feed people tiny scraps
| and hints of what they're looking for, while leading them
| on a long trip past any number of sponsors to where the
| thing they're looking for might be
|
| The airport approach to computing!
| hnick wrote:
| Search just seems bad in general in many applications. So
| many these days do not even support a verbatim (as in,
| find what I typed, exactly) search. They insist on
| ignoring certain characters, fuzzy matching, or treating
| everything as individual words and if it finds one it has
| done its job and earned a gold star.
|
| I have a feeling it's based on tokenising the input
| rather than a string scan like we'd do in the old days.
| Harder to match a literal string if all you have is a
| tree of tokens or something, I guess.
|
| Opengrok was the first time I ran into this years ago. We
| had a perl code base, perl syntax is well known as "an
| explosion in an ASCII factory", so it was a real pain
| trying to find exact text matches using it.
| 9dev wrote:
| As I'm professionally working on a niche search engine,
| let me offer this: it's a notoriously hard problem that
| seems simple at first, but requires catering to a
| bazillion different edge cases; every optimisation you do
| makes another case worse.
|
| Having said all that: I also hate how shitty search
| almost everywhere is. It's hard, but not that hard.
| nikanj wrote:
| I'd be happy if it catered to exactly one edge case:
| "Show me all emails that contain this word"
| 9dev wrote:
| ...which is the problem I was referring to: by optimising
| for that--your--use case, those of other people will
| invariably suffer.
|
| We only have a single text field as the input; how are we
| supposed to guess whether you want to find an exact match
| of the phrase, a fuzzy match, at least one of the words
| provided, or any other possible variation? Also, are you
| interested in the content, the subject, the recipient,
| the sender address you used, a header field, an
| attachment, what have you? Do you want them ranked by the
| frequency of the word, or the position from the start of
| the text? Does it count those occurrences in quoted
| passages of previous mails downthread multiple times?
| What if it's a stop word?
|
| There are of course sensible ranking solutions and
| heuristics for these questions. I just want to highlight
| it's not as trivial as it first sounds. Most mail clients
| probably don't ship with a Lucene index--while they
| should.
| const_cast wrote:
| You could always... you know... ask?
|
| I use Thunderbird and it's approximately 100x better at
| searching for emails than Excel. I just tell it if I'm
| looking in the subject, in the body, in the sender,
| whether it's fuzzy, etc, and then it pulls up the emails.
|
| Whereas Excel doesn't ask shit and, in return, doesn't
| have a working search.
| nikanj wrote:
| Having only a single box is a fully self-imposed leg
| wound
| floathub wrote:
| The answer, as always is Emacs :-)
|
| With mu4e (an Emacs package), you can have lightning fast
| searching across multiple mail accounts. And with a bit
| of work (https://stuff.sigvaldason.com/email.html) it
| will happily interoperate with Microsoft Exchange systems
| that require the OATH2 dance.
| dawnerd wrote:
| Have to make it bad so when they inevitably force AI into
| it, it looks amazing.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I think people overestimate 2000s desktop functionality.
| macOS's mail application is still the good old crap app
| that it was since its inception. Outlook Express, Windows
| Live Mail, and the Windows 8/8.1/10 mail apps are all
| terrible in their own ways. Thunderbird looks like a
| skinned version of a late 2000s mail client and works
| exactly like it. Search is quirky and unpractical, but in
| completely different ways Outlook's and Mail.app's are!
|
| Just for fun, try installing an old OS in a virtual
| machine. Marvel at how fast the old OS runs at modern SSD
| speeds. Get frustrated at the random hangs, freezes,
| glitches, and plain bad behavior of the programs you know
| and love, because the slowness of computers at the time hid
| it all. 20 cores of unused CPU power, dozens of gigabytes
| of RAM laying at the ready, disk I/O hitting dozens of
| megabytes per second, but still loading screens everywhere.
|
| I once tried to go back, for nostalgia's sake, just doing
| the things I do on an old OS for fun. The grass wasn't much
| greener back then, I just had lower standards.
| int_19h wrote:
| I mean, it was common knowledge even back then that
| Outlook Express etc was far from the best email client.
| That's why people used alternatives, so much so that some
| of them were paid and yet had enough people buying them
| to remain in business - e.g. The Bat!
| wkat4242 wrote:
| > and plain bad behavior of the programs you know and
| love, because the slowness of computers at the time hid
| it all.
|
| Can't really blame the devs though because very often
| they only had single threads and definitely single cores
| to work with.
| selimnairb wrote:
| 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.
| eastbound wrote:
| 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!
| nyarlathotep_ wrote:
| IIRC, VSCode packages a rg binary and uses it for search.
|
| Probably explains why it's something that works well and
| works fast.
| const_cast wrote:
| On KDE systems, we have baloo which forms a filesystem
| index for universal (spotlight-like) search. It's very,
| very fast and the ranking algorithm for krunner is quite
| good. I think commercial software should have no issue
| matching this.
| kergonath wrote:
| > 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.
| ctkhn wrote:
| I've given on on macos' mail app too, mailspring isn't
| perfect but I had mail crash and lose my emails and I
| couldn't have that happen again. never been an issue with
| mailspring
| no_wizard wrote:
| Wouldn't the server always have your mail?
| noisem4ker wrote:
| Not in the old days of the POP3 protocol, as opposed to
| today's IMAP.
| isaachinman wrote:
| Strong agree. Wrote a blog post about it here:
|
| https://marcoapp.io/blog/marco-an-introduction
|
| We're building an IMAP-primitive, cross-platform, multi-
| account email client that is single-digit-ms fast in terms
| of search.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Do you really have trouble with Mail.app search? Because I
| find it STARKLY better than Outlook.
|
| Granted, creating any kind of complex multi-clause query is
| a pain, but for simple searches it never lets me down
| whereas Outlook often just fails to find things I know are
| present.
| windward wrote:
| Only half a century after the creation of grep
| dspillett wrote:
| How bad the search features in outlook and teams are, is part
| of the reason I don't bother trying Bing. If you can't get
| local search right, global search is going to suck too.
| gpderetta wrote:
| They are completely unrelated teams (or at least used to).
| Might as well be different companies.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| 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 way and the web version can't even
| search in whole notebooks, just single folders.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| 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 specific PO
| number or software serial number).
|
| I find it immediately. Outlook strikes out. How do you
| break search so badly?
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Yeah it's because Mac Mail downloads every single email
| and indexes it locally. Outlook (especially the new one)
| is just electron-based webmail. So every search happens
| in the cloud and it doesn't have a full copy of all your
| emails.
|
| This would not be a problem for searching of course, if
| the cloud-based search worked properly. But yeah... About
| that. :X
|
| The "classic" outlook should do it better but it also
| doesn't in my experience. Though I can't use it anymore
| at work lately.
|
| It's just so bad because how can they screw this up? It's
| not some fluff feature, it's a core feature in an email
| client.
|
| PS: If you have copilot, it does a lot better at finding
| stuff somehow, though like every AI it can be a bit hit
| and miss.
| codr7 wrote:
| AI in search is just evil, something either exists or it
| doesn't, maybe on a Tuesday isn't good enough.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Well I have mixed feelings about it.
|
| For general searches, I agree. I want those to be highly
| deterministic. But in that case I need to know exactly
| what I'm looking for.
|
| There's also the other kind of thing though. "Who was
| that guy that I emailed with a year or two ago about this
| issue with MacBook Enrolment?". Yes I can filter by
| company or other details if I remember those things but
| sometimes I don't. And that's when AI search can really
| shine. Or not, it can also totally make up stuff out of
| its ass. But at least when it comes to emails that's
| easily verifiable.
| Vilian wrote:
| At that point i would switch to thunderbird or something
| wkat4242 wrote:
| It's really a PITA to use standard protocols on M365 now
| though. They try to make it as difficult as possible. And
| you need lots of exceptions from your admins. Everything
| is "legacy", the Microsoft word for Not Invented Here and
| they make it sound like something super dangerous.
|
| Of course that third party clients don't give them any
| telemetry, "insights", cross-marketing opportunities like
| copilot, has nothing to do with it.
| ii41 wrote:
| Wait, I have the impression that water torturing is either US
| or Soviet invention?
| gilgoomesh wrote:
| From Wikipedia on Chinese Water Torture:
|
| > Despite the name, it is not a Chinese invention and it is
| not traditional anywhere in Asia. Its earliest known version
| was first documented by Hippolytus de Marsiliis in Bologna
| (now in Italy) in the late 15th or early 16th century, and it
| was widely used in Western countries before being popularized
| by Harry Houdini in the early 20th century.
| bloak wrote:
| It turns out that there are lots of different water tortures
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_torture) but the
| "Chinese" one was first documented in Italy:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_water_torture
|
| However, I don't recommend reading those articles beyond the
| first paragraph and list of contents!
| earnestinger wrote:
| Americans go big. They use plenty more water during enhanced
| interrogation.
| brainzap wrote:
| Its sad because using Excel for quick decision making can be a
| super power, these days I use apple numbers
| EFreethought wrote:
| > "using Excel for quick decision making"
|
| Could you expand on that?
| deburo wrote:
| They switched to hardware acceleration in the last few years
| and they removed the toggle to disable it. It still sucks (perf
| & rendering issues, eg. scrollbar not updating when scrolling)
| and there's no way to go back to the old rendering engine
| unless you disable hardware acceleration on Windows as a whole.
| Lmao.
| naikrovek wrote:
| what kills me about things like this is if you load a 1-2
| decade old version of office on a computer today, things are
| _fast_.
|
| all they had to do was keep up with whatever features are
| different in excel between now and then and implement those.
| leaving the menus and UX mostly alone, only improving things
| as time went on. update the engine to do the new features,
| and update the UI only enough to expose the new features and
| make them accessible.
|
| but no... UX people don't have jobs if they can't redesign
| shit for no obvious reason. PMs don't have jobs if they can't
| force nonsense features no one ever asked for. Developers
| don't have jobs if they don't aggressively chase every new
| fad and tool and be in a constant state of learning (and thus
| unlearning).
|
| this whole world is stupid and was a mistake.
| bluedino wrote:
| The Mac version is even worse.
| behnamoh wrote:
| And it keeps getting worse. I had to downgrade to the Oct.
| 2024 version in order to get back to a working version.
| pete1302 wrote:
| Don't even get me started, it one of the many reason why I
| switched the job.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| For Word, go back to Draft (formerly Normal) mode. That makes
| pagination asynchronous and reduces clutter not needed while
| editing.
| rochak wrote:
| Why does a user need to know and do this to get a just
| bearable experience? Has the bar gotten so low?
| mpweiher wrote:
| Yes.
| superconduct123 wrote:
| Its because everyone is already locked in to use it
| godelski wrote:
| People question why I use vim and live in the terminal. Well...
| because everything opens up instantly, and I can run email,
| spotify, my editor, debugger, pdf reader, file browser (with
| image previewing), and everything I need while using less than
| a gig of ram and barely any CPU usage. Not only that, but I get
| to make the things work in the way I want them to, not have to
| constantly hunt down random menus. If I'm ever confused I just
| press ? and 99% of the time find the answer faster than it
| takes to reach for the mouse. Even a shitty TUI usually is
| faster and easier to use than many GUIs. Yes, there are times
| GUIs are better. I don't want a TUI Gimp, but for a lot of
| stuff, I don't need the bloat.
|
| It's because I don't like the Chinese torture you're referring
| to. We're programmers, we don't have to live that way.
| tomrod wrote:
| Neat. I'm interested in your TUI setup. What do you use?
| DecentShoes wrote:
| How are you doing Spotify?
| agumonkey wrote:
| Surprising to see after their talk about recent improvement due
| to rust rewrites of some components..
| nmeofthestate wrote:
| Microsoft have even managed to make Windows Explorer (a lot)
| worse in Windows 11. Auto-complete in the address bar completely
| unresponsive. Taking ten seconds to show the contents of a local
| folder. Interacting with network shares a complete usability
| mess. Looks a bit nicer though, and there's tabs. Goodness knows
| who they've got maintaining Windows.
| diggan wrote:
| > Taking ten seconds to show the contents of a local folder.
|
| I thought that was just me, and even though all hard-drives
| seemed healthy, I was planning on switching the oldest out. But
| if others are having the same issue, guess they just screwed up
| the software side of things, like usual.
| _hao wrote:
| Give the new FilePilot a try - https://filepilot.tech/
| Ponet1945 wrote:
| Check out https://filepilot.tech/
|
| It's in beta and no network drives or CJK yet but feels like a
| breath of fresh air.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| The address bar opens history when you click the delete button
| too.
| windward wrote:
| >Goodness knows who they've got maintaining Windows.
|
| Developers who exclusively test on SSDs is my guess. The UI
| hasn't taken into account any latency from reads.
|
| Having a HDD now moves you into power user territory.
| taspeotis wrote:
| Microsoft Corporation publish Windows File Manager via the
| Microsoft Store.
|
| https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9p7vbbbc49rb
| buyucu wrote:
| Office is a horrible product. Our company left office a few years
| ago and it turned out to be a huge productivity boost.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Unfortunately,RAM is cheap, but even more unfortunate is that all
| these lingering processes tend to take some CPU, threads, IO, and
| even GPU time (dropbox for example. Why the hell do you need GPU
| acceleration????)
| skc wrote:
| I just opened Word and Excel after a cold start of the OS
| (Windows 11)
|
| Both opened fully in a second. So just how much faster should
| these apps actually open?
|
| I suspect this is aimed at Enterprise installations where the
| machines are gunked up with corporate spyware.
| BSDobelix wrote:
| >I just opened Word and Excel after a cold start of the OS
|
| Test those things after a reboot (not a cold start) aka "Fast
| Startup", that's why you have massive uptime when you always
| shutdown/start and don't do reboot's.
| skc wrote:
| Ok so I've just done this and got the same result. It's
| plenty fast.
|
| And this is a pretty average laptop. Dell, Intel Core i7 with
| 16GB of RAM. In fact it's Windows 11 _Home_ edition.
|
| Now I bet if I tried this same test on my work PC which is
| supposed to be much beefier I'd probably find that it takes
| an extra second or two.
|
| This being HN I'm almost 100% certain that the only time
| anyone touches a PC is at work. And work PCs have loads of
| gunk on them.
| SietrixDev wrote:
| I have a different issue. First window of Excel starts fast,
| but try to open another file and you'd think that I just didn't
| click on it. 10 second wait times and I'm on a private machine
| without any corporate bloat.
| ourmandave wrote:
| I noticed that too. Double click xlsx outside Excel and
| wonder if it did anything.
|
| But if you open the 2nd spreadsheet (File > Open) from inside
| Excel, it opens up a lot faster in a separate window.
| amiga386 wrote:
| 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:
| https://www.openoffice.org/documentation/setup_guide2/1.1.x/...
|
| Microsoft made OSA made non-default in Office 2007, and _removed_
| it from Office 2010: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-
| versions/office/o...
|
| Are they now bringing it back?
| barrkel wrote:
| 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.
| alliao wrote:
| some of the modern software is slower because someone made a
| poor decision to fetch something from the network on the
| critical path of main functionality... kills me
| amiga386 wrote:
| Example: https://old.reddit.com/r/libreoffice/comments/upf8
| nw/fixed_o...
|
| Opening a spreadsheet, even if you don't want to print it,
| will hang for 30 seconds doing nothing, because LibreOffice
| will load the printer settings for the document, which
| means asking the printer, which if the printer is network-
| based and turned off, means a 30 second wait for a timeout.
|
| Reported in 2011, still not fixed:
| https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42673
| ramshanker wrote:
| This... 100 times. Everyday wastes my few minutes. 5
| figure commercial application, state of art in it's
| domain, but somehow It has to wait for that unresponsive
| network printer and hang the startup UI.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Best workaround (still ridiculous that it hasn't been
| fixed) is to set a PDF printer as your default printer.
| hedora wrote:
| I frequently have to do this for a different reason on
| MacOS/iOS. Printing directly sends bad PCL to my printer
| and makes it spew garbage pages.
|
| "Print to PDF -> print the PDF" is much more reliable.
|
| _sigh_
| sgarland wrote:
| 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...
| 101008 wrote:
| 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!"
| dns_snek wrote:
| And I thought we were past this sort of gatekeeping and
| elitism. I've worked with people who had a master's
| degree in CS who couldn't code their way out of a wet
| paper bag. In my experience there's very little
| correlation between how someone learned programming and
| how deep their understanding of the entire stack is.
| bsrkf wrote:
| Hope this doesn't come off as disrespectful, as in that I
| don't believe you, but out of personal interest, would
| you consider expanding on that? I'd love to hear about
| the particular example you were thinking of, or in what
| ways self-taught coders surprised you over academically-
| taught ones, if you've had experience working with both
| over a meaningful span of time. Also, if the case, in
| what ways self-taught coders were/are maybe lacking on
| average.
|
| If you've ever given answers to that in another comments
| on HN or elsewhere, feel free to link.
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| It's certainly true in my experience. The main thing that
| makes a difference is simply how curious and interested
| you are.
|
| Plenty of graduates simply got into to it to make money,
| and have no real deep interest. Some of them love the
| theory but hate the practice. And some of them are good
| at both of course.
|
| By contrast, self taught people tend to have personal
| interest going for them. But I've also worked with self
| taught people who had no real understanding (despite
| their interest), and who were satisfied if something just
| worked. Even if they are motivated to know more, they are
| often lacking in deeper theoretical computer science
| (this is a gap I've had to gradually fill in myself).
|
| Anyway, the determining factor is rarely exactly how they
| acquired their skills, it's the approach they take to the
| subject and personal motivation and curiosity.
| bsrkf wrote:
| Makes sense, out of all the potential differentiators the
| source of skill attainment simply isn't the necessarily
| dominant one. Thanks for the answer :)
| dns_snek wrote:
| Not disrespectful at all. I agree with the sibling
| comments, I think what allows someone to become a great
| software developer, to have great intuition, and to
| understand systems and abstractions on a really deep
| level is their curiosity, hunger for knowledge, and a lot
| of experience.
|
| There are many college educated software developers who
| have that sort of drive (or passion, if you will) and
| there are just as many who don't, it's not something
| college can teach you, and the same is true for self-
| taught developers.
|
| At the end of the day "self-taught" is also a spectrum
| that ranges from people who created their first "hello
| world" React app 2 months ago to people who have been
| involved in systems programming since they were 10 years
| old, and have a wealth of knowledge in multiple related
| fields like web development, systems administration, and
| networking. That's why I think it's silly to generalize
| like that.
|
| Software development is extremely broad so depending on
| the discipline self-taught developers might not be
| missing anything essential, or they might have to learn
| algorithms, discrete mathematics, linear algebra, or
| calculus on their own. I learned all of that in college
| but I'd probably have to learn most of it again if I
| really needed it.
| bsrkf wrote:
| Thanks for the answer, very nice of you to take the time
| even hours after.
|
| Guess it makes sense; I'm self taught myself, but thought
| academically taught developers should have a leg up in
| theory and mathematics, at the same time though, at one
| point I considered further formal education for myself
| (in at least paid courses and such), I realized that I
| don't think there's much I can't teach myself with the
| resources available (which includes high quality
| university lectures which are available for free).
|
| Thanks for your perspective.
| dbalatero wrote:
| Yeah, deep understanding I think is a matter of how much
| time you spend investigating the craft and improving.
| Maybe the real question is: what motivates that to
| happen? Maybe it's school type, but maybe it's not.
|
| My personal anecdotes, which are music centric but all
| apply to my software career:
|
| 1. I've studied music my whole life, and baked into music
| is the idea of continual practice & improvement. Because
| of this experiential input, I believe that I can always
| improve at things if I actively put a bit of energy into
| it and show up. I believe it because I've put in so many
| hours to it and have seen the results. This is deeply
| ingrained.
|
| 2. When I picked up bass in high school, I spent the
| first year learning tabs in my bedroom. It was ok, but my
| ability accelerated when I started a band with my friends
| and had to keep up. I really think the people you
| surround yourself with can: push you more, teach you
| things you didn't know, and make the process way more of
| a fun hang than doing it by yourself.
|
| 3. Another outcome from music education was learning that
| I really love how mastery feels. There's a lot of
| positive feeling from achieving and growing. As a result,
| I try to seek it out in other places as well. I imagine
| sports/etc are the same?
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > I've worked with people who had a master's degree in CS
| who couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag.
|
| "Programming" consists of an insanely large number of
| isolated communities. Assuming the respective person is
| capable, I would assume that he simply comes from a very
| different "programming culture".
|
| I actually observe a very related phenomenon for myself:
| the more I learn about some very complicated programming
| topics, the more "alien" I actually (start to) become to
| the programming topics that I have to do at work.
| sgarland wrote:
| I've worked with both (I personally have an unrelated BS
| and an MS in SWE, which I used purely to get my foot in
| the door - it worked), and IMO if someone has a BS, not
| MS, there's a decent chance they at least understand
| DS&A, probably took an OS course, etc.
|
| That said, I have also worked with brilliant people who
| had no formal education in the subject whatsoever, they
| just really, really liked it.
|
| I'm biased towards ops because that's what I do and like,
| but at least in that field, the single biggest green flag
| I've found is whether or not someone has a homelab.
| People can cry all they want about "penalizing people for
| having hobbies outside of their job," but it's pretty
| obvious that if you spend more time doing something -
| even moreso if you enjoy it - you will learn it at a much
| faster rate than someone who only does it during business
| hours.
| jeltz wrote:
| 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.
| sgarland wrote:
| Please see this comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43863885
|
| We have excellent metrics between PMM and AWS Perf.
| Insights / Enhanced Monitoring. I assure you, on-disk
| temp tables were to blame. To your point, though, MySQL
| 5.7 does have a sub-optimal implementation in that it
| kicks a lot of queries out to disk from memory because of
| the existence of a TEXT column, which internally treated
| as a BLOB. Schema design is also partially to blame,
| since most of the tables were unnecessarily denormalized,
| and TEXT was often used where VARCHAR would have been
| more appropriate, but still.
| StefanBatory wrote:
| I wish. I did my undergrad, and now doing my Masters, at
| a top 10 uni in Poland.
|
| Trust me so much, some of the stuff I learned there was
| actively harmful. Half of subjects were random fillers,
| and so on.
|
| I envy Americans so much with that, their CS education
| seems to be top notch.
| athenot wrote:
| It's also a Product issue: "fast and snappy" is almost
| never on their list of priorities. So product managers
| will push devs for more features, which satisfy the
| roadmap, and only get concerned about speed when it
| reaches painful levels.
| jMyles wrote:
| > only get concerned about speed when it reaches painful
| levels.
|
| ...and by then, the requests for performance are
| somewhere between onerous and ridiculous.
|
| I'm as wary of premature optimization as anyone, but I
| also have a healthy fear of future-proofed sluggishness.
| osigurdson wrote:
| Agree. I've heard people say things like "it is slow
| because it is not C++". When, in reality, the problem was
| I/O and N^2 algos.
| zahlman wrote:
| I've been trying to impress upon people from my own
| research in Python packaging: Pip is slow because it
| defaults to pre-compiling bytecode (and doesn't invoke
| multiprocessing for that, although this seems to be in
| the works from the discussion I've seen); imports
| _literally hundreds_ of modules even when it ultimately
| does nothing; creates complex wrappers to set up for
| connecting to the Internet (and using SSH, of course)
| even if you tell it to install from a locally downloaded
| wheel directly; caches things in a way that simulates
| network sessions instead of just actually having the
| files... you get the idea.
|
| "It's written in Python and not e.g. in Rust" is simply
| not relevant in that context.
|
| (For that matter, when uv is asked to pre-compile, while
| it does some intelligent setup for multiprocessing, it
| still ultimately invokes the same bytecode compiler -
| which is part of the Python implementation itself,
| written in C unless you're using an alternative
| implementation like PyPy.)
| osigurdson wrote:
| There may be a bit of culture at play sometimes as well.
| If a language isn't meant to be fast, then perhaps devs
| using the language do not prioritize performance very
| much. For some, as long as it is possible to point to
| some externality ("hey this is Python, what do you
| expect") this is sufficient.
|
| Of course, not always the case. C++ is a good counter
| example with a massive range of performance
| "orientedness". On the other hand, I suspect there are
| few Rust / Zig or C programmers that don't care about
| performance.
| zahlman wrote:
| To me, Python is more of a challenge than an excuse when
| it comes to performance.
|
| On the flip side, I've seen quite a few C developers
| using their own hand-rolled linked lists where vector-
| like storage would be more appropriate, without giving it
| a second thought. Implementing good hash tables from
| scratch turns out not to be very much fun, either. I'm
| sure there are off the shelf solutions for that sort of
| thing, but `#include` and static compilation in C don't
| exactly encourage module reuse the same way that modern
| languages with package managers do (even considering all
| the unique issues with Python package management). For
| better or worse.
|
| (For what it's worth, I worked in J2ME for phones in the
| North American market in the mid 00s, if you remember
| what those were like.)
| jeltz wrote:
| But is it actually faster by any significant amount on
| your workload? Did you benchmark? Temporary tables in
| databases rarely actually do disk IO in any blocking code
| path but mostly just dirty buffers in the OS or in the
| database itself and then something writes it to disk in
| the background. This limits throughput but does not add
| much extra latency in the common cases.
|
| Edit: It still might be a bad idea to waste the IO if you
| do not have to but the latency of a temporary table is
| usually RAM latency, not disk latency even for temporary
| tables on disk.
| sgarland wrote:
| Didn't have to, prod benchmarked it for us, twice.
|
| If you're curious, the EBS disks Aurora uses for
| temporary storage, when faced with a QD of approximately
| 240, can manage approximately 5000 IOPS. This was an
| r6i.32xlarge.
|
| My hypothesis is currently that the massive context
| switching the CPU had to do to handle the interrupts
| slowed down its acceptance of new connections /
| processing other queries enough such that everything
| piled up. I've no idea what kind of core pinning /
| isolation AWS does under the hood, but CPU utilization
| from disk I/O alone, according to Enhanced Monitoring,
| was about 20%.
| jonhohle wrote:
| https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832
| hedora wrote:
| That really should include "sync write 4KB to an SSD".
| People don't realize it's purely in-RAM on the disk these
| days (you pay a PCIe round trip, and that's about it).
| sgarland wrote:
| I do want to add that many of the devs I work with and
| have worked with are genuinely interested in learning
| this stuff, and I am thrilled by it. What bothers me is
| when they neither have an interest in learning it, nor in
| fixing their bad patterns, and leadership shrugs and
| tells infra teams to make it work.
| deeThrow94 wrote:
| This is also a classic emacs mistake, so I wouldn't put it
| all on age.
| mjmas wrote:
| Opening any ms office app with the network disconnected
| opens up almost instantly...
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| What I am glad to leave behind and forget like a nightmare
| is Windows local networking with shared folders etc - these
| never worked nice and the last time anybody I know used
| these was pre-2010. Today we just use NextCloud, Matrix,
| email and Git for all our collaboration needs.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| Who's "we"? I work for a company who drank the MS cool-
| aid, so running Windows on laptops, using Office365 for
| e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets, teams for chat,
| sharepoint / onedrive for shared ressources.
|
| Have you tried launching a local app by typing in the
| start menu on a default win11 install with limited / slow
| internet access? Good times. How about doing some
| operation (say delete an e-mail) in one window of "new"
| outlook and having the others refresh?
|
| I have never understood how some otherwise reasonable
| people are able to consider this absolute shitshow of a
| work environment good enough.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| 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 always challenging.
| That one took ~2-3 seconds to cold start.
| tremon wrote:
| I don't think these apps were ever built to be fast, they
| were built with the resource constraints of the time.
| Moore's law is what's making these apps fast.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Word 2000 definitely was not _very quick_ on a
| contemporary office PC (Pentium II or III), though I 'm
| pretty certain it was much, much faster than desktop O365
| is on a contemporary office PC today, despite those being
| >100x faster. So Fermi would estimate modern office to
| probably require at least 1000x more resources than
| Office 2000.
| rollcat wrote:
| Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh.
|
| This is even more sad with Apple. My M1 Mac felt
| incredibly snappy with Big Sur, but is getting ever so
| slightly slower with each update. My iPhone SE2 is a
| complete disaster.
| mleo wrote:
| They used no networking services either. Now, I open a
| shared PowerPoint and am stuck waiting for a couple of
| minutes while it is syncing or doing who knows what.
| People have no sense of what templates they copy from
| other documents causing the size of the file and load
| times to bloat.
| kyrra wrote:
| If you like fast apps, maybe check out FilePilot, a Windows
| explorer alternative.
|
| https://filepilot.tech/
|
| It's amazingly fast, though it's missing some features and
| will be really expensive when it leaves beta.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| In my opinion Total Commander has always been the most
| ideal (also fast) file management tool since Windows 3.x.
| It was named Windows Commander back in the days but it
| still supports Windows 3.x as Total Commander.
| vlachen wrote:
| I never knew it was a Windows program. I've been using it
| on my Android phones for years.
| gymbeaux wrote:
| Do you know how it compares to Dolphin for interacting
| with very large (100k+ files) directories? Dolphin is the
| only file manager I've found that keeps up with the large
| directories- GNOME (Nautilus) and Windows Explorer are
| dogshit slow, even after the file list populates. macOS
| Finder is somewhere in the middle but still very slow.
| worthless-trash wrote:
| When you have 100k+ files sometimes the filesystem itself
| matters. Have you set your expectations appropriately,
| aka compared it to a raw ls/dir ?
| Lammy wrote:
| Check out ROX-Filer https://github.com/rox-desktop/rox-
| filer
| ct0 wrote:
| how does it compare to directory opus?
| QuicklyNow wrote:
| I made an account to thank you for this. I've been
| looking for a _fast_ alternative to explorer since
| Windows XP. But one that doesn't require a change in
| workflow. This is the fastest I've tried by far. I've
| only been using it for 5 minutes, but I'm sold. Earlybird
| discount too!
|
| Thank you for posting this, and if you have any other
| speedy apps you'd recommend I'd welcome suggestions. Mine
| top suggestions are Speedcrunch [0] (calculator app) and
| Everything [1] file search combined with Listary [2]
|
| [0] https://github.com/ruphy/speedcrunch
|
| [1] https://www.voidtools.com/
|
| [2] https://www.listary.com/
|
| (For reference, I've tried Total Commander, DOpus, Files,
| Explorer XP, XY Explorer, Explorer ++, FreeCommander,
| Double Commander, Q-Dir)
| jpsouth wrote:
| Everything (the tool) is ridiculously fast, I've used it
| for quite a while now and it's nice to see it mentioned
| here.
| zerkten wrote:
| Have you tried xplorer2? I only know about it because I
| was into Windows programming using the WTL eons ago.
| kyrra wrote:
| I'll check these out, thanks!
|
| I learned about File Pilot (whose author posts here:
| https://x.com/vkrajacic) from Casey Muratori
| (https://x.com/cmuratori) who pushed it a bunch because
| he loves fast things.
| aloisdg wrote:
| I like dolphin but pcmanfm is fastet
| Oleksa_dr wrote:
| All of these 'fast' file managers have a big problem:
| they don't support system calls to dialog windows.
|
| Mostly users interact with the explorer in this scenario
| to open/save a file in 'BrowserOS'
| zerkten wrote:
| >> they don't support system calls to dialog windows.
|
| It's a little unclear what you mean exactly. Do you want
| the browsing experience changed for the system's file
| open/save dialogs? i.e. a third-party file explorer opens
| instead with all of it's features.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| > 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 - vulnerability mitigations, cryptography
| etc.
| dbalatero wrote:
| 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 bottleneck
| we have comes from needing to use iframes to sandbox and
| isolate code for security. Having to load code in iframes
| adds an additional network load before we can get to page
| render.
| zerkten wrote:
| 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.
| apricot wrote:
| > It seems fascinating how much more efficient Windows
| apps were back in the nineties
|
| I remember everyone complaining about how bloated they
| were at the time. Pretty sure someone in 2055 is going to
| run today's Office on 2055 computers and marvel at how
| streamlined it is.
| toast0 wrote:
| I mean, as mentioned upthread, Office 97 (and Office 95
| before it) _was_ slow to load, so slow that they added
| the start up accelerator.
|
| You can run Office 97 now and it'll start fast because
| disk i/o and cpus are so much faster now. Otoh Excel 97
| has a maximum of 256 columns and 64k rows. You might want
| to try Excel 2007 for 16k columns and 1M rows, and/or
| Excel 2016 for 64-bit memory.
| spitfire wrote:
| The 90s was a time when computers were doubling in speed
| every 18 months. I remember office 97* being lightning
| fast on. A 366mhz celeron - a cheap chip in 1998.
|
| You could build fast software today by simply adopting a
| reference platform, say. A 10 year old 4core system. then
| measuring performance there. If it lags then do whatever
| work needs to be done to speed it up.
|
| Personally I think we should all adopt the raspberry pi
| zero as a reference platform.
|
| Edit: * office 2000 was fast too with 32 megs of ram.
| Seriously what have we done?
| hedora wrote:
| Oddly, I remember timing it, and the startup accelerator
| didn't seem to speed up Office start time. It slowed
| everything else down though.
|
| I rebooted a lot though (mostly used Linux by then), so
| maybe it was just fighting with itself when I immediately
| fired up office after boot.
| Illotus wrote:
| My recollection is completely different, software was
| really slow on contemporary PCs in the 90s. Spinning
| disks, single core cpus, lot more swapping due to memory
| being so much more expensive.
| hedora wrote:
| This might match your recollection. x86 Win95 raytracing
| in javascript on my arm laptop is usable, but sort of
| slow:
|
| https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows95
|
| Once it boots, run povray, then click run.
|
| It took over 2 minutes to render biscuit.pov, though it
| did manage to use SSE!
| reaperducer wrote:
| _It took over 2 minutes to render biscuit.pov_
|
| We used to wait two hours for a mandelbrot to display on
| a Commodore 64, and were delighted when it did.
| barrkel wrote:
| Contemporary software was slow. You could tell you should
| consider more RAM when the HDD light and chugging noises
| told you it was swapping. But if you ran the same
| software with the benefit of 10 years of hardware
| improvement, it was not slow at all.
| spookie wrote:
| Nah, it's about favouring bad programming practices, not
| thinking about the architecture of the software and
| giving developer experience a bigger role than end user
| experience. All these stemming from a push to get to
| market earlier or making employees replaceable.
| taeric wrote:
| I'd guess less on "bad programming practices" and more
| "prioritizing development speed?" Mostly inline with your
| next point. We value getting things released and do not
| have a solid process for optimizing without adding new
| things.
|
| Ironically, it was specifically the longer feedback cycle
| of long builds and scheduled releases that seems to
| specifically have given us better software?
| spookie wrote:
| Fair, I just think there is a huge overlap between bad
| practice and speed of development. The latter fuels the
| former in many ways.
| taeric wrote:
| Oh, I likely fully agree with you on it. I'm just
| pointing at the hazard that a lot of these practices
| aren't, intrinsically, bad. Rapidly getting something
| done is, generally, a good thing. I'm not entirely sure
| how to make it not the priority, but it does feel that
| that is the problem.
| ralphc wrote:
| How much modern security do I need to write & print a
| term paper or church bulletin on my own computer?
| bell-cot wrote:
| > I wish companies would go back to building fast apps...
|
| Similar to the slow-opening glove box in a car, many humans
| perceive slow computers & software as a signifiers of
| importance/luxury/prestige. At least at first. By the time
| they are familiar with the slow software, and impatient to
| just get their work done - too late, SnailSoft already has
| their money.
| mdhb wrote:
| Instead they decided to build it with React if I remember
| correctly which is truly one of the fucking dumbest ideas
| I've ever heard of.
|
| Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17310738
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| > 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.
| jacurtis wrote:
| I actually use IntelliJ and Sublime interchangeably
| throughout the day. I default to sublime for most work
| because of how snappy fast it is. I only load up Intellij
| when I need to do something that leverages its full IDE
| capabilities. To second your comment, I encourage people to
| try Sublime, you will be shocked at how fast it feels.
|
| I still love IntelliJ, its a great product. But it is slow,
| bloats the computer, needs constant updating. But at least
| its incredibly powerful as a tradeoff to the bloat.
|
| The Office debate is slightly different. It is slow, bloats
| the computer, needs constant updating. But unlike IntelliJ
| i dont feel that there is any advantage to all that added
| weight. We are using a word processor. We type words onto a
| blank screen. Why is Word and Outlook the most common
| applications to crash my computer that has an M1 Max Chip
| with 48Gb of Memory? I can literally run and build AI
| models on my computer with no problem but you boot up
| Microsoft Word to type words onto a blank page and you have
| a 33% chance of crashing the computer.
|
| Google Sheets and Docs are actually better tools in my
| opinion for most people. 99% or more of the features you
| need are available in the google equivalents. These
| products are fast and run in a browser! The UI is actually
| VASTLY superior to Microsoft's ribbon. I still can't find
| stuff that I need on a routine basis and have to google it.
| I don't have this problem when using Google's office
| equivalents.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| >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.
| gymbeaux wrote:
| Man you can still get by with Photoshop CS3 as far as
| features go.
| erkt wrote:
| Lightroom 5 is miles better than what they offer today.
| Lightroom Creative Cloud is steaming dog shit. Adobe
| seriously gets to extort over $120 a year out of me simply
| for the privilege of reading raw files from a new camera.
| They provide zero positive contribution these days. All of
| these incumbent tech companies extract rents on algorithms
| written decades ago. This needs to end. I am very excited
| for AI to get advanced enough to whip up replacement
| programs for everything these companies maintain monopolies
| over.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| > I am very excited for AI to get advanced enough to whip
| up replacement programs for everything these companies
| maintain monopolies over.
|
| You are wildly off base. The algorithms aren't difficult
| or special. They were written by people reading text
| books for the most part.
|
| They are able to sit on an on old algorithm for decades
| because the DMCA made interoperability and selling
| cheaper tools like that basically illegal.
|
| Because of the DMCA, the work that was done to make IBM
| PC clones would have been close enough to illegal to kill
| all the businesses that tried it. They still tried with
| the liberal IP laws at the time.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yeah that era of Office, pre-ribbon, was pretty nice as
| Office goes.
| Illotus wrote:
| Ribbon was better for most people who didn't have all the
| shortcuts in muscle memory. It is much more discoverable.
| hedora wrote:
| That might have been true for the first five minutes of
| using the software (assuming the person had not yet used
| a CUA application before the first time they used
| office). After that, it was strictly worse.
|
| CUA ~= "standard menus + keyboard shortcuts for dos and
| windows":
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access
| Illotus wrote:
| Not really, it is much more discoverable for most people.
| If interested, MS UI lead has a blog about lot of the
| reasons for ribbon and on the research backing it
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh
| hedora wrote:
| The problem with it was that it constantly moved the
| buttons around. So, you had to constantly rediscover it.
| hedora wrote:
| Sadly, none of the links I tried work anymore. (Though
| the conversation in the comments where they have to
| explain how to open a ppt in powerpoint is internet
| gold!)
|
| I was hoping to figure out what led to design
| incompetence so spectacular that people would still be
| discussing it after 17 years.
|
| I think there's a clue in the abstract: The author claims
| they made 25,000 mock UI screenshots, but doesn't mention
| user studies or even internally prototyping some of the
| concepts to see how they feel.
| allears wrote:
| Anecdotal evidence from myself: Although I've been using
| Word for many decades, I've never had much "muscle
| memory" in terms of accessing features. It was always a
| case of learning which pulldown menu held the required
| function.
|
| When the accursed ribbon came along, "discoverability"
| went out the window. Functions were grouped according to
| some strange MS logic I could never understand, and it
| takes me twice as long to format a page as it used to.
| Now, I basically just use Word for text entry, and if I
| want an elegant format, I use a graphic design app like
| Illustrator.
|
| Judging from what I've read online, you may be the only
| person who actually likes the ribbon.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I find its discoverability is terrible. I am always
| hunting for what I want to do and it's never anywhere
| that seems to me to be sensible. I usually end up doing a
| google search for what I want. Perusing the ribbon takes
| me much more time than just looking at the various
| options under the old style menus.
|
| Also traditional menus had some traditional standards.
| Once you learned what was under "File" or "View" or
| "Insert" or "Format" it was often pretty similar across
| applications.
| layer8 wrote:
| The Ribbon is more difficult to visually grep for me than
| the classic menus. Not to mention that a number of
| functions are still hidden in mini-menus in the Ribbon.
|
| It wouldn't be so bad if keyboard navigation was as good
| as with the classic menus, but having to press the Alt
| key separately, and general increased latency, kills it.
| mcswell wrote:
| Hieroglyphics are the opposite of "discoverable". That's
| why they became uninterpretable for almost two thousand
| years, until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. And even
| then it took considerable work to figure out how they
| functioned. In the Ribbon, in order to discover what some
| hieroglyph does, you have to mouse over it. Since there
| are lots of hieroglyphs there, that's a lot of mouse-
| over. And no, the Ribbon's images make no sense in 99% of
| the cases.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > 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.
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| Telemetry, syncing to the cloud by default...
| dagmx wrote:
| Neither of which contribute significantly to size though.
| The size aspect is what these new preloaders would help
| with.
| afavour wrote:
| 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 meant you had no
| choice but to care. Modern tech has "freed" us from that
| concern.
| trealira wrote:
| Niklaus Wirth wrote about this in 1995, in his essay _A
| Plea for Lean Software._
|
| _About 25 years ago, an interactive text editor could be
| designed with as little as 8,000 bytes of storage.
| (Modern program editors request 100 times that much). An
| operating system had to manage with 8,000 bytes, and a
| compiler had to fit into 32 Kbytes, whereas their modern
| descendants require megabytes. Has all this inflated
| software become any faster? On the contrary, were it not
| for a thousand times faster hardware, modern software
| would be utterly unusable._
|
| https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/co/1995/02/r2064/1
| 3rR...
|
| That said, as someone fairly young, I still don't think
| that makes it wrong or something only an old man would
| think. Software seems to perform exactly as well as it
| needs to and no more, which is why hardware advances
| don't make our computers run software much faster.
| joelwilliamson wrote:
| "What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away"
| nextos wrote:
| Aside from slowness, feature creep leads to poor quality,
| i.e. tons of bugs and user confusion with ever-changing
| graphical interfaces.
|
| If software was simpler, we could afford to offer some
| formal guarantees of correctness. Model check protocols,
| verify pre and post conditions a la Dafny, etc.
|
| There's too much change for the sake of change.
| aylmao wrote:
| > There's too much change for the sake of change.
|
| +1 to this. Like a lot of issues, I think the root is
| ideological, but this one in particular very clearly
| manifests organizationally.
|
| The companies building everyday software are ever
| bigger-- full of software engineers, designers and
| various kinds of managers who are asked to justify their
| generous salaries. At an individual level I'm sure
| there's all sorts of cases, but at a general level
| there's almost no other option but to introduce change
| for the sake of change.
| aylmao wrote:
| > There's too much change for the sake of change.
|
| +1 to this. Like a lot of issues, I think the root is
| ideological, but this one in particular very clearly
| manifests organizationally.
|
| The companies building everyday software are ever
| bigger-- full of software engineers, designers and
| various kinds of managers who are asked to justify their
| generous salaries. At an individual level I'm sure
| there's all sorts of cases, but at a general level
| there's often almost no other option but to introduce
| change for the sake of change.
| naikrovek wrote:
| 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
| naively. The developers I support often simply are not
| thinking about the problem they're solving and they solve
| the problem in the simplest way (for them) and not the
| simplest way for a computer.
|
| Software is an inefficiency amplifier, because the number
| of developers for a piece of code is much smaller than
| the number of computers that run that code; how much coal
| has been burned solely because of shitty implementations?
| I'd wager that the answer is "a LOT!"
|
| Even if you don't care about coal usage, think about how
| much happier your users would be if your application was
| suddenly 5x faster than it was previously? now think of
| how many customers want their software to be slow
| (outside of TheDailyWTF): zero.
|
| languages like javascript and python remove you _so much_
| from the CPU and the cache that even if you were thinking
| of those things, you can 't do anything about it. JS and
| Electron are great for developers, and horrible for users
| because of that amplification I described above.
|
| I am dead tired of seeing hustle culture overtake
| everything in this field, and important things, to me,
| like quality and performance and support all fall
| straight down the toilet simply because executives want
| to release features faster.
|
| things like copilot could help with this, i hope.
| presumably copilot will help introduce better code into
| applications than a daydreaming developer would, though
| the existence of vibe coding sort of nulls that out
| probably.
|
| one thing that AI will do quite soon is increase the
| amount of software that exists quite dramatically. and I
| am kinda concerned about the possibility that it's all
| going to suck horribly.
| ralphc wrote:
| What's your proposal for a "compromise" language between
| programmer productivity and performance, especially for
| multiple threads and CPUs? Go, Rust, a BEAM language?
| naikrovek wrote:
| Jai seems to be an excellent start. Possibly Zig as well.
|
| Both are written/designed by people who care a lot about
| application performance and developer experience.
| colonial wrote:
| > presumably copilot will help introduce better code into
| applications than a daydreaming developer would
|
| Copilot is trained on Github (and probably other Git
| forges w/o permission, because OpenAI and Microsoft are
| run by greedy sociopaths.)
|
| I'd wager that the majority of fleshed out repositories
| on these sites contain projects written at the "too-high
| level" you describe. This certainly seems to be true
| based on how these models perform ("good" results for web
| development and scripting, awful results for
| C/++/Rust/assembly...) - so I wouldn't get your hopes up,
| unfortunately.
| tough wrote:
| I dont know if its just the training data, or that CRUD
| and webapps are more inherently easy to parrot away.
|
| Low level programming means actual -thinking- about the
| system, resources, and language decisions etc
|
| Even humans struggle with it, Its much easier to build a
| website than say a compiler, for anyone, humans and llm's
| included
| colonial wrote:
| That probably plays into it as well. I have yet to see
| any convincing evidence that contradicts LLMs being mere
| pattern parrots.
|
| My personal benchmark for these models is writing a
| simple socket BPF in a Rust program. Even the latest and
| greatest hosted frontier models (with web search and
| reasoning enabled!) can only ape the _structure._ The
| substance is inevitably wanting, with invalid BPF
| instructions and hallucinated /missing imports.
| tough wrote:
| imho these tools are great i fyou know what you're doing,
| becasue you know how to smell test the output, but a
| footgun otherwise.
|
| It works great for me, but it is necessarily an aid
| learning tool more than a full on replacement, someone's
| still gotta do the thinking part, even if the llm's can
| cosplay -reasoning- now
| njarboe wrote:
| My standard is that software should appear to work
| instantly to me, a human. Then it is fast enough. No
| pressing a button and waiting. That would be great.
| p_ing wrote:
| > 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 multi-threading makes sense it
| should be employed, but it's difficult to do well.
|
| Otherwise, it's up to the OS to balance threads
| appropriately. All major OSes do this well today.
| naikrovek wrote:
| It's not about programs being multithreaded. It's about
| computers running multiple programs at once on different
| threads and they all perform well.
|
| One can write software that uses the CPU cache in non-
| dumb ways no matter how many threads your program has.
| You can craft your structs so that they take less space
| in RAM, meaning you can fit more in cache at once. You
| can have structs of arrays instead of arrays of structs
| if that helps your application. Few people think of
| things like this today, they just go for the most naive
| implementation possible so that the branch predictor
| can't work well and everything needs to be fetched from
| RAM every time instead of building things so that the
| branch predictor and the cache are helping you instead of
| impeding you. People just do the bare minimum so that the
| PM says the card is complete and they never think of it
| again. It's depressing.
|
| The tools to write fast software are at our fingertips,
| already installed on our computers. And I have had zero
| success in getting people to believe that they should
| develop with performance in mind.
| autoexec wrote:
| > languages like javascript and python remove you so much
| from the CPU and the cache that even if you were thinking
| of those things, you can't do anything about it.
|
| Even operating systems don't get direct access to the
| hardware these days. Instead a bunch of SoC middlemen
| handle everything however they like.
| ppenenko wrote:
| I commiserate with your frustration with developers
| writing things suboptimally all too often. However, I
| disagree with the assumption that it's a JS/Python vs C
| issue.
|
| Example: when VS Code came out, it was much, much faster,
| more responsive and stable than Visual Studio at the
| time. Despite being based on Electron, it apparently was
| much better on architecture, algorithms and
| multithreading than VS with its C++ and .NET legacy
| codebase. That really impressed me, as a C++ programmer.
|
| Overall, it feels like folks who idealize bygone eras of
| computing didn't witness or have forgotten how slow
| Windows, VS, Office etc. used to feel in the 90s.
| Nevermark wrote:
| > Overall, it feels like folks who idealize bygone eras
| of computing didn't witness or have forgotten how slow
| Windows, VS, Office etc. used to feel in the 90s.
|
| Let's normalize speed over time like we do dollars, so we
| are talking about the same thing.
|
| Given the enormous multiplier in CPU and storage hardware
| speeds and parallelism today vs. say 1995, any "slow"
| application then should be indistinguishable from instant
| today.
|
| "Slow" in the 90's vs. "Slow" in 2025 are essentially
| different words. Given unclarified co-use pushes _several
| orders magnitude_ of either speed or inefficiency
| difference under the rug.
| wonnage wrote:
| Counterpoint: single threaded performance hasn't improved
| much in the past 20 years. Maybe 5x at best. And
| virtually every UI programming environment still has
| problems with work done on the main thread.
| DrillShopper wrote:
| Single thread performance increased every processor
| generation, and is still doing so today.
| naikrovek wrote:
| "Slow" is when the human waits on the computer.
|
| The promise of computing is that what was slow in the
| 1960s and 1970s would be instant in 1990. And those
| things were instant, but those things aren't what people
| did with computers anymore.
|
| New software that did more than before, but less
| efficiently, came around, so everything felt the same.
| Developers didn't have to focus on performance so much,
| so they didn't.
|
| Developers are lazy sacks who are held skyward because of
| hardware designers alone. And software developers are
| just getting heavier and heavier all the time, but the
| hardware people can't hold them forever.
|
| This cannot continue forever. Run software from the 1990s
| or 2000s on modern hardware. It is unbelievably fast.
|
| Maybe it was slow in the 1990s, sure. I ask why we can't
| (or won't) write software that performs like that today.
|
| The compiler for Turbo Pascal could compile something
| like a million lines per second in 1990. We have
| regressed to waiting for 60+ minute C++ compile times
| today, on even moderate project sizes.
|
| Debugging in visual studio used to be _instant_ when you
| did things like Step Over. You could hold the Function
| key down and just eyeball your watch variables to see
| what was going on. The UI would update at 60FPS the
| entire time. Now if I hold down that key, the UI
| _freezes_ and when I let go of the key it takes time to
| catch up. Useless. All so Microsoft could write the front
| end in dotnet. Ruin a product so it is easier to write...
| absolute nonsense decision.
|
| All software is like that today. It's all slow because
| developers are lazy sacks who will only do the minimum
| necessary so they can proceed to the next thing. I am
| ashamed of my industry because of things like this.
| antod wrote:
| Office 4.3 loading on Win3.1 was glacial. I haven't
| forgotten.
| vacuity wrote:
| I'm also young and heavily favor simple, quality
| software. Age is a highly coarse proxy for one's
| experiences, but in this case I think it has more to do
| with my personality. I have enough experience in
| computing that I don't think I'm making demands that are
| unrealistic, although they are certainly unrealistic if
| we maintain current incentives and motives.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| It was always like that
| ysofunny wrote:
| we don't have software engineering anymore than the
| romans had civil engineering
|
| we now DO have civil engineering but that is it
| mapt wrote:
| I saw the writing on the wall when I had to install a
| couple 150MB IDEs to run 101-level Java programs in the
| mid 2000's. 150 megabytes. MEGABYTES. I could consume
| about 1 kilobyte per minute of fantasy novel text in
| uncompressed ASCI, call it 1/8th that fully compressed.
| That means this compressed binary you're handing me is
| around 1.2 billion minutes of work (more if ingesting a
| novel is faster than writing/testing/debugging a program)
| for what is functionally a text editor, file manager,
| syntax library, compiler, and debugger. Pretty sure that
| got done in 150 kilobytes a generation earlier. A
| generation later, maybe it will be 150 gigabytes.
| netsharc wrote:
| I looked it up, you want an illegal taxi? 168 MB:
| https://apkcombo.com/uber/com.ubercab/
| reaperducer wrote:
| _install a couple 150MB IDEs_
|
| Not Java, but an IDE in 4K:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_Programming
|
| Having used it quite extensively (Well, five solid days
| over two weeks, which is about 1000x longer than most
| people gargling on the internet), it's surprisingly
| capable.
|
| Imagine if someone with the same talent and motivation
| was working on today's hardware.
|
| <aside> Someone on Atari Age wrote a LISP for the same
| machine.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > 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.
| ryandrake wrote:
| And just when we think we can't make software any more
| inefficient, slow, and bloated, they release things like
| Electron, where you ship an entire browser with your app!
| And then when we think it can't even get worse, we have
| Docker and containers where we ship the entire OS with
| the application.
|
| I'm looking forward to when app developers ship you an
| entire computer in the mail to run their text editor.
| bloomca wrote:
| The problem with Electron is that business-wise it is an
| excellent decision. You can get by with a few people to
| wrap the web app and integrate it with the OS, and then
| get updates pretty much for free.
|
| Yet for the user it is bad -- bloated, slow, feels non-
| native, has specific bugs which are hard to address for
| the devs, etc.
|
| I don't see any light for the desktop UI development
| unless there is some lightweight universal rendering
| engine. Tauri with WebView is somewhat promising, but it
| has problems on Linux and it is hard to target older
| systems.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| It's an excellent business decision... right up until
| your customers abandon you because you make bad quality
| software. Like many businesses have found time and again,
| deliberately sacrificing quality for profit is a short
| term gain for a long term loss.
| ryandrake wrote:
| It's a pretty OK example of a negative externality. A
| little like polluting: Just dumping your waste into the
| environment is business-wise an excellent decision. You
| avoid the cost and everyone else has to deal with the
| downsides.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| >> It's all about stuffing as many features in as quickly
| as we can...
|
| The problem isn't "engineering" the problem is the
| culture of product management. (Note: NOT product
| managers per se).
|
| I ask this basic question, how many Directors, VP's or
| CPO's do you know who got their job based on "cutting out
| unused features"? If you can find one, it will end up
| being the exception that proves the rule. The culture of
| "add", "new" and "shiny" doesn't reward keeping things
| lean and effective. T
|
| In the tangible world we look to accountants for this
| sort of thing (because they tend to have costs). Think
| cheap Costco hotdogs and free cookies at Double Tree. No
| one in product, dev and accounting is going to sit down
| and try to justify loosing some code, features and maybe
| a few customers to make it faster when you can just
| "engineer" you way out of it and not have to sell less is
| more.
| zero_bias wrote:
| > I ask this basic question, how many Directors, VP's or
| CPO's do you know who got their job based on "cutting out
| unused features"?
|
| Google goes a step further and kills entire apps
| ambicapter wrote:
| I really don't think we've "lost it", I think performance
| has just not been a consideration in the engineering of
| Office for a long time, if ever.
| Salgat wrote:
| It's a matter of resource allocation. Lowering your
| design requirements for performance can save significant
| developer cost. Also, Word in 2025 is doing a lot more
| under the hood than 97.
| acdha wrote:
| How does someone get promoted at Microsoft? How do they
| avoid being seen as a low performer?
|
| Performance just isn't on that list, and it's often more
| and harder work than a given new feature took to create.
| Office users are getting what Microsoft is designed to
| deliver.
| gregates wrote:
| I love that I work at a place (Row Zero) where caring
| about performance is baked into the culture, and I can
| spend days fixing weird perf edge cases our users
| discover without management asking why I'm wasting my
| time. And it's office software, no less!
| 90s_dev wrote:
| > we've lost the art of software engineering
|
| Yes! This is what _all_ my projects are geared towards
| restoring. The big one is not _quite_ ready to announce
| yet, but I am very proud of it, and extremely excited to
| release it, to solve exactly that: it makes engineering
| _fun_ again!
| makapuf wrote:
| Well that username matches
| lispisok wrote:
| 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.
| stcroixx wrote:
| Skilled programmers working on boring stuff like office.
| Most programmers today don't have the skills they think
| they do and would find working on something like Office
| boring.
| layer8 wrote:
| Ironically, at the start of my career working on
| something like Office was my dream, and would actually
| still be. I reserve to change my mind once I've seen the
| code base, though. ;)
| skywhopper wrote:
| How much engineering time do you think is spent optimizing
| startup time on most modern editors? I'm guessing next to
| nothing.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| I will make this analogy:
|
| Have a large ZIP file. Preferably like a few gigs and lots
| of (small) files.
|
| Try to open it with the built-in Windows 11 tooling from
| Microsoft. It's going to be super slow to even show
| anything never mind unpack it.
|
| Now install say 7-zip and do the exact same thing(s) and
| it's going to be instant opening and unpacking it takes a
| much much smaller amount of time (only limited by disk
| speed).
|
| Turns out optimizations / not doing stupid things is still
| a thing even with all this raw power we now have.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| 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?!
| cogman10 wrote:
| > 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 swing, SWING, as it's UX. A framework
| written in the 90s filled with warts. Yet, it's still a
| better experience than the more recent JavaFX experience.
| Swing simply has more support.
| ezst wrote:
| Call me an idiot, but I still gladly take Swing and
| javafx over JS and monstrosities like react. The state of
| Qt is also very good. Web won because the distribution
| model is easier on the user, and because managers thought
| UX designers would be making whole apps now, saving on
| rates. Not because it's technically superior.
| cogman10 wrote:
| You're not an idiot for liking the Swing/javafx/QT way of
| doing things. Or even for thinking they are technically
| superior.
|
| The bigger issue isn't the tech, it's the ecosystem.
| While you might like swing, you simply are never going to
| find the swing version of Material UI or D3.js. That's
| more the problem that you'll run into.
|
| For some of our apps because we need charting, we are
| using GraalJS just to run the JS charting library to
| export to an image that we ultimately put on some of our
| downloadable reports. It's a huge pain but really the
| only way to do that.
| jlarocco wrote:
| Because an entire generation of developers and their
| managers believe the hardware is so fast there's no point
| trying to optimize the software.
|
| Besides, the only thing that matters is getting tickets
| "done" before the arbitrary sprint deadline in 2 weeks, so
| best not to spend any extra time cleaning up or optimizing
| the first thing that works. You can't think about
| performance until the sprint dedicated to performance.
| boringg wrote:
| 100% thought process is: why waste internal resources on
| speeding up software when the user has enough hardware to
| manage the workload.
| codr7 wrote:
| Battery use is a pretty big concern these days; also,
| some users like running several things at the same time.
| bradley13 wrote:
| Cruft built on frameworks using libraries with a zillion
| dependencies, some of which are cruft built on
| frameworks...
| layer8 wrote:
| > How did we get back to this though?
|
| By piling up nonzero-cost abstractions left and right.
| wk_end wrote:
| And it's easy to understand how we get into that trap.
| Each one of those abstractions is very low-cost, so it
| seems harmless.
|
| And getting out of the trap is hard too, because no
| single abstraction is to blame - you can't just hit
| things with your profiler and find the hot spot. It's all
| of them. So now you either live with it or rewrite an
| entire stack of abstractions.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I'll take the hate for this, but I have been using gemini
| to build narrow scope apps and they are extremely fucking
| fast compared to their bloated software package suite
| $200/user/month counterparts. It's amazing how fast and
| efficient programs can be when not trying to cover every
| use case for every possible user at every possible moment
| on top of a sea of tech debt programming.
|
| While true LLMs fall flat on their face when fed massive
| codebases, the fact of the matter is that I don't need a
| 200k LOC program to accomplish a single task that an LLM
| can do in 2k LOC.
|
| To give an example, we have proprietary piece of software
| that is used to make (physical) product test systems using
| flow charts and menus. It's expansive and complex. But we
| don't need it when we can just spend 30 minutes prompting
| your way to working test code _and it produces way faster
| and more robust systems_.
|
| Maybe the devs of that software package cannot dump that
| whole codebase into an LLM and work on it. But they are
| completely missing the forest for the trees.
| 7657364574 wrote:
| My guess is that we're already seeing the consequences of
| "AI-assisted programming". Just yesterday, Microsoft's CEO
| revealed that 30% of their code is written by AI.
| drjasonharrison wrote:
| Given the game of telephone which would have to had
| occurred for that 30% figure to travel from developers up
| to the CEO, it's probably including things like
| autocomplete...
|
| The Plan
|
| In the beginning, there was a plan, And then came the
| assumptions, And the assumptions were without form, And
| the plan without substance,
|
| And the darkness was upon the face of the workers, And
| they spoke among themselves saying, "It is a crock of
| shit and it stinks."
|
| And the workers went unto their Supervisors and said, "It
| is a pile of dung, and we cannot live with the smell."
|
| And the Supervisors went unto their Managers saying, "It
| is a container of excrement, and it is very strong, Such
| that none may abide by it."
|
| And the Managers went unto their Directors saying, "It is
| a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide by its
| strength."
|
| And the Directors spoke among themselves saying to one
| another, "It contains that which aids plants growth, and
| it is very strong."
|
| And the Directors went to the Vice Presidents saying unto
| them, "It promotes growth, and it is very powerful."
|
| And the Vice Presidents went to the President, saying
| unto him, "This new plan will actively promote the growth
| and vigor Of the company With very powerful effects."
|
| And the President looked upon the Plan And saw that it
| was good, And the Plan became Policy.
|
| And this, my friend, is how shit happens.
|
| from anonymous email
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Interesting that this story is not really a game of
| telephone, but instead a single layer replaced the
| meaning on purpose.
| codr7 wrote:
| By software, most of it is probably generated
| scaffolding.
| marcod wrote:
| "eight megabytes and constantly swapping"
| PJDK wrote:
| So, we often look back on the old days with rose tinted
| glasses. But let me recount my IT classes from the 90s.
|
| We'd sometimes go to the library to write something up in
| MS Word. We always liked this because it would be a good
| 5-10 mins to boot up some kind of basic Unix menu. You'd
| then select windows 3.1 and wait another 10-15 minutes for
| that to load. Then you could fire up word and wait another
| 5 minutes. Then you could do 5 minutes work before the
| class was over!
| prussian wrote:
| I think people forget that some of this software may be
| relatively fast. The problem is, most corporate
| environments are loaded up with EDRs and other strange
| anti-malware software that impede quick startup or speedy
| library calls. I've seen a misconfigured Forcepoint EDR
| rule block a window for 5 seconds on copy and paste from
| Chrome to Word.
|
| Another example: it takes ~2 seconds to run git on my work
| machine (Measure-Command { git status |
| Out-Null }).TotalSeconds
|
| while running the same command on my personal Windows 11
| virtual machine is near instant: ~0.1 seconds. Still slower
| than Linux, but not nearly as bad as my work machine.
| lukan wrote:
| "How did we get back to this though?"
|
| Probably because windows needs to make a connection for
| every file somewhere else first and wait for the reply,
| before granting you the advanced software as a service
| feature called text editing.
|
| It definitely feels like this at times and I fear there is
| too much truth in my statement.
|
| But it is not just windows only. My old chromebook took
| seconds to open a folder in the file browser (even if it
| was already open). But a "ls" on the terminal was instant
| for any folder. So getting the information was not the
| problem. But from there to displaying it in a GUI, there
| seems to be myriads of important (tracking?) layers
| involved.
| causality0 wrote:
| Ever notice how Windows 7 and 10 and 11 have basically the
| same features and benchmark the same on performance tests
| yet 10 and especially 11 completely shit the bed if you try
| to run them off a hard drive? Like they might all boot in
| twenty seconds from an SSD but booting from a hard disk
| might take W7 two minutes and W11 ten minutes to a stable
| desktop.
| jonhohle wrote:
| I always think the same thing. 486s could run real-time spell
| check and do wisiwig layouts and came on floppy disks. Now we
| have screen recording apps that require 256MB downloads every
| 5 minutes (yesterday's story).
|
| I have a small utility app that I sell and make great pains
| to keep it small and resource light. I really appreciate when
| other devs do the same.
| hedora wrote:
| 486's were way past when that became practical. I remember
| using Prodigy on a 286. Screenshots are rare, since you
| can't fire it up in an emulator unless you have a modem
| that can make phone calls to the 1980's. Also, machines
| from back then didn't really have room to store
| screenshots:
|
| https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/1063
|
| Their service used vector art to render interactive pages
| like that over <= 2400 baud modems. Other than it being
| proprietary and stuff, I'm guessing the web would be a much
| cooler place if HTML hadn't eaten their lunch. SVG is a
| decent consolation prize, I guess.
| ralphc wrote:
| Let me point you to Prodigy Reloaded,
| https://github.com/ProdigyReloaded. We're reviving the
| Prodigy server and as many cache files as we can find,
| using Elixir as the backend language.
|
| It's not merged yet but I've written an Elixir library
| that writes graphics files in Prodigy's graphics format,
| NAPLPS. I'm using it to get current weather and creating
| weather maps that are displayed in Prodigy.
| https://github.com/rrcook/naplps_writer
|
| You can run Prodigy in DOSBox and get screenshots.
| donny2018 wrote:
| Where is that guy who coded RollerCoaster Tycoon in
| Assembly?
| bluedino wrote:
| A lifetime ago when I was doing MSP work, our law office
| clients were using the DOS versions of WordPerfect because
| the Windows version was too slow.
|
| They refused to store files in directories and use good file
| names (although they were limited to 8.3), so they just
| scrolled through all their files until they found the right
| one. But they could open them so fast they didn't care.
|
| In windows you had to use the mouse, click three times, wait
| for the document to load and render....it was instant under
| DOS character mode.
| layer8 wrote:
| I agree with the point about the immediacy of TUIs, but I
| use MS Office (and Windows in general) almost exclusively
| by keyboard, so the point about having to use a mouse isn't
| completely accurate.
| bluedino wrote:
| Right, but you could just hit up/down to scroll through
| the files in the directory listing. Very simple
| layer8 wrote:
| You can still do that? I mean, there are certainly places
| where the interaction happens to be more cumbersome than
| it is in a TUI, because the relevant piece was designed
| mouse-first. However, one reason I prefer Windows as a
| desktop UI is that it was designed to be fully operable
| by keyboard as well.
| josephernest wrote:
| I still use Office 2007 on my computer. Super super snappy, I
| think Word or Excel starts and finishes loading in 0.5 second
| after clicking the icon. It has 99% of the features I need
| compared to the newest Office version.
| benjiro wrote:
| Same ... Office 2007 for the win. Frankly, i do not even
| use 90% of Office 2007 feature, so why do i even need more?
| For AI ... no.
|
| And funny thing, barely uses any memory! Makes todays apps
| look like monsters. Even my music player uses 5x more
| memory while paused, then freaking Excel with multiple
| pages open.
| mcswell wrote:
| And 100% of what you don't need--the Ribbon--was not in Word
| 97.
| lizknope wrote:
| 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.
| Lammy wrote:
| 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(tm)
| lolinder wrote:
| Yeah, I'm honestly trying to figure out why this is getting so
| much attention. Applications setting themselves to start up at
| login in order to avoid doing a bunch of work when they're
| asked for later is one of the oldest patterns in Windows. It's
| annoying to regularly have to go in and clear out new startup
| applications, but it's been part of maintaining a Windows
| machine for decades, and Microsoft Office is hardly the worst
| offender.
|
| Why is HN suddenly so interested in Microsoft doing the same
| thing that has always been done by large, bloated app suites?
| raincole wrote:
| You're honestly trying to figure out why people want
| performant apps...?
| lolinder wrote:
| That's not at all what I asked.
| fredoliveira wrote:
| > Why is HN suddenly so interested in Microsoft doing the
| same thing that has always been done by large, bloated app
| suites?
|
| Probably because it is horrible? It's indicative of how we
| spend less time optimizing code than we do coming up with
| computationally expensive, inefficient workarounds.
|
| Let's say a hypothetical Windows user spends 2% of their day
| using Office (I made that number up). Why should Office be
| partially loaded the other 98% of the time? How is it
| acceptable to use those resources?
|
| When are we actually going to start using the new compute
| capabilities in our machines, rather than letting them get
| consumed by unoptimized, barely decent code?
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| > Let's say a hypothetical Windows user spends 2% of their
| day using Office
|
| I don't know about a "hypothetical" user, but I'd bet a
| "mean" (corporate) user probably uses office all day long.
| Hell, I've lost count of the number of e-mails I've seen
| having a screenshot which is inside a word document for
| some reason, or the number of excel files which are just a
| 5x4 table.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| > OpenOffice.org (predecessor of LibreOffice) copied this
| feature, which they called "QuickStarter"
|
| It still does. Neither LibreOffice itself nor it's installation
| process with its components choice have changed seriously since
| the old days and I'm very grateful for this. The QuickStarter
| isn't as relevant anymore as we have fast SSDs now but some
| slow computers are still around and that's great we still have
| the option.
| gymbeaux wrote:
| Back in those days it took 15 minutes for Windows to "finish"
| booting. You'd hit the desktop but the HDD was still going ham
| loading a dozen programs, each with their own splash screen to
| remind you of their existence.
| Grazester wrote:
| Ah the ole slash screen. I remember in high school days
| writing programs in VB and of course it had to have some
| "Cool" splash screen.
| amiga386 wrote:
| "I bet somebody got a really nice bonus for that feature" h
| ttps://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20061101-03/?p=29
| ...
|
| > The thing is, all of these bad features were probably
| justified by some manager somewhere because it's the only
| way their feature would get noticed. They have to justify
| their salary by pushing all these stupid ideas in the
| user's faces. "Hey, look at me! I'm so cool!" After all,
| when the boss asks, "So, what did you accomplish in the
| past six months," a manager can't say, "Um, a bunch of
| stuff you can't see. It just works better." They have to
| say, "Oh, check out this feature, and that icon, and this
| dialog box." Even if it's a stupid feature.
|
| On the other hand, I very much enjoyed going to Excel 97
| cell X97:L97, pressing tab, holding Ctrl+Shift and clicking
| on the chart icon, because then you could play Excel's
| built in _flight simulator_
| toast0 wrote:
| If you've had the priviledge of running Windows 10 on a
| spinning drive, it never gets to disk idle. Who knows what
| it's doing, but by that metric it never finishes. It probably
| never gets to disk idle on an SSD either, but SSDs have so
| much more io capacity it isn't noticed.
| d_tr wrote:
| I thought Windows had a generic subsystem for "warming up"
| frequently used apps for faster launches.
| xquce wrote:
| People don't use Office frequently, and then when they do
| it's slow and a bad look. So they will cheat in a way that
| prioritize their own software, and then every one else will
| then that feature loses all value, as all programs launch on
| startup as not to be "slow"
| layer8 wrote:
| Only for OS components, I think?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista_I/O_technologie
| s...
|
| SuperFetch was supposed to work with any app. It never
| seemed to have much effect IMO.
| agilob wrote:
| 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.
| silon42 wrote:
| 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.
| plorg wrote:
| Huh. Maybe it's because I haven't installed Office since the
| 2010 version, I assumed OSA was still a thing. My work computer
| has O365 managed by IT and I could swear I've seen resident
| daemons (besides, say, Teams) running in the background.
| araes wrote:
| Equivalently useless back in 2004.
|
| Notably, a solution to the current issues with modern office is
| to use a copy of Office 97.
|
| 20+ page XLS uses ~7MB and loads effectively instantly (on a
| frankly horribly performing laptop that can usually barely run
| demos on HN)
| tossandthrow wrote:
| Over the next 6 months I need to decide on the platform we roll
| out for our small startup.
|
| Windows is categorically left out.
|
| Funnily, it is probably going to be Valve that will be the death
| of Windows.
|
| All my Steam games runs better on Bazzite / Steam OS without any
| Windows interruption. At some point, this will spread like a wild
| fire in the gamin community - teaching people about alternatives
| to Windows.
|
| The next generation will not be bothered with Windows.
| asmor wrote:
| I've ran Linux on my laptops since 2012, but avoided it for my
| desktop. I made the jump last week, and it only took slightly
| modifying my NixOS config (unlocking amdgpu for instance) for
| everything to just work. Oblivion Remaster runs noticeably
| better. Most multiplayer games also just work. And I'm no
| longer dealing with Windows search randomly not working, SMB
| connections stalling, random sleep issues... it all just works.
|
| I had to invest a little into getting Sunshine to work with
| virtual displays (like Artemis), but even that took like a day
| and it'll be easy to set up if I ever need to reinstall.
| theshackleford wrote:
| I've been hearing some variation of this my entire adult life
| and it hasn't been right yet.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| Just like ANN's in the 0s
| int_19h wrote:
| SteamOS is great right up until the point where you need to
| play competitive multiplayer games, most of which require
| kernel-level anti-cheat that doesn't work on Linux.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| LibreOffice has been doing this for ages, at least on Windows. It
| works well. And, to be honest, if you're going to be using Office
| anyway, you may as well speed up launching it.
|
| I'm surprised they don't use the existing Windows Prefetching
| system for this, though.
| asmor wrote:
| It feels like different teams at Microsoft don't work with each
| other; they work against each other. I've noticed that too with
| Edge, it seems to be a competition at which team can put short
| term metrics (shopping and "creator following" vs privacy,
| shouldersurfing other search engines vs setting your search
| engine to bing) over respecting the user or engineering a
| coherent product.
|
| Maybe stack ranking does create terrible culture.
| cheschire wrote:
| Microsoft hasn't used stack ranking for over a decade. I guess
| the team level competitive culture has persisted though.
| lifeisgood99 wrote:
| Teams at Microsoft operate like their own mini companies. For
| example, moving to a different team usually requires doing an
| interview loop, with coding challenges.
| mappu wrote:
| I think the old Office 97 Shortcut Bar preloaded some Office dlls
| too, maybe not all of them.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| If you have an old machine laying around, I highly recommend
| setting it up with Windows XP and Office XP. It's a breath of
| fresh air if you have to use Office a lot. Also an agonizing
| reminder of how far Microsoft has strayed from the light. Office
| software was a solved problem, and somehow it isn't anymore.
| theothertimcook wrote:
| Windows 10LTSC gets updates till 2030 something.
|
| Office 2016 is the last year before it went OneDrive and will
| still autosave documents locally.
|
| Apparently there are activation scripts that can help you if
| you've lost your license information for these older products...
| p_ing wrote:
| Autosave has only ever been a SharePoint/OneDrive feature. You
| may be confusing it with auto recovery.
| bigpeopleareold wrote:
| They might as well load the rest of Windows at startup if that is
| the magic bullet of how many performance issues their OS and
| software has. It still shocks me that my cheap 8-year old laptop
| with Fedora on it feels all around snappier and a relief to work
| with than the computer handed to me at work. That computer would
| fly with a decent operating system.
| plaidfuji wrote:
| Surprised there's no mention of Google Workspace here. I've been
| using Workspace exclusively for probably 5 years now. It's
| obviously faster to open, the interface has remained clean and
| simple, and they've steadily closed the feature gap with Word,
| Excel and PPT.
|
| The only major gap remaining, IMO, is on Sheets - performance as
| sheets get large or have lots of formulas, and _plotting_. If
| Google would take that product a little more seriously (rather
| than trying to turn it into a Notion databases clone), they could
| become a real alternative.
| resource_waste wrote:
| I generally agree with what you said.
|
| My only issue is that it cannot handle lots of data. Both Docs
| and Sheets have caused limitations here. Docs gets unusably
| slow. Sheets just wont work.
| tantalor wrote:
| https://support.google.com/docs/answer/9702507?hl=en
|
| > You can access, analyze, visualize, and share billions of
| rows of data from your spreadsheet with Connected Sheets, the
| new BigQuery data connector.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Docs stopped getting slow at some point in the past few
| years.
|
| It used to be a nightmare to edit a 150 page file. Now it's
| no problem at all.
|
| Not sure if it has to do with migrating from HTML to canvas
| for rendering, or totally separate.
| thomasfromcdnjs wrote:
| I just sorted my drive by last modified ascending, I started
| using Google Docs in 2008, I don't remember using anything
| other than that since.
|
| I did not realize how many people on HN are still using MS
| suite, a nice refreshing bubble buster.
| jacurtis wrote:
| In Corporate America there is an old saying that goes
|
| > "No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft Office".
|
| Basically if you are the head of IT and you use Microsoft
| Office, the CEO comes to you and complains it is slow, you can
| say "Well Microsoft makes it slow". The CEO will shrug and move
| on. But if you instead get rid of microsoft and move the org to
| Google WOrkspace, then the CEO comes to you and says "Google
| Sheets doesn't have this one formula that I use" and you tell
| them that Google doesn't offer it, the CEO fires you for
| swithcing away from Microsoft Office.
|
| Google Workspace is amazing. But Corporate IT departments just
| absolutely love paying their Microsoft enterprise
| subscriptions. So I have to use it for that reason.
|
| Like you said, the office UI is horrible. I can't ever find
| anything. But in Google Docs, Slides, and Sheets, everything is
| exactly where I want it. I truly haven't ran into cases where
| Office products have something significant that Google's
| workspaces can't. I know there are differences, with office
| having some more advanced features but I think 99.5% of people
| don't ever use these advanced features.
| toast0 wrote:
| Microsoft Office and OpenLibreOffice.Org suck and are slow, but
| I can't recall a time where they loaded a document part way.
|
| Google Docs is always loading like half a document in a
| reasonable amount of time and then doing who knows what. It's
| almost usable for text documents, cause you can usually at
| least see stuff, even if you can't edit it. It's just trash for
| spreadsheets; especially when it's like i'll take your input
| but won't run your formula for a while. I'm not entering the
| Excel World Championships here, my spreadsheets would calculate
| 'instantly' on a 486 in excel 5.0 if I had such a setup. _If_
| the documents fully load and there 's no weirdness, sure it's
| fine enough; and the multiplayer features are handy, but it's
| not worth it for single player spreadsheets IMHO.
|
| I haven't had the experience of using Microsoft's Office in a
| browser, I can only imagine the fun involved there.
| anentropic wrote:
| Outlook is so bad at email
|
| Just utterly basic fundamental stuff that was working forever in
| other clients, like quoting replied text
|
| Everyone at work has to resort to farcical formatting tricks, the
| email chain ends up a series of people saying like "I added my
| comments in green bold below", "my comments in blue italic" like
| it's a Word document instead of a message thread
| abraxas wrote:
| It's 20+ years of Microsoft fucking with it and bringing
| Eternal September to our inboxes.
|
| In years prior the email/usenet etiquette was simple: The '>'
| sign as the first character indicated a quote block in a reply
| with new content added after the quoted text.
|
| Then came Microsoft with its Outlook and Outlook Express. First
| they fucked with everyone just for the hell of it by making
| their client top post by default. Then they brought in html
| into emails and usenet posts. Then they worked hard at it to
| make everything the mess it is today.
| chaostheory wrote:
| I'm confused. Doesn't office 365 online make this completely
| unnecessary?
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| Quite a few years ago I read on Reddit a post made allegedly by a
| Microsoft programmer, who was telling that the young generation
| of programmers do not want to maintain the old optimized code (he
| was saying specifically about pipes in windows) and want to
| reimplement all fro scratch. In this example (pipes) they wrote a
| new pipe mechanism which then was lacking that ACL et. al.
| authorisation features and they had to hide it from normal
| programmers (made it somehow internal to system)
|
| What it would mean (if we can believe this) is that Windows
| becomes a legacy burden and without proper management and
| knowledge will become a big ball of mud (if it's not yet like
| this) unbearable and unmabagable.
|
| Right now I can access at least five styles of UI, from different
| epochs, each one is doing something important in the system, BC
| one cannot rewrite everything to the new style without enormous
| funds
| anonymars wrote:
| Feels like we're living through the bronze-age-collapse of
| software. It's depressing to watch the software I use get worse
| and worse and be forced onto the downgrades
| p_ing wrote:
| Yeah, I'd take that with a giant grain. You can't "hide"
| features that the system uses -- they're all visible. This is
| why NT APIs get used, even though they're not supposed to be
| leveraged outside of the kernel/critical system components.
| There's no "hiding" a pipe.
|
| Mail Slots are on their way out, though. Not that they're
| useful today.
| kypro wrote:
| They did this with IE back in the day right? Not because it was
| particularly slow, but because the it gave them an advantage over
| competitors like FF which couldn't use preloaded windows
| libraries to load as quickly?
|
| I might be wrong. I was a kid when I read about this.
| dimgl wrote:
| Windows is bafflingly bad. It's gotten so much worse in the last
| four years, but it's always been bad. I've never gotten bluetooth
| to work correctly on Windows. Apps randomly crash. Three
| different versions of settings pages, and they crash. Snipping
| Tool only works half the time. I had to run a debloater on my
| system because searching for something in the Start Menu would
| never give me the results I wanted. Xbox ads during gameplay... I
| mean the list goes on.
|
| I'm done with it. I've switched to Ubuntu and I haven't looked
| back. I only boot up my Windows installation when I need to do
| game development on Unreal or use an incompatible program. But
| for now, MacOS and Linux are covering everything.
|
| I used to be a big gamer but I've basically given up on playing
| games that don't work on Linux. The selection of games is
| steadily growing and some games work at launch (like Oblivion
| Remastered).
|
| I know there's a lot of animosity for GNOME, but it's the best
| Linux desktop in my opinion. In terms of polish it's definitely
| the closest to MacOS.
|
| Application installs are still an absolute pain, but it's gotten
| better. At the very least I can now go through the Ubuntu App
| Center to get the most common apps. There's the occassional app
| that doesn't work (like VLC) and then I'll have to look into Snap
| or Flatpak or whatever other variation of app packaging Linux
| devs decide to unleash on the masses... but then it works and I
| don't think about it again.
|
| One last gripe for me is the lack of HDR support in Ubuntu. I
| can't use my LG C2 with it. But I've switched to using two Dell
| monitors with DisplayPort and now it doesn't matter... and I use
| the LG C2 with something else.
|
| For the average user this experience sucks. But for me, I'm okay
| putting up with this pain if it means never using Windows again.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| LibreOffice, the most popular office suite available for Linux,
| is comparably slow and bloated.
| moooo99 wrote:
| Oh it absolutely is, but at least it's free
| dimgl wrote:
| I haven't used Office tools in over a decade...
| bborud wrote:
| 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 Studio Code
| is. A rather minimal, skeletal, code editing platform that
| derives nearly all its value from the extensions people make
| for it. There are lots and lots of editors and IDEs. But
| extremely few of them serve as _platforms_. As the
| infrastructural basis for creating applications.
|
| Yes, there are IDEs that are possibly marginally better at
| editing, say, Java or Go code. But VSC is pretty good at
| almost every language that is in common use today. And it
| manages to compete pretty well with more specialized
| solutions. It does this because an editor that does 90% in
| all the languages you use is far more valuable than switching
| between two editors that perhaps achieve 95%.
|
| Word, and its open source counterparts, are antiquated and
| obsolete. I don't think the field can be advanced by building
| word processors that are just iterations of 30 year old
| ideas. Yes, you can probably extend them, but people don't.
| You have to understand what it is that makes some pieces of
| software work as platforms (like VSC), and why other pieces
| of software do not inspire people to build on them.
|
| I think Microsoft should reinvent Word as a platform that is
| designed to be extended and that is _easy_ to extend. I would
| then release the base software platform as open source. Much
| of the functionality that resides in Word today I would move
| to paid extensions - including useful bundles of extensions.
| This way Microsoft would retain its revenue stream, and I
| wouldn 't have to deal with all of the crud Word contains.
|
| I would also create a marketplace for both paid and free
| (open source) extensions. Which in turn would make the
| product more valuable (even though the base product is free).
| Because other companies and people invest in it and have a
| shared interest in its health beyond mere existence.
|
| Of course, not only Microsoft can do this. Anyone could
| create an editing platform. But it would have to be someone
| with a bit of money who can spend perhaps 5-6 years
| supporting the effort to see if it takes off. Maybe it does,
| maybe it doesn't.
|
| One reason I see this as perhaps the only way forward for
| this class of application is that I'm doing some work for a
| company that manufactures physical products. A would-be
| advanced user of office automation tools. This kind of
| business has a very complex document structure where there's
| a vast hierarchy of thousands of documents that goes into
| every project and even spans projects. Doing this with Word,
| Sharepoint and whatnot is complicated, fragile and requires a
| lot of work. It doesn't work very well. It also means you
| have to memorize a lot of procedures. This could have
| benefitted from very narrow, domain specific tooling.
| Including LLMs that allow you to ask questions with context
| derived from sources other than the Word documents. Yes,
| Microsoft is trying to stuff this into their products, but it
| isn't actually all that useful because it is generic. It is
| never going to support what our customer needs.
|
| I don't think Office, LibreOffice etc are the right kind of
| tools. They are children of the 1990s. We have better
| starting points today and better technology. It is time to
| re-think this.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| I love this idea, and agree with your assessment of office
| tools in general. You almost make me want to try it, but
| it's evident the size this body of work would take.
| prmoustache wrote:
| There are other like Anyoffice or Caligra Office. Or you can
| use any web based one...even office365 ;-)
|
| If your needs are smaller you can do a lot with just abiword
| and gnumeric. They launch instantly.
|
| Gnome evolution is much nicer to use than Outlook in my
| experience.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Personally, I live the Office license my workplace pays for
| untouched, and use LibreOffice on my work Windows computer
| instead.
|
| Yes, it's slow and bloated. But it's comparably faster and
| leaner, and it doesn't use undocumented APIs to take
| resources away from everything else running on the same
| computer and make every other thing unusable.
|
| And yeah, calc lacks features when compared to excel. So,
| avoid spreadsheets for complex problems.
| bborud wrote:
| 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 because managers and leaders in
| Microsoft are not rewarded for quality. 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.
|
| For instance the office suite. The last 20 or so years have
| taught me that an Office suite can be a lot simpler and it will
| actually work better if it is simpler. Just in the last 5 years
| I have observed three different companies where people
| routinely perform most of their writing and editing in other
| tools and then insert what they have written in Word. Because
| it is far better than creating the content in Word itself. At
| my current consulting gig a lot of people write things in
| Google Docs and then import them into Word documents to produce
| the official versions of documents.
|
| Word is a mess. It is packed with too many features you will
| never use. Those have a cost because they take up screen space,
| and make the features you do care about harder to find and use.
| Word constantly distracts you because it misbehaves and you
| have to somehow try to deal with its quirks and interruptions.
| It is slow, complex and resource intensive.
|
| Word is objectively not a very good piece of software. I have
| never met anyone who loves it. Who feels that Word makes them
| more productive than any alternatives. It is software you have
| to cope with. Software that must be tolerated. Or not.
|
| I do not understand why Microsoft, with its deep pockets, has
| made no attempt to reinvent, for instance, Word, to create a
| word processor from scratch. With focus on quality,
| correctness, performance, usability, and perhaps most
| importantly: easy extensibility.
|
| They could draw some inspiration from Visual Studio Code. There
| are many things that are wrong with VS Code, but they got a few
| things right. The most important being that unlike other IDEs
| it is essentially just a skeletal platform that derives its
| value from extensions. Third party extensions. This means that
| VS Code can be adapted to fit your individual needs, or more
| importantly, the needs to _segments_ of users. It means that
| people who want to make tools can build on VS Code rather than
| having to do a lot of work orthogonal to their goal to create
| tooling.
|
| Yes, you can probably wrangle special functionality into Word.
| But nobody does. Not at any meaningful scale.
|
| Word is rooted in a world that existed before many of you were
| born. A world that is long gone. There has been decades of
| technology evolution. If you were to develop a word processor
| today, you would be starting from a point that is completely
| different.
|
| And let's not get started on Azure. I have to deal with it
| about every two years. And every two years I try to approach it
| with an open mind and with optimism. Surely they have fixed
| things now? I am always disappointed. Things look slick on the
| surface, but then you start to use them, and you are confronted
| with systems that are slow, slow, slow, ugly and buggy. AWS is
| certainly not the belle of the ball. Its constant complexity
| and the awkwardness and just overall badness of the tooling
| makes me limit how much of it I make myself dependent on AWS
| services.
|
| But at least AWS isn't as bad as Azure.
|
| I don't get why Microsoft can't seem to invest in quality. Yes,
| I get all the arguments that it just needs to be good enough
| for their customers to keep using them, but surely, at some
| point it has to hurt your pride.
|
| If I were in Nadella's shoes I would invest heavily in quality.
| In stripping things down. In starting over. In making sure that
| I understand the required cultural change required to make
| products that are objectively speaking, good. If not great. And
| perhaps that requires getting rid of a lot of long-time leaders
| that just can't change gears. Perhaps it requires creating
| teams that are isolated to a greater degree from other teams so
| they don't drag each other down.
| morning-coffee wrote:
| > Developers at Microsoft are obviously not rewarded for
| quality.
|
| I work at Microsoft and you're absolutely correct as far as
| I've observed. Rewards are for speed and doing things
| (usually hyped-based) that advance the goals of leadership...
| these goals are rarely if ever about "let's make sure we nail
| the basics first". I think it comes down to serving
| shareholders vs. serving real customers.
| saratogacx wrote:
| > 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 code and to pretend it
| holds no to little value gives us half-hearted replacements
| which never quite ascend to the heights they were supposed to
| replace.
|
| Sure, there are some exceptions where the concept around
| "what the thing is" needed to change and a new product needs
| to re-imagine a solution (VS -> VSCode). However, I feel that
| we, the software development community, put way more hope
| that this is true way more often than it is in reality.
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| > Windows is bafflingly bad. It's gotten so much worse in the
| last four years, but it's always been bad. I've never gotten
| bluetooth to work correctly on Windows. Apps randomly crash.
| Three different versions of settings pages, and they crash.
| Snipping Tool only works half the time. I had to run a
| debloater on my system because searching for something in the
| Start Menu would never give me the results I wanted. Xbox ads
| during gameplay... I mean the list goes on.
|
| Not to defend Microsoft, as I've firmly believed them to be a
| shitty entity for a loooong time now, but as a counter example
| and many years going on Windows 10/11, I don't have _any_ of
| these issues and I 've only run debloater maybe a few times in
| the last 5 years.
|
| I don't know wtf people are installing on their PCs to make
| them so shitty like this, but I've not encountered these things
| across dozens of personal or employer devices in recent in
| times. Like not even once. Maybe you're downloading beta
| drivers? Maybe the manufacturer of your devices are cheapo
| brands with poorly made chipsets? Maybe you have bloatware
| installed by your manufacturer that you haven't uninstalled? At
| this stage, it's hard to believe this is not some kind of user
| error. Be it a lack of research before acquiring a device, or
| lack of knowledge on how to navigate the device.
|
| Edit: to put into perspective a bit more, I use my main laptop
| - a Lenovo Legion laptop - for gaming (many acquired through
| the "dark waters" even), full-stack software development, AI
| video up-scaling, photo-editing, running a media-server
| (Jellyfin), torrenting, office programs, running virtual
| machines, running WSL2 with docker, running many various open-
| source programs, producing music with Ableton and a plethora of
| third-party VSTs, etc.
|
| No issues.
| const_cast wrote:
| Windows doesn't have "issues", per se. As in the system is
| pretty stable and it works, presumably, like it's designed.
|
| The problem is the design is just bad. Lots of things are
| just sucky and they're meant to be that way. Search is ass,
| explorer is half-decent only in Windows 11. There's way more
| than 3 settings panels, and yes, they all look different. You
| still have to edit the registry for some random tweaks. Apps
| put there files god knows where. Every app updates
| independently. You still have to go online and download
| random _.exe_ and _.msi_ files to install things. If you get
| errors the message is typically worthless. The system tray is
| a fucking mess. IIS sucks. powershell is okay but cmd is
| still around and yes, sometimes you have to use it. And,
| cherry on top, everything is slowwwww. Especially the file
| system. You don 't really notice it until you have a version
| controlled code base but NTFS has to be, like, 1000x slower
| than competing Linux filesystems.
| naikrovek wrote:
| this is like a word-for-word repeat of a comment that i've seen
| probably 1,000 times in my career.
|
| > never gotten bluetooth to work on windows
|
| I seriously doubt this. seriously. if true, it is a user
| problem, because i've never had an issue, nor has anyone I
| know.
|
| > apps randomly crash
|
| true of any operating system, also that's not what "randomly"
| means. you mean "unexpectedly" I think.
|
| > settings pages crash
|
| never happened to me, ever. if it has, it was infrequent enough
| that i have no memory of it, and i've never heard this
| complaint before from anyone.
|
| > snipping tool only works half the time
|
| again, I use that thing continuously on Windows and it always
| works.
|
| > xbox ads during gameplay
|
| what game? what [everything]? I've never seen this and I play
| games on windows all the dang time.
|
| it very much sounds like you've cherry picked experiences that
| others have had and piled them all here and declared that they
| happen to you. Maybe they have, I don't know, but if this has
| all happened to you in the last 4 years, you are the only
| person on the planet who has experienced this. Not even in the
| depths of Microsofts online communities and the Microsoft
| Discord do I read of a single person with all of these
| problems.
|
| I don't know what your problems are underneath, but they're not
| Microsoft. If they were, I would have those problems, and I
| don't. Some of these were common 10 years ago when Windows 10
| came out, but only for a month or two. Certainly not in the
| past 4 years. not unless you're intentionally avoiding upgrades
| or something.
| efdee wrote:
| THANK YOU.
| dimgl wrote:
| I love these kinds of comments. It reminds me of the Reddit
| threads of people complaining about bugs on Cyberpunk 2077's
| release, only for people to reply with "I played the game, I
| didn't run into any bugs! What bugs are you talking about?"
| Meanwhile a quick Google/YouTube search reveals entire
| montages devoted purely to bugs.
|
| Here are Windows Forum threads talking about each of the
| problems I've mentioned, with thousands of people saying "I
| have the same question":
|
| https://answers.microsoft.com/en-
| us/windows/forum/all/unable...
|
| https://answers.microsoft.com/en-
| us/windows/forum/all/window...
|
| https://answers.microsoft.com/en-
| us/windows/forum/all/window...
|
| https://answers.microsoft.com/en-
| us/windows/forum/all/snippi...
|
| https://answers.microsoft.com/en-
| us/xbox/forum/all/unwanted-...
| naikrovek wrote:
| This is likely because people take their customizations
| (like custom setup scripts to "decrapify" windows) that
| used to work great on previous versions of windows and
| apply them unchanged to new versions or something, because
| "windows is the same underneath, this is just a reskin that
| they charge you $150 for." Every time I have helped someone
| with problems like these (when I did see them a lot earlier
| in my career) it was because they did something goofy to
| cause it. Like using a PCIe to PCI adapter with a PCI to
| ISA adapter, so they could plug in a flipping Sound
| Blaster64 or something. "I'm not buying a new sound card!!
| I'm not using the onboard sound!! I bought this sound
| blaster in 1996 and I want to use it!! Microsoft should let
| me!!"
|
| Others would show me how the computer would act weird after
| unplugging PCI cards while the computer was running, and
| blame Microsoft. "See!? SEE?!" Every single WTF moment I
| had in desktop support with issues like this was user
| error.
|
| Maybe yours aren't. Maybe the Microsoft Answers forum is
| filled with exceptionally smart people who all know exactly
| how to use a computer, never ask stupid questions, and
| never give wrong answers, but I think we both know that
| isn't really true.
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| > I seriously doubt this. seriously. if true, it is a user
| problem, because i've never had an issue, nor has anyone I
| know.
|
| I have about a 50% success rate with Bluetooth devices
| pairing and reconnecting properly on Windows, so at least I'm
| doing better than OP.
|
| The Bluetooth software stack on the whole is a disaster, but
| the only platform where I've had a trouble free experience is
| macOS.
| vivzkestrel wrote:
| stupid question: why haven't we even heard of an attempt to say
| rewrite office from scratch or how about even bigger like write
| windows from scratch for the next version and scrap all the 20
| yr old+ workarounds hardcoded into it
| matteoraso wrote:
| Check out Libreoffice. It's like MS Office, but less
| resource-intensive.
| bicolao wrote:
| because it's not worth the risk of breaking plenty
| applications out there (or in the case of office, documents).
| I have heard stories of MS making changes to keep older apps
| working. Imagine carrying all that to a new rewrite.
| riskable wrote:
| > Snipping Tool only works half the time.
|
| This started happening to me too like six months ago. I
| figured, "yet again they broke something with an update, but
| it'll probably fix itself eventually."
|
| Nope!
|
| I'd switch to some 3rd party tool but my employer doesn't allow
| any since we all got upgraded to Windows 11. Why don't they
| allow it anymore? Because _the snipping tool_ (Snip & Sketch).
|
| At least they still let me install Ditto (I never liked how the
| Windows clipboard history feature works... No, I'll paste when
| _I_ want to paste--not when I select the item!)
| efdee wrote:
| > I had to run a debloater on my system
|
| Hot take: your ""debloater"" screwed up your system.
|
| I've had problems with Windows, but none of the ones you've
| described.
|
| > For the average user this experience sucks. But for me, I'm
| okay.
|
| I guess this describes my Windows experience. I _know_ some
| people have problems. I don't, because I guess either I got
| used to it or I know how to avoid it.
| dimgl wrote:
| This is a great comment. I may wipe my Windows machine a 10th
| time and try again, but I'm sticking with Linux for now.
| const_cast wrote:
| Windows kind of has this property where it rots. Both in time
| between reboots and in time in general. Running Windows 1+
| week without a reboot and it just... gets a little more buggy
| and a little more slow each day. And then after a few years,
| it's time for a reinstall.
| AnonHP wrote:
| I use LibreOffice for my personal needs, which is spreadsheets (I
| also donate to Document Foundation to support it). Sadly, even
| LibreOffice has suffered from being slow to start up, is bloated
| and sluggish (on Windows and macOS; I have tried it on Linux for
| a very long time).
|
| It seems like all Office-like apps are cursed to be slow and
| bloated. It also seems like 32GB should be the bare minimum
| amount of RAM for a Windows machine today (even the "new Teams"
| app is sluggish nowadays and takes up quite a bit of memory or
| crashes often).
| zahlman wrote:
| I've found arrow-key scrolling through a LibreOffice Calc
| spreadsheet on Linux to be quite painful.
| geodel wrote:
| Seems at this point any low level code they concern them with is
| security because it can have legal consequences, or porting to
| new CPU versions, archs as it can have financial consequences. So
| C++ is slow? very well write some Typescript/ReactJS frontend. It
| is slower? No worries, now you can run that in cloud. Anything
| else is to be taken care AI and crap. Problem solved.
| masfoobar wrote:
| I have been enjoying the comments on this one. :-)
|
| There are sooo many things to unpack in the world of Windows. We
| could talk about Windows 11. We can talk about bloated software
| like Office or Visual Studio. We could even compare the
| performance difference between old version from the 90s to what
| people use today.
|
| On one end.. I get it. Microsoft are throwing so much "features"
| at you, whether part of the OS or particular software like
| Office. If they dont their competitors will.
|
| Microsoft "Office" use to be a Desktop Publishing suite which
| included the likes of Excel, Word, Access, etc. Now, Office is
| just a category of hundreds of applications accessed via the
| cloud. To think, whether on Windows bootup, or launching an
| modern application involves many API calls to something,
| somewhere in the world. No wonder applications like MS Teams
| takes 8-20 seconds to load (and that is sometimes being nice!)
|
| Considering the specs of my PC.. it should load incredibly fast.
| Yet, for some reason, I could run something like Visual Studio
| 6.0 from the late 90s and will load INSTANTLY on a modern machine
| -- and it will be single threaded! Some may be thinking "but
| modern Visual Studio has these features I cannot live without!"
| -- are these excuses why it take so long to LOAD?
|
| The problem we have is.. to some degree.. you have a development
| team who do not care about performance or memory. On the other
| end, you have a development team that are frustrated because it
| is outside their control what is considered IMPORTANT. If they
| speak up it might cost them their job.
|
| I will always remember during my College days I had a project
| which was about doing 3D animations. We had to do a Presentation
| on our work at the end of the assignment. I think most people
| spend 50% of their project time on Microsoft Powerpoint. For its
| day, on the hardware available.. even that was bloat! They were
| fiddling with their text and images on screen. I was sooo fed up
| with it I decided to amend my program so it could be used as a
| presentation slideshow as well. Once added, all I had to do was
| use a text editor, writing scheme-like code to a file, covering
| how build each slide and animations. It was running smooth and
| fast and everyone was asking "how did you get it to look so good"
| thinking I am doing some cool trick in MS Powerpoint. Nope...
| just OpenGL in C.
|
| Things like Office has always been bulky and slow. The funny
| thing is -- I bet Microsoft Powerpoint from 1997 would run
| EXTREMELY fast on todays hardware.
|
| At home, I moved away from Microsoft and Windows since 2006-ish
| trying Ubuntu. I did experiment with Suse Linux before that but
| once home internet became solid.. so did Linux in my opinion.
| Sure, I still use Windows as my job requires it... and I can see
| Microsoft keeping their power/control thanks to cloud/azure and
| other things. Also, Excel has such as legacy to it that many
| people in Finance and other dept RELY on Excel! Point is many
| will stick with Windows because of that.
|
| You have Valve helping Linux thrive in the gaming space. We need
| something that can help Linux thrive in the Office space. I am
| suprised there is not modern Spreadsheet application that takes
| us away from Excel. Sadly, you need a full DTP suite.
| RS-232 wrote:
| Maybe I'm an out-of-touch nerd who needs to touch grass, but I
| would love to see a world where Markdown has supplanted this
| glorified suite of XML editors.
|
| Markdown has docs, slides, tables, diagrams (via Mermaid), and
| can be read on any system that has a text editor. It's simple,
| non-proprietary, and future proof.
|
| This repo says it all: https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown
| vendiddy wrote:
| As a lay person, apps like Office feel like they stay the same
| between updates and somehow manage to get fatter and slower.
|
| (I'm sure they've got some new improvements tucked away but I
| don't notice them.)
|
| Or every time I update my OS it's like a 10GB download. What did
| I just get for that 10GB? I honestly can't tell.
|
| Even my smartphone. Seem often where I'm asked to install a 2GB
| update aaand it's same as before but slower?
|
| Anyone else have this sentiment?
| alias_neo wrote:
| A lot of the time, it's underlying libraries and tools that are
| updated to fix bugs, security vulnerabilities or just because
| they got a new version. In the case of binaries (the thing you
| download as an end user; compiled code), even the smallest 1
| character change in the source code, can mean you have to
| download the entire binary again, whether it's a 5kB binary, or
| a 1GB one. There are patching techniques that can work around
| this but they're rarely used at a binary level and usually at a
| "package" or "archive" level.
|
| For performance, it's a harder one to answer, because there are
| potentially many reasons, I have my opinions as a Software
| Engineer myself, but others will have different opinions.
| Ultimately, software moves "forward", which can mean more code,
| more features, more bug fixes (and thus safety checks etc) and
| potentially worse performance, although _better_ performance is
| also possible with optimisations.
|
| That said, as hardware advances, it enables writing more
| powerful software with more features, which then become more of
| a struggle for older hardware to run.
|
| From a device manufacturer perspective; they want to sell you
| new devices, so there's little incentive for them (in my
| opinion) in spending developer time on trying to optimise new
| code for older devices.
| oriettaxx wrote:
| one day we'll be able to estimate the underdevelopment and waste
| of energy caused from such a bad software, good for me I learned
| very early to stay far from the whole microshit world: never had
| any doubt.
|
| ...and his head is till pontificating on how the world should
| run...
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Ehm this is nothing new. They did that decades ago.
|
| Edit: Should have known I wouldn't be the first to remember :)
| ErrorNoBrain wrote:
| Personally i'd prefer just a "lite" version of the main apps,
| excel, word, powerpoint...
|
| i dont need the other programs and ALL of them contain a TON of
| features i'll never ever use (as a private person, not company of
| course)
| smt88 wrote:
| How do the apps know which features you'll use or not? How do
| they know which features were used in the document you're
| opening?
| vgb2k18 wrote:
| Edge has been doing this for a very long time, since well-before
| Windows 11 existed.
| MaxGripe wrote:
| I 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.
|
| It seems like things like this are no longer possible for
| Microsoft. They keep producing clunky tools which, although
| functional, always come with a horribly frustrating UX (as
| usual).
|
| I've been working within the Microsoft tech stack for around 25
| years now (mostly SQL Server). I used to be a huge fan of their
| products because they were one of the best companies when it came
| to developer experience (developers! developers!). Unfortunately,
| that was a long time ago. Things are very different now. Of all
| the things I once liked, only SQL Server really remains
| (ironically, it's a technology they acquired - it used to be
| Sybase). I still think C#, F#, and PowerShell are great, but I
| actively discourage people from using most of their so-called
| "products" because the quality is just appallingly low.
|
| Even something like Visual Studio is better replaced with Rider +
| LINQPad. Their GitHub repositories are full of open issues that
| have been dragging on for years. There's virtually nothing left
| of the old Microsoft that I still respect or admire.
|
| That said, I have to admit that most other corporations aren't
| any better - there's a general trend of maximizing profit while
| offering the lowest quality that customers are still willing to
| tolerate. If I were starting IT studies today, I would go 100%
| down the open-source path.
| smelendez wrote:
| I use Pages as my default word processor. It doesn't have all
| of Word's features but I seldom need them, and it's much faster
| than Word. I highly recommend it.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Same. I use Word only to edit Word files that I have to send
| back to someone outside my company. That's not often for me.
| Pages is vastly better for every other use case I have.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Microsoft's free web app office suite is a slimmed down, quick
| version of Office that does most of the stuff most users want
| most of the time, for the cases where Pages or Google Docs
| would also suffice.
|
| The alternative to the full office suite with decades of
| backwards compatibility and hundreds of features, is the quick,
| free version Microsoft made to fight off Google Docs.
| bitwize wrote:
| We've reached peak bloat when the version of an app that
| lives in a fucking browser is "slimmed down" and "fast"
| compared to the real app.
| jasonephraim wrote:
| Numbers has it's issues as well. I have to open .csv files
| dozens if not hundreds of times a day - always the same format.
| Numbers will not allow me to default to freezing the
| first/header column or _not_ show the formatting sidebar on
| open. I have to set the freeze header option and close the
| sidebar every time.
|
| At this point, I've started using IDE extensions when I just
| need to view/filter
| dagmx wrote:
| If you're doing it often enough, you might benefit from using
| AppleScript to automate opening it in an app and changing
| setting . Not ideal, but it'll make it a lot less annoying.
| gtk40 wrote:
| Meanwhile Microsoft removed WordPad in the latest version of
| Windows 11. It was a great simple word processor and text
| editor. It even supported docx and odt files.
| stevage wrote:
| > 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.
| varunneal wrote:
| hey there's preview
| naikrovek wrote:
| yeah preview can do more than it appears it can do.
|
| quicktime pro was like that. it was insanely powerful and
| things were all hidden behind just a few menu items and a
| few little added UI elements here and there. quicktime pro
| was amazing and I miss it a bit.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| They just purchased Pixelmator ;)
| daedrdev wrote:
| yeah I was surprised to find myself donwloading gimp for
| image editing. However, Microsofts modern paint (paint3d? I
| dont remember what they call it) is atrocious imo so I can't
| really fault apple.
| bbatha wrote:
| Also shout out to Keynote which is the best presentation
| software. PowerPoint is so clunky in comparison. Nice features
| like making image backgrounds transparent are huge wins.
|
| Pages is also pretty nice. Its definitely enough for home
| usage, and if my colleagues could read the pages files natively
| I would find it completely sufficient for professional use. I
| find it does layout much better than MS Office. Which honestly
| is a much bigger concern for home users: professional users
| will just switch to professional layout tools when they need
| it, but Sam doesn't need that cost/complexity for some bake
| sale fliers.
|
| Numbers can also be nicer for home use cases, but is a bit
| weird if you're used to excel. And unlike pages or keynote
| quickly hits upper limits on complexity. I would never use
| numbers in a professional setting.
| nkotov wrote:
| I use Numbers daily for simple local spreadsheet math / tables.
| It works for what I need and I'm glad every new Mac comes with
| it.
| tbirdny wrote:
| Numbers used to be painfully slow. It was just maybe 3 years
| ago or so it improved a lot. It was practically unusable for
| large spreadsheets. I swear spreadsheets from 20 years earlier
| performed better on much slower hardware. If you haven't used
| Numbers for a few years, maybe give it another try.
| gloosx wrote:
| I'm a Macbook user, but I often have screen sharing experiences
| with people using Windows laptops, god, it's painful watching
| them. Brand new, solid book with decent specs, only used for
| few months and everything is visibly very slow. Opening some
| documents and presentations while being on screen share takes
| minutes, file explorer lags, screen compositor lags.
| Notifications with weather, STOCKS info, murders and clickbait
| news around just pop up mid-conferences.
|
| The most funny part? I was debugging application .exe not
| starting. Reason? AVG antivirus UPLOADED EXE to their server
| for EXAMINATION. EXE with an 600$ Extended Validation license.
| There was a message for the user TO WAIT FEW HOURS before they
| studied it and exe could be unblocked from launching. All was
| completely normal to the said windows user. What a dystopian
| thing they are used to
| efdee wrote:
| Sounds like an AVG problem, not a Windows problem.
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| The very normalization of antivirus on Windows is a Windows
| problem. For better or worse, Mac users simply don't think
| about AV.
| notyourwork wrote:
| Can anyone with inside information explain why these apps are
| slow? Why can they not just make startup faster?
| mdhb wrote:
| Because they did this
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17310738
| gootz wrote:
| This is what Linux is for :))
| bsrkf wrote:
| Since this thread, rightfully so (and in full agreement), has
| people complain about the bloat of today's software stack, is it
| only me in thinking there may be sincere potential profit streams
| for high quality paid software?
|
| I would happily pay for software that was high-
| quality was fast was privacy preserving had
| sane defaults had/provided reasonable support/insight
| (forum and developer blog) had a fair pricing models
| (non-subscription, x-years of updates etc)
|
| as in an e-mail client an office suite
| a scheduler (scheduling learning, tasks, various
| deadlines, calendar, ...) photo/video editor
| (wouldn't need to be of the scope of a professional suite)
| a browser (earnestly, one that wasn't a mere chrome re-
| skin, wasn't run by a bloated paid by Google organization like
| Mozilla, and would take fingerprinting prevention and privacy
| seriously) ...
|
| or am I underestimating the problem? How many full-time
| developers working how many hours, building on open-source
| software where sensible (as in you wouldn't hand-roll your own
| cryptography, networking protocol implementations, GUI libraries)
| would it take, for e.g. a good cross-compatible Desktop E-Mail
| Client? (there's little in terms of software that I hate more
| than Outlook)
|
| And given competitive non-US, maybe even non EU-wages for such
| developers, how many 'customers' with fair pricing would such a
| company/startup need?
|
| You could open-source part of your stack (as in singular
| libraries) for exposure and good will, could maybe offer free-
| tiered versions, potential fair pricing models could be similar
| to Sublime's https://www.sublimehq.com/store/text you could build
| upon technologies people are exited about and willing to take pay
| cuts for if that's what they could work in (Odin, Zig, Rust, ...)
| etc...
|
| Even considering vendor lock in, market dominance of existing
| solutions, the dominance of smartphones over desktops, isn't
| there still a viable market? Maybe what's left is even more so,
| given Desktop use seems (besides gamers) consist (to a
| significant extent) of power users, semi-
| professionals/professionals & businesses?
|
| And, even though this place here is of course a highly niche
| bubble, the plights of modern's software lack of quality are real
| and I'm sure felt beyond us.
| likium wrote:
| There is a viable market, it exists as a word + excel
| combination like Notion, Coda and Monday. Notion just recently
| had an email and calendar client.
|
| And I don't think non-US or non EU-wages, or being open source
| would help. Microsoft's success is due to the lock in and GTM
| sales org that Microsoft has. Just see how Teams eclipsed over
| Slack despite the latter being a first-mover and a better
| quality product.
| bsrkf wrote:
| Nowhere have I claimed that the whole product would need (nor
| should) be fully open source and why wouldn't non-US wages
| help?
|
| Assuming it takes me X-amount of software engineering hours
| to produce an alpha version of a given product and now let's
| imagine a rented office space plus four developers; consider
| renting in a major US city, and paying competitive US-major-
| city-wages versus doing so in a significantly smaller city in
| Eastern Europe (Czechoslovakia, Romania, Estonia).
|
| In both cases you could develop an English-Language version
| of your product for global use and you can distribute
| software cheaply over the internet; you'd still charge
| customers in the US US-prices, yet would have saved on
| development costs.
|
| I'm sure this comes with its own set of difficulties,
| especially regarding US business customers, but initially it
| could be an advantage in certain scenarios.
|
| There also seems to be a current push towards non-US
| (sometimes even specifically from-EU) products in tech, which
| might give one an interesting market position, albeit I'm
| lacking details here, and it's yet to pan out how viable this
| trend is long-term of course.
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| What Linux gui was it where you'd be in the desktop, but it was
| blocked by a modal until all components and startups were done
| loading? I always preferred that over a slow desktop environment
| struggling for resources while components were still starting.
| neuroelectron wrote:
| Anyone else still using Office 2007? 2010 is ok too but I hate
| the ribbon. One of our clients still uses it though.
| csdvrx wrote:
| I use both: they are extremely fast - faster than Wordpad (on a
| native windows installation), much faster than libreoffice (on
| linux with wine).
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| Windows is too slow at startup, so microsoft boots it up before
| you buy it.
| SCdF wrote:
| Doesn't Windows already precache frequently started binaries (and
| I presume the data that binary loads at startup)? Or was that a
| different operating system?
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| ok but can they just optimize that to the ground or they just get
| fcked with backward compability and tech debt????
| smithkl42 wrote:
| I made the observation back in the 90's that Word will always
| take several seconds to load. Any longer and it becomes too
| painful, so Microsoft will figure out a way to fix it. Any
| shorter and it just means that there are more bloated features
| that Microsoft can stuff into it.
| daft_pink wrote:
| I just wish they didn't shove onedrive down your throat.
| sunshine-o wrote:
| The harm that Microsoft and Office has done to global
| productivity over the last decades is unquantifiable at this
| point.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| That is just the kind of duct tape, that they would come up with,
| instead of fixing the underlying issues. To be fair, probably by
| now the Office mess is unfixable in any sensible time frame,
| without a massive effort. And since offline/local Office is not a
| priority for MS at all, they are probably not willing to invest
| the resources, and continue to sell shitty software.
| n8m8 wrote:
| That's it, I'm switching to linux for real this time
| bk496 wrote:
| Can they do this for vscode?
| jacurtis wrote:
| I have an M1 Max with 48 Gb of memory. It is 11am right now, and
| so far today, Outlook has crashed twice and Excel has crashed
| once. Word crashes about 50% of the time, but I do everything in
| my power to avoid launching Word since it is for some reason the
| worst contender.
|
| Granted, the corporate malware on my computer doesn't help the
| situation. I can literally build AI Models from scratch on my
| computer. But if I boot up a Microsoft Office product I have a
| 33% chance that it crashes.
|
| How can I build an AI model with no issue, find and replace
| instantly in an IDE for a projects that is tens of gigabytes and
| thousands of files with no issue. But I want to write a sentance
| onto a blank page in Microsoft Word, or Reply "thanks" to an
| email in Microsoft Outlook and the application crashes or takes 3
| minutes to load?
|
| I truly do not understand how Microsoft Office is still the
| dominant enterprise platform. These applications have horrible
| UIs, they are bloated, slow, and expensive. Yet every IT
| department foams at the mouth and gets a hard-on to sign their
| Microsoft 365 contract for $200 per user.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| The customer is not the user for Microsoft products.
| kuekacang wrote:
| It seems like it would be more stable to run windows office
| under wine instead.
| noname120 wrote:
| Outlook and the office suite hardly ever crash on my up-to-date
| MacBook Pro M2 with no company MDM crapware. Are you sure it's
| not your company's bs that causes the crashes?
| johnklos wrote:
| Imagine explaining this to someome in 1995:
|
| "In thirty years our computers will have sixteen threads of
| execution at 4.5 GHz each, with 4 IPC or better, along with 16
| gigabytes of memory that can move data at 50 gigabytes a second.
| Practically everyone will have solid state storage that loads and
| saves at more than a gigabyte per second. Many computers will
| have GPUs capable of beating the fastest supercomputers in the
| 1995 world, and most of that capacity will be used for little
| more than just pushing pixels to a monitor."
|
| "Wow! I bet Microsoft Word will load instantly!"
|
| "No. It'll take longer to load than Word 5.1 takes to load on an
| Amiga with an '060 accelerator running ShapeShifter. It'll be so
| slow that Microsoft decides to load key parts of Office when the
| system boots, but only if you have more RAM than can be directly
| accessed by a 32 bit processor."
|
| It's something you'd expect from a snarky article from The
| Register or from me, if you know me, but I think both El Reg and
| I wouldn't've quite gotten the full extent of it.
| riskable wrote:
| Fast forward ten years from NOW:
|
| * Windows itself takes 10 minutes to boot because it's
| preloading a hundred Office libraries/extensions like Mac OS 7.
|
| * Microsoft Office apps have returned to being incredibly slow
| to open--because they decided that the added speed of
| preloading just gave them more leeway to add bloat.
|
| * Microsoft has acquired several AI startups that use different
| models and provide several high-RAM, GPU-hogging apps. To work
| around the slowness they have worked with hardware vendors to
| include multiple GPUs on each actual GPU card. They don't
| communicate directly with each other though... That feature is
| only enabled for the "Enterprise" series of GPUs that cost
| $50,000 each.
|
| * Microsoft Office now automatically use AI prediction for
| _everything_. Including the data (not just the formulas) in
| your Excel spreadsheets. But it gets it wrong so often that
| people wish they could turn that feature off. They can 't,
| though, because they didn't pay for the "Enterprise" version of
| Windows or Office (have to have both in order to truly disable
| the AI).
|
| * AI is now actively watching all inbound and outbound traffic
| on every PC, increasing base latency a hundredfold. Microsoft
| claims this allows them to catch viruses, scammers, and bad
| state actors faster.
| libraryatnight wrote:
| Dude, the only thing keeping me on Windows is Ableton. Can one of
| you super hackers go get a job there and port Ableton to Linux,
| plase? (it's not great through Wine) I'd go with bitwig but I
| have a push device and it's super cool. Tauntingly, Push runs a
| Linux Ableton variant in standalone mode, I've read. They're
| mocking me.
|
| I'm so sick of Windows.When Elon took over twitter and you
| stopped being able to say anything, I was banned because I told
| Microsoft I hate them and I hope they burn - I'd just received an
| update that forced some bullshit on me and it inconvenienced my
| personal and work life, I felt they needed told they suck.
|
| I don't miss twitter at all, I still hope Microsoft burns.
| scioto wrote:
| 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, October 14 this
| year.
| riskable wrote:
| I love that you've got something like, "upgrade to Linux" in
| your calendar :)
|
| However, I recommend at least _testing_ it on your hardware
| before that date. Put Ventoy on a USB drive and play with some
| live distros. Just to make sure everything works the way you
| expect.
|
| You never know, you may have that one piece of hardware that
| doesn't work :shrug:
| sota_pop wrote:
| FYI - that is the publicly announced date that MSFT will be
| officially dropping support for Win10.
| Wingy wrote:
| 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!
| scblock wrote:
| FYI "the few games that work" is most of them these days,
| including newer games like Baldur's Gate 3 and Elden Ring and
| older ridiculous towers of cards like my heavily modded Skyrim
| setup. I think it's mostly things that use invasive anti-cheat
| software that struggle. I use a mix of Steam and Heroic Games
| Launcher and haven't run into anything I've been playing
| recently that doesn't work except my PSVR2 to PC adapter in
| Steam, which I haven't taken any time to troubleshoot.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Electron?
|
| Isn't Microsoft migrating all of their Office apps over to
| WebView2 (their version of Electron).
|
| If so, I wonder how much of this is related to that than anything
| else?
| _ah wrote:
| Wow, this takes me back.
|
| I actually worked on Office performance many years ago. We did a
| lot of very clever stuff to improve the product, even to the
| point of optimizing the byte ordering on disk (spinning rust) so
| that the initial boot would be faster.
|
| That said, it always felt a bit like a losing battle. The goal
| was "make Office not get slower". It's very hard to convince app
| teams that their new shiny abstraction or graphics object is
| actually the reason everything is worse, and it's even more
| challenging when there's no direct impact- just a broad increase
| in system memory pressure.
|
| Typically, perf isn't a few bad decisions. It's a very large
| number of independently reasonable decisions that add up to a bad
| result. If the team loses that discipline for even one moment
| then it's very very difficult to fix. I wonder if my former team
| still exists or if they've all been reassigned elsewhere.
| nikanj wrote:
| And if you try to bring up perf at any point during the design
| phase, people pull the "Knuth said premature optimization is
| the root of all evil" card. As if you could design and build a
| Ford Pinto, then hotspot optimize it into a Saturn V
| calf wrote:
| Was Knuth talking about deployed software when he wrote that?
| nikanj wrote:
| He wrote that in 1974. Software products were orders of
| magnitude smaller back then.
| majkinetor wrote:
| I guess he was thinking that u might not need Saturn V. If u
| later decide based on more info that u need it, drop the old
| work and make perfy version from 0. I yhink that is
| reasonable given how much more work and resources it requires
| godelski wrote:
| > people pull the "Knuth said premature optimization is the
| root of all evil" card.
|
| Incredible how so many people misuse quotes and end up
| undermining the the whole point of the quote.
|
| So for everyone that doesn't understand, here's the longer
| quote There is no doubt that the holy grail
| of efficiency leads to abuse. Programmers waste enormous
| amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed
| of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at
| efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when
| debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget
| about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time:
| premature optimization is the root of all evil.
| Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical
| 3%. A good programmer will not be lulled into complacency by
| such reasoning, he will be wise to look carefully at the
| critical code; but only after that code has been identified.
|
| Knuth said: "Get a profiler and make sure that you're
| optimizing the right thing"
|
| It is incredible how this became "don't optimize".
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/356635.356640 (alt)
| https://sci-hub.se/10.1145/356635.356640
| pradn wrote:
| > Typically, perf isn't a few bad decisions. It's a very large
| number of independently reasonable decisions that add up to a
| bad result. If the team loses that discipline for even one
| moment then it's very very difficult to fix. I wonder if my
| former team still exists or if they've all been reassigned
| elsewhere.
|
| This is precisely where the adage "premature optimization is
| the root of all evil" falls apart. You really do need everyone
| to care about performance to an obsessive, unreasonable degree
| to keep the entire, massive system performant. Companies with
| good engineering leadership understand this. The thousand cuts
| can come from language, libraries, feature creep, and pure
| ignorance or carelessness.
| rozab wrote:
| This is a fascinating contrast to Raymond Chen's recent blog post
| about adding seconds to the taskbar clock[0]. Apparently there is
| some energy efficiency team at Microsoft which in some cases is
| so strict it blocked this feature for decades. But at the same
| time... things like this are allowed to happen. Something about
| Conway's law perhaps?
|
| [0]
| https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250421-00/?p=11...
| jjcm wrote:
| To me the craziest thing about this is that often times web apps
| with the same functionality feel leagues faster to load, with
| nearly equivalent functionality.
|
| Google docs/google sheets/notion/coda all load faster than the
| native MS Word / Excel.
|
| Photopea is another example - it clones out the main user paths
| of Photoshop and loads in a 1/10th of the time.
|
| I really don't understand it.
| globular-toast wrote:
| That's funny. My Emacs config does the opposite. It defers
| loading stuff until you need it to speed up initially load time.
| jimt1234 wrote:
| Here's a crazy idea: Make software that isn't bloated with
| features that 90% of customers don't actually use.
| josephernest wrote:
| I still use Office 2007 on my computer. Super super snappy, I
| think Word or Excel starts and finishes loading in 0.5 second
| after clicking the icon. It has 99% of the features I need
| compared to the newest Office version.
| rochak wrote:
| I don't know what is going on at Microsoft but words can't
| express how fast their ecosystem has been going down the gutter.
| At this point, I do not recommend Microsoft's products if a good
| enough alternative exists (many times it does).
| pete1302 wrote:
| What the hell Bruv........
| m-p-3 wrote:
| So instead of rounds of optimizations, it bogs down everything
| else..
| DLA wrote:
| Pages, Keynote, Numbers on Mac load in seconds. Thanks I'm good.
| arkensaw wrote:
| I have an old copy of office 2003 I still use, it's lightning
| quick on even ten year old hardware. It literally starts in under
| 1 second.
|
| It needs a plugin to open and save docx but it works well.
|
| I don't know if there's some fantastic functionality I'm missing
| out on but it works fine for me.
| giroro wrote:
| Microsoft does not put it's good programmers on its consumer-
| grade products, because Microsoft does not respect it's
| consumers.
|
| Microsoft puts its real talent on its customer-grade products,
| like Azure and SaaS. That's where they make real money, so that's
| where they send real talent. The only exception right now might
| be copilot, which will never make money... But they say that's
| where they're putting their best and brightest. Then again,
| they're probably spending billions of CPU hours to generate
| millions of unique disclaimers and pleasantries - when they could
| instead use a simple look up table to efficiently weed-out the
| most common/worthless prompts. That isn't the big-brain design
| innovation that you'd normally expect from top talent. It's not
| even baseline acceptable from anybody who actually knows the
| first thing about how computers work, really. They would rather
| spend 10 billion dollars on a single computer than to prioritize
| optimization. Its weird.
|
| But do you want an electronics engineer who understands
| "instructions", "addresses", "registers", "clocks" and even knows
| why a pointer works? Or do you want a modern CS major who can use
| a template to quickly crank out non-scalable apps in a software
| factory? These skills are mutually exclusive.
| jug wrote:
| Edge also does this, as in not just web rendering for those parts
| of Windows using WebView2, but Edge itself. You can supposedly
| disable it in Edge -> Settings -> System and Performance ->
| Disable Quick Start
| quantum_state wrote:
| It is a wrong thing to do ... soon .. no one would want to use
| Windows ....
| Animats wrote:
| Java distros once came with a thing that exercised Java once a
| minute or so to keep it in memory.
|
| I found this running on a milling machine's control PC, and I was
| seriously annoyed.
| low_tech_punk wrote:
| It's time for some severance at the office
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