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

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2651749/office-is-too-slow-so-microsoft-is-making-it-load-at-windows-startup.html

by airstrike • 1 year ago

807 1019 1 year ago

cebert• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

dbg31415• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

The real impact is in Microsoft making people throw away perfectly good computers by ending Windows 10 support.

_Algernon_3• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

It's essentially a giant XML file, so it's not going to win awards for speed or efficiency.

int_19h8• 1 year ago

Modern hardware can parse XML with speeds measured in hundreds of megabytes per second.

vjvjvjvjghv• 1 year ago

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_k3• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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!

ghurtado2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

Maybe they're only now making this public so people will believe that Office will start faster!

conductr• 1 year ago

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.

SietrixDev3• 1 year ago

For me it's exactly other way around. First window is fast, another file is slow.

Spooky234• 1 year ago

It changed with O365 a few years ago. Basically office is a big virtual app these days.

rappatic• 1 year ago

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.

ghurtado2• 1 year ago

Why on startup?

Because Windows is usually a lot less optional than Office, for the average user.

zamadatix• 1 year ago

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.

theandrewbailey3• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

Is this just a fancy name for (re)starting the application in the background?

EGreg• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

I disagree, my Windows machine loads into the OS quicker from login than my Mac.

spicybright7• 1 year ago

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.

0cf8612b2e1e• 1 year ago

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.

bee_rider• 1 year ago

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.

mikaelsouza• 1 year ago

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 :)

herbst3• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

chneu2• 1 year ago

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.

herbst3• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

Back in 1997, most developers would show a 'splash screen' as their application loaded, because of course it takes time for applications to load.

theandrewbailey3• 1 year ago

Now we have web apps that show spinners and throbbers, sometimes forever.

snkzxbs• 1 year ago

Just to be clear current Office applications have a splash screen.

coherentpony• 1 year ago

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_hearn3• 1 year ago

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_ing11• 1 year ago

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.

dankwizard• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

Nothing new and closing Office applications don’t necessarily terminate some of the Office processes - notoriously Outlook.

naikrovek13• 1 year ago

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_file2• 1 year ago

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.

spicybright7• 1 year ago

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.

skydhash• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

spicybright7• 1 year ago

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.

_--__--__• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

hinkley2• 1 year ago

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.

whyoh2• 1 year ago

That's not Edge the browser, but a separate app called Edge WebView2.

whyoh2• 1 year ago

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-...

moralestapia3• 1 year ago

Hmm, wonder if this could trigger another antitrust lawsuit?

spicybright7• 1 year ago

How? Any other office suite or program could do the same thing.

nomel2• 1 year ago

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.

moralestapia3• 1 year ago

You made me go back and read TFA, I don't think that's the case.

Where did you saw that?

1970-01-01• 1 year ago

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...

bitwize2• 1 year ago

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.

theandrewbailey3• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

I think Adobe PDF reader loaded incredibly slowly and they used a preloader

cosmotic• 1 year ago

My understanding is that Chrome has been doing this for years. ChatGPT agrees and links to https://ihaveapc.com/2024/10/understanding-chromes-continue-...

mrandish5• 1 year ago

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?

crazygringo2• 1 year ago

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.

mrandish5• 1 year ago

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.

Spooky234• 1 year ago

You’ll be back. LibreOffice is so visually gross it’s pretty hard to use.

mrandish5• 1 year ago

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.

noisy_boy3• 1 year ago

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.

gtech1• 1 year ago

Check out Only Office

al_borland2• 1 year ago

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.

tpm• 1 year ago

MS Office is much harder to use for the casual user not already used to it - the interface is very disorienting.

chneu2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

It's not as bad as it was 5 years ago. It's closer to the flat office design.

ptx4• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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 !!

worik• 1 year ago

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

packetlost• 1 year ago

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.

n3storm2• 1 year ago

OnlyOffice is not based on LibreOffice. CollaboraOffice does. jfyi

nguyenkien• 1 year ago

No. It's js, render in qtwebengine.

polotics• 1 year ago

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.

bArray4• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

I do this too, however there is considerable formatting issues when you're working collaboratively on documents with other people who use MS Office.

taurath• 1 year ago

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.

n3storm2• 1 year ago

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.

bambax9• 1 year ago

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.

tomatocracy2• 1 year ago

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).

jasode3• 1 year ago

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.

threatripper2• 1 year ago

How can it be free if you need to buy a license?

reddalo2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

Tempest19812• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

ubermonkey4• 1 year ago

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.

dfedbeef2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

I switched to onlyoffice + joplin for notes and am very happy with both.

rs186• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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

physicles• 1 year ago

I’d recommend switching to Obsidian and never looking back. And unless you have additional software that requires windows, Linux is also a lower-stress compute experience these days.

I also used OneNote for the better part of a decade before switching to Linux in 2017. Joplin is ok-ish, but Obsidian is closer to OneNote with its folder-based layout.

niutech3• 1 year ago

Check out ONLYOFFICE Desktop, it's open source and provides great compatibility with MS Office files.

CyberDildonics• 1 year ago

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_k3• 1 year ago

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?)

eviks4• 1 year ago

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_3• 1 year ago

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.

tekla• 1 year ago

There is a list of software several miles long that does not work on non-Windows

xyst• 1 year ago

Microsoft Build 2.0 is going to be a massive joke.

jackconsidine• 1 year ago

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

bflesch8• 1 year ago

They already have the "wallpaper of the day" feature with small description text to keep you busy while waiting.

al_borland2• 1 year ago

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.

pjmlp4• 1 year ago

Well, Libre/OpenOffice does the same, but lets not get that in the way of a good Microsoft bashing round.

vachina• 1 year ago

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.

pjmlp4• 1 year ago

Only if ignoring history, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarOffice

badmintonbaseba• 1 year ago

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?

pjmlp4• 1 year ago

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Faq/General/148

snappr021• 1 year ago

Microsoft is too slow full stop.

When will there be a viable alternative that runs industry standard software?

lionkor• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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_hearn3• 1 year ago

Industry standard software like what, MS Office?

quaestio• 1 year ago

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?

herbst3• 1 year ago

Depending on the industrie there is really nothing holding them back other than dirty Microsoft deals and lazy bosses

bflesch8• 1 year ago

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.

RedShift12• 1 year ago

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.

rvba• 1 year ago

30% of code is written by AI!

The biggest problem is sharepoint. You save your files "somewhere" and links between them barely work

blitzar2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

mrweasel3• 1 year ago

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.

bambax9• 1 year ago

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).

blitzar2• 1 year ago

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.

pizza2342• 1 year ago

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).

o11c2• 1 year ago

This does not appear to be the case for LibreOffice in my tests.

Mashimo2• 1 year ago

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)

pizza2342• 1 year ago

There's an option in Options->General, called Quickstarter. I think it's disabled by default.

kilotaras• 1 year ago

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.

threatripper2• 1 year ago

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.

taneq2• 1 year ago

“I could do this all day!”

HPsquared2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

The only impact values I see on my home machine are "Not measured" and "None".

vasco• 1 year ago

Office codebase is soon going to probably be older than most people that work on it.

andruby• 1 year ago

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".

gigel82• 1 year ago

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.

immibis2• 1 year ago

Raymond Chen wrote about this.

bjackman2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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™).

alliao2• 1 year ago

make the apps trade with each other using cpu/memory as money lol and they earn money by usage

RegW• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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-toast4• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

bgro6• 1 year ago

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.

amarcheschi2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

bgro6• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

Don't worry, Principal Engineer Copilot will fix all their issues.

cornholio• 1 year ago

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

windward4• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

What a mess..

xyproto• 1 year ago

Derp.

solardev• 1 year ago

What useful major features had Office even gained since 97?

yallpendantools• 1 year ago

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.

HPsquared2• 1 year ago

Node is doing stuff when you just try to open a terminal window? How does that work?!

h1fra• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

I think someone said the definition of legacy code is code that makes lots of money.

QuantumSeed• 1 year ago

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

torben-friis2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

Autoruns utility still exists.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/aut...

bgro6• 1 year ago

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.

jeroenhd6• 1 year ago

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_ing11• 1 year ago

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.

ohgr7• 1 year ago

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.

mrweasel3• 1 year ago

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?

ohgr7• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

tsimionescu2• 1 year ago

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.

immibis2• 1 year ago

You still have to deal with the rest of Windows.

bgro6• 1 year ago

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.

Havoc• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

rafaelmn9• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

"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

mrweasel3• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

"We will continue to protect the privacy of European data."

Bröther, you're literally the thing we need protection from!

henry_springs• 1 year ago

"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.

worldsayshi2• 1 year ago

What is really missing for Linux desktop nowadays? Still drivers? And I guess office software and gui configurability.

graemep3• 1 year ago

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.

pastage• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

Tade0• 1 year ago

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.

prmoustache3• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

amiga3864• 1 year ago

Windows: What is my purpose?

Rick: You launch Steam

Windows: OH. MY. GOD.

Rick: Yeah, welcome to the club, pal.

sgarland11• 1 year ago

How dare you – Steam Launcher 11 makes a pleasant sound upon login, harkening back to its forebears, CD-ROM Launcher 95 and 98.

PuppetSoup2• 1 year ago

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?

rafaelmn9• 1 year ago

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.

pyr0hu• 1 year ago

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.

os2warpman• 1 year ago

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.

mr_mitm• 1 year ago

Same here. Linux has been my daily driver for over twenty years now, at home and at work. (Not a gamer though.)

skissane• 1 year ago

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

jimnotgym• 1 year ago

Microsoft Office

AlienRobot2• 1 year ago

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.

bobmcnamara2• 1 year ago

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.

nfriedly• 1 year ago

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.

esskay• 1 year ago

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.

magicalhippo• 1 year ago

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.

bgro6• 1 year ago

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.

bnolsen3• 1 year ago

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.

danielktdoranie2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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_19h8• 1 year ago

The under-the-hood NT stuff is the best thing about Windows.

p_ing11• 1 year ago

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.

bigfatkitten7• 1 year ago

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.

BarryMilo3• 1 year ago

As much as I'm a diehard Linux defender, Gnome can get bent. XFCE does everything I want, which is to say, almost nothing.

_kidlike• 1 year ago

Gnome sucks... KDE is awesome :)

amiga-workbench3• 1 year ago

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

nottorp• 1 year ago

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?

sgarland11• 1 year ago

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.

ohgr7• 1 year ago

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.

bowsamic• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

I like Mate. I recommend it.

anothernewdude• 1 year ago

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

LtWorf4• 1 year ago

Try plasma.

EdwardDiego• 1 year ago

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.

MSFT_Edging4• 1 year ago

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.

bardak• 1 year ago

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.

chuckadams3• 1 year ago

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.

tremon2• 1 year ago

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.

luckys• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

rafaelmn9• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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_waste3• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

prmoustache3• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

At this point you would have to pay me to use Windows or Microsoft Office... which is exactly what is happening at work.

wltr8• 1 year ago

Haha, I’m gonna steal this phrase!

xattt2• 1 year ago

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).

LtWorf4• 1 year ago

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.

rafaelmn9• 1 year ago

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 :)

tristan9573• 1 year ago

Assuming your apps are using the XDG desktop portal, they all use the same file picker.

wodenokoto• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

These issues have been the bane of my existence lately, especially your F2 renaming example.

dmos62• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

What Linux distribution can be recommended to someone who wants to try out a desktop OS with experience as close to Windows as possible?

tristan9573• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

and you got no say in it. this is why u need an option like gnu/linux.

mythz• 1 year ago

Abandoning Windows after 25 years for Fedora gets validated with every "Windows Innovation"

croes• 1 year ago

Is the Office dev team part of the 30% id from AI?

vjk800• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

It's so shitty and slow because it's a bloatware. Lucky for MS they are kind of a monopoly in the corporate world.

jeroenhd6• 1 year ago

Office is like Jira: taken on its own, it sucks, but there are no real alternatives to it.

gregmac• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

geekifier2• 1 year ago

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.

windward4• 1 year ago

Only half a century after the creation of grep

dspillett2• 1 year ago

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.

wkat42428• 1 year ago

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.

ii41• 1 year ago

Wait, I have the impression that water torturing is either US or Soviet invention?

gilgoomesh• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

Americans go big. They use plenty more water during enhanced interrogation.

brainzap• 1 year ago

Its sad because using Excel for quick decision making can be a super power, these days I use apple numbers

EFreethought• 1 year ago

"using Excel for quick decision making"

Could you expand on that?

deburo• 1 year ago

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.

naikrovek13• 1 year ago

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.

bluedino4• 1 year ago

The Mac version is even worse.

behnamoh• 1 year ago

And it keeps getting worse. I had to downgrade to the Oct. 2024 version in order to get back to a working version.

pete13023• 1 year ago

Don't even get me started, it one of the many reason why I switched the job.

kevin_thibedeau2• 1 year ago

For Word, go back to Draft (formerly Normal) mode. That makes pagination asynchronous and reduces clutter not needed while editing.

rochak2• 1 year ago

Why does a user need to know and do this to get a just bearable experience? Has the bar gotten so low?

superconduct123• 1 year ago

Its because everyone is already locked in to use it

godelski6• 1 year ago

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.

tomrod2• 1 year ago

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

DecentShoes• 1 year ago

How are you doing Spotify?

hsbauauvhabzb2• 1 year ago

I was going to agree until I realised that I’ve aliased emacs to open emacsclient and do exactly what office is planning on doing.

you win this one vim, but I’ll get you next time.

agumonkey• 1 year ago

Surprising to see after their talk about recent improvement due to rust rewrites of some components..

nmeofthestate• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

Give the new FilePilot a try - https://filepilot.tech/

Ponet1945• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

The address bar opens history when you click the delete button too.

windward4• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

Microsoft Corporation publish Windows File Manager via the Microsoft Store.

https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9p7vbbbc49rb

buyucu• 1 year ago

Office is a horrible product. Our company left office a few years ago and it turned out to be a huge productivity boost.

jbverschoor• 1 year ago

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????)

skc2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

skc2• 1 year ago

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.

SietrixDev3• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

amiga3864• 1 year ago

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?

barrkel2• 1 year ago

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.

alliao2• 1 year ago

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

Cthulhu_• 1 year ago

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.

gymbeaux3• 1 year ago

Man you can still get by with Photoshop CS3 as far as features go.

SoftTalker2• 1 year ago

Yeah that era of Office, pre-ribbon, was pretty nice as Office goes.

MisterTea2• 1 year ago

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.

jonhohle2• 1 year ago

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.

bluedino4• 1 year ago

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.

josephernest2• 1 year ago

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.

mcswell2• 1 year ago

And 100% of what you don't need--the Ribbon--was not in Word 97.

lizknope2• 1 year ago

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.

psunavy03• 1 year ago

The worst thing Office ever did was effectively kill WordPerfect, and I will die on this hill.

Reveal Codes was an order of magnitude more useful than whatever crap MS continues to pass off as formatting notation to this day 20+ years later, and that's before we even get into Word being over-helpful and getting ahead of you by doing things with autoformat you never wanted to have happen.

Yes, I know WordPerfect is still around, but fat chance being able to conveniently use it anymore.

sh34r2• 1 year ago

Ignoring the serious memory safety and security problems that were exploited to get acceptable performance on contemporary hardware, I’d point to shared document editing, automatic backups via OneDrive, and version history as rather significant features in that missing 5%.

I think rosy recollection is tainting your memory here. How often docs would get corrupted due to those aforementioned memory safety issues, even if that Win95/98 box was never connected to the internet.

Of course it’s gonna be super snappy. It was designed to run on any Doom-compatible hardware. Which includes some toasters now.

Edit: it’s also worth noting that 1997 was right around the time where Moore’s law succumbed to the laws of physics for improving single-core CPU performance via clock speed alone.

lolinder3• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

You're honestly trying to figure out why people want performant apps...?

fredoliveira• 1 year ago

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?

qwerty4561275• 1 year ago

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.

gymbeaux3• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

toast03• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

I thought Windows had a generic subsystem for "warming up" frequently used apps for faster launches.

xquce• 1 year ago

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"

layer87• 1 year ago

Only for OS components, I think?

agilob• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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)

infinet• 1 year ago

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

tossandthrow2• 1 year ago

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.

_cenw3• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

I’ve been hearing some variation of this my entire adult life and it hasn’t been right yet.

tossandthrow2• 1 year ago

Just like ANN's in the 0s

int_19h8• 1 year ago

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.

jeroenhd6• 1 year ago

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.

_cenw3• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

Microsoft hasn’t used stack ranking for over a decade. I guess the team level competitive culture has persisted though.

lifeisgood99• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

I think the old Office 97 Shortcut Bar preloaded some Office dlls too, maybe not all of them.

ryukoposting• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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_ing11• 1 year ago

Autosave has only ever been a SharePoint/OneDrive feature. You may be confusing it with auto recovery.

bigpeopleareold• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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_waste3• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

crazygringo2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

jacurtis3• 1 year ago

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.

toast03• 1 year ago

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.

zelphirkalt2• 1 year ago

The thing is, Google's word processor tool (whatever it is called now) is a children's toy, compared to proper word processing software. It doesn't even have proper styles and direct formatting rules the minds of people using it.

anentropic• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

I’m confused. Doesn’t office 365 online make this completely unnecessary?

p0w3n3d• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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_ing11• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

dimgl4• 1 year ago

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__alchemist2• 1 year ago

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

moooo99• 1 year ago

Oh it absolutely is, but at least it’s free

dimgl4• 1 year ago

I haven't used Office tools in over a decade...

bborud3• 1 year ago

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.

prmoustache3• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

bborud3• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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_cast9• 1 year ago

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.

naikrovek13• 1 year ago

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.

efdee5• 1 year ago

THANK YOU.

dimgl4• 1 year ago

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/snippi...

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/xbox/forum/all/unwanted-...

bigfatkitten7• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

Check out Libreoffice. It's like MS Office, but less resource-intensive.

bicolao• 1 year ago

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.

riskable3• 1 year ago

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!)

efdee5• 1 year ago

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.

dimgl4• 1 year ago

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_cast9• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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).

zahlman4• 1 year ago

I've found arrow-key scrolling through a LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet on Linux to be quite painful.

geodel• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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...

wkat42428• 1 year ago

Ehm this is nothing new. They did that decades ago.

Edit: Should have known I wouldn't be the first to remember :)

ErrorNoBrain• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

Edge has been doing this for a very long time, since well-before Windows 11 existed.

_7acn• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

jeroenhd6• 1 year ago

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.

bitwize2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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

dagmx2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

hey there's preview

carlosjobim2• 1 year ago

They just purchased Pixelmator ;)

daedrdev2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

gloosx3• 1 year ago

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

efdee5• 1 year ago

Sounds like an AVG problem, not a Windows problem.

notyourwork• 1 year ago

Can anyone with inside information explain why these apps are slow? Why can they not just make startup faster?

mdhb2• 1 year ago

Because they did this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17310738

gootz• 1 year ago

This is what Linux is for :))

bsrkf5• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

bsrkf5• 1 year ago

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.

bigmattystyles2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

Anyone else still using Office 2007? 2010 is ok too but I hate the ribbon. One of our clients still uses it though.

csdvrx• 1 year ago

I use both: they are extremely fast - faster than Wordpad (on a native windows installation), much faster than libreoffice (on linux with wine).

randomNumber7• 1 year ago

Windows is too slow at startup, so microsoft boots it up before you buy it.

SCdF• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

ok but can they just optimize that to the ground or they just get fcked with backward compability and tech debt????

smithkl42• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

I just wish they didn’t shove onedrive down your throat.

sunshine-o• 1 year ago

The harm that Microsoft and Office has done to global productivity over the last decades is unquantifiable at this point.

zelphirkalt2• 1 year ago

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.

n8m82• 1 year ago

That's it, I'm switching to linux for real this time

bk496• 1 year ago

Can they do this for vscode?

jacurtis3• 1 year ago

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.

carlosjobim2• 1 year ago

The customer is not the user for Microsoft products.

kuekacang• 1 year ago

It seems like it would be more stable to run windows office under wine instead.

noname120• 1 year ago

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?

not_a_bot_4sho• 1 year ago

Granted, the corporate malware on my computer doesn't help the situation.

I'd bet on this being the cause before Office itself

johnklos• 1 year ago

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.

riskable3• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

riskable3• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

FYI - that is the publicly announced date that MSFT will be officially dropping support for Win10.

Wingy• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

nikanj4• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

Was Knuth talking about deployed software when he wrote that?

majkinetor• 1 year ago

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

godelski6• 1 year ago

  > 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

pradn2• 1 year ago

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.

navane• 1 year ago

It's not premature if your crafting an office product in 2025 which sits in a direct line of 30 years of the same word processor.

rozab• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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-toast4• 1 year ago

That's funny. My Emacs config does the opposite. It defers loading stuff until you need it to speed up initially load time.

jimt1234• 1 year ago

Here's a crazy idea: Make software that isn't bloated with features that 90% of customers don't actually use.

josephernest2• 1 year ago

rochak2• 1 year ago

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).

pete13023• 1 year ago

What the hell Bruv........

m-p-3• 1 year ago

So instead of rounds of optimizations, it bogs down everything else..

DLA• 1 year ago

Pages, Keynote, Numbers on Mac load in seconds. Thanks I’m good.

arkensaw• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

It is a wrong thing to do ... soon .. no one would want to use Windows ....

Animats• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

It's time for some severance at the office

pjfin123• 1 year ago

LibreOffice is still fast to start

ZunarJ52• 1 year ago

I don't want it to load at startup.

HackerThemAll• 1 year ago

The solution could be to rewrite some parts in Electron, Node and/or other JavaScript-based junk, with millions of files and dirs in node_modules. That would surely improve performance. Electron developers still cannot use ZIP/7z for storing their crap to save space and make loading faster. They invented their own ASAR which they also don't use. The amount of node_modules crap only increases what is in line with ever-increasing entropy.

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

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