I came here looking for this. It's an old idea, from the days when spinning rust was the limiting factor - precache the binaries.
If you ever tried Office 97 on a PC of 10+ years later, it's amazing how fast and lightweight it was. Instant startup, super snappy. And those apps were not lacking in features. 95% of what you need out of a desktop word processor was in Word 97.
> from the days when spinning rust was the limiting factor
How did we get back to this though? We have gigabytes/sec with NVMe and stupid fast CPU's with at least 4 cores in even low end models. Yet a text editor takes so long to load we need to load it up on boot... Such a frustrating field to work in.
I know this is such a stereotypical "get off my lawn" statement but we've lost the art of software engineering. It's all about stuffing as many features in as quickly as we can and pushing it out to as many people as possible. Performance is always secondary.
Not that I'm that nostalgic for the old days, we would have been doing the exact same thing if we were able to get away with it. But performance restrictions meant you had no choice but to care. Modern tech has "freed" us from that concern.
Niklaus Wirth wrote about this in 1995, in his essay A Plea for Lean Software.
About 25 years ago, an interactive text editor could be designed with as little as 8,000 bytes of storage. (Modern program editors request 100 times that much). An operating system had to manage with 8,000 bytes, and a compiler had to fit into 32 Kbytes, whereas their modern descendants require megabytes. Has all this inflated software become any faster? On the contrary, were it not for a thousand times faster hardware, modern software would be utterly unusable.
That said, as someone fairly young, I still don't think that makes it wrong or something only an old man would think. Software seems to perform exactly as well as it needs to and no more, which is why hardware advances don't make our computers run software much faster.
Aside from slowness, feature creep leads to poor quality, i.e. tons of bugs and user confusion with ever-changing graphical interfaces.
If software was simpler, we could afford to offer some formal guarantees of correctness. Model check protocols, verify pre and post conditions à la Dafny, etc.
+1 to this. Like a lot of issues, I think the root is ideological, but this one in particular very clearly manifests organizationally.
The companies building everyday software are ever bigger— full of software engineers, designers and various kinds of managers who are asked to justify their generous salaries. At an individual level I'm sure there's all sorts of cases, but at a general level there's often almost no other option but to introduce change for the sake of change.
I once asked a man who worked in marketing why Oreos keep making crazy new flavors like "sour patch kids Oreos" when the normal kind is great and clearly has no issues being sold. I could see some upside - it gets people talking about them, it's fun, it reinforces the normal flavor as the best chocolate cookie, etc. but I was still dubious that those benefits outweighed the cost of developing new flavors in a lab, paperwork for food safety, a new manufacturing process, new ads, new packaging, etc. especially for something temporary.
He said it's often just some new marketing exec wants to put something on their resume, and they have certain metrics that they target that don't necessarily align with long term profits of the company.
+1 to this. Like a lot of issues, I think the root is ideological, but this one in particular very clearly manifests organizationally.
The companies building everyday software are ever bigger— full of software engineers, designers and various kinds of managers who are asked to justify their generous salaries. At an individual level I'm sure there's all sorts of cases, but at a general level there's almost no other option but to introduce change for the sake of change.
At a general level, I believe there are other options - changes/features need to meet some level of usage or it is scrapped out of recognition that supporting all these features make bugs more likely, performance likely to degrade, increase difficulty of adding features, make the product more difficult to use, etc.
> Software seems to perform exactly as well as it needs to and no more
The cynical spin I would put on this idea is that software performs as poorly as it can get away with. MSFT is feeling the need/pressure to have Office load faster, and they will try to get away with preloading it.
Otherwise, there is a strong pull towards bloat that different people will try to take credit for as features even if the cumulative experience of all these "features" is actually a worse user-experience.
software authors that don't care about performance annoy me (and I am an old man.)
The amount of things a computer can do in a single thread are amazing, and computers now have a dozen or more threads to do work. If developers cared about performance, things would easily be 20x as performant as they are today.
I'm not talking about "write in assembly, duh" I'm talking about just doing things intelligently instead of naively. The developers I support often simply are not thinking about the problem they're solving and they solve the problem in the simplest way (for them) and not the simplest way for a computer.
Software is an inefficiency amplifier, because the number of developers for a piece of code is much smaller than the number of computers that run that code; how much coal has been burned solely because of shitty implementations? I'd wager that the answer is "a LOT!"
Even if you don't care about coal usage, think about how much happier your users would be if your application was suddenly 5x faster than it was previously? now think of how many customers want their software to be slow (outside of TheDailyWTF): zero.
languages like javascript and python remove you so much from the CPU and the cache that even if you were thinking of those things, you can't do anything about it. JS and Electron are great for developers, and horrible for users because of that amplification I described above.
I am dead tired of seeing hustle culture overtake everything in this field, and important things, to me, like quality and performance and support all fall straight down the toilet simply because executives want to release features faster.
things like copilot could help with this, i hope. presumably copilot will help introduce better code into applications than a daydreaming developer would, though the existence of vibe coding sort of nulls that out probably.
one thing that AI will do quite soon is increase the amount of software that exists quite dramatically. and I am kinda concerned about the possibility that it's all going to suck horribly.
I commiserate with your frustration with developers writing things suboptimally all too often. However, I disagree with the assumption that it's a JS/Python vs C issue.
Example: when VS Code came out, it was much, much faster, more responsive and stable than Visual Studio at the time. Despite being based on Electron, it apparently was much better on architecture, algorithms and multithreading than VS with its C++ and .NET legacy codebase. That really impressed me, as a C++ programmer.
Overall, it feels like folks who idealize bygone eras of computing didn't witness or have forgotten how slow Windows, VS, Office etc. used to feel in the 90s.
> Overall, it feels like folks who idealize bygone eras of computing didn't witness or have forgotten how slow Windows, VS, Office etc. used to feel in the 90s.
Let’s normalize speed over time like we do dollars, so we are talking about the same thing.
Given the enormous multiplier in CPU and storage hardware speeds and parallelism today vs. say 1995, any “slow” application then should be indistinguishable from instant today.
“Slow” in the 90’s vs. “Slow” in 2025 are essentially different words. Given unclarified co-use pushes several orders magnitude of either speed or inefficiency difference under the rug.
The promise of computing is that what was slow in the 1960s and 1970s would be instant in 1990. And those things were instant, but those things aren’t what people did with computers anymore.
New software that did more than before, but less efficiently, came around, so everything felt the same. Developers didn’t have to focus on performance so much, so they didn’t.
Developers are lazy sacks who are held skyward because of hardware designers alone. And software developers are just getting heavier and heavier all the time, but the hardware people can’t hold them forever.
This cannot continue forever. Run software from the 1990s or 2000s on modern hardware. It is unbelievably fast.
Maybe it was slow in the 1990s, sure. I ask why we can’t (or won’t) write software that performs like that today.
The compiler for Turbo Pascal could compile something like a million lines per second in 1990. We have regressed to waiting for 60+ minute C++ compile times today, on even moderate project sizes.
Debugging in visual studio used to be instant when you did things like Step Over. You could hold the Function key down and just eyeball your watch variables to see what was going on. The UI would update at 60FPS the entire time. Now if I hold down that key, the UI freezes and when I let go of the key it takes time to catch up. Useless. All so Microsoft could write the front end in dotnet. Ruin a product so it is easier to write… absolute nonsense decision.
All software is like that today. It’s all slow because developers are lazy sacks who will only do the minimum necessary so they can proceed to the next thing. I am ashamed of my industry because of things like this.
“Developers are lazy sacks who are held skyward because of hardware designers alone”
As a programmer who studied computer and electrical engineering in university, never before have I been so offended by something I one hundred percent agree with
Counterpoint: single threaded performance hasn't improved much in the past 20 years. Maybe 5x at best. And virtually every UI programming environment still has problems with work done on the main thread.
RAM parallel bandwidth, increased caching levels and size, and better caching rules, instruction re-ordering, predictive branching, register optimization, vector instructions, ... there have been many advances in single thread execution since the 90's. Beyond any clock speed advances.
> The amount of things a computer can do in a single thread are amazing, and computers now have a dozen or more threads to do work. If developers cared about performance, things would easily be 20x as performant as they are today.
Why? A good portion of programs are still single-threaded, and often that's the correct choice. Even in games a single-threaded main thread or logic thread may be the only choice. Where multi-threading makes sense it should be employed, but it's difficult to do well.
Otherwise, it's up to the OS to balance threads appropriately. All major OSes do this well today.
I think what the author wanted to say is that because computers are very fast today developers have no incentive of writing optimized code.
Nowadays you just "scale horizontally" by the magic of whatever orchestration platform you happen to use, which is the modern approach of throwing hardware at the problem in the vertical scaling days.
It’s not about programs being multithreaded. It’s about computers running multiple programs at once on different threads and they all perform well.
One can write software that uses the CPU cache in non-dumb ways no matter how many threads your program has. You can craft your structs so that they take less space in RAM, meaning you can fit more in cache at once. You can have structs of arrays instead of arrays of structs if that helps your application. Few people think of things like this today, they just go for the most naive implementation possible so that the branch predictor can’t work well and everything needs to be fetched from RAM every time instead of building things so that the branch predictor and the cache are helping you instead of impeding you. People just do the bare minimum so that the PM says the card is complete and they never think of it again. It’s depressing.
The tools to write fast software are at our fingertips, already installed on our computers. And I have had zero success in getting people to believe that they should develop with performance in mind.
So your assertion is that developers should get in a big huddle to decide how they’re going to consume L1 between applications? Which of course no dev has control over since the OS determines what runs and when.
You can make your time in the CPU more efficient by thinking of the cache and the branch predictor, or you can say “nothing I do matters because the OS schedules things how it wants.” Up to you I guess, but I know which of those approaches performs significantly better.
My standard is that software should appear to work instantly to me, a human. Then it is fast enough. No pressing a button and waiting. That would be great.
That is probably the correct measure. If “The Promise of Computing” is ever to come true, people must never wait on computers when interacting with them.
Waiting is ok when it comes to sending batches of data to be transformed or rendered or processed or whatever. I’m talking about synchronous stuff; when I push a key on my keyboard the computer should be done with what I told it to do before I finish pushing the button all the way down. Anything less is me waiting on the computer and that slows the user down.
Businesses should be foaming at the mouth about performance; every second spent by a user waiting on a computer to do work locally, multiplied by the number of users who wait, multiplied by the number of times this happens per day, multiplied by the number of work days in a year… it’s not a small amount of money lost. Every more efficient piece of code means lighter devices are needed by users. Lambda is billed by CPU and RAM usage, and inefficient code there directly translates into higher bills. But everyone still writes code which stores a Boolean value as a 32-bit integer, and where all numbers are always 8-bytes wide.
What. The. Fuck.
People already go on smoke breaks and long lunches and come in late and leave early; do we want them waiting on their computers all of the time, too? Apparently so, because I’ve never once heard anyone complain to a vendor that their software is so slow that it’s costing money, but almost all of those vendor products are that slow.
I’m old enough that I’m almost completely sick of the industry I once loved.
Software developers used to be people who really wanted to write software, and wanted to write it well. Now, it’s just a stepping stone on the way to a few VP positions at a dozen failed startups and thousands of needlessly optimistic posts on LinkedIn. There’s almost no craft here anymore. Businessmen have taken everything good about this career and flushed it down the toilet and turned teams into very unhappy machines. And if you don’t pretend you’re happy, you’re “not a good fit” anymore and you’re fired. All because you want to do your job well and it’s been made too difficult to reliably do anything well.
> languages like javascript and python remove you so much from the CPU and the cache that even if you were thinking of those things, you can't do anything about it.
Even operating systems don't get direct access to the hardware these days. Instead a bunch of SoC middlemen handle everything however they like.
Wait…those dastardly systems architecture engineers with their decadent trusted platform modules, each with an outrageous number of kilobytes of ROM. They are the true villains of software performance?
that doesn't matter; if you make your cache usage smart and your branches predictable, the CPU will take advantage of that and your program will run faster. It is in the interests of the system and CPU designers to make sure this is the case, and it is.
If you do the things which make your code friendly to the CPU cache and the branch predictor, when it comes time for your code to run on the CPU, it will run faster than it would if you did not do those things.
What's your proposal for a "compromise" language between programmer productivity and performance, especially for multiple threads and CPUs? Go, Rust, a BEAM language?
I don't think the tools are the issue here, they are tools you can do good and bad jobs with all of them. What is lacking are the right incentives. The tech market has never been as anti-competitive as it is today. Let's repeal DMCA 1201 and go from there.
I wasn't asked for examples of software that is congruent to whatever definition you want. I was asked for a proposal of a "compromise" language, and I answered that question.
> presumably copilot will help introduce better code into applications than a daydreaming developer would
Copilot is trained on Github (and probably other Git forges w/o permission, because OpenAI and Microsoft are run by greedy sociopaths.)
I'd wager that the majority of fleshed out repositories on these sites contain projects written at the "too-high level" you describe. This certainly seems to be true based on how these models perform ("good" results for web development and scripting, awful results for C/++/Rust/assembly...) - so I wouldn't get your hopes up, unfortunately.
That probably plays into it as well. I have yet to see any convincing evidence that contradicts LLMs being mere pattern parrots.
My personal benchmark for these models is writing a simple socket BPF in a Rust program. Even the latest and greatest hosted frontier models (with web search and reasoning enabled!) can only ape the structure. The substance is inevitably wanting, with invalid BPF instructions and hallucinated/missing imports.
imho these tools are great i fyou know what you're doing, becasue you know how to smell test the output, but a footgun otherwise.
It works great for me, but it is necessarily an aid learning tool more than a full on replacement, someone's still gotta do the thinking part, even if the llm's can cosplay -reasoning- now
I'm also young and heavily favor simple, quality software. Age is a highly coarse proxy for one's experiences, but in this case I think it has more to do with my personality. I have enough experience in computing that I don't think I'm making demands that are unrealistic, although they are certainly unrealistic if we maintain current incentives and motives.
I saw the writing on the wall when I had to install a couple 150MB IDEs to run 101-level Java programs in the mid 2000's. 150 megabytes. MEGABYTES. I could consume about 1 kilobyte per minute of fantasy novel text in uncompressed ASCI, call it 1/8th that fully compressed. That means this compressed binary you're handing me is around 1.2 billion minutes of work (more if ingesting a novel is faster than writing/testing/debugging a program) for what is functionally a text editor, file manager, syntax library, compiler, and debugger. Pretty sure that got done in 150 kilobytes a generation earlier. A generation later, maybe it will be 150 gigabytes.
Having used it quite extensively (Well, five solid days over two weeks, which is about 1000x longer than most people gargling on the internet), it's surprisingly capable.
Imagine if someone with the same talent and motivation was working on today's hardware.
<aside> Someone on Atari Age wrote a LISP for the same machine.
> I know this is such a stereotypical "get off my lawn" statement but we've lost the art of software engineering.
Indeed. I am sure many of us here are burnt out on bloat. I am also sure many of us want to move to smaller stuff but cant simply because of industry momentum. BUT that doesn't mean the dream is dead, only that we must work towards those goals on our own time. I found Plan 9 and haven't looked back. I can rebuild the entire OS in seconds on a fast machine. Even my little Celeron J1900 can rebuild the OS for several supported architectures in minutes. I can share a USB device seamlessly across my network, PXE booted from a single disk without installing anything. Cat(1) is just 36 lines of C.
There's still hope. Just ignore the industry hype noise and put in the effort ourselves.
And just when we think we can't make software any more inefficient, slow, and bloated, they release things like Electron, where you ship an entire browser with your app! And then when we think it can't even get worse, we have Docker and containers where we ship the entire OS with the application.
I'm looking forward to when app developers ship you an entire computer in the mail to run their text editor.
The problem with Electron is that business-wise it is an excellent decision. You can get by with a few people to wrap the web app and integrate it with the OS, and then get updates pretty much for free.
Yet for the user it is bad -- bloated, slow, feels non-native, has specific bugs which are hard to address for the devs, etc.
I don't see any light for the desktop UI development unless there is some lightweight universal rendering engine. Tauri with WebView is somewhat promising, but it has problems on Linux and it is hard to target older systems.
It's a pretty OK example of a negative externality. A little like polluting: Just dumping your waste into the environment is business-wise an excellent decision. You avoid the cost and everyone else has to deal with the downsides.
Polluting is indeed an excellent business decision. The thing about apps is that all of them are polluting, just some of them are worse than others. And we tend to fill all available resources, so over time it only gets worse.
It's an excellent business decision... right up until your customers abandon you because you make bad quality software. Like many businesses have found time and again, deliberately sacrificing quality for profit is a short term gain for a long term loss.
there are quite a few examples of software built with electron that have very large user bases. this sounds like a personal vendetta against electron rather than meaningful insight.
I love that I work at a place (Row Zero) where caring about performance is baked into the culture, and I can spend days fixing weird perf edge cases our users discover without management asking why I'm wasting my time. And it's office software, no less!
>> It's all about stuffing as many features in as quickly as we can...
The problem isn't "engineering" the problem is the culture of product management. (Note: NOT product managers per se).
I ask this basic question, how many Directors, VP's or CPO's do you know who got their job based on "cutting out unused features"? If you can find one, it will end up being the exception that proves the rule. The culture of "add", "new" and "shiny" doesn't reward keeping things lean and effective. T
In the tangible world we look to accountants for this sort of thing (because they tend to have costs). Think cheap Costco hotdogs and free cookies at Double Tree. No one in product, dev and accounting is going to sit down and try to justify loosing some code, features and maybe a few customers to make it faster when you can just "engineer" you way out of it and not have to sell less is more.
Ford does. They look at connected vehicle telemetry to strip out features nobody uses in order to save software maintenance, hardware and third party IP licensing costs.
My personal theory is there is a threshold of performance. Below the threshold the experience is bad enough it affects revenue so getting the program up to speed becomes a priority. Above the threshold only features are prioritized to drive more revenue. That's why despite computers getting orders of magnitude faster computer programs seem to run about the same speed.
I think the threshold is more about how much more rent can we seek to collect from users, and making things more performant or ergonomic doesn’t do anything to allow sales to add another 10% to the per-user subscription pricing (I assume this is a product with per-user subscriptions, even though it’s almost certainly unnecessary).
But adding yet another gateway to ChatGPT’s API…that’s a $15/mo/user add-on right there, and not just a monkey, but one of the slower intern monkeys, could write the code for such an incredibly innovative and, there’s no other word for it, powerful new feature that everyone should be thrilled to pay for at a 200-300% (or more!) markup.
So guess who gets that VP of New Bullshit Development position, and guess what kind of choices get reinforced?
How does someone get promoted at Microsoft? How do they avoid being seen as a low performer?
Performance just isn’t on that list, and it’s often more and harder work than a given new feature took to create. Office users are getting what Microsoft is designed to deliver.
Yes! This is what all my projects are geared towards restoring. The big one is not quite ready to announce yet, but I am very proud of it, and extremely excited to release it, to solve exactly that: it makes engineering fun again!
It's a matter of resource allocation. Lowering your design requirements for performance can save significant developer cost. Also, Word in 2025 is doing a lot more under the hood than 97.
I'll take the hate for this, but I have been using gemini to build narrow scope apps and they are extremely fucking fast compared to their bloated software package suite $200/user/month counterparts. It's amazing how fast and efficient programs can be when not trying to cover every use case for every possible user at every possible moment on top of a sea of tech debt programming.
While true LLMs fall flat on their face when fed massive codebases, the fact of the matter is that I don't need a 200k LOC program to accomplish a single task that an LLM can do in 2k LOC.
To give an example, we have proprietary piece of software that is used to make (physical) product test systems using flow charts and menus. It's expansive and complex. But we don't need it when we can just spend 30 minutes prompting your way to working test code and it produces way faster and more robust systems.
Maybe the devs of that software package cannot dump that whole codebase into an LLM and work on it. But they are completely missing the forest for the trees.
Have a large ZIP file. Preferably like a few gigs and lots of (small) files.
Try to open it with the built-in Windows 11 tooling from Microsoft. It's going to be super slow to even show anything never mind unpack it.
Now install say 7-zip and do the exact same thing(s) and it's going to be instant opening and unpacking it takes a much much smaller amount of time (only limited by disk speed).
Turns out optimizations / not doing stupid things is still a thing even with all this raw power we now have.
Because an entire generation of developers and their managers believe the hardware is so fast there's no point trying to optimize the software.
Besides, the only thing that matters is getting tickets "done" before the arbitrary sprint deadline in 2 weeks, so best not to spend any extra time cleaning up or optimizing the first thing that works. You can't think about performance until the sprint dedicated to performance.
For the local OS and sustained workloads like video playback, yes, battery optimization is huge. For an individual app with bursty compute, less so, plus some of that inefficient code can run in the cloud instead, which is costly, but premium subscriptions can pay for it, and power plants are now colocated with data centers so power transmission cost is negligible. The incentive to be efficient is insufficient.
I think people forget that some of this software may be relatively fast. The problem is, most corporate environments are loaded up with EDRs and other strange anti-malware software that impede quick startup or speedy library calls.
I've seen a misconfigured Forcepoint EDR rule block a window for 5 seconds on copy and paste from Chrome to Word.
Another example: it takes ~2 seconds to run git on my work machine
(Measure-Command { git status | Out-Null }).TotalSeconds
while running the same command on my personal Windows 11 virtual machine is near instant: ~0.1 seconds.
Still slower than Linux, but not nearly as bad as my work machine.
> Why the hell are all my desktop apps written in JS now?!
Have you seen the state of pretty much every non-js UX framework?
That's why.
JS/css/html won the UX domain in a way that no other language comes close to. If you look at the most recent most modern UX frameworks, they are often just half implemented poor mimics of the js/css/html stack with approximately 0 devs writing new 3rd party extensions.
Intellij uses swing, SWING, as it's UX. A framework written in the 90s filled with warts. Yet, it's still a better experience than the more recent JavaFX experience. Swing simply has more support.
Call me an idiot, but I still gladly take Swing and javafx over JS and monstrosities like react. The state of Qt is also very good. Web won because the distribution model is easier on the user, and because managers thought UX designers would be making whole apps now, saving on rates. Not because it's technically superior.
You're not an idiot for liking the Swing/javafx/QT way of doing things. Or even for thinking they are technically superior.
The bigger issue isn't the tech, it's the ecosystem. While you might like swing, you simply are never going to find the swing version of Material UI or D3.js. That's more the problem that you'll run into.
For some of our apps because we need charting, we are using GraalJS just to run the JS charting library to export to an image that we ultimately put on some of our downloadable reports. It's a huge pain but really the only way to do that.
> you simply are never going to find the swing version of Material UI or D3.js. That's more the problem that you'll run into.
I remember a time when having your application look "out of place" was undesired, and the ultimate goal was to be "as native as possible". If you are running a website selling something, I agree that you want a brand-identity and a unique look. But productive software shouldn't require users to adapt to new UX paradigms (guessing whether the cancel button comes on the left or on the right, dealing with slightly do different input method and entry shortcuts…).
Anyhow, I think things could be worse, since, as you say, we can embed a webview into any JavaFX/Qt/… app and get the best of both worlds.
Skilled programmers working on boring stuff like office. Most programmers today don't have the skills they think they do and would find working on something like Office boring.
Ironically, at the start of my career working on something like Office was my dream, and would actually still be. I reserve to change my mind once I’ve seen the code base, though. ;)
Well, we networked all the computers together around that time, and it turned out that all the 1337 performance hacking that people did back then had severe unintended consequences. You’re talking about an era in which the NX bit would not be utilized by Windows for another ~7 years. “Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit” was contemporary work.
It’s not rocket science to eke out oodles of performance out of a potato if you don’t care about correctness or memory safety.
Word 97 will only delight you if you use it on an airgapped computer, as a glorified typewriter, never open anyone else’s documents with it, and are diligent about manually saving the doc to multiple places for when it inevitably self-corrupts.
But at that point, why not be like GRRM and write on a DOS word processor? Those were historically a lot more reliable than these second-generation GUI apps.
So, we often look back on the old days with rose tinted glasses. But let me recount my IT classes from the 90s.
We'd sometimes go to the library to write something up in MS Word. We always liked this because it would be a good 5-10 mins to boot up some kind of basic Unix menu. You'd then select windows 3.1 and wait another 10-15 minutes for that to load. Then you could fire up word and wait another 5 minutes. Then you could do 5 minutes work before the class was over!
And it's easy to understand how we get into that trap. Each one of those abstractions is very low-cost, so it seems harmless.
And getting out of the trap is hard too, because no single abstraction is to blame - you can't just hit things with your profiler and find the hot spot. It's all of them. So now you either live with it or rewrite an entire stack of abstractions.
Probably because windows needs to make a connection for every file somewhere else first and wait for the reply, before granting you the advanced software as a service feature called text editing.
It definitely feels like this at times and I fear there is too much truth in my statement.
But it is not just windows only. My old chromebook took seconds to open a folder in the file browser (even if it was already open). But a "ls" on the terminal was instant for any folder. So getting the information was not the problem. But from there to displaying it in a GUI, there seems to be myriads of important (tracking?) layers involved.
My guess is that we're already seeing the consequences of "AI-assisted programming". Just yesterday, Microsoft's CEO revealed that 30% of their code is written by AI.
Given the game of telephone which would have to had occurred for that 30% figure to travel from developers up to the CEO, it's probably including things like autocomplete...
The Plan
In the beginning, there was a plan,
And then came the assumptions,
And the assumptions were without form,
And the plan without substance,
And the darkness was upon the face of the workers,
And they spoke among themselves saying,
"It is a crock of shit and it stinks."
And the workers went unto their Supervisors and said,
"It is a pile of dung, and we cannot live with the smell."
And the Supervisors went unto their Managers saying,
"It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong,
Such that none may abide by it."
And the Managers went unto their Directors saying,
"It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide by its strength."
And the Directors spoke among themselves saying to one another,
"It contains that which aids plants growth, and it is very strong."
And the Directors went to the Vice Presidents saying unto them,
"It promotes growth, and it is very powerful."
And the Vice Presidents went to the President, saying unto him,
"This new plan will actively promote the growth and vigor
Of the company With very powerful effects."
And the President looked upon the Plan
And saw that it was good,
And the Plan became Policy.
There are no financial or career incentives to optimise existing, working things in these institutions. The structures which these large companies use are for people working on new things, so that's what we get. Making office faster doesn't create headlines, but a new product that does the same thing somehow will.
Ever notice how Windows 7 and 10 and 11 have basically the same features and benchmark the same on performance tests yet 10 and especially 11 completely shit the bed if you try to run them off a hard drive? Like they might all boot in twenty seconds from an SSD but booting from a hard disk might take W7 two minutes and W11 ten minutes to a stable desktop.
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.
> I wish companies would go back to building fast apps
It seems fascinating how much more efficient Windows apps were back in the nineties, capable do to almost everything the same today apps do in a similar manner on orders of magnitude less powerful hardware, often performing even faster.
The last time I expressed this, probably also here, somebody suggested the performance drop is the cost of modern security - vulnerability mitigations, cryptography etc.
I think the performance drop probably has more to do with managers & product folks expecting growth and features at all costs at the expense of keeping performance at some baseline.
I also wonder if it's just harder to continually monitor performance in a way that alerts a team early enough to deal with regressions?
That said, security _can_ impact performance! I work on Stripe frontend surfaces, and one performance bottleneck we have comes from needing to use iframes to sandbox and isolate code for security. Having to load code in iframes adds an additional network load before we can get to page render.
I think you need to add that many more developers, or even teams of developers, are building these apps. They have their own fiefdoms and it's less common for devs to have a complete understanding of the code base.
Over time decisions are made independently by devs/teams which cause the code bases to get out of alignment with a performant design. This is exacerbated by the growth pressure. It's then really hard for someone to come in and optimize top to bottom because there is everything from a bug to a design problem. Remediation has significant overhead, so only things around the edges are touched.
Fast forward a couple of years and you have a code base that devs struggle to evolve and add features to as well as keep performant. The causes are many and we come to the same one whether we complain about performance or maintainability. You probably don't feel this way, but Stripe and other premier engineering companies are way ahead of others in terms of their practices when you compare with the average situation developers are facing.
Independent mobile development is often where I see most attention to performance these days. The situation for these devs is a little bit closer to what existed in the nineties. They have a bigger span of control and performance is something they feel directly so are incentivized to ensure it's great.
> It seems fascinating how much more efficient Windows apps were back in the nineties
I remember everyone complaining about how bloated they were at the time. Pretty sure someone in 2055 is going to run today's Office on 2055 computers and marvel at how streamlined it is.
My recollection is completely different, software was really slow on contemporary PCs in the 90s. Spinning disks, single core cpus, lot more swapping due to memory being so much more expensive.
Contemporary software was slow. You could tell you should consider more RAM when the HDD light and chugging noises told you it was swapping. But if you ran the same software with the benefit of 10 years of hardware improvement, it was not slow at all.
Nah, it's about favouring bad programming practices, not thinking about the architecture of the software and giving developer experience a bigger role than end user experience. All these stemming from a push to get to market earlier or making employees replaceable.
I'd guess less on "bad programming practices" and more "prioritizing development speed?" Mostly inline with your next point. We value getting things released and do not have a solid process for optimizing without adding new things.
Ironically, it was specifically the longer feedback cycle of long builds and scheduled releases that seems to specifically have given us better software?
Oh, I likely fully agree with you on it. I'm just pointing at the hazard that a lot of these practices aren't, intrinsically, bad. Rapidly getting something done is, generally, a good thing. I'm not entirely sure how to make it not the priority, but it does feel that that is the problem.
This depends on whether you want to exchange data with other computers using even removable media, let alone the Internet. Also whether you want to use Unicode. In case you only want to hand-type, edit and print a plain English paper right away by dumping plaintext/PostScript/PCL to LPT you probably are fine with any computer you can find. It's just nobody is using standalone computers anymore, almost every modern computer is a network device.
I mean, as mentioned upthread, Office 97 (and Office 95 before it) was slow to load, so slow that they added the start up accelerator.
You can run Office 97 now and it'll start fast because disk i/o and cpus are so much faster now. Otoh Excel 97 has a maximum of 256 columns and 64k rows. You might want to try Excel 2007 for 16k columns and 1M rows, and/or Excel 2016 for 64-bit memory.
The 90s was a time when computers were doubling in speed every 18 months.
I remember office 97* being lightning fast on. A 366mhz celeron - a cheap chip in 1998.
You could build fast software today by simply adopting a reference platform, say. A 10 year old 4core system. then measuring performance there. If it lags then do whatever work needs to be done to speed it up.
Personally I think we should all adopt the raspberry pi zero as a reference platform.
Edit: * office 2000 was fast too with 32 megs of ram. Seriously what have we done?
I made an account to thank you for this. I've been looking for a _fast_ alternative to explorer since Windows XP. But one that doesn't require a change in workflow. This is the fastest I've tried by far. I've only been using it for 5 minutes, but I'm sold. Earlybird discount too!
Thank you for posting this, and if you have any other speedy apps you'd recommend I'd welcome suggestions. Mine top suggestions are Speedcrunch [0] (calculator app) and Everything [1] file search combined with Listary [2]
Listary has slowed down tremendously ever since they included search. For a launcher I'm still using "find as run robot", which truly is a 90s era piece of softer but works blazingly fast. I do have a plug-in to tie it into search everything.
In my opinion Total Commander has always been the most ideal (also fast) file management tool since Windows 3.x. It was named Windows Commander back in the days but it still supports Windows 3.x as Total Commander.
>> they don't support system calls to dialog windows.
It's a little unclear what you mean exactly. Do you want the browsing experience changed for the system's file open/save dialogs? i.e. a third-party file explorer opens instead with all of it's features.
Do you know how it compares to Dolphin for interacting with very large (100k+ files) directories? Dolphin is the only file manager I’ve found that keeps up with the large directories- GNOME (Nautilus) and Windows Explorer are dogshit slow, even after the file list populates. macOS Finder is somewhere in the middle but still very slow.
I actually use IntelliJ and Sublime interchangeably throughout the day. I default to sublime for most work because of how snappy fast it is. I only load up Intellij when I need to do something that leverages its full IDE capabilities. To second your comment, I encourage people to try Sublime, you will be shocked at how fast it feels.
I still love IntelliJ, its a great product. But it is slow, bloats the computer, needs constant updating. But at least its incredibly powerful as a tradeoff to the bloat.
The Office debate is slightly different. It is slow, bloats the computer, needs constant updating. But unlike IntelliJ i dont feel that there is any advantage to all that added weight. We are using a word processor. We type words onto a blank screen. Why is Word and Outlook the most common applications to crash my computer that has an M1 Max Chip with 48Gb of Memory? I can literally run and build AI models on my computer with no problem but you boot up Microsoft Word to type words onto a blank page and you have a 33% chance of crashing the computer.
Google Sheets and Docs are actually better tools in my opinion for most people. 99% or more of the features you need are available in the google equivalents. These products are fast and run in a browser! The UI is actually VASTLY superior to Microsoft's ribbon. I still can't find stuff that I need on a routine basis and have to google it. I don't have this problem when using Google's office equivalents.
I don't think these apps were ever built to be fast, they were built with the resource constraints of the time. Moore's law is what's making these apps fast.
This is even more sad with Apple. My M1 Mac felt incredibly snappy with Big Sur, but is getting ever so slightly slower with each update. My iPhone SE2 is a complete disaster.
They used no networking services either. Now, I open a shared PowerPoint and am stuck waiting for a couple of minutes while it is syncing or doing who knows what. People have no sense of what templates they copy from other documents causing the size of the file and load times to bloat.
Word 2000 definitely was not very quick on a contemporary office PC (Pentium II or III), though I'm pretty certain it was much, much faster than desktop O365 is on a contemporary office PC today, despite those being >100x faster. So Fermi would estimate modern office to probably require at least 1000x more resources than Office 2000.
>I wish companies would go back to building fast apps
My prediction is that we are about to enter a great winter of poor performance across the industry as AI slop is put in to production en mass. Along with bugginess that we have not seen since the early dotcom days.
> I wish companies would go back to building fast apps...
Similar to the slow-opening glove box in a car, many humans perceive slow computers & software as a signifiers of importance/luxury/prestige. At least at first. By the time they are familiar with the slow software, and impatient to just get their work done - too late, SnailSoft already has their money.
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.
486's were way past when that became practical. I remember using Prodigy on a 286. Screenshots are rare, since you can't fire it up in an emulator unless you have a modem that can make phone calls to the 1980's. Also, machines from back then didn't really have room to store screenshots:
Their service used vector art to render interactive pages like that over <= 2400 baud modems. Other than it being proprietary and stuff, I'm guessing the web would be a much cooler place if HTML hadn't eaten their lunch. SVG is a decent consolation prize, I guess.
Let me point you to Prodigy Reloaded, https://github.com/ProdigyReloaded. We're reviving the Prodigy server and as many cache files as we can find, using Elixir as the backend language.
It's not merged yet but I've written an Elixir library that writes graphics files in Prodigy's graphics format, NAPLPS. I'm using it to get current weather and creating weather maps that are displayed in Prodigy.
https://github.com/rrcook/naplps_writer
You can run Prodigy in DOSBox and get screenshots.
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
Opening a spreadsheet, even if you don't want to print it, will hang for 30 seconds doing nothing, because LibreOffice will load the printer settings for the document, which means asking the printer, which if the printer is network-based and turned off, means a 30 second wait for a timeout.
This... 100 times. Everyday wastes my few minutes. 5 figure commercial application, state of art in it's domain, but somehow It has to wait for that unresponsive network printer and hang the startup UI.
"I was one of the many who reported this problem in one from or another. The problem is Windows-specific. I have found out that the problem actually comes from the Windows print system. There is no way to check that a printer is actually active or working or even present without incurring a long time-out in case the printer is not present or powered. Trying to check the defualt printer will incur the same time-out.
Calc apparently wants to check the printer to know how to construct its layout, and has to wait for the time-out to continue.
Some of the comments that claim that Calc hangs and never returns have probably not waited long enough for the timeout.
On my new Windows 11 computer, this printer system behavior has been changed and I no longer experience a delay while opening Calc."
I don't recall spreadsheets ever having any visible printer formatting until the point at which you print them? So surely it's not even a case of "even if you don't want to print it"?
It’s because modern devs by and large have zero concept of latency differences. I had to explain to people yesterday why an on-disk temporary table in MySQL was slower than an in-memory one. “But the disk is an SSD,” was an actual rebuttal I got. Never mind the fact that this was Aurora, so the “disk” is a slice of (multiple) SSDs exposed over a SAN…
I've been trying to impress upon people from my own research in Python packaging: Pip is slow because it defaults to pre-compiling bytecode (and doesn't invoke multiprocessing for that, although this seems to be in the works from the discussion I've seen); imports literally hundreds of modules even when it ultimately does nothing; creates complex wrappers to set up for connecting to the Internet (and using SSH, of course) even if you tell it to install from a locally downloaded wheel directly; caches things in a way that simulates network sessions instead of just actually having the files... you get the idea.
"It's written in Python and not e.g. in Rust" is simply not relevant in that context.
(For that matter, when uv is asked to pre-compile, while it does some intelligent setup for multiprocessing, it still ultimately invokes the same bytecode compiler - which is part of the Python implementation itself, written in C unless you're using an alternative implementation like PyPy.)
There may be a bit of culture at play sometimes as well. If a language isn't meant to be fast, then perhaps devs using the language do not prioritize performance very much. For some, as long as it is possible to point to some externality ("hey this is Python, what do you expect") this is sufficient.
Of course, not always the case. C++ is a good counter example with a massive range of performance "orientedness". On the other hand, I suspect there are few Rust / Zig or C programmers that don't care about performance.
To me, Python is more of a challenge than an excuse when it comes to performance.
On the flip side, I've seen quite a few C developers using their own hand-rolled linked lists where vector-like storage would be more appropriate, without giving it a second thought. Implementing good hash tables from scratch turns out not to be very much fun, either. I'm sure there are off the shelf solutions for that sort of thing, but `#include` and static compilation in C don't exactly encourage module reuse the same way that modern languages with package managers do (even considering all the unique issues with Python package management). For better or worse.
(For what it's worth, I worked in J2ME for phones in the North American market in the mid 00s, if you remember what those were like.)
Not sure what you mean, but I guess you're getting at something like "is it really pip's fault that it imports almost everything on almost every run?".
Well first off, pip itself does defer quite a few imports - just not in a way that really matters. Notably, if you use the `--python` flag, the initial run will only import some of the modules before it manages to hand off to the subprocess (which has to import those modules again). But that new pip process will end up importing a bunch more eventually anyway.
The thing is that this isn't just about where you put `import` statements (at the top, following style guidelines, vs. in a function to defer them and take full advantage of `sys.modules` caching). The real problem is with library dependencies, and their architecture.
If I use a library that provides the `foo` top-level package, and `import foo.bar.baz.quux`, at a minimum Python will need to load the `foo`, `foo.bar`, `foo.bar.baz` and `foo.bar.baz.quux` modules (generally, from the library's `foo/__init__.py`, foo/bar/__init__.py`, `foo/bar/baz/__init__.py` and `foo/bar/baz/quux.py` respectively). But some libraries offer tons of parallel, stand-alone functionality, such that that's the end of it; others are interconnected, such that those modules will have a bunch of their own top-level `import`s, etc. There are even cases where library authors preemptively import unnecessary things in their `__init__.py` files just to simplify the import statements for the client code. That also happens for backward compatibility reasons (if a library reorganizes some functionality from `foo` into `foo.bar`, then `foo/__init__.py` might have `from . import bar` to avoid breaking existing code that does `import foo`... and then over time `bar` might grow a lot bigger).
For pip, rich (https://pypi.org/project/rich/) is a major culprit, from what I've seen. Pip uses little of its functionality (AFAIK, just for coloured text and progress bars) and it tends to import quite a bit preemptively (such as an emoji database). It's very much not designed with modularity or import speed in mind. (It also uses the really old-fashioned system of ad-hoc testing by putting some demo code in each module behind an `if __name__ == '__main__':` block - code that is only ever used if you do `python -m rich.whatever.submodule` from the command line, but has to be processed by everyone).
And yes, these things are slow even with Python's system for precompiling and caching bytecode. It's uniformly slow, without an obvious bottleneck - the problem is the amount of code, not (as far as I can tell) any specific thing in that code.
It's also a Product issue: "fast and snappy" is almost never on their list of priorities. So product managers will push devs for more features, which satisfy the roadmap, and only get concerned about speed when it reaches painful levels.
But is it actually faster by any significant amount on your workload? Did you benchmark? Temporary tables in databases rarely actually do disk IO in any blocking code path but mostly just dirty buffers in the OS or in the database itself and then something writes it to disk in the background. This limits throughput but does not add much extra latency in the common cases.
Edit: It still might be a bad idea to waste the IO if you do not have to but the latency of a temporary table is usually RAM latency, not disk latency even for temporary tables on disk.
Didn’t have to, prod benchmarked it for us, twice.
If you’re curious, the EBS disks Aurora uses for temporary storage, when faced with a QD of approximately 240, can manage approximately 5000 IOPS. This was an r6i.32xlarge.
My hypothesis is currently that the massive context switching the CPU had to do to handle the interrupts slowed down its acceptance of new connections / processing other queries enough such that everything piled up. I’ve no idea what kind of core pinning / isolation AWS does under the hood, but CPU utilization from disk I/O alone, according to Enhanced Monitoring, was about 20%.
And I thought we were past this sort of gatekeeping and elitism. I've worked with people who had a master's degree in CS who couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag. In my experience there's very little correlation between how someone learned programming and how deep their understanding of the entire stack is.
Yeah, deep understanding I think is a matter of how much time you spend investigating the craft and improving. Maybe the real question is: what motivates that to happen? Maybe it's school type, but maybe it's not.
My personal anecdotes, which are music centric but all apply to my software career:
1. I've studied music my whole life, and baked into music is the idea of continual practice & improvement. Because of this experiential input, I believe that I can always improve at things if I actively put a bit of energy into it and show up. I believe it because I've put in so many hours to it and have seen the results. This is deeply ingrained.
2. When I picked up bass in high school, I spent the first year learning tabs in my bedroom. It was ok, but my ability accelerated when I started a band with my friends and had to keep up. I really think the people you surround yourself with can: push you more, teach you things you didn't know, and make the process way more of a fun hang than doing it by yourself.
3. Another outcome from music education was learning that I really love how mastery feels. There's a lot of positive feeling from achieving and growing. As a result, I try to seek it out in other places as well. I imagine sports/etc are the same?
> I've worked with people who had a master's degree in CS who couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag.
"Programming" consists of an insanely large number of isolated communities. Assuming the respective person is capable, I would assume that he simply comes from a very different "programming culture".
I actually observe a very related phenomenon for myself: the more I learn about some very complicated programming topics, the more "alien" I actually (start to) become to the programming topics that I have to do at work.
Hope this doesn't come off as disrespectful, as in that I don't believe you, but out of personal interest, would you consider expanding on that? I'd love to hear about the particular example you were thinking of, or in what ways self-taught coders surprised you over academically-taught ones, if you've had experience working with both over a meaningful span of time. Also, if the case, in what ways self-taught coders were/are maybe lacking on average.
If you've ever given answers to that in another comments on HN or elsewhere, feel free to link.
It's certainly true in my experience. The main thing that makes a difference is simply how curious and interested you are.
Plenty of graduates simply got into to it to make money, and have no real deep interest. Some of them love the theory but hate the practice. And some of them are good at both of course.
By contrast, self taught people tend to have personal interest going for them. But I've also worked with self taught people who had no real understanding (despite their interest), and who were satisfied if something just worked. Even if they are motivated to know more, they are often lacking in deeper theoretical computer science (this is a gap I've had to gradually fill in myself).
Anyway, the determining factor is rarely exactly how they acquired their skills, it's the approach they take to the subject and personal motivation and curiosity.
Makes sense, out of all the potential differentiators the source of skill attainment simply isn't the necessarily dominant one. Thanks for the answer :)
Not disrespectful at all. I agree with the sibling comments, I think what allows someone to become a great software developer, to have great intuition, and to understand systems and abstractions on a really deep level is their curiosity, hunger for knowledge, and a lot of experience.
There are many college educated software developers who have that sort of drive (or passion, if you will) and there are just as many who don't, it's not something college can teach you, and the same is true for self-taught developers.
At the end of the day "self-taught" is also a spectrum that ranges from people who created their first "hello world" React app 2 months ago to people who have been involved in systems programming since they were 10 years old, and have a wealth of knowledge in multiple related fields like web development, systems administration, and networking. That's why I think it's silly to generalize like that.
Software development is extremely broad so depending on the discipline self-taught developers might not be missing anything essential, or they might have to learn algorithms, discrete mathematics, linear algebra, or calculus on their own. I learned all of that in college but I'd probably have to learn most of it again if I really needed it.
Thanks for the answer, very nice of you to take the time even hours after.
Guess it makes sense; I'm self taught myself, but thought academically taught developers should have a leg up in theory and mathematics, at the same time though, at one point I considered further formal education for myself (in at least paid courses and such), I realized that I don't think there's much I can't teach myself with the resources available (which includes high quality university lectures which are available for free).
Not the GP, but here is my N=1 (N=3, actually, as you'll see).
I have a Master's in Economics. After 3 years of economics, I started a Master's program in maths (back then the Master's degree was the standard thing you achieved after 4.5–5 years of studying in my country, there was basically nothing in-between high school and that). 9 years later I got a PhD in mathematical analysis (so not really close to CS). But I've been programming as a hobby since late 80s (Commodore 64 Basic, Logo, then QBasic, of course quite a bit of Turbo Pascal, and a tiny bit of C, too). I also read a bit (but not very much) about things like algos, data structures etc. Of course, a strong background in analysis gives one a pretty solid grasp of things like O(n) vs O(n log n) vs O(n^2) vs O(2^n). 9 years ago I started programming as a side job, and 2 years later I quit the uni.
I lack a lot of foundations – I know very little about networks, for example. But even in our small team of 5, I don't /need/ to know that much – if I have a problem, I can ask a teammate next desk (who actually studied CS).
Of course, _nemo iudex in causa sua_, but I think doing some stuff on the C64 and then Turbo Pascal gave me pretty solid feeling for what is going on under the hood. (I believe it's very probable that coding in BASIC on an 8-bit computer was objectively "closer to the bare metal" than contemporary C with all the compiler optimizations.) I would probably be able to implement the (in)famous linked list with eyes closed, and avoiding N+1 database queries is a natural thing for me to do (having grown up with a 1 MHz processor I tend to be more frugal with cycles than my younger friends). Recently I was tasked with rewriting a part of our system to optimize it to consume less memory (which is not necessarily an obvious thing in Node.js).
Another teammate (call them A) who joined us maybe 2 years ago is a civil engineer who decided to switch careers. They are mainly self-taught (well, with a bit of older-brother-taught), but they are a very intelligent person with a lot of curiosity and willingness to learn. I used to work with someone else (call them B) who had formal CS education (and wasn't even fresh out of a university, it was their second programming job, I think), but lacked general life experience (they were 5-10 years younger than A), curiosity and deep understanding, and I preferred to work with A than with B hands down. For example, B was perfectly willing to accept rules of thumb as a universal truths "because I was told it was good practice", without even trying to understand why, while A liked to know _why_ it was a good practice.
So – as you yourself noticed – how you acquire knowledge is not _that_ important. IMHO the most important advantage of having a formal CS education is that your knowledge is more likely (but not guaranteed!) to be much more comprehensive. That advantage can be offset by curiosity, willing to learn, some healthy skepticism and age. And yes, I think that young age – as in, lack of general life experience – can be a disadvantage. B was willing to accept even stupid tasks at face value and just code his way through them (and then tear the code apart because it had some fundamental design problem). A, as a more mature person, instinctively (or maybe even consciously) saw when a task did not fit the business needs and sometimes was able to find another solution which was for example simpler/easier to code and at the same time satisfied the actual needs of the customer better.
I’ve worked with both (I personally have an unrelated BS and an MS in SWE, which I used purely to get my foot in the door – it worked), and IMO if someone has a BS, not MS, there’s a decent chance they at least understand DS&A, probably took an OS course, etc.
That said, I have also worked with brilliant people who had no formal education in the subject whatsoever, they just really, really liked it.
I’m biased towards ops because that’s what I do and like, but at least in that field, the single biggest green flag I’ve found is whether or not someone has a homelab. People can cry all they want about “penalizing people for having hobbies outside of their job,” but it’s pretty obvious that if you spend more time doing something – even moreso if you enjoy it – you will learn it at a much faster rate than someone who only does it during business hours.
Maybe you should skip bashing modern devs and people who learnt from online courses when the parent poster is the one in the wrong. Unless InnoDB has a particularly bad implementation of disk backed temporary tables almodt all disk IO should be done in the background so the latency cost should be small. I recommend benchmarking on you particular workload of you really want to know hur big it is.
I am an old-school developer with a computer engineering degree but many of the old famous devs were self taught. Yes, if you learn how to code through online courses you will miss some important fundamentals but those are possible to learn later and I know several people who have.
We have excellent metrics between PMM and AWS Perf. Insights / Enhanced Monitoring. I assure you, on-disk temp tables were to blame. To your point, though, MySQL 5.7 does have a sub-optimal implementation in that it kicks a lot of queries out to disk from memory because of the existence of a TEXT column, which internally treated as a BLOB. Schema design is also partially to blame, since most of the tables were unnecessarily denormalized, and TEXT was often used where VARCHAR would have been more appropriate, but still.
That really should include "sync write 4KB to an SSD". People don't realize it's purely in-RAM on the disk these days (you pay a PCIe round trip, and that's about it).
I do want to add that many of the devs I work with and have worked with are genuinely interested in learning this stuff, and I am thrilled by it.
What bothers me is when they neither have an interest in learning it, nor in fixing their bad patterns, and leadership shrugs and tells infra teams to make it work.
What I am glad to leave behind and forget like a nightmare is Windows local networking with shared folders etc - these never worked nice and the last time anybody I know used these was pre-2010. Today we just use NextCloud, Matrix, email and Git for all our collaboration needs.
Who's "we"? I work for a company who drank the MS cool-aid, so running Windows on laptops, using Office365 for e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets, teams for chat, sharepoint / onedrive for shared ressources.
Have you tried launching a local app by typing in the start menu on a default win11 install with limited / slow internet access? Good times. How about doing some operation (say delete an e-mail) in one window of "new" outlook and having the others refresh?
I have never understood how some otherwise reasonable people are able to consider this absolute shitshow of a work environment good enough.
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.
I agree with the point about the immediacy of TUIs, but I use MS Office (and Windows in general) almost exclusively by keyboard, so the point about having to use a mouse isn’t completely accurate.
You can still do that? I mean, there are certainly places where the interaction happens to be more cumbersome than it is in a TUI, because the relevant piece was designed mouse-first. However, one reason I prefer Windows as a desktop UI is that it was designed to be fully operable by keyboard as well.
You could see the files as you scrolled through them. I don't think you understood how it works, I didn't do a great job explaining it. You can see the content of the files instantly on the screen as you go through them. Similar to how preview works on Mac
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.
I find its discoverability is terrible. I am always hunting for what I want to do and it's never anywhere that seems to me to be sensible. I usually end up doing a google search for what I want. Perusing the ribbon takes me much more time than just looking at the various options under the old style menus.
Also traditional menus had some traditional standards. Once you learned what was under "File" or "View" or "Insert" or "Format" it was often pretty similar across applications.
Logically, users have to learn the name of the tool before performing any sort of geographical associations (which menu, symbol, etc to find the tool).
There is no faster discoverability than O(log(N)) search using the letters of the name as a lookup.
The biggest failure of modern operating systems is failing to standardize this innate reality.
Windows,Linux,etc should have 1. keyboard button to jump to search box 2. type 1-2 letters and hit enter. Operating systems and applications should all have this kind of interface.
The most ironic apps have a ribbon named something like "Edit" but then the most used "edit" command lives in an unrelated ribbon.
Anecdotal evidence from myself: Although I've been using Word for many decades, I've never had much "muscle memory" in terms of accessing features. It was always a case of learning which pulldown menu held the required function.
When the accursed ribbon came along, "discoverability" went out the window. Functions were grouped according to some strange MS logic I could never understand, and it takes me twice as long to format a page as it used to. Now, I basically just use Word for text entry, and if I want an elegant format, I use a graphic design app like Illustrator.
Judging from what I've read online, you may be the only person who actually likes the ribbon.
Hieroglyphics are the opposite of "discoverable". That's why they became uninterpretable for almost two thousand years, until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. And even then it took considerable work to figure out how they functioned.
In the Ribbon, in order to discover what some hieroglyph does, you have to mouse over it. Since there are lots of hieroglyphs there, that's a lot of mouse-over.
And no, the Ribbon's images make no sense in 99% of the cases.
That might have been true for the first five minutes of using the software (assuming the person had not yet used a CUA application before the first time they used office). After that, it was strictly worse.
Its probably a case of UI discoverability vs usability. Brand new users might discover better with the ribbon, but as brand new users keep using the product, they transition to experienced users, and the UI needs to adapt to that. My experience is that the ribbon doesn't. Its tolerable, and for me thats enough but I get the points about the ribbon. Its sort of like the new reddit UI, but props to reddit they at least have kept much of the old UI available for longer than I expected them to.
Sadly, none of the links I tried work anymore. (Though the conversation in the comments where they have to explain how to open a ppt in powerpoint is internet gold!)
I was hoping to figure out what led to design incompetence so spectacular that people would still be discussing it after 17 years.
I think there’s a clue in the abstract: The author claims they made 25,000 mock UI screenshots, but doesn’t mention user studies or even internally prototyping some of the concepts to see how they feel.
Looks like the links in the posts no longer work, but all the posts are readable and he goes through the work they did and why. They did a lot of usability testing for the ribbon. But anyways I have no horse in this race other than liking ribbon over 16x16 icons and menus, so no point in hashing this over.
The Ribbon is more difficult to visually grep for me than the classic menus. Not to mention that a number of functions are still hidden in mini-menus in the Ribbon.
It wouldn’t be so bad if keyboard navigation was as good as with the classic menus, but having to press the Alt key separately, and general increased latency, kills it.
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.
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.
Same ... Office 2007 for the win. Frankly, i do not even use 90% of Office 2007 feature, so why do i even need more? For AI ... no.
And funny thing, barely uses any memory! Makes todays apps look like monsters. Even my music player uses 5x more memory while paused, then freaking Excel with multiple pages open.
Do you have a good way to run multiple versions of office? I do sometimes need some of the newer features but I'd like to default to using the older versions.
Lightroom 5 is miles better than what they offer today. Lightroom Creative Cloud is steaming dog shit. Adobe seriously gets to extort over $120 a year out of me simply for the privilege of reading raw files from a new camera. They provide zero positive contribution these days. All of these incumbent tech companies extract rents on algorithms written decades ago. This needs to end. I am very excited for AI to get advanced enough to whip up replacement programs for everything these companies maintain monopolies over.
> I am very excited for AI to get advanced enough to whip up replacement programs for everything these companies maintain monopolies over.
You are wildly off base. The algorithms aren't difficult or special. They were written by people reading text books for the most part.
They are able to sit on an on old algorithm for decades because the DMCA made interoperability and selling cheaper tools like that basically illegal.
Because of the DMCA, the work that was done to make IBM PC clones would have been close enough to illegal to kill all the businesses that tried it. They still tried with the liberal IP laws at the time.
Well that's a bit disappointing but i am aware that their are gaps in my knowledge. I had assumed it was the feasibility of competing with an entrenched firm, not lack of access to research texts. I will chat with Chat to learn more about how DMCA applies, thank you.
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.
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.
> The thing is, all of these bad features were probably justified by some manager somewhere because it’s the only way their feature would get noticed. They have to justify their salary by pushing all these stupid ideas in the user’s faces. “Hey, look at me! I’m so cool!” After all, when the boss asks, “So, what did you accomplish in the past six months,” a manager can’t say, “Um, a bunch of stuff you can’t see. It just works better.” They have to say, “Oh, check out this feature, and that icon, and this dialog box.” Even if it’s a stupid feature.
On the other hand, I very much enjoyed going to Excel 97 cell X97:L97, pressing tab, holding Ctrl+Shift and clicking on the chart icon, because then you could play Excel's built in flight simulator
> 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.
This has always been the problem with Microsoft. Here is a rant from 2020 about Visual Studio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC-0tCy4P1U and live comparison of performance degradation while loading the same project.
I remember about 15 years ago running Windows + VS in VMWare because I could skip installing Office inside the VM and the system would run noticeably faster.
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"
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.
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.
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?
> 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?
> Let's say a hypothetical Windows user spends 2% of their day using Office
I don't know about a "hypothetical" user, but I'd bet a "mean" (corporate) user probably uses office all day long. Hell, I've lost count of the number of e-mails I've seen having a screenshot which is inside a word document for some reason, or the number of excel files which are just a 5x4 table.
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.
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.
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.
Every time I reinstall office, I am actively googling how to disable that within 5 minutes of using word. I don't get why all these companies keep trying to add flashy crap to what is essentially a hammer.
It reminds me of that college humor sketch about the CEO of Oreo shouting at his team for trying to innovate on the Oreo... It's a solved problem, we made the perfect cookie 100 years ago. Just stop
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.
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.
Office 2003 can absolutely open docx and xlsx and pptx files. It is annoying because it usually opens those in read-only mode, and then you need to "save as" to do your modifications. But it works fine otherwise.
“View” unfortunately isn’t the same as “Open and edit”, and in business you need to do the latter. Otherwise we’d be 100% libreoffice from the start. Yep, that’s the moat.
It's been a while, but I think what they're saying is that you have to "save as" in order to be allowed to edit. Office 2003 thinks of the compressed versions as export formats rather than internal formats.
> I think what they're saying is that you have to "save as" in order to be allowed to edit.
The issue is that roundtripping between Office 2007+ and Office 2003 is unreliable and will often result in corrupted files.
Using Office 2003 (with Compatibility Pack add-on to open xlsx and docx) is ok for isolated work but can be unreliable for collaborative back & forth editing depending on what features are used. E.g. cell colors used in Excel 2007 xlsx get corrupted in Excel 2003 xls.
It's a completely different format. Iirc .doc files are basically implementation defined files and consist of c-structs dumped to disk. .docx is a properly specified format of compressed xml.
It's not "C structs dumped to disk". It's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COM_Structured_Storage, which is basically a filesystem-in-a-file. And it has been documented for a long time, ever since Microsoft was forced to write docs for Office file formats because of antitrust:
> 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.
That's actually not true, Office has had activation since XP (2002), so 2003 is included in that.
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.
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.
You're right about Excel; however, I think big data files should be handled in a db rather than in a spreadsheet. And sqlite can query Excel files (with an extension), and it's super fast and you can use any function you want, or write your own.
>; however, I think big data files should be handled in a db rather than in a spreadsheet. And sqlite can query Excel files (with an extension)
A lot of normal users of Excel are not users of database software like SQLite or MS Access. That's too cumbersome. E.g. they download a csv file that has ~100000 rows (which really isn't that "big") and clicking on it gets them an instant visual grid as a GUI in Excel. Slicing & dicing and pivoting data is way faster in Excel than coding SQL WHERE GROUP BY statements. I've commented previously on why databases are not substitutes for the workflow ergonomics made possible by spreadsheet tools : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30987638
It's similar to reasons why Python/R or Jupyter notebooks are also not substitutes for Excel for the typical users of Excel.
The low row count of 65536 in Excel 2003 was just a legacy limitation of 1980s 16-bit computing that was carried over into 32-bit computing for many years for backwards compatibility reasons. Spreadsheet users don't really want to switch to databases or Python just to get more usable rows than 65536.
> The scenario of "I just sent you an xlsx where the rows highlighted in red are problems and if you can just add your notes to column K, that would be great. Thanks!" -- is not easy in other tools that are not spreadsheets.
There are no words to tell how much I hate that!!! ;-) Users are too creative. Some will merge some cells and not others and boom the file can't be properly sorted anymore. Many will use font color, font weight or background color to mean wildly different things, which is very difficult or impossible to sort or do a sumif over. Others will add footnotes, because why not?, and links to spreadsheets that never leave their own device, or mini-blank-rows for spacing and general layout, etc. It's completely insane.
> I think big data files should be handled in a db rather than in a spreadsheet.
Your side lost completely. Pop a signal flare or build a bonfire, maybe someone can rescue you from the island you've been living on since the war ended.
If Microsoft had adopted this attitude, then by now Excel's market share would probably be 0% and Google Sheets' would be 100%. Microsoft doesn't add features because they like bloated software; they add features because the market demands them, and the market demanded support for more than 65,535 rows.
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).
Sumif (without the s) worked in Excel 4 (1992), you just had to enter it with CTRL+Enter and use curly braces IIRC. I used it to build dashboards. Not sure what problem sumifs solves beyond sumif.
XLookup sure is useful but again you can probably replace it with a combination of vlookup and hlookup (or index match).
Regarding the size... If you're dealing with huge spreadsheets it's really better to use a proper db. Or even manipulate data with sqlite. sqlite can query xlsx files directly (with an extension), it's extremely fast and stable.
The problem with the column limit is not so much about huge datasets as limiting flexibility in how you can lay things out - 65k rows and 16.7m cells are plenty and I’d be wanting to use a database well before I got there. But 255 columns does feel quite constraining.
And whilst you can work around lack of XLOOKUP or SUMIFS using the older functions, again it constrains how you lay things out (eg VLOOKUP needs you to presort your table by the lookup column if you don’t want an exact match) and this can often result in sheets which are much more unwieldy and slow to calculate.
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.
Now that even Google search is garbage, can't really claim they're good at search. It's also always been true that their search at anything aside from the main search product is horrible. YouTube search is its own level of colossal uselessness and has always been that way and has only gotten worse over time. These days it doesn't even show you 10 videos related to your search before going out of its way to show other "related" categories.
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 !!
The workspace admins can disable Gemini, among many other things. Google also does not "steal" your data if you read the ToS; any training is strictly scoped to that workspace.
If you thought for a few seconds, you would realize that companies with big legal teams would not sign a contract that would give Google the right to their data.
> any training is strictly scoped to that workspace
Are they really doing training separately for each workspace? I thought LLM training was enormously expensive and needed lots of data, which wouldn't make sense to do separately.
Yeah google does not steal your data and that's why companies like amazon dont even send you full details of your online shopping order so google can't crawl what you bought and what price you bought it for.
Is it reasonable to assume that individuals and small companies get the same friendly terms as companies with big legal teams and expensive contracts?
That may be the case, but I wouldn’t count on it. Probably it can change with one email from Google that has “oh btw we’re changing some contract terms, you have 14 days to opt out, no big deal” buried deep down.
True, I had a large contract recently with this issue, but it worked out in the end.
The problem is that we thought "let's switch to the online MS Word editor", which then proceeds to delete your text as you write [1]. Bare in mind that my company pays an Office subscription per employee for that crap.
There are considerable formatting issues when you're working collaboratively on documents with other people who use MS office when you are using MS office too.
We gave up for large documents, assigned an editor and just send them chunks of text.
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.
> between tons of bugs (waiting for printers on startup is a default..),
Never had issues with printers to be fair, but it sounds like something that could be done in a background thread.
Bare in mind that we are contrasting this with Office, which is itself incredibly slow to start.
> extremely janky UI from 20 years ago
I love this about Libreoffice, everything can be located super reliably.
> poor performance
For a Java application I think it's crazily fast?
> and bad formatting issues and incompatibilities
It's certainly not a 100% drop-in replacement. A lot of the formatting issues I have experienced is because a Office user did something that assumes a perfect renderer - something we don't even get in browsers. Like people pressing enter multiple times to create a new page and not just CTRL+ENTER.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
LibreOffice has several themes that makes it look like MS Office (e.g. ribbons, modern UI, etc).
Select TOOLS > OPTIONS > ADVANCED > Enable experimental Options (WARNING this is experimental and may be unstable) > OK and then RESTART LIBREOFFICE. On restart VIEW > TOOLBAR LAYOUT > NOTEBOOKBAR. You can then play with the options with VIEW > NOTEBOOKBAR > CONTEXTUAL GROUPS/ CONTEXTUAL SINGLE / TABBED.
It is actually View -> Toolbars -> Customize -> Notebookbar but within that there is only "Tabbed" option which doesn't really show a way to change themes.
This is a perfect example of actions that make adoption harder. This should have been at most 2 clicks and prominently displayed assuming LibreOffice wants to be a great alternative to MS Office and make the transition easier. I have been using Linux daily for over 20 years now and it is not intuitive to me - it doesn't make me very optimistic about the experience for a new user.
Found it - thanks! I wish this was more easily accessible to new users - it actually makes a difference in terms of organization of icons and ease of finding things.
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.
My work pays for a full O365 subscription for me. The web apps are more than I'll ever need as someone who basically uses Excel and Word as an interchange format.
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.
OpenOffice/Libreoffice lets you choose between multiple UX styles, which rearranges the buttons like old office, the ribbon stuff, and many more. I was amazed when I first noticed this (kind of hidden) feature. You should check it out.
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).
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.
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.
I always say that there's only one reason to use vim over emacs, and that's that vi is on almost every machine you touch. It's an optional POSIX command[0], but it is as common as `more` or `type`. Though that is a bit of a lie. The other reason is that you're more likely to find vim bindings in random programs than emacs :P
Emacs probably enables more functionality than vscode or any other tool. You can literally browse the web or send emails from emacs - I’m not saying you should, but the potential for performing tasks are infinite.
Vim has by far the better default user interface, though.
Nothing too fancy. I'm not going to dox myself, I like to (pretend to) keep this account anonymous so I'm not going to drop my dotfiles (though I am pretty proud of them). But I don't do anything too fancy. vim, neomutt, spotify-player, yazi, and tdf for pdfs (not still mixed about this one). I'll also maybe play around with a few for random tools but I usually don't use more than these.
Day to day I'm listening to music, reading emails, internet, and writing programs with vim (half my time I'm ssh'd into other machines anyways. I do ML research). So I got pretty much everything covered except Slack and Signal
I'm using spotify_player[0]. It is pretty bare-bones but honestly, what do you need? I got album art, a progress bar, and can search and go to my library
Note that if you google you will probably get spotify-tui[1] which DOES NOT work
side note: man... I really wish I had the time to write or rewrite some TUIs. I'm sure I'm not the only one... Problem with a lot of open source is that they're side projects. I'd imagine there could be state of things could be a lot better if some small org just paid a few engineers to make and maintain a few of them.
not op, The long story short is that a lot of data analysis that would normally require days of development can be done with a few clicks in excel.
Would you get a better result if a team of 7 people spent en entire week working on it? Yes. Can a normal competant accountant get 99% of the way there by spending 2 hours in Excel, also yes.
Excel takes care of a lot of things that are a massive pain in the ass the deal with with any other solutions. It starts witht he ability to import data with a simple ctrl-c + ctrl-v instead of having to write code, but it doesn't end there.
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.
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.
I think people overestimate 2000s desktop functionality. macOS's mail application is still the good old crap app that it was since its inception. Outlook Express, Windows Live Mail, and the Windows 8/8.1/10 mail apps are all terrible in their own ways. Thunderbird looks like a skinned version of a late 2000s mail client and works exactly like it. Search is quirky and unpractical, but in completely different ways Outlook's and Mail.app's are!
Just for fun, try installing an old OS in a virtual machine. Marvel at how fast the old OS runs at modern SSD speeds. Get frustrated at the random hangs, freezes, glitches, and plain bad behavior of the programs you know and love, because the slowness of computers at the time hid it all. 20 cores of unused CPU power, dozens of gigabytes of RAM laying at the ready, disk I/O hitting dozens of megabytes per second, but still loading screens everywhere.
I once tried to go back, for nostalgia's sake, just doing the things I do on an old OS for fun. The grass wasn't much greener back then, I just had lower standards.
I mean, it was common knowledge even back then that Outlook Express etc was far from the best email client. That's why people used alternatives, so much so that some of them were paid and yet had enough people buying them to remain in business - e.g. The Bat!
I am genuinely confused why search is so bad in the major email webapps/clients. Search is a well studied feature, and it seems like it's something that should just work but I can never find the thing I'm searching for in my email (especially O365). Knowing the date and then scrolling often seems to be the most accurate way of finding things...
I think search has been deprecated in general because it gives the user too much control over the output. Through search, people can quickly find what they are looking for, which is bad. The goal has instead become to feed people tiny scraps and hints of what they're looking for, while leading them on a long trip past any number of sponsors to where the thing they're looking for might be.
I have to assume that Outlook email searches have already been set up to have ads injected into them, when/if one day Microsoft decides to flip the switch. Actually, I'm so out of touch with Windows they might already be doing this.
> The goal has instead become to feed people tiny scraps and hints of what they're looking for, while leading them on a long trip past any number of sponsors to where the thing they're looking for might be
Search just seems bad in general in many applications. So many these days do not even support a verbatim (as in, find what I typed, exactly) search. They insist on ignoring certain characters, fuzzy matching, or treating everything as individual words and if it finds one it has done its job and earned a gold star.
I have a feeling it's based on tokenising the input rather than a string scan like we'd do in the old days. Harder to match a literal string if all you have is a tree of tokens or something, I guess.
Opengrok was the first time I ran into this years ago. We had a perl code base, perl syntax is well known as "an explosion in an ASCII factory", so it was a real pain trying to find exact text matches using it.
As I’m professionally working on a niche search engine, let me offer this: it’s a notoriously hard problem that seems simple at first, but requires catering to a bazillion different edge cases; every optimisation you do makes another case worse.
Having said all that: I also hate how shitty search almost everywhere is. It’s hard, but not that hard.
…which is the problem I was referring to: by optimising for that—your—use case, those of other people will invariably suffer.
We only have a single text field as the input; how are we supposed to guess whether you want to find an exact match of the phrase, a fuzzy match, at least one of the words provided, or any other possible variation? Also, are you interested in the content, the subject, the recipient, the sender address you used, a header field, an attachment, what have you? Do you want them ranked by the frequency of the word, or the position from the start of the text? Does it count those occurrences in quoted passages of previous mails downthread multiple times? What if it’s a stop word?
There are of course sensible ranking solutions and heuristics for these questions. I just want to highlight it’s not as trivial as it first sounds. Most mail clients probably don’t ship with a Lucene index—while they should.
I use Thunderbird and it's approximately 100x better at searching for emails than Excel. I just tell it if I'm looking in the subject, in the body, in the sender, whether it's fuzzy, etc, and then it pulls up the emails.
Whereas Excel doesn't ask shit and, in return, doesn't have a working search.
With mu4e (an Emacs package), you can have lightning fast searching across multiple mail accounts. And with a bit of work (https://stuff.sigvaldason.com/email.html) it will happily interoperate with Microsoft Exchange systems that require the OATH2 dance.
Haha, I love your reply because it brings up auth. You can't do the slightest search or action without first pinging a web server with an auth token. Yet another source of wasting milliseconds.
Spotlight search on macOS is in general kinda…spotty. Now that we have super fast SSDs it should be instantaneous very reliable. How hard can this be? BeOS seem to have figured it out 30 years ago. Apple missed a chance to fix this once and for all when APFS was developed, but they are fat and happy, no fire in their guts. Craig Ferengi must go.
On KDE systems, we have baloo which forms a filesystem index for universal (spotlight-like) search. It's very, very fast and the ranking algorithm for krunner is quite good. I think commercial software should have no issue matching this.
Do you really have trouble with Mail.app search? Because I find it STARKLY better than Outlook.
Granted, creating any kind of complex multi-clause query is a pain, but for simple searches it never lets me down whereas Outlook often just fails to find things I know are present.
As an update, I found that some of my issues were due to some bug in FileVault. My Spotlight would seemingly stop working altogether. The only solution was to toggle FileVault off/on.
I am using my mac with an LDAP (AD) user account, so I am possibly in the minority of people here.
I've given on on macos' mail app too, mailspring isn't perfect but I had mail crash and lose my emails and I couldn't have that happen again. never been an issue with mailspring
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.
We use Office 365 and their hosted Exchange for email. I manage my mail in the native Mac Mail tool; my boss uses Outlook. For commercial exchanges (ie, dialog about sales with customers), we're almost always both on copy.
SEVERAL TIMES A MONTH he asks me to find a mail for him, because Outlook search is letting him down, often on bone simple searches (e.g., for something like a specific PO number or software serial number).
I find it immediately. Outlook strikes out. How do you break search so badly?
Yeah it's because Mac Mail downloads every single email and indexes it locally. Outlook (especially the new one) is just electron-based webmail. So every search happens in the cloud and it doesn't have a full copy of all your emails.
This would not be a problem for searching of course, if the cloud-based search worked properly. But yeah... About that. :X
The "classic" outlook should do it better but it also doesn't in my experience. Though I can't use it anymore at work lately.
It's just so bad because how can they screw this up? It's not some fluff feature, it's a core feature in an email client.
PS: If you have copilot, it does a lot better at finding stuff somehow, though like every AI it can be a bit hit and miss.
For general searches, I agree. I want those to be highly deterministic. But in that case I need to know exactly what I'm looking for.
There's also the other kind of thing though. "Who was that guy that I emailed with a year or two ago about this issue with MacBook Enrolment?". Yes I can filter by company or other details if I remember those things but sometimes I don't. And that's when AI search can really shine. Or not, it can also totally make up stuff out of its ass. But at least when it comes to emails that's easily verifiable.
It's really a PITA to use standard protocols on M365 now though. They try to make it as difficult as possible. And you need lots of exceptions from your admins. Everything is "legacy", the Microsoft word for Not Invented Here and they make it sound like something super dangerous.
Of course that third party clients don't give them any telemetry, "insights", cross-marketing opportunities like copilot, has nothing to do with it.
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.
Aye, I was being at least a little facetious. The team of indexing global content is quite different to that of searching my local mail and chat logs. The various "English language search" features attempted for SQL Server are different again.
But they are still all search functions, and the Outlook & Teams search functions seem so terrible that you'd think they'd try do something about it to support the pubic view of their other search related efforts.
It's crazy to me how because 1% of Excel users need pivot tables or something we're all stuck on it. LibreOffice is enough for the vast majority of use cases.
> It's crazy to me how because 1% of Excel users need pivot tables or something we're all stuck on it.
Finance and insurance industries are full of Excel powerusers.
> LibreOffice is enough for the vast majority of use cases.
Often (from my job experience I can at least attest this for the finance and insurance sectors), Excel is an integrated part of many large workflows. Changing from Excel to LibreOffice would mean rewriting important parts of central business applications, so you better have a really good reason why you want to do the switch from Excel to LibreOffice.
We are working on backend for life insurance. They have a separate pricing team who creates calculations for different insurance products. The results are usually presented as excel files with heavy scripting inside. Really heavy! Have you seen 100mb excel files? I did!
On the funny note: as powerful excel is, it cannot open two files with the same name from different folders! Or at least my version can't.
I used to work on Excel extensibility. I’ll never forget when we were talking with one of the top 5 insurance companies in the US and they showed us this huge VBA macro and told us they processed the top 10% of their claims using this file. That moment made me realize Excel powers at least 10% of the world economy.
Oh yeah, because references to the book name would conflict. If you open a new instance of Excel (e.g. shift-click the taskbar icon), you can open one file in each, but they can't reference each other.
I have seen 600mb+ geodata based, script bloated, slow as hell, make your MB Air commit sucide type of excel every day for 4 months, working on a project.
Excel is also used and abused. In finance and insurance, often Excel isn't used as a spreadsheet and visualization application. It's used as a database and application engine.
This is really bad for a lot of reasons. Of course it's painfully slow, but it's also incredibly brittle and foot-gunny. Excel IS NOT a competent database engine or application engine. It makes JS and C++ look sane and safe.
Excel shouldn't be switched out to LibreOffice. It should be switched out to a proper application with a proper database. What, finance bros don't know how to navigate a database. Tough fucking luck! In the 70s, secretaries could do that. They better figure it out. Because these existing "systems" are a disaster waiting to happen.
I mean, it's not as if Libreoffice was created yesterday. Its predecessor OpenOffice is now 25 years old. Your question becomes: Why did you choose the expensive version where you never know what it will cost next year in the first place?
Big companies have (sometimes hard negotiated) volume contracts with Microsoft, which makes Excel much cheaper to them than to, say, small companies. Thus Excel is not really expensive for them.
Concerning
> where you never know what it will cost next year in the first place
For open source software there exists a similar risk that you don't know into which direction the product will develop.
In the past, Microsoft has been quite reliable in keeping backwards compatible, and continue selling office for decades.
In my observation, the zigzag course that Microsoft starting doing with Windows (but is now also doing with office), and, relatedly, deviating from the course of being very insanely dependable in delivering the software that companies need from them, is what by now got big companies at least have a look at what possible alternatives to Microsoft products could be.
> For open source software there exists a similar risk that you don't know into which direction the product will develop.
You know what's really interesting to me about this argument point?
It is actually the proprietary solution that is at risk of this, and we feel it daily. The next version of Microsofts own flagship product (Windows) is nearly universally denigrated, but people are forced to upgrade.
With FOSS, there's significantly less risk, if the product changes direction you and your other company friends can just use old versions or in the worst case.. fork it.
Entire departments run on the "pivot table" button. Most companies have at least one person who needs some Excel feature that isn't available in the common alternatives.
I've worked on software that communicated with other software using custom Excel spreadsheets exported by yet different software, modified by humans. Every stage of the process was specs-incompliant and was using edge case features, but this process oversaw transport for goods worth millions every day. I tried my very best not to reach for a Windows VM, but there was nothing that could work on these files.
For the vast majority of times, bikes are good enough for the majority of travels, yet there are cars everywhere.
> "because 1% of Excel users need pivot tables or something"
It's crazy to me how often Open Source pushers have the vibe "I don't use computers, I don't know what anyone does with computers, but I'm still dismissive and superior". I almost made this comment earlier today in reply to [1] which was another "You have problems with Linux? I daily-drive Linux for years and I've never had any problems" comment and the issues were common/well-known things - fractional scaling in Gnome, HDMI, screen sharing in Slack, crashes in Google Meet, crashes in Chrome, KDE unstable, missing desktop software they use, audio too buggy, constant crashes in another program after days of work.
Nothing anyone would be surprised at, except a Linux user who - apparently - never does anything with their computer and is baffled that other people do. I decided my comment was too trolling and didn't finish it, but here you are bringing that vibe again: you don't know what Excel does or why people use it, but you're confident that you know better; prompting me to actually call it out.
The first thing I looked for when I installed LibreOffice most recently, I found a thread[2] asking: "In excel you can create a table simply by using insert->table. Is there a way to create tables in calc, as well?" and the first visible reply is them explaining that they don't want to create a table in Write, they want Excel's "insert table" feature in Calc. Why would they have to explain that again already, their question was two short lines. Presumably the people replying don't know that feature exists. There are some people being helpful and suggesting ways to get similar effects, but of course there's "Why do you want to insert a table into a Calc spreadsheet? It doesn’t seem like a feature that I’d use much" ("I don't know what the feature does but I know I don't want it"), a couple people commenting explanations of what Excel's tables are and why they are useful including a link to a video demonstration ... followed by someone saying "It already works, they are called database ranges" - no, that's different. Someone who doesn't know what they are, didn't read the explanations or watch the video and still thinks they know better. Crazy.
One of the earlier repliers comes back with "LibreOffice has a database component which is by far more powerful than any fake tables on a calculator’s grid." doubling down on "I don't understand it, didn't read the explanations, don't respect you enough to consider that you know anything about what you want or do on a computer, I still know better" and with namecalling it 'fake'. Crazy.
Note, to avoid the obvious tangent, that I'm not demanding people implement features for me in free software. As the thread ends by kerosene5 "Instead of spending so much time poo pooing the feature request, you could explore it. It really is a good feature. I just downloaded and opened my bank transactions and the very FIRST thing I did was look how to convert it to a table. . . . back to Excel."
It's not "1% of Excel users need pivot tables or something" it was the very FIRST thing they wanted, and multiple people in that thread want, and the second thing I wanted. No this is not the only feature Excel has that LibreOffice hasn't; if you want to know why people aren't using Open Source software? Try actually looking and listening instead of whatever that is you are doing.
My god the amount of projection in your comment. It seems you've mistaken me for everyone who ever commented in favor of migrating off of Excel.
I"m aware that there are things I'm unaware of. Perhaps I don't know how to use Excel, I'm "no true Excel user" if you will, and therefore my opinion is invalid. Like you I'm baffled not by the technical side of things but by our reaction to it. People say "it powers 10% of the world's economy" but not "and it's a problem".
It's a problem. My point is not that LO is better, it's that we should work to remove our dependency on closed-source software for universal office work. Governments should be doing that. But no, let's just say "the other one sucks" and continue to act like depending on a single for-profit company for all our economies is a good thing.
Not sure how my other comment relates to this. Is it arrogant to have preferences?
Lots of documents have to be styled in a very particular way. These rules aren’t laws of physics, they’re made by humans to make other people’s lives more miserable than it’s necessary
Absolute most of the time what is offered by markdown is enough.
When doing my thesis I was asking myself “is it really that important to use 16pt font or 14pt one or this is a made up rule because someone said so many years ago”
There are tons of alternatives, you just need to accept that its missing 1 or 2 features you like, because if the app supported the 1 or 2 features for everyone, it turns into jira/office
I’ve never had a problem working with CSVs in Excel, but I’ll take your word for it. For text operations, I frequently find myself using Notepad++ anyway.
> 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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
> 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.
It's premature in the sense that you need to care about it before you do profiling, which is the usual advice for perf improvements: "you don't know where the hotspots are, so write your code, profile it, and fix the slow bits".
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
> 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".
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
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.
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
I think letting certain software thrive which just blatantly disregards your own certification and validation processes is exactly Windows problem. Some developer(s) paid 600$ and emailed their passport to Microsoft affiliates to get rid of that "SmartScreen" warning, do they have to pay and email their passport copy to AVG as well so their application can be ran without uploading step and needing to wait few hours of "examination"?
Windows historically allowed a dire situation with security, so no-one really freaking knows what software is safe and what not. Even monopoly they have on deciding what software is safe and what is not (extended validation certification procedure) is not helping anyone, because anyone can circumvent it with photoshop and 10$
Are you saying Microsoft shouldn't care about making a secure system and they can just outsource the subject to a third company which will upload .exe to their server and tell user to wait few hours before it can be launched?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
yeah preview can do more than it appears it can do.
quicktime pro was like that. it was insanely powerful and things were all hidden behind just a few menu items and a few little added UI elements here and there. quicktime pro was amazing and I miss it a bit.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I love this idea, and agree with your assessment of office tools in general. You almost make me want to try it, but it's evident the size this body of work would take.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Well, then they are one in four. The other three were quality, performance and correctness. Simply re-implementing something, or writing something that is poor software isn't sufficient.
As for knowledge: yes, it is more valuable than the software. That does not imply the software is the only place where software is stored. In its most useful form it is stored in people. Which is why you should revisit, and rewrite, code that is important often enough to ensure the knowledge is passed on.
However, don't forget to make room for new knowledge and new ideas. That has hardly happened to Office suites for 30 years. They just tend to become "more".
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.
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.
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.
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":
This is likely because people take their customizations (like custom setup scripts to “decrapify” windows) that used to work great on previous versions of windows and apply them unchanged to new versions or something, because “windows is the same underneath, this is just a reskin that they charge you $150 for.” Every time I have helped someone with problems like these (when I did see them a lot earlier in my career) it was because they did something goofy to cause it. Like using a PCIe to PCI adapter with a PCI to ISA adapter, so they could plug in a flipping Sound Blaster64 or something. “I’m not buying a new sound card!! I’m not using the onboard sound!! I bought this sound blaster in 1996 and I want to use it!! Microsoft should let me!!”
Others would show me how the computer would act weird after unplugging PCI cards while the computer was running, and blame Microsoft. “See!? SEE?!” Every single WTF moment I had in desktop support with issues like this was user error.
Maybe yours aren’t. Maybe the Microsoft Answers forum is filled with exceptionally smart people who all know exactly how to use a computer, never ask stupid questions, and never give wrong answers, but I think we both know that isn’t really true.
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!)
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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™).
Makes perfect sense. It recently became clear to me (e.g. [2]) that it's not a cohesive concept but to me personally this is the meaning of POSIWID [1].
Basically making Windows a good desktop OS is not in any meaningful way the "purpose" of that part of MS. The "purpose" of any team of 20+ SWEs _is_ the set of objectives they measure and act upon. That's the only way you can actually predict the outcomes of its work.
And the corrolary is that you can usually quite clearly look at the output of such an org and infer what its "purpose" is, when defined as such.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I guess, those of us who actually like the idea should be more vocal. As otherwise the devs would read the comments and decide nobody likes what they do. Personally, I’m super happy about current Gnome. Coming after 10+ years of macOS. I don’t want to see that ugly mess of visual distractions on my screen all the time. Basic vitals like battery is okay for me. Distractions from apps, I don’t need them. They serve zero purpose to me, and being a computer user of 20+ years, I never interacted with those widgets. Even on Windows. So, kudos to Gnome team, I really like Gnome since 42 or when they started this radical simplicity thing. I enjoy the system each and every day I interact with it, and it does not wear off. It’s not like it looks cool, but after a couple of days I understand it isn’t.
Having to interact with them, even having to hide them, is forcing them upon me. I don’t understand a reason for them to exist. They’re simply useless to me and a sign of a complex design.
GNOME is open to adding a system tray. There are even designs for it.
There is just no one working on the technology. TingPing, an Igalia employee and GNOME contributor, was working on a new D-Bus protocol for it, but the work stopped. There is a PR up on the freedesktop xdg-specs repository.
So rather than disable the system tray, or use other applications that don't have inconsistent scaled and styled icons, you'd prefer that nobody who uses Gnome is able to have a system tray?
I prefer not having to worry about it at all, and I don't. Its tidy by default and stays tidy no matter what I install. Many other "deficiencies" in Gnome, like the lack of desktop filing, or the austere file manager contribute to this tidiness.
The first versions of Gnome 3 did indeed have a system tray for backwards compatibility, and it was hidden out of the way until you needed it. Eventually it was scrapped once enough software was updated to not rely on it.
If somebody insists on having a messy UI, they can use literally any other DE available for Linux.
It does a lot of things, though many are somewhat subtle, like screen locking timeout and stuff with networking and a bunch of utility programs and so on. I like to start off Xfce Debian and plaster i3wm over it, it's the best 'power user' setup I've come across.
I wouldn't hesitate to put a 'regular' computer user in front of Xfce, it strikes a nice combination of simple and discoverable with very few annoyances. It's also where I go when I want to use some many-windowed application that doesn't fit into tiling.
While it may seem overblown, it's absolutely RIDICULOUS how fast it flies on contemporary systems, and even older ones.
One can also omit most of their other apps, with the exception of KWIN, drawing the desktop and its window decorations, and konqueror, the filemanager, and the things managing the menu(bar(s)), applauncher.
Using modern apps for the rest, like anywhere else.
And have them styled, themed however you like. With a few mouseclicks.
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.
KDE is great. It gets slept on because of its bad rap circa 2004, but it has low-key become the best DE by far. Sane defaults, nothing tries to fight you, everything is configurable.
If you don't have the time or inclination to tinker with things like tiling WMs - and more power to you if you do, but I don't - KDE is the best there is.
I've been using KDE for a good decade or so, and what a lot of people don't know is that not only is the desktop great, the applications are, too.
Everyone knows Dolphin is by far the best file manager, but not a lot of people know that Kate is fantastic. Konsole is really good too. The new System Monitor basically replaces a ton of programs. Spectacle is a great and snappy screenshot utility. Filelight is so useful.
There's definitely a few misses, though. kmail in particular. But, overtime the applications actually improve, both in performance and features. This seems to be in contrast in gnome, where apps like Nautilus have been getting worse for a long time. And in contrast to Windows.
System monitor can do all this stuff, pstree and all, and you can get really cool visualizations. Pi charts, line graphs, and my personal favorite, color grid. That one's really good for CPU utilization.
But the real icing is that it doesn't just work for processes, applications, CPU usage and whatnot. It works for any sensor, including temperature and fans. And, of course, it's all customizable.
Be that as it may, it is slow to start, or switch between different views. I tested that again just now. Furthermore, it's causing more load by running, than one btop++ or htop running in Konsole. Which btw. both show temperatures, and could also show the rpm of the little 'Miefquirl'...err.. fan if I wanted them to.
That's seems to be common for all the monitoring stuff running graphically, no matter if Gnome, XFCE, or even old KDE (Trinity).
That aside, htop and especially btop++ are heavily customizable, too.
Whatever. To each his own. It's a matter of taste.
Yeah it's pretty fast but it's still a full graphical application. It's probably written using QtQuick so it's fast... ish. Terminal applications are almost always going to be much faster. But, it's a neat application that doesn't get much competition on the GUI side.
Tiling WMs have more up front cost, but they don't require continuous tinkering if you don't want to tinker. I have been using the same SwayWM config for like 5 years now.
I started using KDE regularly after trying it out on the Steam Decks desktop mode. It works great! I had used it previously over a decade ago and was not impressed with it at first, but now it's my daily driver desktop enviornment.
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.
I've always joked about the eventual evolution of the GNOME desktop converging to a single login screen followed by a full screen button labeled LOGOFF because they will claim anything else is too confusing for their users.
>> 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.
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.
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.
+1 plasma is pretty nice and also lets you reconfigure things if you like. The rate of "we broke this and you were stupid for ever wanting it" is much lower than for gnome
That's what I thought for a long time, until I tried it on the Steam deck since they use it for its desktop mode. I now use it as my daily driver desktop environment
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.
I'm not a huge fan of this statement - just because some users prefer simplicity, doesn't make them "illiterate." I'm happy to be a pretty tech-savvy gnome user - everyone uses a computing device for different purposes (as a tool, not a hobby). For example, it's great that KDE offers 2 or 3 kick-off menus, multiple clock plasmoids, etc, but just because a user is fine with a single, well-refined option, doesn't mean they are less "computer literate."
Of all the reasons to be upset with Gnome, that's the silliest. I could not care less about their political opinions. It's their opinions on how a computer should look and work that are the problem.
> 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?
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.
> Right now I upgraded my GPU to 9070XT - I'm still not sure if that would work on Linux yet because of driver support delay
You can install AMDs driver from their repo directly, it works just fine (using it every day).
> I still cannot use my LG C4 as a monitor in full capacity because AMD on Linux does not support HDMI 2.1
That will never be possible. To prevent pirates from breaking it (lol), HDMI has decided to keep HDMI 2.1 secret. No open source version of HDMI 2.1 can exist.
That said, AMD's driver repo includes both the open source drivers and some proprietary versions of the driver, maybe that'll work for you.
Another option would be using a displayport output and a DP to HDMI converter, as e.g. Intel is using for their GPUs.
- Fractional scaling: That's because X11 itself does not support it. Many older Windows apps also have problems with fractional scaling.
- HDMI 2.1: The HDMI Forum blocked it, as they don't want the details of HDMI 2.1 publically available. If you can, use DisplayPort, which is an actual open standard, and is better anyway. Nvidia works because they implemented it in closed-source firmware instead. https://www.phoronix.com/news/HDMI-2.1-OSS-Rejected
Strangely enough Plasma was able to handle this regardless (guess it was misreporting the resolution to X11 app or something like that to make it work ?) it was a Gnome/Wayland thing.
DisplayPort isn't an option - the TV only has HDMI in and converters suck (they crash constantly, even the expensive ones)
If you're happy to dip your toes into another DAW, Reaper has excellent first-class Linux support, works with all your plugins, and has a 60 day trial* for you to get used to it.
* The free trial is enforced as heavily as WinRAR's, and it's pretty cheap (~$60) to buy a licence if the nag screen makes you feel bad enough
I tried that first but had trouble getting it to launch so I decided might as well goo with the OSS option. Boy was I in for a fun ride with getting the whole jackd and audio subsystems running.
The problem is not only the DAW support, but the support of low-latency audio interfaces in Linux. Audio interface makers rarely create a Linux driver, and a low-latency setup on Linux is its own hell, with real-time kernel patches.
On MacOS and Windows, it works out of the box.
> When I switched to KDE/Plasma 5 to get fractional scaling it was extremely unstable
KDE Plasma 6 made major improvements and has excellent fractional scaling, the best I've seen in a Linux desktop environment and comparable to scaling in Windows 10-11. I encourage you to give it a try.
you can use Carla in linux to run windows VSTs, i do it all the time. Works great. Midi and audio routing is also quite good. Ableton also runs with Wine.
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
Well, don't help him. People(me) grew up without the Internet or Smartphones and broke Windows on the family PC all the time. In 2000 when I got SuSE it only slowed down the breakdowns. He can always fix stuff himself by reinstalling the OS. As long as he doesn't format the /home partition he will not lose data. And he will learn his lessons.
12-year-old me installed Linux on an old desktop tower and I also broke things constantly. The difference is my parents were both humanities majors and I knew full well there was no point in asking them for help. Even at the time, the resources were all there for me to teach myself to Linux. Sure, I spent many many hours troubleshooting things instead of doing whatever it was I had as my end goal, but I was a kid—learning is the point!
It's harder as a parent to know that you're capable of solving their problem and still say no, but by age 12 that's pretty much your primary job: to find more and more things that they can start doing for themselves, express your confidence in them, and let them figure out how to adult bit by bit. Breaking a Linux install and fixing it again is among the lowest stakes ways that dynamic will play out from here on.
This is great, though, really. I broke our computer so many times growing up, I couldn’t possibly count. I don’t think I ever lost anything of import, other than some savegames of mine. I keep telling people who ask, “how do I learn Linux?” that they need to use it, tinker with it, break it, and fix it, ideally without anything other than man pages and distro docs. It is a shockingly effective way to learn how things work.
There is more to learn / do than anyone has time. My kid is supposed to spend an hour on his violin, half an hour an fitness, then some time on chess, then eat - including clean up and/or cook. somehow he needs to fit some free play in too. He doesn't have time for more.
It isn't that he could do that, but what else to give up?
I think for a lot of us that learned linux this way, it was firmly in the "fun time" category. We would have rather been tinkering than most other things.
I'd say that screen capture probably works under X11 no matter what your graphic card is. However this kind of confirm your general feeling: there is no only one blessed and enforced way to do things so everything can break because of combinations.
Examples (I've been on desktop Linux since 2009): shutdown actually reboots except for a few months with some lucky combination of kernel and nvidia driver. The brightness control keys didn't work for at least half of the years. They currently work. All of that has workarounds but I understand that some people legitimately fold and go using another OS.
I started with Linux installing it from floppy disks in about 1996.
In 1995, I was back on Windows 95 within a week because I needed to get something done.
In 2000, I was back on Windows 2000 within a week because I needed to get something done.
In 2005, I was back on Windows XP within a week because I needed to get something done.
In 2012, I was back on Windows 7 within a week because I needed to get something done.
In 2015, I was back on macOS within a week because I needed to get something done.
In 2020, I worked out I'm wasting my time on this.
I watch my colleagues and friend struggling with it. Lots of small papercuts. Lots of weirdness. Lots of regressions. Plus many years of server-side experience says to me "I should probably just use FreeBSD" in that space.
So couple of issues there. Never upgrade windows. Fresh install only. Never had a good day upgrading it.
Secondly, there isn't always a solution in Linux. I've got one now where something is utterly broken and it's 5 layers of maintainers down and no one gives a shit.
My experience is the opposite. Epgot a hold of a bunch of floppies in 1991. Dual booted so I could play Diablo. Some time around '98/99 got tired of dual booting.
Steam getting proton was a godsend, all those years of games became playable so now I have a huge back catalog.
Put him on debian stable with xfce and no sudo if he is such a bother. Sounds to me this is a people problem, not Linux problem. Do you miss windows or do you miss not having to spend time with kid on things that bother you?
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.
> 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.
It's really funny because this is one of the things I absolutely do not like about Windows. I absolutely hate it that I put the computer to sleep and when I come back the next day it has hibernated. That said, I agree that hibernation has always been finicky on Linux, however, I would say Ubuntu is not the best distro for this use case. I have been using Fedora and they even publish official guides for it[0] that's how seriously they take it.
Just have it suspend to disk and shutdown on lid close.
I do this for arch Linux on my framework and it's fine. Startup time is under ten seconds, essentially zero battery drain, right back in your session with all apps/docs open.
Hibernate is definitely better but still finicky even on Mac/Windows, machines can and do fry themselves, or require a hard reset if you unplug a device at the wrong time. Or unexpectedly continue draining the battery.
It's a terrible, funky, poorly documented, exception filled world down in the low power states for hardware.
A computer is a tool - learn to use it like a tool. People spend far more time learning to drive than they do learning to use computers these days, but I'd wager the computer matters more.
But too many companies have discovered that a docile "user" who's fed constant dopamine hits and has no actionable way to use a device other than open their wallet and fork over cash to watch more cats dance, or shop on more stores is exactly what they want.
Why don't you just click here and pay for Onedrive. Or just click there and accept Apple's new ridiculous terms.
If you just want to watch cats dance... you do you. I'll just keep doing me over here.
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.
Could some game programmer say if it's true that kernel level anti cheat is just bad programming?
Primagean recently said that in a video commenting PewDiePie's "I switched to Linux" video. While he's apparently a good programmer (he worked at Netflix), he uses Vim, so I don't trust him.
Edit: part about vim is an edgy joke.
Weird reason not to trust someone, and I think prime is a decent programmer.
I work in AAA gamedev and have deployed kernel level anti-cheats before, and I’m aware how unpopular they are; so, sorry for that… you would also accuse us of “bad programming” if there was an overabundance of cheaters that went undetected and/or uncorrected.
The answer is unfortunately complicated, the kernel level anti-cheats themselves aren’t necessarily poorly written, but what they are trying to do is poorly defined, so theres a temptation to put most of the logic into userland code and then share information with the kernel component- but then it’s dangerous for the same reason that crowdstrike was.
Not doing endpoint detection is also a problem because some amount of client trust is necessary for a good experience with low input latency. You get about 8ms in most cases to make a decision about what you will display to the user, that’s not enough time to round-trip to a server about if what is happening is ok or not. Movement in particular will feel extremely sluggish.
So, its a combination of kernel level code being harder in general (malloc, file access etc; are things the kernel gives you in user land after all), the problem space being relatively undefined (find errant software packages and memory manipulation), not being able to break out of the kernel level environment for an easier programming and iteration experience and trying to not affect performance.
Lots of people think they can do it better, I’m happy to hire anyone who actually thinks they have a clue, it’s a really hard problem honestly and the whole gamedev industry is itching for something better: even us gamedevs don’t like kernel level anti-cheat, it makes debugging harder for ourselves too and introduces hard to reproduce bugs.
PS; sorry if I’m not being eloquent, I am on vacation and typing from my phone.
This is well written and quite easy to understand. (I only have cursory knowledge of programming.)
However, what if Primeagen meant that HAVING to IMPLEMENT kernel level anti cheat is a symptom of bad programming, and not the anti cheat per se? (that is, with good enough programming, it could somehow be avoided).
And kudos to you. I appreciate people in game dev, they can get a lot done in short time.
I haven't played mmo fps since battlefield 3, and it wasn't that bad then. But I've heard that without kernel level they would be unplayable.
The reason why you need kernel-level anti-cheat for it to be meaningful is because it necessarily needs to sit on a level lower than cheats themselves; and cheats can be very advanced these days.
Long term I'm kinda hopeful that this is something that will be mitigated through AI-based approaches working to detect the resulting patterns rather than trying to detect the cheat code itself. But this requires sufficiently advanced models running very fast locally, and we're still far from that.
The cheaters are very good these days. They will happily sit in the kernel space to hide from the game if needed, because people pay a lot of money to cheat developers to be able to cheat.
> so theres a temptation to put most of the logic into userland code and then share information with the kernel component- but then it’s dangerous for the same reason that crowdstrike was.
I don't understand, how could crowdstrike have avoided their issues by putting more code in the kernel? Or am I misreading your statement?
Good faith question: why is the server not the source of truth? With local interpolation for things like character movement, reconciled in heartbeat updates?
The two most widely used anti cheat application battle eye and easy anti cheat both natively support linux but game developer have to check a box to enable it.
About 40% of games that use anti cheat currently work on linux. Getting banned for using wine is very rare because anti cheat that don't support linux would complain about not running an prevent you from even joining a game to get banned.
Compile sure, but they really had some bad ideas in those days. Remember MDI Multiple Document Interface? Having Windows within windows. It was a terrible idea.
OLE? Sure, let every application talk to the DLL components of every other application! What could go wrong? Data wants to be free right? Spread the love.
Making the desktop into a live webpage? And of course let any webpage happily load whatever binaries it wants from the internet. Super handy stuff. For some people more handy than others (really how this did not cause a mega Wannacry-event back in the day I don't understand)
There is a reason this stuff is legacy. The only reason it still compiles is because some companies have spent millions on custom developments 20 years ago that nobody remembers how it still works. Not because you should still be using it :)
You and I must have had very different experiences in those times.
> Remember MDI Multiple Document Interface? Having Windows within windows. It was a terrible idea.
It was definitely overused - nobody needs Microsoft word to be a window manager for every doc file. But it ends up growing into something really nice where you get to build out the sub windows of your IDE wherever you want them.
> OLE? Sure, let every application talk to the DLL components of every other application! What could go wrong? Data wants to be free right? Spread the love.
This was also incredible. I built one of the first tabbed web browsers by embedding instances of the IE 4 DLL into my tabs. OLE and OCX extended object-oriented programming across program and language boundaries.
> Making the desktop into a live webpage? And of course let any webpage happily load whatever binaries it wants from the internet. Super handy stuff. For some people more handy than others (really how this did not cause a mega Wannacry-event back in the day I don't understand)
This was terrific for pranks. Yeah what were they thinking on this one.
> There is a reason this stuff is legacy. The only reason it still compiles is because some companies have spent millions on custom developments 20 years ago that nobody remembers how it still works. Not because you should still be using it :)
Maybe as I've aged the novelty of building programs has worn off. For some things I don't want to have to port or even recompile it. I just want it to run. If Win32 is the only stable Linux ABI, GDI is the only stable Linux GUI toolkit.
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.
One of the things I wonder about recently is whether there's too many distros, which is dividing effort and there's less drive to find consensus on certain issues when everyone has the freedom to do things their own way and experiment to explore their niche. That freedom is the point of free software to a large extent, but there's costs to it. It also divides the userbase so when something doesn't work you may need to dive deeper into the details than you'd like to see if there's anything particular about your species of the linux animal kingdom.
It'd be interesting if there was a "Ubuntu v2" type effort, over 20 years later. Before ubuntu it's not as though desktop linux was an impossible dream or there was a lack of distros, but Canonical cleaned up a lot of rough edges to the extent it became a lingua franca. It's to the extent you can rely on ubuntu being in instructions for linux software, for example if there's any differences to required package names it'll be the ubuntu names over debian's.
Yes, exactly. To be fair, projects like GNOME and distros like Ubuntu do publish human interface guidelines, but I dont think there is any enforcement and so jankiness creeps in. I suppose it's no different from Windows 11 still having programs that have UIs dating from Win2K. But at least the icons and colors and window chrome are professional looking.
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.
Regarding 3. Battery life - I’ve had a ThinkPad Nano for several years that, on Windows 11 would get roughly 4-6 hours battery, and this was optimized (very few running apps, no junk on startup, power saving settings on, etc). I switched it to Ubuntu (I was surprised that everything worked out of the box too, all of the hot keys and everything), and it will get about 8-10 hours doing the same tasks (primarily Chrome). So there is something to be said about Linux in general just being so much more “light weight” so to speak vs windows, which has become such a bloated mess.
But the main issue I had was your point 4, since the thinkpads screen is 2K, everything was either too small (with no scaling) or too big (with scaling on).
Fully agree that Desktop Linux isn’t nearly there. If I need a Linux DE for something, I spin up a Debian VM with XFCE, because that seems to suck the least, and I already have prebaked Debian images.
For headless servers, I want nothing else. For a daily driver, as much as it pains me, nothing comes close to the Apple ecosystem. Apple Silicon is years ahead of everyone, and their interop with (admittedly only their own) other hardware is incredible. Universal Clipboard is magic. The fact that I can do nothing more than open an AirPod case and my phone registers it is magic. Finally, the fact that MacOS is *nix is absolutely icing on the cake.
to me it's such a crime that for all the crowing in the world about the need for operational sovergnity, MacOs is the only OS that can offer such a high standard of operation. I've seen some countries try their hand at modifying android to compete but the lack of a competitive monolith to them has allowed them to become complacent
I'll echo archvile here, in that I get excellent battery life running Linux. I've been getting 10-12 hours of battery life from the assortment of Asus and Thinkpad laptops I've had the past 15 years.
To give a very concrete example, I have two identical Thinkpad T14 at work, one running Linux (Debian Bookworm with KDE) and one running Windows 11. When doing normal office work, the Linux laptop easily lasts a whole workday with >20% battery left at the end. The Windows laptop runs out of battery in less than 2 hours.
> Today, in 2025, a full decade after 4K became standard, the way various DE/WMs handle scaling is embarrassing.
Generally, I agree, but Qt (KDE) is the standout to me, primarily because it is "commercial first, and open source second" in my mind. Do you have HiDPI scaling issues with Qt apps?
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.
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.
Not to argue with you, but is that Linux Mint specifically? I never used it, and its DE looked very unprofessional to my liking. Personally, I prefer modern Gnome, but I also like KDE. Everything else looks very unfriendly to an average user, I won’t ever install it. I’d go Gnome for Mac users and KDE for Windows refugees.
This is why Linux will always be a terrible OS. Every time someone says "Linux is bad because XYZ" someone will tell you "actually that's your distro, if you used distro ABC you wouldn't have that problem." But ABC has a different set of problems, which if you wasted 2 months to realize them and start complaining about, someone would just direct you to distro JKL.
The fragmentation of Linux leads to a ping-pong of responsibilities. Linux can never be a bad OS because it isn't an OS.
On Windows, if the file manager is bad, that's Microsoft's fault. Period. Nobody tries to say "actually..." it's Microsoft's fault. Period. The same goes for the taskbar, for the control panel, for MS Paint, for even Microsoft Office. If Microsoft will fix it or make it worse depends on them, but nobody denies who is to blame and everyone know where the blame lies. Meanwhile I don't even know if the basic utilities that my distro distributes are under the responsibility of Mint's team or if they will just direct me to some random open source project's issue tracker if I start complaining about Celluloid or the "Drawing" app.
You can't talk about Linux thinking only about the good parts, or you aren't inviting people to try Linux, you're inviting them to try your distro. "Linux" means the whole ecosystem, including all of its problems.
Au contraire, I would say that Mint is probably the closest to stock Win11/macOS experience right now. Gnome, on the other hand, looks utterly alien and non-discoverable
They have been converging for some time now. The taskbar in Win11 is very much a macOS Dock wannabe, for example.
Personally, I find modern Gnome insufferable because it is non-customizable to the extent that even macOS only dreams of, and it doubles down on the modern trend of hiding important UI behind poorly discoverable gestures (active corners etc). Except their take on it is even worse in general for mouse users because of how much more "legwork" it adds - e.g. in a default Gnome setup on Fedora, you need to move mouse cursor in the top left corner for the dock to show up (so that you can switch apps or launch a new one)... but then it shows on the bottom of the screen, so now you need to move the cursor all the way there across the screen.
But that's all subjective and not really my point. The point, rather, is that Gnome looks and behaves very different from Win11 and macOS both, in ways that don't make it easy for users to migrate (and in fact they specifically state that their UX design does not consider that a goal).
I never thought of this, the excessive mouse movements, like top left to bottom. What I thought of is that it killed this silly minimise and full screen option, even when everyone and their granny trained for those three buttons.
I like they ditched all the unnecessary things from the settings. I think all the pro-level settings must be dealt with via terminal. That way, it’s both of two worlds. Me, I don’t mind it. But if I manage the computer for someone, I want them to have only the minimum things, so they won’t be overwhelmed. That’s very wise, and unfortunately all these Win3.1 geeks are complaining it’s bad. Yeah, okay, keep using your favourite XFCE then, or whatever.
I’d install Gnome for elderly, even if they have some previous Windows experience. Because they can afford to just ignore it. My mum, she has no computer, and last time she used Windows was like, idk, a decade ago. Explaining Gnome to her is easy: here is the Windows (or CMD) button, you press it once, you have this iPad like interface. Here is the Dock, you have all the necessary apps in there. More of them if you press that Windows button one more time. But actually you don’t need it 99% of the time, so you can survive with top left corner pressed once. Two times press is for me. Closing the app is that X button. What else does she need?
Now, try to explain the [any other DE basically] to elders the same way. Considering most of these people have iPads. And if they’re not, well, I don’t really get why, they should. My guess is that their interface appeal to that audience. And to me that’s a great thing, that’s most of non-tech people now.
However, I’m (being an obviously pro user) able to use the default Gnome productively. Almost as productively as I use SwayWM. To me, that’s very impressive.
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.
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).
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 :)
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.
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.
"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.
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.
>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.
> 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
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Codeweavers Crossover does an admirable job at filling the gap (shoutout for making AoE II run like it’s native), but yeah, there are some that you can’t get around using Windows for.
What you mean by sysadmin GUI things? Linux is so much simpler, you don’t need any GUI to configure it. And probably there’s no point in that. Actually, there is a way to configure it using code (see Ansible), which is better (I’d say).
I believe this way of configuring is much more efficient. Yes, you have to learn some new things, probably even new paradigm. But once you done, it stays mostly the same for long years, and is dead simple. I am, being Linux user for circa 15 years, see administrating Windows with dread. And most Windows sysadmins I know personally, when I tell them about Linux, and they react like it’s some hidden obscure knowledge they have to spend ten years studying it. Which is vice-versa actually. I cannot imagine what that is, to be a Windows sysadmin, especially supporting all this mediocre engineering.
> Actually, there is a way to configure it using code (see Ansible), which is better (I’d say).
It may be better, but it needs change and retraining.
> I am, being Linux user for circa 15 years, see administrating Windows with dread.
Me too. I do not much like using Windows either and it seems to be getting worse.
> they react like it’s some hidden obscure knowledge they have to spend ten years studying it.
Partly FUD (lots of people make claims like "you have to compile your own software to use Linux") and partly because people hate change, and partly because it took them 10 years to learn Windows (many years ago) and they expect the same again.
It took me many years to accept Unix logic (macOS and Linux) too, but mostly because my first system was Windows.
For some reason, things like disks, C:\ and D:\ were logical to me, while I couldn’t grasp why cannot I put my files into root directory, and I’m forced to live in a subdirectory (/home/user) instead. It takes some time to re-learn, but I’m looking back with some dread. Things I accepted as simple, are actually unacceptably complex.
> Linux desktop environments tend to be more configurable, and you can configure most things end users want to configure in a GUI with the major DEs.
I was mostly thinking about the times I end up needing to tweak something through the terminal. I wouldn't expect most desktop users to want to do this. But maybe you're right that the most important stuff is covered by guis nowadays. There seem to be a lack of guardrails for low to semi-technical users though. I wonder if something like Nix could help with guardrails and being able to backtrack.
>Libre Office is more than sufficient for most people.
Buddy, I love Fedora, but this is nonsense.
The UI for Libre Powerpoint(or whatever its called) doesnt have text size on the main screen. The reddit mods on the subreddit literally ban people for complaining about it.
> The UI for Libre Powerpoint(or whatever its called) doesnt have text size on the main screen.
I was curious, so opened Impress, typed some text, and saw that the font selection and size was by default open on the right-hand "Properties" panel, alongside all the various text configuration options. So that at least is not true.
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.
There's Qubes, but even its enthusiasts are quick to say in its current incarnation it's not in any shape to be foisted on an end user. The other Linux flavor that sandboxes apps by default would be Android, which seems to have a few users.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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'!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
To be even more clear, LibreOffice also has a splash screen.
I haven't run it this boot, and I just timed myself taking 7.5 seconds to start Writer, close the welcome popup, and quit. By feel, about half of that was waiting for the loading bar and the other half was figuring out how to dismiss the welcome popup.
On a hot start, with several attempts it takes between 2.1 and 2.5 seconds to start and quit it. For some reason the welcome popup has disappeared.
These experiments were performed using LibreOffice 7.4.7.2 40(Build:2) - wow, are they also copying version numbering from Microsoft? - on the cheapest 120GB SSD I could find in early 2019.
'Hey, I'm loading! I'm going to steal focus from whatever else you're doing and make your taskbar flash! No, that doesn't mean you can give me any input yet'
I'd really like to own a device that can multitask, one day.
I have this issue with lots of applications: taking focus away from something I'm using, but not being ready to be usable. Apps shouldn't take focus until they're ready.
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.
> 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.
That app didn't fully load the Office apps despite the name, and if you removed it Office 97 still started way faster than its competitors. As it did on Linux.
The rumours were (that I remember) that Microsoft had a secret/invisible way to hook Office into Windows startup. Otherwise, how did it start so much faster than StarOffice, which appeared to have similar functionality.
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.
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.
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:
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!
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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)
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.
No... it's not fine. I don't reboot all the time for work or run a zillion VMs, I'm just a regular user. But sometimes when I'm rebooting - I need to get to necessary information quickly. Waiting 40+ seconds is an eternity when standing at an airport immigration counter pulling up a pre-filed form that they said I did not need to bring but which they're now demanding (because their machines are rebooting).
I'm glad you feel it's fine for you. Not all of us agree. I'm especially annoyed because much of the new bloat slowing my life down during startup is stupid and unnecessary shit I don't even use much (or ever) - like initializing CoPilot, Edge, and now, Office.
Note: I even upgraded my SSD to an expensive Samsung 990 Pro, reportedly one of the fastest available. It's still >40 secs - and I've already gone through and thoroughly pruned all the unnecessary services, tasks and autoruns that I can. It's a top of the line >$3000 laptop that's less than a year old.
Weirdly for me I don't have much trouble with startup, but shutting down windows seems to take an impossibly long time, especially on my work laptop. Like several minutes. Probably some misbehaving program and maybe not windows' fault, but I have no idea what it's doing just sitting there at the final screen after its killed all remaining tasks for eternity.
Something is wrong with your computer if it takes 40 seconds, I have a similar samsung SSD and it takes like 20 seconds maximum from a cold boot to desktop on Win11
> Something is wrong with your computer if it takes 40 seconds
Yes, he just said it, it has Windows on it.
But more to the point: Windows slow boot has been a constant ever since the times when I would boot up Windows ME and go make myself a tea. If anything, Windows has always stayed one step of the technology that would bring its boot times down, to the point where I'd guess (as this article suggests) that it's company policy to dump slow components there.
Yeah my ~1000€ Lenovo Yoga 7 Pro takes 18 seconds from cold boot(power button press) to signed in via windows hello. And that's with Bitlocker and myself having installed a whole bunch of background utilities.
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.
I just timed it, my personal Mac takes 10s to the login screen and then 4 seconds to the desktop after putting in my password. My work Mac takes 3+ min. All of the endpoint monitoring stuff they put on there really takes its toll.
My windows gaming PC starts up in about 30s from a cold boot (though it's not encrypted...), so I would at least put the personal Mac and the Windows machine in the same ballpark. I couldn't have told you which one is faster without timing it. The work machine laptop is clearly noticeably slower.
If you measured with a stop watch I'm sure it would take more than 2 seconds but to be accurate it is perceptibly brief whereas others startup is perceptibly to them slow. Why?
When fast startup is enabled shutting down does a reboot and then a hibernate so that it can wake up from hibernate when you start up but with the same effect as a fresh start. This is generally much faster than a full startup. This should and in many cases must be disabled to dual boot another OS.
Different hardware takes longer to initialize which may delay startup. This is especially true of failing hardware which may whilst in bad shape continue to work after a fashion but take far longer to initialize.
The answer is a definite maybe because some hardware will keep state when hibernated and will be unusable if this isn't disabled. For instance the WiFi won't work in the other OS. Also sooner or later you are going to need a file you received on windows or indeed on any fs mounted on windows.
Because.. it’s slow. My team used to do VDI engineering. We could reduce boot times by 30% with optimized and tweaked out configurations, but it was still slower than my out of the box MacBook Air.
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 :)
That would be an implementation deficiency. If Windows can be FDE and load faster than macOS, then the way macOS has implemented the FDE solution is suboptimal, if startup time is your primary measurement.
I personally don't have issues with startup times on my M2 Air or 5800X3D/Win11, both encrypted.
The way File Vault works nowadays, as I understand it, is that your user data (and maybe even much of the OS) isn't decrypted until you've put in your password on the login screen. This means that even if you devised a way to hijack the login screen, or sniff the keys coming out of the secure enclave, you'd still be stuck without the user's login password.
Windows, by contrast, unlocks the entire OS drive before you get to the login screen. So, a hypothetical login screen hijack would let you get to everything, or cold boot attacks/sniffing keys coming from the TPM to the CPU.
I'd argue the macOS version is better from a security aspect, but it has a necessary downside of being unable to load as much before the user can put in their password.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Car theft is on the rise. Rather than investigate or cooperate with police or policies they can just pay out the loss and lobby against crime reduction in a variety of ways. Then, because they paid a loss they can raise that persons amount they pay due to a rising “risk.” Then everybody’s rates can rise because of this problem.
The larger the cost, the bigger total cash value they can get on their percentage based profit.
Playing into the cost, they can cut deals with manufacturers directly or in lobbying for parts to be artificially inflated to make this problem even worse. Plastic fuel valve maybe costs 30 cents to manufacture but is sold for $900 and that price is doubled to install it. And the car isn’t safe to drive without it so insurance can demand you pay up or deny all coverage or payouts.
Same for medical inflation though that’s more commonly discussed.
If insurance didn’t exist as a service then these inflated prices would be dramatically cut down. We see this when you don’t use insurance at a doctors office or pharmacy checkout. Though insurance can sometimes demand insurance be used regardless of your consent simply if the cashier is aware they have insurance.
Lobbying and passively steering the direction into bloating end users cost is massively incentivized wherever possible for insurance. Then hiding behind a veil of blame to avoid accountability or even just fair payouts when you actually need them.
It’s like insurance is the IRS who runs a casino and they threaten you if you win the jackpot and then threaten to “randomly” select you for audit if you proceed to cash out for the full amount instead of a $25 Red Robin gift card.
Those are interesting theories. The system is a little more complicated and it’s hard for an insurer to directly control theft rates (to continue your example) but they do charge less for vehicle types that are stolen less often.
I do feel similarly that there are huge conflicts of interest in the finance industry. Mortgages and house prices is another one that comes to mind. Finance doesn't just react to the reality, it plays a part in driving the reality. It's a bit of a chicken and egg thing. I feel like in general humans are particularly susceptible to complicated things being abstracted by simple numbers and the finance industry is just cashing in on this susceptibility.
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?
Adobe is the worst offender. I just checked and I have no less than 8 Adobe processes running on my macOS machine, without any Adobe apps running, and with all of the settings to run in the background or sync stuff turned off. I even have a script to nuke all of the services they install that I run every once in a while, but they just come back after a while. It's literally malware. If Photoshop and Lightroom weren't the best at what they do I'd be gone, but sadly they are.
Not to be that guy, but at some point, if you ever decide that fighting a war with Microsoft to have control over your own computer and not be surveilled stops being worth it... linux. Yes, there's an upfront cost you pay to learn, and there are ongoing costs as defaults and tools change over the years.. but at least the relationship is not adversarial.
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.
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.
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.
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”?
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.
Oof. Yeah it definitely wasn’t this bad, I remember that having an unclearly named app in your startup menu was considered a clear tell that you had a malware infection.
This sounds like Microsoft is failing spectacularly at enforcing strict limits on what software can do.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
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.
Additionally, I suspect there's 4 decades of legacy backward compatibility hacks that doing anything intelligent to help UX is impossible. It might break some peanut butter factory in Indiana that is paying for support.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
"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.
* 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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I bought Softmaker Office last year. The Textmaker word processor is better than LibreOffice Writer. It's more MS Office compatible, so I don't get complaints about formatting issues from co-workers.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
You're bringing up an important point. However: As far as I can tell, Linux can very well be integrated into an Active Directory setup.[0,1] Also: If you want to avoid Active Directory altogether, there seem to be plenty alternatives?[2]
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?
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.
>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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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????)
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.
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.
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).
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)
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?
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?)
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.
But Windows is know for a lot of productivity apps other platforms lack. I meant the Everything file search app (doesn't exist on Linux/Mac), not the default Windows search
"that very thing" was instant and anywhere (not your irrelevant generic description), which your suggested tools can't do.
You're just content with a poor cli substitute.
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.
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.
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%.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
I'm not sure what TFA or xi means, but any program you install can stay open in the background for quick launching. What makes you think microsoft has exclusive access to doing that?
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?
I came here looking for this. It's an old idea, from the days when spinning rust was the limiting factor - precache the binaries.
If you ever tried Office 97 on a PC of 10+ years later, it's amazing how fast and lightweight it was. Instant startup, super snappy. And those apps were not lacking in features. 95% of what you need out of a desktop word processor was in Word 97.
> from the days when spinning rust was the limiting factor
How did we get back to this though? We have gigabytes/sec with NVMe and stupid fast CPU's with at least 4 cores in even low end models. Yet a text editor takes so long to load we need to load it up on boot... Such a frustrating field to work in.
I know this is such a stereotypical "get off my lawn" statement but we've lost the art of software engineering. It's all about stuffing as many features in as quickly as we can and pushing it out to as many people as possible. Performance is always secondary.
Not that I'm that nostalgic for the old days, we would have been doing the exact same thing if we were able to get away with it. But performance restrictions meant you had no choice but to care. Modern tech has "freed" us from that concern.
Niklaus Wirth wrote about this in 1995, in his essay A Plea for Lean Software.
About 25 years ago, an interactive text editor could be designed with as little as 8,000 bytes of storage. (Modern program editors request 100 times that much). An operating system had to manage with 8,000 bytes, and a compiler had to fit into 32 Kbytes, whereas their modern descendants require megabytes. Has all this inflated software become any faster? On the contrary, were it not for a thousand times faster hardware, modern software would be utterly unusable.
https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/co/1995/02/r2064/13rR...
That said, as someone fairly young, I still don't think that makes it wrong or something only an old man would think. Software seems to perform exactly as well as it needs to and no more, which is why hardware advances don't make our computers run software much faster.
Aside from slowness, feature creep leads to poor quality, i.e. tons of bugs and user confusion with ever-changing graphical interfaces.
If software was simpler, we could afford to offer some formal guarantees of correctness. Model check protocols, verify pre and post conditions à la Dafny, etc.
There's too much change for the sake of change.
> There's too much change for the sake of change.
+1 to this. Like a lot of issues, I think the root is ideological, but this one in particular very clearly manifests organizationally.
The companies building everyday software are ever bigger— full of software engineers, designers and various kinds of managers who are asked to justify their generous salaries. At an individual level I'm sure there's all sorts of cases, but at a general level there's often almost no other option but to introduce change for the sake of change.
I once asked a man who worked in marketing why Oreos keep making crazy new flavors like "sour patch kids Oreos" when the normal kind is great and clearly has no issues being sold. I could see some upside - it gets people talking about them, it's fun, it reinforces the normal flavor as the best chocolate cookie, etc. but I was still dubious that those benefits outweighed the cost of developing new flavors in a lab, paperwork for food safety, a new manufacturing process, new ads, new packaging, etc. especially for something temporary.
He said it's often just some new marketing exec wants to put something on their resume, and they have certain metrics that they target that don't necessarily align with long term profits of the company.
I'm sure software has a similar problem.
> There's too much change for the sake of change.
+1 to this. Like a lot of issues, I think the root is ideological, but this one in particular very clearly manifests organizationally.
The companies building everyday software are ever bigger— full of software engineers, designers and various kinds of managers who are asked to justify their generous salaries. At an individual level I'm sure there's all sorts of cases, but at a general level there's almost no other option but to introduce change for the sake of change.
This is exactly what I see as well.
At a general level, I believe there are other options - changes/features need to meet some level of usage or it is scrapped out of recognition that supporting all these features make bugs more likely, performance likely to degrade, increase difficulty of adding features, make the product more difficult to use, etc.
> Software seems to perform exactly as well as it needs to and no more
The cynical spin I would put on this idea is that software performs as poorly as it can get away with. MSFT is feeling the need/pressure to have Office load faster, and they will try to get away with preloading it.
Otherwise, there is a strong pull towards bloat that different people will try to take credit for as features even if the cumulative experience of all these "features" is actually a worse user-experience.
software authors that don't care about performance annoy me (and I am an old man.)
The amount of things a computer can do in a single thread are amazing, and computers now have a dozen or more threads to do work. If developers cared about performance, things would easily be 20x as performant as they are today.
I'm not talking about "write in assembly, duh" I'm talking about just doing things intelligently instead of naively. The developers I support often simply are not thinking about the problem they're solving and they solve the problem in the simplest way (for them) and not the simplest way for a computer.
Software is an inefficiency amplifier, because the number of developers for a piece of code is much smaller than the number of computers that run that code; how much coal has been burned solely because of shitty implementations? I'd wager that the answer is "a LOT!"
Even if you don't care about coal usage, think about how much happier your users would be if your application was suddenly 5x faster than it was previously? now think of how many customers want their software to be slow (outside of TheDailyWTF): zero.
languages like javascript and python remove you so much from the CPU and the cache that even if you were thinking of those things, you can't do anything about it. JS and Electron are great for developers, and horrible for users because of that amplification I described above.
I am dead tired of seeing hustle culture overtake everything in this field, and important things, to me, like quality and performance and support all fall straight down the toilet simply because executives want to release features faster.
things like copilot could help with this, i hope. presumably copilot will help introduce better code into applications than a daydreaming developer would, though the existence of vibe coding sort of nulls that out probably.
one thing that AI will do quite soon is increase the amount of software that exists quite dramatically. and I am kinda concerned about the possibility that it's all going to suck horribly.
I commiserate with your frustration with developers writing things suboptimally all too often. However, I disagree with the assumption that it's a JS/Python vs C issue.
Example: when VS Code came out, it was much, much faster, more responsive and stable than Visual Studio at the time. Despite being based on Electron, it apparently was much better on architecture, algorithms and multithreading than VS with its C++ and .NET legacy codebase. That really impressed me, as a C++ programmer.
Overall, it feels like folks who idealize bygone eras of computing didn't witness or have forgotten how slow Windows, VS, Office etc. used to feel in the 90s.
> Overall, it feels like folks who idealize bygone eras of computing didn't witness or have forgotten how slow Windows, VS, Office etc. used to feel in the 90s.
Let’s normalize speed over time like we do dollars, so we are talking about the same thing.
Given the enormous multiplier in CPU and storage hardware speeds and parallelism today vs. say 1995, any “slow” application then should be indistinguishable from instant today.
“Slow” in the 90’s vs. “Slow” in 2025 are essentially different words. Given unclarified co-use pushes several orders magnitude of either speed or inefficiency difference under the rug.
“Slow” is when the human waits on the computer.
The promise of computing is that what was slow in the 1960s and 1970s would be instant in 1990. And those things were instant, but those things aren’t what people did with computers anymore.
New software that did more than before, but less efficiently, came around, so everything felt the same. Developers didn’t have to focus on performance so much, so they didn’t.
Developers are lazy sacks who are held skyward because of hardware designers alone. And software developers are just getting heavier and heavier all the time, but the hardware people can’t hold them forever.
This cannot continue forever. Run software from the 1990s or 2000s on modern hardware. It is unbelievably fast.
Maybe it was slow in the 1990s, sure. I ask why we can’t (or won’t) write software that performs like that today.
The compiler for Turbo Pascal could compile something like a million lines per second in 1990. We have regressed to waiting for 60+ minute C++ compile times today, on even moderate project sizes.
Debugging in visual studio used to be instant when you did things like Step Over. You could hold the Function key down and just eyeball your watch variables to see what was going on. The UI would update at 60FPS the entire time. Now if I hold down that key, the UI freezes and when I let go of the key it takes time to catch up. Useless. All so Microsoft could write the front end in dotnet. Ruin a product so it is easier to write… absolute nonsense decision.
All software is like that today. It’s all slow because developers are lazy sacks who will only do the minimum necessary so they can proceed to the next thing. I am ashamed of my industry because of things like this.
“Developers are lazy sacks who are held skyward because of hardware designers alone”
As a programmer who studied computer and electrical engineering in university, never before have I been so offended by something I one hundred percent agree with
Counterpoint: single threaded performance hasn't improved much in the past 20 years. Maybe 5x at best. And virtually every UI programming environment still has problems with work done on the main thread.
Single thread performance increased every processor generation, and is still doing so today.
Increased yes, but not by a whole lot. See https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/CPU-p... and https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/CPU-p...
Source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/11/a-history-of-intel-v...
(I'm sure someone could dig up more recent graphs, but you get the idea).
In order to get more performance, your app needs to use multithreading.
Too true!
RAM parallel bandwidth, increased caching levels and size, and better caching rules, instruction re-ordering, predictive branching, register optimization, vector instructions, ... there have been many advances in single thread execution since the 90's. Beyond any clock speed advances.
Office 4.3 loading on Win3.1 was glacial. I haven't forgotten.
> The amount of things a computer can do in a single thread are amazing, and computers now have a dozen or more threads to do work. If developers cared about performance, things would easily be 20x as performant as they are today.
Why? A good portion of programs are still single-threaded, and often that's the correct choice. Even in games a single-threaded main thread or logic thread may be the only choice. Where multi-threading makes sense it should be employed, but it's difficult to do well.
Otherwise, it's up to the OS to balance threads appropriately. All major OSes do this well today.
I think what the author wanted to say is that because computers are very fast today developers have no incentive of writing optimized code.
Nowadays you just "scale horizontally" by the magic of whatever orchestration platform you happen to use, which is the modern approach of throwing hardware at the problem in the vertical scaling days.
It’s not about programs being multithreaded. It’s about computers running multiple programs at once on different threads and they all perform well.
One can write software that uses the CPU cache in non-dumb ways no matter how many threads your program has. You can craft your structs so that they take less space in RAM, meaning you can fit more in cache at once. You can have structs of arrays instead of arrays of structs if that helps your application. Few people think of things like this today, they just go for the most naive implementation possible so that the branch predictor can’t work well and everything needs to be fetched from RAM every time instead of building things so that the branch predictor and the cache are helping you instead of impeding you. People just do the bare minimum so that the PM says the card is complete and they never think of it again. It’s depressing.
The tools to write fast software are at our fingertips, already installed on our computers. And I have had zero success in getting people to believe that they should develop with performance in mind.
So your assertion is that developers should get in a big huddle to decide how they’re going to consume L1 between applications? Which of course no dev has control over since the OS determines what runs and when.
You can make your time in the CPU more efficient by thinking of the cache and the branch predictor, or you can say “nothing I do matters because the OS schedules things how it wants.” Up to you I guess, but I know which of those approaches performs significantly better.
My standard is that software should appear to work instantly to me, a human. Then it is fast enough. No pressing a button and waiting. That would be great.
That is probably the correct measure. If “The Promise of Computing” is ever to come true, people must never wait on computers when interacting with them.
Waiting is ok when it comes to sending batches of data to be transformed or rendered or processed or whatever. I’m talking about synchronous stuff; when I push a key on my keyboard the computer should be done with what I told it to do before I finish pushing the button all the way down. Anything less is me waiting on the computer and that slows the user down.
Businesses should be foaming at the mouth about performance; every second spent by a user waiting on a computer to do work locally, multiplied by the number of users who wait, multiplied by the number of times this happens per day, multiplied by the number of work days in a year… it’s not a small amount of money lost. Every more efficient piece of code means lighter devices are needed by users. Lambda is billed by CPU and RAM usage, and inefficient code there directly translates into higher bills. But everyone still writes code which stores a Boolean value as a 32-bit integer, and where all numbers are always 8-bytes wide.
What. The. Fuck.
People already go on smoke breaks and long lunches and come in late and leave early; do we want them waiting on their computers all of the time, too? Apparently so, because I’ve never once heard anyone complain to a vendor that their software is so slow that it’s costing money, but almost all of those vendor products are that slow.
I’m old enough that I’m almost completely sick of the industry I once loved.
Software developers used to be people who really wanted to write software, and wanted to write it well. Now, it’s just a stepping stone on the way to a few VP positions at a dozen failed startups and thousands of needlessly optimistic posts on LinkedIn. There’s almost no craft here anymore. Businessmen have taken everything good about this career and flushed it down the toilet and turned teams into very unhappy machines. And if you don’t pretend you’re happy, you’re “not a good fit” anymore and you’re fired. All because you want to do your job well and it’s been made too difficult to reliably do anything well.
> languages like javascript and python remove you so much from the CPU and the cache that even if you were thinking of those things, you can't do anything about it.
Even operating systems don't get direct access to the hardware these days. Instead a bunch of SoC middlemen handle everything however they like.
Wait…those dastardly systems architecture engineers with their decadent trusted platform modules, each with an outrageous number of kilobytes of ROM. They are the true villains of software performance?
that doesn't matter; if you make your cache usage smart and your branches predictable, the CPU will take advantage of that and your program will run faster. It is in the interests of the system and CPU designers to make sure this is the case, and it is.
If you do the things which make your code friendly to the CPU cache and the branch predictor, when it comes time for your code to run on the CPU, it will run faster than it would if you did not do those things.
What's your proposal for a "compromise" language between programmer productivity and performance, especially for multiple threads and CPUs? Go, Rust, a BEAM language?
I don't think the tools are the issue here, they are tools you can do good and bad jobs with all of them. What is lacking are the right incentives. The tech market has never been as anti-competitive as it is today. Let's repeal DMCA 1201 and go from there.
Jai seems to be an excellent start. Possibly Zig as well.
Both are written/designed by people who care a lot about application performance and developer experience.
This is an unserious take. Jai doesn’t even have official documentation and zig hasn’t reached a 1.0 release
I wasn't asked for examples of software that is congruent to whatever definition you want. I was asked for a proposal of a "compromise" language, and I answered that question.
[flagged]
> presumably copilot will help introduce better code into applications than a daydreaming developer would
Copilot is trained on Github (and probably other Git forges w/o permission, because OpenAI and Microsoft are run by greedy sociopaths.)
I'd wager that the majority of fleshed out repositories on these sites contain projects written at the "too-high level" you describe. This certainly seems to be true based on how these models perform ("good" results for web development and scripting, awful results for C/++/Rust/assembly...) - so I wouldn't get your hopes up, unfortunately.
I dont know if its just the training data, or that CRUD and webapps are more inherently easy to parrot away.
Low level programming means actual -thinking- about the system, resources, and language decisions etc
Even humans struggle with it, Its much easier to build a website than say a compiler, for anyone, humans and llm's included
That probably plays into it as well. I have yet to see any convincing evidence that contradicts LLMs being mere pattern parrots.
My personal benchmark for these models is writing a simple socket BPF in a Rust program. Even the latest and greatest hosted frontier models (with web search and reasoning enabled!) can only ape the structure. The substance is inevitably wanting, with invalid BPF instructions and hallucinated/missing imports.
imho these tools are great i fyou know what you're doing, becasue you know how to smell test the output, but a footgun otherwise.
It works great for me, but it is necessarily an aid learning tool more than a full on replacement, someone's still gotta do the thinking part, even if the llm's can cosplay -reasoning- now
I'm also young and heavily favor simple, quality software. Age is a highly coarse proxy for one's experiences, but in this case I think it has more to do with my personality. I have enough experience in computing that I don't think I'm making demands that are unrealistic, although they are certainly unrealistic if we maintain current incentives and motives.
“What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away”
I saw the writing on the wall when I had to install a couple 150MB IDEs to run 101-level Java programs in the mid 2000's. 150 megabytes. MEGABYTES. I could consume about 1 kilobyte per minute of fantasy novel text in uncompressed ASCI, call it 1/8th that fully compressed. That means this compressed binary you're handing me is around 1.2 billion minutes of work (more if ingesting a novel is faster than writing/testing/debugging a program) for what is functionally a text editor, file manager, syntax library, compiler, and debugger. Pretty sure that got done in 150 kilobytes a generation earlier. A generation later, maybe it will be 150 gigabytes.
I looked it up, you want an illegal taxi? 168 MB: https://apkcombo.com/uber/com.ubercab/
install a couple 150MB IDEs
Not Java, but an IDE in 4K: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_Programming
Having used it quite extensively (Well, five solid days over two weeks, which is about 1000x longer than most people gargling on the internet), it's surprisingly capable.
Imagine if someone with the same talent and motivation was working on today's hardware.
<aside> Someone on Atari Age wrote a LISP for the same machine.
> I know this is such a stereotypical "get off my lawn" statement but we've lost the art of software engineering.
Indeed. I am sure many of us here are burnt out on bloat. I am also sure many of us want to move to smaller stuff but cant simply because of industry momentum. BUT that doesn't mean the dream is dead, only that we must work towards those goals on our own time. I found Plan 9 and haven't looked back. I can rebuild the entire OS in seconds on a fast machine. Even my little Celeron J1900 can rebuild the OS for several supported architectures in minutes. I can share a USB device seamlessly across my network, PXE booted from a single disk without installing anything. Cat(1) is just 36 lines of C.
There's still hope. Just ignore the industry hype noise and put in the effort ourselves.
And just when we think we can't make software any more inefficient, slow, and bloated, they release things like Electron, where you ship an entire browser with your app! And then when we think it can't even get worse, we have Docker and containers where we ship the entire OS with the application.
I'm looking forward to when app developers ship you an entire computer in the mail to run their text editor.
The problem with Electron is that business-wise it is an excellent decision. You can get by with a few people to wrap the web app and integrate it with the OS, and then get updates pretty much for free.
Yet for the user it is bad -- bloated, slow, feels non-native, has specific bugs which are hard to address for the devs, etc.
I don't see any light for the desktop UI development unless there is some lightweight universal rendering engine. Tauri with WebView is somewhat promising, but it has problems on Linux and it is hard to target older systems.
It's a pretty OK example of a negative externality. A little like polluting: Just dumping your waste into the environment is business-wise an excellent decision. You avoid the cost and everyone else has to deal with the downsides.
Polluting is indeed an excellent business decision. The thing about apps is that all of them are polluting, just some of them are worse than others. And we tend to fill all available resources, so over time it only gets worse.
It's an excellent business decision... right up until your customers abandon you because you make bad quality software. Like many businesses have found time and again, deliberately sacrificing quality for profit is a short term gain for a long term loss.
there are quite a few examples of software built with electron that have very large user bases. this sounds like a personal vendetta against electron rather than meaningful insight.
Electron is horrid, but as a user, I prefer bloated "apps" to no support at all.
As for your second point: [1]
1: https://snapcraft.io/
> Cat(1) is just 36 lines of C.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it around 800 lines[1]?
1. https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/cat.c
I love that I work at a place (Row Zero) where caring about performance is baked into the culture, and I can spend days fixing weird perf edge cases our users discover without management asking why I'm wasting my time. And it's office software, no less!
>> It's all about stuffing as many features in as quickly as we can...
The problem isn't "engineering" the problem is the culture of product management. (Note: NOT product managers per se).
I ask this basic question, how many Directors, VP's or CPO's do you know who got their job based on "cutting out unused features"? If you can find one, it will end up being the exception that proves the rule. The culture of "add", "new" and "shiny" doesn't reward keeping things lean and effective. T
In the tangible world we look to accountants for this sort of thing (because they tend to have costs). Think cheap Costco hotdogs and free cookies at Double Tree. No one in product, dev and accounting is going to sit down and try to justify loosing some code, features and maybe a few customers to make it faster when you can just "engineer" you way out of it and not have to sell less is more.
> I ask this basic question, how many Directors, VP's or CPO's do you know who got their job based on "cutting out unused features"?
Google goes a step further and kills entire apps
Moment of silence for Play Music. YT Music isn't any less awful now than it was a decade ago.
Ford does. They look at connected vehicle telemetry to strip out features nobody uses in order to save software maintenance, hardware and third party IP licensing costs.
https://www.slashgear.com/1513242/ford-gets-rid-of-self-park...
My personal theory is there is a threshold of performance. Below the threshold the experience is bad enough it affects revenue so getting the program up to speed becomes a priority. Above the threshold only features are prioritized to drive more revenue. That's why despite computers getting orders of magnitude faster computer programs seem to run about the same speed.
I think the threshold is more about how much more rent can we seek to collect from users, and making things more performant or ergonomic doesn’t do anything to allow sales to add another 10% to the per-user subscription pricing (I assume this is a product with per-user subscriptions, even though it’s almost certainly unnecessary).
But adding yet another gateway to ChatGPT’s API…that’s a $15/mo/user add-on right there, and not just a monkey, but one of the slower intern monkeys, could write the code for such an incredibly innovative and, there’s no other word for it, powerful new feature that everyone should be thrilled to pay for at a 200-300% (or more!) markup. So guess who gets that VP of New Bullshit Development position, and guess what kind of choices get reinforced?
(EDIT: grammar)
How does someone get promoted at Microsoft? How do they avoid being seen as a low performer?
Performance just isn’t on that list, and it’s often more and harder work than a given new feature took to create. Office users are getting what Microsoft is designed to deliver.
I really don't think we've "lost it", I think performance has just not been a consideration in the engineering of Office for a long time, if ever.
> I know this is such a stereotypical "get off my lawn" statement but we've lost the art of software engineering.
Absolutely this. I think this is evidence that points to modern civilization starting to collapse. When we can engineer correctly, we're fucked.
> we've lost the art of software engineering
Yes! This is what all my projects are geared towards restoring. The big one is not quite ready to announce yet, but I am very proud of it, and extremely excited to release it, to solve exactly that: it makes engineering fun again!
Well that username matches
we don't have software engineering anymore than the romans had civil engineering
we now DO have civil engineering but that is it
It was always like that
It's a matter of resource allocation. Lowering your design requirements for performance can save significant developer cost. Also, Word in 2025 is doing a lot more under the hood than 97.
I'll take the hate for this, but I have been using gemini to build narrow scope apps and they are extremely fucking fast compared to their bloated software package suite $200/user/month counterparts. It's amazing how fast and efficient programs can be when not trying to cover every use case for every possible user at every possible moment on top of a sea of tech debt programming.
While true LLMs fall flat on their face when fed massive codebases, the fact of the matter is that I don't need a 200k LOC program to accomplish a single task that an LLM can do in 2k LOC.
To give an example, we have proprietary piece of software that is used to make (physical) product test systems using flow charts and menus. It's expansive and complex. But we don't need it when we can just spend 30 minutes prompting your way to working test code and it produces way faster and more robust systems.
Maybe the devs of that software package cannot dump that whole codebase into an LLM and work on it. But they are completely missing the forest for the trees.
I will make this analogy:
Have a large ZIP file. Preferably like a few gigs and lots of (small) files.
Try to open it with the built-in Windows 11 tooling from Microsoft. It's going to be super slow to even show anything never mind unpack it.
Now install say 7-zip and do the exact same thing(s) and it's going to be instant opening and unpacking it takes a much much smaller amount of time (only limited by disk speed).
Turns out optimizations / not doing stupid things is still a thing even with all this raw power we now have.
Because an entire generation of developers and their managers believe the hardware is so fast there's no point trying to optimize the software.
Besides, the only thing that matters is getting tickets "done" before the arbitrary sprint deadline in 2 weeks, so best not to spend any extra time cleaning up or optimizing the first thing that works. You can't think about performance until the sprint dedicated to performance.
100% thought process is: why waste internal resources on speeding up software when the user has enough hardware to manage the workload.
Battery use is a pretty big concern these days; also, some users like running several things at the same time.
For the local OS and sustained workloads like video playback, yes, battery optimization is huge. For an individual app with bursty compute, less so, plus some of that inefficient code can run in the cloud instead, which is costly, but premium subscriptions can pay for it, and power plants are now colocated with data centers so power transmission cost is negligible. The incentive to be efficient is insufficient.
I think people forget that some of this software may be relatively fast. The problem is, most corporate environments are loaded up with EDRs and other strange anti-malware software that impede quick startup or speedy library calls. I've seen a misconfigured Forcepoint EDR rule block a window for 5 seconds on copy and paste from Chrome to Word.
Another example: it takes ~2 seconds to run git on my work machine
while running the same command on my personal Windows 11 virtual machine is near instant: ~0.1 seconds. Still slower than Linux, but not nearly as bad as my work machine.Telemetry, syncing to the cloud by default…
Neither of which contribute significantly to size though. The size aspect is what these new preloaders would help with.
We stopped developing for users/customers and instead added layers to make developer lives easier.
Why the hell are all my desktop apps written in JS now?!
> Why the hell are all my desktop apps written in JS now?!
Have you seen the state of pretty much every non-js UX framework?
That's why.
JS/css/html won the UX domain in a way that no other language comes close to. If you look at the most recent most modern UX frameworks, they are often just half implemented poor mimics of the js/css/html stack with approximately 0 devs writing new 3rd party extensions.
Intellij uses swing, SWING, as it's UX. A framework written in the 90s filled with warts. Yet, it's still a better experience than the more recent JavaFX experience. Swing simply has more support.
Call me an idiot, but I still gladly take Swing and javafx over JS and monstrosities like react. The state of Qt is also very good. Web won because the distribution model is easier on the user, and because managers thought UX designers would be making whole apps now, saving on rates. Not because it's technically superior.
You're not an idiot for liking the Swing/javafx/QT way of doing things. Or even for thinking they are technically superior.
The bigger issue isn't the tech, it's the ecosystem. While you might like swing, you simply are never going to find the swing version of Material UI or D3.js. That's more the problem that you'll run into.
For some of our apps because we need charting, we are using GraalJS just to run the JS charting library to export to an image that we ultimately put on some of our downloadable reports. It's a huge pain but really the only way to do that.
> you simply are never going to find the swing version of Material UI or D3.js. That's more the problem that you'll run into.
I remember a time when having your application look "out of place" was undesired, and the ultimate goal was to be "as native as possible". If you are running a website selling something, I agree that you want a brand-identity and a unique look. But productive software shouldn't require users to adapt to new UX paradigms (guessing whether the cancel button comes on the left or on the right, dealing with slightly do different input method and entry shortcuts…).
Anyhow, I think things could be worse, since, as you say, we can embed a webview into any JavaFX/Qt/… app and get the best of both worlds.
It's quite something that there hasn't been any real successor living up to Delphi or even goddamn Visual Basic for modern desktops.
Skilled programmers working on boring stuff like office. Most programmers today don't have the skills they think they do and would find working on something like Office boring.
Ironically, at the start of my career working on something like Office was my dream, and would actually still be. I reserve to change my mind once I’ve seen the code base, though. ;)
Cruft built on frameworks using libraries with a zillion dependencies, some of which are cruft built on frameworks...
Well, we networked all the computers together around that time, and it turned out that all the 1337 performance hacking that people did back then had severe unintended consequences. You’re talking about an era in which the NX bit would not be utilized by Windows for another ~7 years. “Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit” was contemporary work.
It’s not rocket science to eke out oodles of performance out of a potato if you don’t care about correctness or memory safety.
Word 97 will only delight you if you use it on an airgapped computer, as a glorified typewriter, never open anyone else’s documents with it, and are diligent about manually saving the doc to multiple places for when it inevitably self-corrupts.
But at that point, why not be like GRRM and write on a DOS word processor? Those were historically a lot more reliable than these second-generation GUI apps.
So, we often look back on the old days with rose tinted glasses. But let me recount my IT classes from the 90s.
We'd sometimes go to the library to write something up in MS Word. We always liked this because it would be a good 5-10 mins to boot up some kind of basic Unix menu. You'd then select windows 3.1 and wait another 10-15 minutes for that to load. Then you could fire up word and wait another 5 minutes. Then you could do 5 minutes work before the class was over!
> How did we get back to this though?
By piling up nonzero-cost abstractions left and right.
And it's easy to understand how we get into that trap. Each one of those abstractions is very low-cost, so it seems harmless.
And getting out of the trap is hard too, because no single abstraction is to blame - you can't just hit things with your profiler and find the hot spot. It's all of them. So now you either live with it or rewrite an entire stack of abstractions.
"How did we get back to this though?"
Probably because windows needs to make a connection for every file somewhere else first and wait for the reply, before granting you the advanced software as a service feature called text editing.
It definitely feels like this at times and I fear there is too much truth in my statement.
But it is not just windows only. My old chromebook took seconds to open a folder in the file browser (even if it was already open). But a "ls" on the terminal was instant for any folder. So getting the information was not the problem. But from there to displaying it in a GUI, there seems to be myriads of important (tracking?) layers involved.
My guess is that we're already seeing the consequences of "AI-assisted programming". Just yesterday, Microsoft's CEO revealed that 30% of their code is written by AI.
Given the game of telephone which would have to had occurred for that 30% figure to travel from developers up to the CEO, it's probably including things like autocomplete...
The Plan
In the beginning, there was a plan, And then came the assumptions, And the assumptions were without form, And the plan without substance,
And the darkness was upon the face of the workers, And they spoke among themselves saying, "It is a crock of shit and it stinks."
And the workers went unto their Supervisors and said, "It is a pile of dung, and we cannot live with the smell."
And the Supervisors went unto their Managers saying, "It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong, Such that none may abide by it."
And the Managers went unto their Directors saying, "It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide by its strength."
And the Directors spoke among themselves saying to one another, "It contains that which aids plants growth, and it is very strong."
And the Directors went to the Vice Presidents saying unto them, "It promotes growth, and it is very powerful."
And the Vice Presidents went to the President, saying unto him, "This new plan will actively promote the growth and vigor Of the company With very powerful effects."
And the President looked upon the Plan And saw that it was good, And the Plan became Policy.
And this, my friend, is how shit happens.
from anonymous email
Interesting that this story is not really a game of telephone, but instead a single layer replaced the meaning on purpose.
By software, most of it is probably generated scaffolding.
There are no financial or career incentives to optimise existing, working things in these institutions. The structures which these large companies use are for people working on new things, so that's what we get. Making office faster doesn't create headlines, but a new product that does the same thing somehow will.
Software 'engineering' is too abstract, yet imagine the outrage if every new highway had a 20km/h limit...
Ever notice how Windows 7 and 10 and 11 have basically the same features and benchmark the same on performance tests yet 10 and especially 11 completely shit the bed if you try to run them off a hard drive? Like they might all boot in twenty seconds from an SSD but booting from a hard disk might take W7 two minutes and W11 ten minutes to a stable desktop.
In the old days there was the saying 'What Intel Giveth, Microsoft Taketh Away'
How much engineering time do you think is spent optimizing startup time on most modern editors? I’m guessing next to nothing.
"eight megabytes and constantly swapping"
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.
> I wish companies would go back to building fast apps
It seems fascinating how much more efficient Windows apps were back in the nineties, capable do to almost everything the same today apps do in a similar manner on orders of magnitude less powerful hardware, often performing even faster.
The last time I expressed this, probably also here, somebody suggested the performance drop is the cost of modern security - vulnerability mitigations, cryptography etc.
I think the performance drop probably has more to do with managers & product folks expecting growth and features at all costs at the expense of keeping performance at some baseline.
I also wonder if it's just harder to continually monitor performance in a way that alerts a team early enough to deal with regressions?
That said, security _can_ impact performance! I work on Stripe frontend surfaces, and one performance bottleneck we have comes from needing to use iframes to sandbox and isolate code for security. Having to load code in iframes adds an additional network load before we can get to page render.
I think you need to add that many more developers, or even teams of developers, are building these apps. They have their own fiefdoms and it's less common for devs to have a complete understanding of the code base.
Over time decisions are made independently by devs/teams which cause the code bases to get out of alignment with a performant design. This is exacerbated by the growth pressure. It's then really hard for someone to come in and optimize top to bottom because there is everything from a bug to a design problem. Remediation has significant overhead, so only things around the edges are touched.
Fast forward a couple of years and you have a code base that devs struggle to evolve and add features to as well as keep performant. The causes are many and we come to the same one whether we complain about performance or maintainability. You probably don't feel this way, but Stripe and other premier engineering companies are way ahead of others in terms of their practices when you compare with the average situation developers are facing.
Independent mobile development is often where I see most attention to performance these days. The situation for these devs is a little bit closer to what existed in the nineties. They have a bigger span of control and performance is something they feel directly so are incentivized to ensure it's great.
> It seems fascinating how much more efficient Windows apps were back in the nineties
I remember everyone complaining about how bloated they were at the time. Pretty sure someone in 2055 is going to run today's Office on 2055 computers and marvel at how streamlined it is.
My recollection is completely different, software was really slow on contemporary PCs in the 90s. Spinning disks, single core cpus, lot more swapping due to memory being so much more expensive.
Contemporary software was slow. You could tell you should consider more RAM when the HDD light and chugging noises told you it was swapping. But if you ran the same software with the benefit of 10 years of hardware improvement, it was not slow at all.
This might match your recollection. x86 Win95 raytracing in javascript on my arm laptop is usable, but sort of slow:
https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows95
Once it boots, run povray, then click run.
It took over 2 minutes to render biscuit.pov, though it did manage to use SSE!
It took over 2 minutes to render biscuit.pov
We used to wait two hours for a mandelbrot to display on a Commodore 64, and were delighted when it did.
Nah, it's about favouring bad programming practices, not thinking about the architecture of the software and giving developer experience a bigger role than end user experience. All these stemming from a push to get to market earlier or making employees replaceable.
I'd guess less on "bad programming practices" and more "prioritizing development speed?" Mostly inline with your next point. We value getting things released and do not have a solid process for optimizing without adding new things.
Ironically, it was specifically the longer feedback cycle of long builds and scheduled releases that seems to specifically have given us better software?
Fair, I just think there is a huge overlap between bad practice and speed of development. The latter fuels the former in many ways.
Oh, I likely fully agree with you on it. I'm just pointing at the hazard that a lot of these practices aren't, intrinsically, bad. Rapidly getting something done is, generally, a good thing. I'm not entirely sure how to make it not the priority, but it does feel that that is the problem.
How much modern security do I need to write & print a term paper or church bulletin on my own computer?
This depends on whether you want to exchange data with other computers using even removable media, let alone the Internet. Also whether you want to use Unicode. In case you only want to hand-type, edit and print a plain English paper right away by dumping plaintext/PostScript/PCL to LPT you probably are fine with any computer you can find. It's just nobody is using standalone computers anymore, almost every modern computer is a network device.
I mean, as mentioned upthread, Office 97 (and Office 95 before it) was slow to load, so slow that they added the start up accelerator.
You can run Office 97 now and it'll start fast because disk i/o and cpus are so much faster now. Otoh Excel 97 has a maximum of 256 columns and 64k rows. You might want to try Excel 2007 for 16k columns and 1M rows, and/or Excel 2016 for 64-bit memory.
The 90s was a time when computers were doubling in speed every 18 months. I remember office 97* being lightning fast on. A 366mhz celeron - a cheap chip in 1998.
You could build fast software today by simply adopting a reference platform, say. A 10 year old 4core system. then measuring performance there. If it lags then do whatever work needs to be done to speed it up.
Personally I think we should all adopt the raspberry pi zero as a reference platform.
Edit: * office 2000 was fast too with 32 megs of ram. Seriously what have we done?
Oddly, I remember timing it, and the startup accelerator didn't seem to speed up Office start time. It slowed everything else down though.
I rebooted a lot though (mostly used Linux by then), so maybe it was just fighting with itself when I immediately fired up office after boot.
If you like fast apps, maybe check out FilePilot, a Windows explorer alternative.
https://filepilot.tech/
It's amazingly fast, though it's missing some features and will be really expensive when it leaves beta.
I made an account to thank you for this. I've been looking for a _fast_ alternative to explorer since Windows XP. But one that doesn't require a change in workflow. This is the fastest I've tried by far. I've only been using it for 5 minutes, but I'm sold. Earlybird discount too!
Thank you for posting this, and if you have any other speedy apps you'd recommend I'd welcome suggestions. Mine top suggestions are Speedcrunch [0] (calculator app) and Everything [1] file search combined with Listary [2]
[0] https://github.com/ruphy/speedcrunch
[1] https://www.voidtools.com/
[2] https://www.listary.com/
(For reference, I've tried Total Commander, DOpus, Files, Explorer XP, XY Explorer, Explorer ++, FreeCommander, Double Commander, Q-Dir)
Everything (the tool) is ridiculously fast, I’ve used it for quite a while now and it’s nice to see it mentioned here.
I'll check these out, thanks!
I learned about File Pilot (whose author posts here: https://x.com/vkrajacic) from Casey Muratori (https://x.com/cmuratori) who pushed it a bunch because he loves fast things.
Listary has slowed down tremendously ever since they included search. For a launcher I'm still using "find as run robot", which truly is a 90s era piece of softer but works blazingly fast. I do have a plug-in to tie it into search everything.
Have you tried xplorer²? I only know about it because I was into Windows programming using the WTL eons ago.
In my opinion Total Commander has always been the most ideal (also fast) file management tool since Windows 3.x. It was named Windows Commander back in the days but it still supports Windows 3.x as Total Commander.
I never knew it was a Windows program. I've been using it on my Android phones for years.
All of these ‘fast’ file managers have a big problem: they don't support system calls to dialog windows.
Mostly users interact with the explorer in this scenario to open/save a file in ‘BrowserOS’
>> they don't support system calls to dialog windows.
It's a little unclear what you mean exactly. Do you want the browsing experience changed for the system's file open/save dialogs? i.e. a third-party file explorer opens instead with all of it's features.
Do you know how it compares to Dolphin for interacting with very large (100k+ files) directories? Dolphin is the only file manager I’ve found that keeps up with the large directories- GNOME (Nautilus) and Windows Explorer are dogshit slow, even after the file list populates. macOS Finder is somewhere in the middle but still very slow.
Check out ROX-Filer https://github.com/rox-desktop/rox-filer
When you have 100k+ files sometimes the filesystem itself matters. Have you set your expectations appropriately, aka compared it to a raw ls/dir ?
I like dolphin but pcmanfm is fastet
how does it compare to directory opus?
I actually use IntelliJ and Sublime interchangeably throughout the day. I default to sublime for most work because of how snappy fast it is. I only load up Intellij when I need to do something that leverages its full IDE capabilities. To second your comment, I encourage people to try Sublime, you will be shocked at how fast it feels.
I still love IntelliJ, its a great product. But it is slow, bloats the computer, needs constant updating. But at least its incredibly powerful as a tradeoff to the bloat.
The Office debate is slightly different. It is slow, bloats the computer, needs constant updating. But unlike IntelliJ i dont feel that there is any advantage to all that added weight. We are using a word processor. We type words onto a blank screen. Why is Word and Outlook the most common applications to crash my computer that has an M1 Max Chip with 48Gb of Memory? I can literally run and build AI models on my computer with no problem but you boot up Microsoft Word to type words onto a blank page and you have a 33% chance of crashing the computer.
Google Sheets and Docs are actually better tools in my opinion for most people. 99% or more of the features you need are available in the google equivalents. These products are fast and run in a browser! The UI is actually VASTLY superior to Microsoft's ribbon. I still can't find stuff that I need on a routine basis and have to google it. I don't have this problem when using Google's office equivalents.
> and it's not even the fastest editor, iirc it uses Python under the hood
The majority of the app is written in C++. Python is used for plugins.
Instead they decided to build it with React if I remember correctly which is truly one of the fucking dumbest ideas I’ve ever heard of.
Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17310738
I don't think these apps were ever built to be fast, they were built with the resource constraints of the time. Moore's law is what's making these apps fast.
Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh.
This is even more sad with Apple. My M1 Mac felt incredibly snappy with Big Sur, but is getting ever so slightly slower with each update. My iPhone SE2 is a complete disaster.
They used no networking services either. Now, I open a shared PowerPoint and am stuck waiting for a couple of minutes while it is syncing or doing who knows what. People have no sense of what templates they copy from other documents causing the size of the file and load times to bloat.
Word 2000 definitely was not very quick on a contemporary office PC (Pentium II or III), though I'm pretty certain it was much, much faster than desktop O365 is on a contemporary office PC today, despite those being >100x faster. So Fermi would estimate modern office to probably require at least 1000x more resources than Office 2000.
>I wish companies would go back to building fast apps
My prediction is that we are about to enter a great winter of poor performance across the industry as AI slop is put in to production en mass. Along with bugginess that we have not seen since the early dotcom days.
> I wish companies would go back to building fast apps...
Similar to the slow-opening glove box in a car, many humans perceive slow computers & software as a signifiers of importance/luxury/prestige. At least at first. By the time they are familiar with the slow software, and impatient to just get their work done - too late, SnailSoft already has their money.
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.
486's were way past when that became practical. I remember using Prodigy on a 286. Screenshots are rare, since you can't fire it up in an emulator unless you have a modem that can make phone calls to the 1980's. Also, machines from back then didn't really have room to store screenshots:
https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/1063
Their service used vector art to render interactive pages like that over <= 2400 baud modems. Other than it being proprietary and stuff, I'm guessing the web would be a much cooler place if HTML hadn't eaten their lunch. SVG is a decent consolation prize, I guess.
Let me point you to Prodigy Reloaded, https://github.com/ProdigyReloaded. We're reviving the Prodigy server and as many cache files as we can find, using Elixir as the backend language.
It's not merged yet but I've written an Elixir library that writes graphics files in Prodigy's graphics format, NAPLPS. I'm using it to get current weather and creating weather maps that are displayed in Prodigy. https://github.com/rrcook/naplps_writer
You can run Prodigy in DOSBox and get screenshots.
Where is that guy who coded RollerCoaster Tycoon in Assembly?
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
Example: https://old.reddit.com/r/libreoffice/comments/upf8nw/fixed_o...
Opening a spreadsheet, even if you don't want to print it, will hang for 30 seconds doing nothing, because LibreOffice will load the printer settings for the document, which means asking the printer, which if the printer is network-based and turned off, means a 30 second wait for a timeout.
Reported in 2011, still not fixed: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42673
This... 100 times. Everyday wastes my few minutes. 5 figure commercial application, state of art in it's domain, but somehow It has to wait for that unresponsive network printer and hang the startup UI.
Best workaround (still ridiculous that it hasn't been fixed) is to set a PDF printer as your default printer.
I frequently have to do this for a different reason on MacOS/iOS. Printing directly sends bad PCL to my printer and makes it spew garbage pages.
"Print to PDF -> print the PDF" is much more reliable.
sigh
> Reported in 2011, still not fixed: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42673
Perhaps spurred by this comment, there was new discussion in the report and it turned out Microsoft has fixed the issue in Windows 11: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42673#c8...
Quote:
"I was one of the many who reported this problem in one from or another. The problem is Windows-specific. I have found out that the problem actually comes from the Windows print system. There is no way to check that a printer is actually active or working or even present without incurring a long time-out in case the printer is not present or powered. Trying to check the defualt printer will incur the same time-out.
Calc apparently wants to check the printer to know how to construct its layout, and has to wait for the time-out to continue.
Some of the comments that claim that Calc hangs and never returns have probably not waited long enough for the timeout.
On my new Windows 11 computer, this printer system behavior has been changed and I no longer experience a delay while opening Calc."
I don't recall spreadsheets ever having any visible printer formatting until the point at which you print them? So surely it's not even a case of "even if you don't want to print it"?
It’s because modern devs by and large have zero concept of latency differences. I had to explain to people yesterday why an on-disk temporary table in MySQL was slower than an in-memory one. “But the disk is an SSD,” was an actual rebuttal I got. Never mind the fact that this was Aurora, so the “disk” is a slice of (multiple) SSDs exposed over a SAN…
Agree. I've heard people say things like "it is slow because it is not C++". When, in reality, the problem was I/O and N^2 algos.
I've been trying to impress upon people from my own research in Python packaging: Pip is slow because it defaults to pre-compiling bytecode (and doesn't invoke multiprocessing for that, although this seems to be in the works from the discussion I've seen); imports literally hundreds of modules even when it ultimately does nothing; creates complex wrappers to set up for connecting to the Internet (and using SSH, of course) even if you tell it to install from a locally downloaded wheel directly; caches things in a way that simulates network sessions instead of just actually having the files... you get the idea.
"It's written in Python and not e.g. in Rust" is simply not relevant in that context.
(For that matter, when uv is asked to pre-compile, while it does some intelligent setup for multiprocessing, it still ultimately invokes the same bytecode compiler - which is part of the Python implementation itself, written in C unless you're using an alternative implementation like PyPy.)
There may be a bit of culture at play sometimes as well. If a language isn't meant to be fast, then perhaps devs using the language do not prioritize performance very much. For some, as long as it is possible to point to some externality ("hey this is Python, what do you expect") this is sufficient.
Of course, not always the case. C++ is a good counter example with a massive range of performance "orientedness". On the other hand, I suspect there are few Rust / Zig or C programmers that don't care about performance.
To me, Python is more of a challenge than an excuse when it comes to performance.
On the flip side, I've seen quite a few C developers using their own hand-rolled linked lists where vector-like storage would be more appropriate, without giving it a second thought. Implementing good hash tables from scratch turns out not to be very much fun, either. I'm sure there are off the shelf solutions for that sort of thing, but `#include` and static compilation in C don't exactly encourage module reuse the same way that modern languages with package managers do (even considering all the unique issues with Python package management). For better or worse.
(For what it's worth, I worked in J2ME for phones in the North American market in the mid 00s, if you remember what those were like.)
Do you have a real world example of a Python project that does selective import?
Not sure what you mean, but I guess you're getting at something like "is it really pip's fault that it imports almost everything on almost every run?".
Well first off, pip itself does defer quite a few imports - just not in a way that really matters. Notably, if you use the `--python` flag, the initial run will only import some of the modules before it manages to hand off to the subprocess (which has to import those modules again). But that new pip process will end up importing a bunch more eventually anyway.
The thing is that this isn't just about where you put `import` statements (at the top, following style guidelines, vs. in a function to defer them and take full advantage of `sys.modules` caching). The real problem is with library dependencies, and their architecture.
If I use a library that provides the `foo` top-level package, and `import foo.bar.baz.quux`, at a minimum Python will need to load the `foo`, `foo.bar`, `foo.bar.baz` and `foo.bar.baz.quux` modules (generally, from the library's `foo/__init__.py`, foo/bar/__init__.py`, `foo/bar/baz/__init__.py` and `foo/bar/baz/quux.py` respectively). But some libraries offer tons of parallel, stand-alone functionality, such that that's the end of it; others are interconnected, such that those modules will have a bunch of their own top-level `import`s, etc. There are even cases where library authors preemptively import unnecessary things in their `__init__.py` files just to simplify the import statements for the client code. That also happens for backward compatibility reasons (if a library reorganizes some functionality from `foo` into `foo.bar`, then `foo/__init__.py` might have `from . import bar` to avoid breaking existing code that does `import foo`... and then over time `bar` might grow a lot bigger).
For pip, rich (https://pypi.org/project/rich/) is a major culprit, from what I've seen. Pip uses little of its functionality (AFAIK, just for coloured text and progress bars) and it tends to import quite a bit preemptively (such as an emoji database). It's very much not designed with modularity or import speed in mind. (It also uses the really old-fashioned system of ad-hoc testing by putting some demo code in each module behind an `if __name__ == '__main__':` block - code that is only ever used if you do `python -m rich.whatever.submodule` from the command line, but has to be processed by everyone).
And yes, these things are slow even with Python's system for precompiling and caching bytecode. It's uniformly slow, without an obvious bottleneck - the problem is the amount of code, not (as far as I can tell) any specific thing in that code.
It's also a Product issue: "fast and snappy" is almost never on their list of priorities. So product managers will push devs for more features, which satisfy the roadmap, and only get concerned about speed when it reaches painful levels.
> only get concerned about speed when it reaches painful levels.
...and by then, the requests for performance are somewhere between onerous and ridiculous.
I'm as wary of premature optimization as anyone, but I also have a healthy fear of future-proofed sluggishness.
But is it actually faster by any significant amount on your workload? Did you benchmark? Temporary tables in databases rarely actually do disk IO in any blocking code path but mostly just dirty buffers in the OS or in the database itself and then something writes it to disk in the background. This limits throughput but does not add much extra latency in the common cases.
Edit: It still might be a bad idea to waste the IO if you do not have to but the latency of a temporary table is usually RAM latency, not disk latency even for temporary tables on disk.
Didn’t have to, prod benchmarked it for us, twice.
If you’re curious, the EBS disks Aurora uses for temporary storage, when faced with a QD of approximately 240, can manage approximately 5000 IOPS. This was an r6i.32xlarge.
My hypothesis is currently that the massive context switching the CPU had to do to handle the interrupts slowed down its acceptance of new connections / processing other queries enough such that everything piled up. I’ve no idea what kind of core pinning / isolation AWS does under the hood, but CPU utilization from disk I/O alone, according to Enhanced Monitoring, was about 20%.
That is what happens when your dev learnt it from an online course instead of going to college or through proper education. "Anyone can code!"
And I thought we were past this sort of gatekeeping and elitism. I've worked with people who had a master's degree in CS who couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag. In my experience there's very little correlation between how someone learned programming and how deep their understanding of the entire stack is.
Yeah, deep understanding I think is a matter of how much time you spend investigating the craft and improving. Maybe the real question is: what motivates that to happen? Maybe it's school type, but maybe it's not.
My personal anecdotes, which are music centric but all apply to my software career:
1. I've studied music my whole life, and baked into music is the idea of continual practice & improvement. Because of this experiential input, I believe that I can always improve at things if I actively put a bit of energy into it and show up. I believe it because I've put in so many hours to it and have seen the results. This is deeply ingrained.
2. When I picked up bass in high school, I spent the first year learning tabs in my bedroom. It was ok, but my ability accelerated when I started a band with my friends and had to keep up. I really think the people you surround yourself with can: push you more, teach you things you didn't know, and make the process way more of a fun hang than doing it by yourself.
3. Another outcome from music education was learning that I really love how mastery feels. There's a lot of positive feeling from achieving and growing. As a result, I try to seek it out in other places as well. I imagine sports/etc are the same?
> I've worked with people who had a master's degree in CS who couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag.
"Programming" consists of an insanely large number of isolated communities. Assuming the respective person is capable, I would assume that he simply comes from a very different "programming culture".
I actually observe a very related phenomenon for myself: the more I learn about some very complicated programming topics, the more "alien" I actually (start to) become to the programming topics that I have to do at work.
Hope this doesn't come off as disrespectful, as in that I don't believe you, but out of personal interest, would you consider expanding on that? I'd love to hear about the particular example you were thinking of, or in what ways self-taught coders surprised you over academically-taught ones, if you've had experience working with both over a meaningful span of time. Also, if the case, in what ways self-taught coders were/are maybe lacking on average.
If you've ever given answers to that in another comments on HN or elsewhere, feel free to link.
It's certainly true in my experience. The main thing that makes a difference is simply how curious and interested you are.
Plenty of graduates simply got into to it to make money, and have no real deep interest. Some of them love the theory but hate the practice. And some of them are good at both of course.
By contrast, self taught people tend to have personal interest going for them. But I've also worked with self taught people who had no real understanding (despite their interest), and who were satisfied if something just worked. Even if they are motivated to know more, they are often lacking in deeper theoretical computer science (this is a gap I've had to gradually fill in myself).
Anyway, the determining factor is rarely exactly how they acquired their skills, it's the approach they take to the subject and personal motivation and curiosity.
Makes sense, out of all the potential differentiators the source of skill attainment simply isn't the necessarily dominant one. Thanks for the answer :)
Not disrespectful at all. I agree with the sibling comments, I think what allows someone to become a great software developer, to have great intuition, and to understand systems and abstractions on a really deep level is their curiosity, hunger for knowledge, and a lot of experience.
There are many college educated software developers who have that sort of drive (or passion, if you will) and there are just as many who don't, it's not something college can teach you, and the same is true for self-taught developers.
At the end of the day "self-taught" is also a spectrum that ranges from people who created their first "hello world" React app 2 months ago to people who have been involved in systems programming since they were 10 years old, and have a wealth of knowledge in multiple related fields like web development, systems administration, and networking. That's why I think it's silly to generalize like that.
Software development is extremely broad so depending on the discipline self-taught developers might not be missing anything essential, or they might have to learn algorithms, discrete mathematics, linear algebra, or calculus on their own. I learned all of that in college but I'd probably have to learn most of it again if I really needed it.
Thanks for the answer, very nice of you to take the time even hours after.
Guess it makes sense; I'm self taught myself, but thought academically taught developers should have a leg up in theory and mathematics, at the same time though, at one point I considered further formal education for myself (in at least paid courses and such), I realized that I don't think there's much I can't teach myself with the resources available (which includes high quality university lectures which are available for free).
Thanks for your perspective.
Not the GP, but here is my N=1 (N=3, actually, as you'll see).
I have a Master's in Economics. After 3 years of economics, I started a Master's program in maths (back then the Master's degree was the standard thing you achieved after 4.5–5 years of studying in my country, there was basically nothing in-between high school and that). 9 years later I got a PhD in mathematical analysis (so not really close to CS). But I've been programming as a hobby since late 80s (Commodore 64 Basic, Logo, then QBasic, of course quite a bit of Turbo Pascal, and a tiny bit of C, too). I also read a bit (but not very much) about things like algos, data structures etc. Of course, a strong background in analysis gives one a pretty solid grasp of things like O(n) vs O(n log n) vs O(n^2) vs O(2^n). 9 years ago I started programming as a side job, and 2 years later I quit the uni.
I lack a lot of foundations – I know very little about networks, for example. But even in our small team of 5, I don't /need/ to know that much – if I have a problem, I can ask a teammate next desk (who actually studied CS).
Of course, _nemo iudex in causa sua_, but I think doing some stuff on the C64 and then Turbo Pascal gave me pretty solid feeling for what is going on under the hood. (I believe it's very probable that coding in BASIC on an 8-bit computer was objectively "closer to the bare metal" than contemporary C with all the compiler optimizations.) I would probably be able to implement the (in)famous linked list with eyes closed, and avoiding N+1 database queries is a natural thing for me to do (having grown up with a 1 MHz processor I tend to be more frugal with cycles than my younger friends). Recently I was tasked with rewriting a part of our system to optimize it to consume less memory (which is not necessarily an obvious thing in Node.js).
Another teammate (call them A) who joined us maybe 2 years ago is a civil engineer who decided to switch careers. They are mainly self-taught (well, with a bit of older-brother-taught), but they are a very intelligent person with a lot of curiosity and willingness to learn. I used to work with someone else (call them B) who had formal CS education (and wasn't even fresh out of a university, it was their second programming job, I think), but lacked general life experience (they were 5-10 years younger than A), curiosity and deep understanding, and I preferred to work with A than with B hands down. For example, B was perfectly willing to accept rules of thumb as a universal truths "because I was told it was good practice", without even trying to understand why, while A liked to know _why_ it was a good practice.
So – as you yourself noticed – how you acquire knowledge is not _that_ important. IMHO the most important advantage of having a formal CS education is that your knowledge is more likely (but not guaranteed!) to be much more comprehensive. That advantage can be offset by curiosity, willing to learn, some healthy skepticism and age. And yes, I think that young age – as in, lack of general life experience – can be a disadvantage. B was willing to accept even stupid tasks at face value and just code his way through them (and then tear the code apart because it had some fundamental design problem). A, as a more mature person, instinctively (or maybe even consciously) saw when a task did not fit the business needs and sometimes was able to find another solution which was for example simpler/easier to code and at the same time satisfied the actual needs of the customer better.
I’ve worked with both (I personally have an unrelated BS and an MS in SWE, which I used purely to get my foot in the door – it worked), and IMO if someone has a BS, not MS, there’s a decent chance they at least understand DS&A, probably took an OS course, etc.
That said, I have also worked with brilliant people who had no formal education in the subject whatsoever, they just really, really liked it.
I’m biased towards ops because that’s what I do and like, but at least in that field, the single biggest green flag I’ve found is whether or not someone has a homelab. People can cry all they want about “penalizing people for having hobbies outside of their job,” but it’s pretty obvious that if you spend more time doing something – even moreso if you enjoy it – you will learn it at a much faster rate than someone who only does it during business hours.
Maybe you should skip bashing modern devs and people who learnt from online courses when the parent poster is the one in the wrong. Unless InnoDB has a particularly bad implementation of disk backed temporary tables almodt all disk IO should be done in the background so the latency cost should be small. I recommend benchmarking on you particular workload of you really want to know hur big it is.
I am an old-school developer with a computer engineering degree but many of the old famous devs were self taught. Yes, if you learn how to code through online courses you will miss some important fundamentals but those are possible to learn later and I know several people who have.
Please see this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43863885
We have excellent metrics between PMM and AWS Perf. Insights / Enhanced Monitoring. I assure you, on-disk temp tables were to blame. To your point, though, MySQL 5.7 does have a sub-optimal implementation in that it kicks a lot of queries out to disk from memory because of the existence of a TEXT column, which internally treated as a BLOB. Schema design is also partially to blame, since most of the tables were unnecessarily denormalized, and TEXT was often used where VARCHAR would have been more appropriate, but still.
I wish. I did my undergrad, and now doing my Masters, at a top 10 uni in Poland.
Trust me so much, some of the stuff I learned there was actively harmful. Half of subjects were random fillers, and so on.
I envy Americans so much with that, their CS education seems to be top notch.
https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832
That really should include "sync write 4KB to an SSD". People don't realize it's purely in-RAM on the disk these days (you pay a PCIe round trip, and that's about it).
I do want to add that many of the devs I work with and have worked with are genuinely interested in learning this stuff, and I am thrilled by it. What bothers me is when they neither have an interest in learning it, nor in fixing their bad patterns, and leadership shrugs and tells infra teams to make it work.
Opening any ms office app with the network disconnected opens up almost instantly...
This is also a classic emacs mistake, so I wouldn't put it all on age.
What I am glad to leave behind and forget like a nightmare is Windows local networking with shared folders etc - these never worked nice and the last time anybody I know used these was pre-2010. Today we just use NextCloud, Matrix, email and Git for all our collaboration needs.
Who's "we"? I work for a company who drank the MS cool-aid, so running Windows on laptops, using Office365 for e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets, teams for chat, sharepoint / onedrive for shared ressources.
Have you tried launching a local app by typing in the start menu on a default win11 install with limited / slow internet access? Good times. How about doing some operation (say delete an e-mail) in one window of "new" outlook and having the others refresh?
I have never understood how some otherwise reasonable people are able to consider this absolute shitshow of a work environment good enough.
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.
I agree with the point about the immediacy of TUIs, but I use MS Office (and Windows in general) almost exclusively by keyboard, so the point about having to use a mouse isn’t completely accurate.
Right, but you could just hit up/down to scroll through the files in the directory listing. Very simple
You can still do that? I mean, there are certainly places where the interaction happens to be more cumbersome than it is in a TUI, because the relevant piece was designed mouse-first. However, one reason I prefer Windows as a desktop UI is that it was designed to be fully operable by keyboard as well.
You could see the files as you scrolled through them. I don't think you understood how it works, I didn't do a great job explaining it. You can see the content of the files instantly on the screen as you go through them. Similar to how preview works on Mac
Ah, I see. Yeah, that’s more rare to come across on Windows for text documents.
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.
Yeah that era of Office, pre-ribbon, was pretty nice as Office goes.
Ribbon was better for most people who didn't have all the shortcuts in muscle memory. It is much more discoverable.
I find its discoverability is terrible. I am always hunting for what I want to do and it's never anywhere that seems to me to be sensible. I usually end up doing a google search for what I want. Perusing the ribbon takes me much more time than just looking at the various options under the old style menus.
Also traditional menus had some traditional standards. Once you learned what was under "File" or "View" or "Insert" or "Format" it was often pretty similar across applications.
Logically, users have to learn the name of the tool before performing any sort of geographical associations (which menu, symbol, etc to find the tool).
There is no faster discoverability than O(log(N)) search using the letters of the name as a lookup.
The biggest failure of modern operating systems is failing to standardize this innate reality.
Windows,Linux,etc should have 1. keyboard button to jump to search box 2. type 1-2 letters and hit enter. Operating systems and applications should all have this kind of interface.
The most ironic apps have a ribbon named something like "Edit" but then the most used "edit" command lives in an unrelated ribbon.
Anecdotal evidence from myself: Although I've been using Word for many decades, I've never had much "muscle memory" in terms of accessing features. It was always a case of learning which pulldown menu held the required function.
When the accursed ribbon came along, "discoverability" went out the window. Functions were grouped according to some strange MS logic I could never understand, and it takes me twice as long to format a page as it used to. Now, I basically just use Word for text entry, and if I want an elegant format, I use a graphic design app like Illustrator.
Judging from what I've read online, you may be the only person who actually likes the ribbon.
Hieroglyphics are the opposite of "discoverable". That's why they became uninterpretable for almost two thousand years, until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. And even then it took considerable work to figure out how they functioned. In the Ribbon, in order to discover what some hieroglyph does, you have to mouse over it. Since there are lots of hieroglyphs there, that's a lot of mouse-over. And no, the Ribbon's images make no sense in 99% of the cases.
That might have been true for the first five minutes of using the software (assuming the person had not yet used a CUA application before the first time they used office). After that, it was strictly worse.
CUA ~= "standard menus + keyboard shortcuts for dos and windows": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access
Not really, it is much more discoverable for most people. If interested, MS UI lead has a blog about lot of the reasons for ribbon and on the research backing it https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh
Its probably a case of UI discoverability vs usability. Brand new users might discover better with the ribbon, but as brand new users keep using the product, they transition to experienced users, and the UI needs to adapt to that. My experience is that the ribbon doesn't. Its tolerable, and for me thats enough but I get the points about the ribbon. Its sort of like the new reddit UI, but props to reddit they at least have kept much of the old UI available for longer than I expected them to.
The problem with it was that it constantly moved the buttons around. So, you had to constantly rediscover it.
Sadly, none of the links I tried work anymore. (Though the conversation in the comments where they have to explain how to open a ppt in powerpoint is internet gold!)
I was hoping to figure out what led to design incompetence so spectacular that people would still be discussing it after 17 years.
I think there’s a clue in the abstract: The author claims they made 25,000 mock UI screenshots, but doesn’t mention user studies or even internally prototyping some of the concepts to see how they feel.
Looks like the links in the posts no longer work, but all the posts are readable and he goes through the work they did and why. They did a lot of usability testing for the ribbon. But anyways I have no horse in this race other than liking ribbon over 16x16 icons and menus, so no point in hashing this over.
The Ribbon is more difficult to visually grep for me than the classic menus. Not to mention that a number of functions are still hidden in mini-menus in the Ribbon.
It wouldn’t be so bad if keyboard navigation was as good as with the classic menus, but having to press the Alt key separately, and general increased latency, kills it.
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.
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.
Same ... Office 2007 for the win. Frankly, i do not even use 90% of Office 2007 feature, so why do i even need more? For AI ... no.
And funny thing, barely uses any memory! Makes todays apps look like monsters. Even my music player uses 5x more memory while paused, then freaking Excel with multiple pages open.
Do you have a good way to run multiple versions of office? I do sometimes need some of the newer features but I'd like to default to using the older versions.
And 100% of what you don't need--the Ribbon--was not in Word 97.
I remember a laptop in the early 1990's that had Microsoft Office in ROM to load faster. I can't find a reference to it right now.
HP Omnibook 300? https://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=123
`Omnibook300Intro-5091-6270-6pages-May93.pdf` https://www.hpmuseum.net/exhibit.php?hwdoc=123 sez:
> Built-in ROM applications don't use up disk space
- Microsoft Windows
- Microsoft Word for Windows
- Microsoft Excel
- Appointment Book
- Phone Book
- HP Calculator
- Microsoft File Manager
- LapLink Remote Access™
That looks like it. I didn't have one but I remember the magazine ads for it.
Man you can still get by with Photoshop CS3 as far as features go.
Lightroom 5 is miles better than what they offer today. Lightroom Creative Cloud is steaming dog shit. Adobe seriously gets to extort over $120 a year out of me simply for the privilege of reading raw files from a new camera. They provide zero positive contribution these days. All of these incumbent tech companies extract rents on algorithms written decades ago. This needs to end. I am very excited for AI to get advanced enough to whip up replacement programs for everything these companies maintain monopolies over.
> I am very excited for AI to get advanced enough to whip up replacement programs for everything these companies maintain monopolies over.
You are wildly off base. The algorithms aren't difficult or special. They were written by people reading text books for the most part.
They are able to sit on an on old algorithm for decades because the DMCA made interoperability and selling cheaper tools like that basically illegal.
Because of the DMCA, the work that was done to make IBM PC clones would have been close enough to illegal to kill all the businesses that tried it. They still tried with the liberal IP laws at the time.
Well that's a bit disappointing but i am aware that their are gaps in my knowledge. I had assumed it was the feasibility of competing with an entrenched firm, not lack of access to research texts. I will chat with Chat to learn more about how DMCA applies, thank you.
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.
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.
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.
"I bet somebody got a really nice bonus for that feature" https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20061101-03/?p=29...
> The thing is, all of these bad features were probably justified by some manager somewhere because it’s the only way their feature would get noticed. They have to justify their salary by pushing all these stupid ideas in the user’s faces. “Hey, look at me! I’m so cool!” After all, when the boss asks, “So, what did you accomplish in the past six months,” a manager can’t say, “Um, a bunch of stuff you can’t see. It just works better.” They have to say, “Oh, check out this feature, and that icon, and this dialog box.” Even if it’s a stupid feature.
On the other hand, I very much enjoyed going to Excel 97 cell X97:L97, pressing tab, holding Ctrl+Shift and clicking on the chart icon, because then you could play Excel's built in flight simulator
> 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.
This has always been the problem with Microsoft. Here is a rant from 2020 about Visual Studio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC-0tCy4P1U and live comparison of performance degradation while loading the same project.
I remember about 15 years ago running Windows + VS in VMWare because I could skip installing Office inside the VM and the system would run noticeably faster.
I thought Windows had a generic subsystem for "warming up" frequently used apps for faster launches.
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"
Only for OS components, I think?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista_I/O_technologies...
SuperFetch was supposed to work with any app. It never seemed to have much effect IMO.
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.
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.
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)
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?
> 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?
> Let's say a hypothetical Windows user spends 2% of their day using Office
I don't know about a "hypothetical" user, but I'd bet a "mean" (corporate) user probably uses office all day long. Hell, I've lost count of the number of e-mails I've seen having a screenshot which is inside a word document for some reason, or the number of excel files which are just a 5x4 table.
You're honestly trying to figure out why people want performant apps...?
That's not at all what I asked.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Does it still have the smooth-animated cursor as you type? That thing messes with my brain, so that I lose my train of thought.
Every time I reinstall office, I am actively googling how to disable that within 5 minutes of using word. I don't get why all these companies keep trying to add flashy crap to what is essentially a hammer.
It reminds me of that college humor sketch about the CEO of Oreo shouting at his team for trying to innovate on the Oreo... It's a solved problem, we made the perfect cookie 100 years ago. Just stop
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.
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.
Office 2003 can absolutely open docx and xlsx and pptx files. It is annoying because it usually opens those in read-only mode, and then you need to "save as" to do your modifications. But it works fine otherwise.
“View” unfortunately isn’t the same as “Open and edit”, and in business you need to do the latter. Otherwise we’d be 100% libreoffice from the start. Yep, that’s the moat.
It's been a while, but I think what they're saying is that you have to "save as" in order to be allowed to edit. Office 2003 thinks of the compressed versions as export formats rather than internal formats.
> I think what they're saying is that you have to "save as" in order to be allowed to edit.
The issue is that roundtripping between Office 2007+ and Office 2003 is unreliable and will often result in corrupted files.
Using Office 2003 (with Compatibility Pack add-on to open xlsx and docx) is ok for isolated work but can be unreliable for collaborative back & forth editing depending on what features are used. E.g. cell colors used in Excel 2007 xlsx get corrupted in Excel 2003 xls.
It's a completely different format. Iirc .doc files are basically implementation defined files and consist of c-structs dumped to disk. .docx is a properly specified format of compressed xml.
It's not "C structs dumped to disk". It's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COM_Structured_Storage, which is basically a filesystem-in-a-file. And it has been documented for a long time, ever since Microsoft was forced to write docs for Office file formats because of antitrust:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/windows_protocol...
Yes that's what I meant. You can edit xlsx in Excel 2003; you open, modify and save as. It's a little annoying but it works.
> 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.
That's actually not true, Office has had activation since XP (2002), so 2003 is included in that.
There is an addon for 2003 that enables OOXML support. Look for FileFormatConverters.exe.
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.
>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.
You're right about Excel; however, I think big data files should be handled in a db rather than in a spreadsheet. And sqlite can query Excel files (with an extension), and it's super fast and you can use any function you want, or write your own.
>; however, I think big data files should be handled in a db rather than in a spreadsheet. And sqlite can query Excel files (with an extension)
A lot of normal users of Excel are not users of database software like SQLite or MS Access. That's too cumbersome. E.g. they download a csv file that has ~100000 rows (which really isn't that "big") and clicking on it gets them an instant visual grid as a GUI in Excel. Slicing & dicing and pivoting data is way faster in Excel than coding SQL WHERE GROUP BY statements. I've commented previously on why databases are not substitutes for the workflow ergonomics made possible by spreadsheet tools : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30987638
It's similar to reasons why Python/R or Jupyter notebooks are also not substitutes for Excel for the typical users of Excel.
The low row count of 65536 in Excel 2003 was just a legacy limitation of 1980s 16-bit computing that was carried over into 32-bit computing for many years for backwards compatibility reasons. Spreadsheet users don't really want to switch to databases or Python just to get more usable rows than 65536.
From your linked comment:
> The scenario of "I just sent you an xlsx where the rows highlighted in red are problems and if you can just add your notes to column K, that would be great. Thanks!" -- is not easy in other tools that are not spreadsheets.
There are no words to tell how much I hate that!!! ;-) Users are too creative. Some will merge some cells and not others and boom the file can't be properly sorted anymore. Many will use font color, font weight or background color to mean wildly different things, which is very difficult or impossible to sort or do a sumif over. Others will add footnotes, because why not?, and links to spreadsheets that never leave their own device, or mini-blank-rows for spacing and general layout, etc. It's completely insane.
> I think big data files should be handled in a db rather than in a spreadsheet.
Your side lost completely. Pop a signal flare or build a bonfire, maybe someone can rescue you from the island you've been living on since the war ended.
I don't want to be rescued.
duckdb is doing fine.
If Microsoft had adopted this attitude, then by now Excel's market share would probably be 0% and Google Sheets' would be 100%. Microsoft doesn't add features because they like bloated software; they add features because the market demands them, and the market demanded support for more than 65,535 rows.
I've thankfully never had to deal with anything close to that size, what kind of super computers are they running?
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).
Sumif (without the s) worked in Excel 4 (1992), you just had to enter it with CTRL+Enter and use curly braces IIRC. I used it to build dashboards. Not sure what problem sumifs solves beyond sumif.
XLookup sure is useful but again you can probably replace it with a combination of vlookup and hlookup (or index match).
Regarding the size... If you're dealing with huge spreadsheets it's really better to use a proper db. Or even manipulate data with sqlite. sqlite can query xlsx files directly (with an extension), it's extremely fast and stable.
The problem with the column limit is not so much about huge datasets as limiting flexibility in how you can lay things out - 65k rows and 16.7m cells are plenty and I’d be wanting to use a database well before I got there. But 255 columns does feel quite constraining.
And whilst you can work around lack of XLOOKUP or SUMIFS using the older functions, again it constrains how you lay things out (eg VLOOKUP needs you to presort your table by the lookup column if you don’t want an exact match) and this can often result in sheets which are much more unwieldy and slow to calculate.
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.
How can it be free if you need to buy a license?
I think the user meant that it's "free to keep", it's not a recurring subscription like modern Office versions.
Yes.
No subscription. "Free" to use forever once to obtained the licence, unliie the current crop.
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.
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
Now that even Google search is garbage, can't really claim they're good at search. It's also always been true that their search at anything aside from the main search product is horrible. YouTube search is its own level of colossal uselessness and has always been that way and has only gotten worse over time. These days it doesn't even show you 10 videos related to your search before going out of its way to show other "related" categories.
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 !!
The workspace admins can disable Gemini, among many other things. Google also does not "steal" your data if you read the ToS; any training is strictly scoped to that workspace.
If you thought for a few seconds, you would realize that companies with big legal teams would not sign a contract that would give Google the right to their data.
> any training is strictly scoped to that workspace
Are they really doing training separately for each workspace? I thought LLM training was enormously expensive and needed lots of data, which wouldn't make sense to do separately.
they're no so much training as providing context just when you invoke it
Yeah google does not steal your data and that's why companies like amazon dont even send you full details of your online shopping order so google can't crawl what you bought and what price you bought it for.
my recent amazon order emails actually came with a full itemized list with prices
Is it reasonable to assume that individuals and small companies get the same friendly terms as companies with big legal teams and expensive contracts?
That may be the case, but I wouldn’t count on it. Probably it can change with one email from Google that has “oh btw we’re changing some contract terms, you have 14 days to opt out, no big deal” buried deep down.
I use LibreOffice for 99% of documents completely fine, and generate my own documents via Pandoc. The setup has served me really well so far.
I do this too, however there is considerable formatting issues when you're working collaboratively on documents with other people who use MS Office.
True, I had a large contract recently with this issue, but it worked out in the end.
The problem is that we thought "let's switch to the online MS Word editor", which then proceeds to delete your text as you write [1]. Bare in mind that my company pays an Office subscription per employee for that crap.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Office365/comments/11be6wd/firefox_...
[2] https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/how-c...
Try ONLYOFFICE Desktop, it is open source and has superior compatibility with MS Office.
There are considerable formatting issues when you're working collaboratively on documents with other people who use MS office when you are using MS office too.
We gave up for large documents, assigned an editor and just send them chunks of text.
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.
> between tons of bugs (waiting for printers on startup is a default..),
Never had issues with printers to be fair, but it sounds like something that could be done in a background thread.
Bare in mind that we are contrasting this with Office, which is itself incredibly slow to start.
> extremely janky UI from 20 years ago
I love this about Libreoffice, everything can be located super reliably.
> poor performance
For a Java application I think it's crazily fast?
> and bad formatting issues and incompatibilities
It's certainly not a 100% drop-in replacement. A lot of the formatting issues I have experienced is because a Office user did something that assumes a perfect renderer - something we don't even get in browsers. Like people pressing enter multiple times to create a new page and not just CTRL+ENTER.
> For a Java application I think it's crazily fast?
LibreOffice isn't written in Java. It can optionally use Java for extensions and for some database reporting features: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Faq/General/015
I believe you're correct, I saw some error message on start-up and always assumed it was a Java application.
I've been using OnlyOffice lately. I'm not a hardcore office user so maybe someone else can comment on how it is compared to Libre/MS Office.
https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DesktopEditors
It has better compatibility with MS Office OOXML format.
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.
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.
OnlyOffice is not based on LibreOffice. CollaboraOffice does. jfyi
No. It's js, render in qtwebengine.
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.
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.
I switched to onlyoffice + joplin for notes and am very happy with both.
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
Check out ONLYOFFICE Desktop, it's open source and provides great compatibility with MS Office files.
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.
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.
You’ll be back. LibreOffice is so visually gross it’s pretty hard to use.
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.
LibreOffice has several themes that makes it look like MS Office (e.g. ribbons, modern UI, etc).
Select TOOLS > OPTIONS > ADVANCED > Enable experimental Options (WARNING this is experimental and may be unstable) > OK and then RESTART LIBREOFFICE. On restart VIEW > TOOLBAR LAYOUT > NOTEBOOKBAR. You can then play with the options with VIEW > NOTEBOOKBAR > CONTEXTUAL GROUPS/ CONTEXTUAL SINGLE / TABBED.
It is actually View -> Toolbars -> Customize -> Notebookbar but within that there is only "Tabbed" option which doesn't really show a way to change themes.
This is a perfect example of actions that make adoption harder. This should have been at most 2 clicks and prominently displayed assuming LibreOffice wants to be a great alternative to MS Office and make the transition easier. I have been using Linux daily for over 20 years now and it is not intuitive to me - it doesn't make me very optimistic about the experience for a new user.
Nope, it's actually Menu -> User Interface: https://postimg.cc/sMhhFvC1
Then this dialog appears: https://postimg.cc/YhVWyQVJ
Found it - thanks! I wish this was more easily accessible to new users - it actually makes a difference in terms of organization of icons and ease of finding things.
> 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.
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.
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.
My work pays for a full O365 subscription for me. The web apps are more than I'll ever need as someone who basically uses Excel and Word as an interchange format.
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.
OpenOffice/Libreoffice lets you choose between multiple UX styles, which rearranges the buttons like old office, the ribbon stuff, and many more. I was amazed when I first noticed this (kind of hidden) feature. You should check it out.
LibreOffice also does this.
Correct. Thanks for the hint. I keep mixing up openoffice and libreoffice even though I only use libreoffice on my system.
Check out Only Office
It's not as bad as it was 5 years ago. It's closer to the flat office design.
MS Office is much harder to use for the casual user not already used to it - the interface is very disorienting.
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).
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.
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.
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.
I always say that there's only one reason to use vim over emacs, and that's that vi is on almost every machine you touch. It's an optional POSIX command[0], but it is as common as `more` or `type`. Though that is a bit of a lie. The other reason is that you're more likely to find vim bindings in random programs than emacs :P
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_POSIX_commands
As someone who came from vim, I find evil to be great tbh.
Why go to emacs then? What do you get that vim couldn't provide?
Emacs probably enables more functionality than vscode or any other tool. You can literally browse the web or send emails from emacs - I’m not saying you should, but the potential for performing tasks are infinite.
Vim has by far the better default user interface, though.
Neat. I'm interested in your TUI setup. What do you use?
Nothing too fancy. I'm not going to dox myself, I like to (pretend to) keep this account anonymous so I'm not going to drop my dotfiles (though I am pretty proud of them). But I don't do anything too fancy. vim, neomutt, spotify-player, yazi, and tdf for pdfs (not still mixed about this one). I'll also maybe play around with a few for random tools but I usually don't use more than these.
Day to day I'm listening to music, reading emails, internet, and writing programs with vim (half my time I'm ssh'd into other machines anyways. I do ML research). So I got pretty much everything covered except Slack and Signal
Thanks! Your use case sounds similar to mine (and some the same workload).
How are you doing Spotify?
I'm using spotify_player[0]. It is pretty bare-bones but honestly, what do you need? I got album art, a progress bar, and can search and go to my library
Note that if you google you will probably get spotify-tui[1] which DOES NOT work
[0] https://github.com/aome510/spotify-player
[1] https://github.com/Rigellute/spotify-tui
side note: man... I really wish I had the time to write or rewrite some TUIs. I'm sure I'm not the only one... Problem with a lot of open source is that they're side projects. I'd imagine there could be state of things could be a lot better if some small org just paid a few engineers to make and maintain a few of them.
Its sad because using Excel for quick decision making can be a super power, these days I use apple numbers
> "using Excel for quick decision making"
Could you expand on that?
not op, The long story short is that a lot of data analysis that would normally require days of development can be done with a few clicks in excel. Would you get a better result if a team of 7 people spent en entire week working on it? Yes. Can a normal competant accountant get 99% of the way there by spending 2 hours in Excel, also yes.
Excel takes care of a lot of things that are a massive pain in the ass the deal with with any other solutions. It starts witht he ability to import data with a simple ctrl-c + ctrl-v instead of having to write code, but it doesn't end there.
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.
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.
I think people overestimate 2000s desktop functionality. macOS's mail application is still the good old crap app that it was since its inception. Outlook Express, Windows Live Mail, and the Windows 8/8.1/10 mail apps are all terrible in their own ways. Thunderbird looks like a skinned version of a late 2000s mail client and works exactly like it. Search is quirky and unpractical, but in completely different ways Outlook's and Mail.app's are!
Just for fun, try installing an old OS in a virtual machine. Marvel at how fast the old OS runs at modern SSD speeds. Get frustrated at the random hangs, freezes, glitches, and plain bad behavior of the programs you know and love, because the slowness of computers at the time hid it all. 20 cores of unused CPU power, dozens of gigabytes of RAM laying at the ready, disk I/O hitting dozens of megabytes per second, but still loading screens everywhere.
I once tried to go back, for nostalgia's sake, just doing the things I do on an old OS for fun. The grass wasn't much greener back then, I just had lower standards.
> and plain bad behavior of the programs you know and love, because the slowness of computers at the time hid it all.
Can't really blame the devs though because very often they only had single threads and definitely single cores to work with.
I mean, it was common knowledge even back then that Outlook Express etc was far from the best email client. That's why people used alternatives, so much so that some of them were paid and yet had enough people buying them to remain in business - e.g. The Bat!
I am genuinely confused why search is so bad in the major email webapps/clients. Search is a well studied feature, and it seems like it's something that should just work but I can never find the thing I'm searching for in my email (especially O365). Knowing the date and then scrolling often seems to be the most accurate way of finding things...
I think search has been deprecated in general because it gives the user too much control over the output. Through search, people can quickly find what they are looking for, which is bad. The goal has instead become to feed people tiny scraps and hints of what they're looking for, while leading them on a long trip past any number of sponsors to where the thing they're looking for might be.
I have to assume that Outlook email searches have already been set up to have ads injected into them, when/if one day Microsoft decides to flip the switch. Actually, I'm so out of touch with Windows they might already be doing this.
> The goal has instead become to feed people tiny scraps and hints of what they're looking for, while leading them on a long trip past any number of sponsors to where the thing they're looking for might be
The airport approach to computing!
Search just seems bad in general in many applications. So many these days do not even support a verbatim (as in, find what I typed, exactly) search. They insist on ignoring certain characters, fuzzy matching, or treating everything as individual words and if it finds one it has done its job and earned a gold star.
I have a feeling it's based on tokenising the input rather than a string scan like we'd do in the old days. Harder to match a literal string if all you have is a tree of tokens or something, I guess.
Opengrok was the first time I ran into this years ago. We had a perl code base, perl syntax is well known as "an explosion in an ASCII factory", so it was a real pain trying to find exact text matches using it.
As I’m professionally working on a niche search engine, let me offer this: it’s a notoriously hard problem that seems simple at first, but requires catering to a bazillion different edge cases; every optimisation you do makes another case worse.
Having said all that: I also hate how shitty search almost everywhere is. It’s hard, but not that hard.
I’d be happy if it catered to exactly one edge case: ”Show me all emails that contain this word”
…which is the problem I was referring to: by optimising for that—your—use case, those of other people will invariably suffer.
We only have a single text field as the input; how are we supposed to guess whether you want to find an exact match of the phrase, a fuzzy match, at least one of the words provided, or any other possible variation? Also, are you interested in the content, the subject, the recipient, the sender address you used, a header field, an attachment, what have you? Do you want them ranked by the frequency of the word, or the position from the start of the text? Does it count those occurrences in quoted passages of previous mails downthread multiple times? What if it’s a stop word?
There are of course sensible ranking solutions and heuristics for these questions. I just want to highlight it’s not as trivial as it first sounds. Most mail clients probably don’t ship with a Lucene index—while they should.
You could always... you know... ask?
I use Thunderbird and it's approximately 100x better at searching for emails than Excel. I just tell it if I'm looking in the subject, in the body, in the sender, whether it's fuzzy, etc, and then it pulls up the emails.
Whereas Excel doesn't ask shit and, in return, doesn't have a working search.
Outlook on the other hand has an extremely powerful search
Having only a single box is a fully self-imposed leg wound
The answer, as always is Emacs :-)
With mu4e (an Emacs package), you can have lightning fast searching across multiple mail accounts. And with a bit of work (https://stuff.sigvaldason.com/email.html) it will happily interoperate with Microsoft Exchange systems that require the OATH2 dance.
Haha, I love your reply because it brings up auth. You can't do the slightest search or action without first pinging a web server with an auth token. Yet another source of wasting milliseconds.
Have to make it bad so when they inevitably force AI into it, it looks amazing.
Spotlight search on macOS is in general kinda…spotty. Now that we have super fast SSDs it should be instantaneous very reliable. How hard can this be? BeOS seem to have figured it out 30 years ago. Apple missed a chance to fix this once and for all when APFS was developed, but they are fat and happy, no fire in their guts. Craig Ferengi must go.
> Spotlight search on macOS is in general kinda…spotty. Now that we have super fast SSDs it should be instantaneous very reliable.
Which is maddening because back when it was released on Tiger it was great, and on spinning disks.
What’s infuriating is, `find` and `grep` are snappy, they find everything you need in microseconds per gigabyte, and they have no index!
If the macOS or Windows searches were just wrappers for find/grep, it would already be an improvement!
On KDE systems, we have baloo which forms a filesystem index for universal (spotlight-like) search. It's very, very fast and the ranking algorithm for krunner is quite good. I think commercial software should have no issue matching this.
IIRC, VSCode packages a rg binary and uses it for search.
Probably explains why it's something that works well and works fast.
Do you really have trouble with Mail.app search? Because I find it STARKLY better than Outlook.
Granted, creating any kind of complex multi-clause query is a pain, but for simple searches it never lets me down whereas Outlook often just fails to find things I know are present.
As an update, I found that some of my issues were due to some bug in FileVault. My Spotlight would seemingly stop working altogether. The only solution was to toggle FileVault off/on.
I am using my mac with an LDAP (AD) user account, so I am possibly in the minority of people here.
Strong agree. Wrote a blog post about it here:
https://marcoapp.io/blog/marco-an-introduction
We're building an IMAP-primitive, cross-platform, multi-account email client that is single-digit-ms fast in terms of search.
I've given on on macos' mail app too, mailspring isn't perfect but I had mail crash and lose my emails and I couldn't have that happen again. never been an issue with mailspring
Wouldn’t the server always have your mail?
Not in the old days of the POP3 protocol, as opposed to today's IMAP.
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.
We are a small software company.
We use Office 365 and their hosted Exchange for email. I manage my mail in the native Mac Mail tool; my boss uses Outlook. For commercial exchanges (ie, dialog about sales with customers), we're almost always both on copy.
SEVERAL TIMES A MONTH he asks me to find a mail for him, because Outlook search is letting him down, often on bone simple searches (e.g., for something like a specific PO number or software serial number).
I find it immediately. Outlook strikes out. How do you break search so badly?
Yeah it's because Mac Mail downloads every single email and indexes it locally. Outlook (especially the new one) is just electron-based webmail. So every search happens in the cloud and it doesn't have a full copy of all your emails.
This would not be a problem for searching of course, if the cloud-based search worked properly. But yeah... About that. :X
The "classic" outlook should do it better but it also doesn't in my experience. Though I can't use it anymore at work lately.
It's just so bad because how can they screw this up? It's not some fluff feature, it's a core feature in an email client.
PS: If you have copilot, it does a lot better at finding stuff somehow, though like every AI it can be a bit hit and miss.
He's running full Outlook, not the shitty new one. And anyway this problem has existed for 10 years.
AI in search is just evil, something either exists or it doesn't, maybe on a Tuesday isn't good enough.
Well I have mixed feelings about it.
For general searches, I agree. I want those to be highly deterministic. But in that case I need to know exactly what I'm looking for.
There's also the other kind of thing though. "Who was that guy that I emailed with a year or two ago about this issue with MacBook Enrolment?". Yes I can filter by company or other details if I remember those things but sometimes I don't. And that's when AI search can really shine. Or not, it can also totally make up stuff out of its ass. But at least when it comes to emails that's easily verifiable.
I can see the usefulness.
But I'm already sick and tired of search not returning stuff I know is in there, because I forgot to check the blessed combination of boxes.
At that point i would switch to thunderbird or something
It's really a PITA to use standard protocols on M365 now though. They try to make it as difficult as possible. And you need lots of exceptions from your admins. Everything is "legacy", the Microsoft word for Not Invented Here and they make it sound like something super dangerous.
Of course that third party clients don't give them any telemetry, "insights", cross-marketing opportunities like copilot, has nothing to do with it.
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.
They are completely unrelated teams (or at least used to). Might as well be different companies.
Aye, I was being at least a little facetious. The team of indexing global content is quite different to that of searching my local mail and chat logs. The various "English language search" features attempted for SQL Server are different again.
But they are still all search functions, and the Outlook & Teams search functions seem so terrible that you'd think they'd try do something about it to support the pubic view of their other search related efforts.
Only half a century after the creation of grep
For Word, go back to Draft (formerly Normal) mode. That makes pagination asynchronous and reduces clutter not needed while editing.
Why does a user need to know and do this to get a just bearable experience? Has the bar gotten so low?
Yes.
The Mac version is even worse.
And it keeps getting worse. I had to downgrade to the Oct. 2024 version in order to get back to a working version.
Don't even get me started, it one of the many reason why I switched the job.
It's so shitty and slow because it's a bloatware. Lucky for MS they are kind of a monopoly in the corporate world.
Office is like Jira: taken on its own, it sucks, but there are no real alternatives to it.
It's crazy to me how because 1% of Excel users need pivot tables or something we're all stuck on it. LibreOffice is enough for the vast majority of use cases.
> It's crazy to me how because 1% of Excel users need pivot tables or something we're all stuck on it.
Finance and insurance industries are full of Excel powerusers.
> LibreOffice is enough for the vast majority of use cases.
Often (from my job experience I can at least attest this for the finance and insurance sectors), Excel is an integrated part of many large workflows. Changing from Excel to LibreOffice would mean rewriting important parts of central business applications, so you better have a really good reason why you want to do the switch from Excel to LibreOffice.
We are working on backend for life insurance. They have a separate pricing team who creates calculations for different insurance products. The results are usually presented as excel files with heavy scripting inside. Really heavy! Have you seen 100mb excel files? I did!
On the funny note: as powerful excel is, it cannot open two files with the same name from different folders! Or at least my version can't.
I used to work on Excel extensibility. I’ll never forget when we were talking with one of the top 5 insurance companies in the US and they showed us this huge VBA macro and told us they processed the top 10% of their claims using this file. That moment made me realize Excel powers at least 10% of the world economy.
Oh yeah, because references to the book name would conflict. If you open a new instance of Excel (e.g. shift-click the taskbar icon), you can open one file in each, but they can't reference each other.
I have seen 600mb+ geodata based, script bloated, slow as hell, make your MB Air commit sucide type of excel every day for 4 months, working on a project.
Excel is also used and abused. In finance and insurance, often Excel isn't used as a spreadsheet and visualization application. It's used as a database and application engine.
This is really bad for a lot of reasons. Of course it's painfully slow, but it's also incredibly brittle and foot-gunny. Excel IS NOT a competent database engine or application engine. It makes JS and C++ look sane and safe.
Excel shouldn't be switched out to LibreOffice. It should be switched out to a proper application with a proper database. What, finance bros don't know how to navigate a database. Tough fucking luck! In the 70s, secretaries could do that. They better figure it out. Because these existing "systems" are a disaster waiting to happen.
I mean, it's not as if Libreoffice was created yesterday. Its predecessor OpenOffice is now 25 years old. Your question becomes: Why did you choose the expensive version where you never know what it will cost next year in the first place?
Concerning
> Why did you choose the expensive version
Big companies have (sometimes hard negotiated) volume contracts with Microsoft, which makes Excel much cheaper to them than to, say, small companies. Thus Excel is not really expensive for them.
Concerning
> where you never know what it will cost next year in the first place
For open source software there exists a similar risk that you don't know into which direction the product will develop.
In the past, Microsoft has been quite reliable in keeping backwards compatible, and continue selling office for decades.
In my observation, the zigzag course that Microsoft starting doing with Windows (but is now also doing with office), and, relatedly, deviating from the course of being very insanely dependable in delivering the software that companies need from them, is what by now got big companies at least have a look at what possible alternatives to Microsoft products could be.
> For open source software there exists a similar risk that you don't know into which direction the product will develop.
You know what's really interesting to me about this argument point?
It is actually the proprietary solution that is at risk of this, and we feel it daily. The next version of Microsofts own flagship product (Windows) is nearly universally denigrated, but people are forced to upgrade.
With FOSS, there's significantly less risk, if the product changes direction you and your other company friends can just use old versions or in the worst case.. fork it.
As a counterpoint, Microsoft is in the process of discontinuing Publisher and plans to remove it from M365 installations next year.
Entire departments run on the "pivot table" button. Most companies have at least one person who needs some Excel feature that isn't available in the common alternatives.
I've worked on software that communicated with other software using custom Excel spreadsheets exported by yet different software, modified by humans. Every stage of the process was specs-incompliant and was using edge case features, but this process oversaw transport for goods worth millions every day. I tried my very best not to reach for a Windows VM, but there was nothing that could work on these files.
For the vast majority of times, bikes are good enough for the majority of travels, yet there are cars everywhere.
> For the vast majority of times, bikes are good enough for the majority of travels, yet there are cars everywhere.
Wow that was a very Dutch comment! I wonder whether it resonates with the Americans here :D
> software that communicated with other software using custom Excel spreadsheets exported by yet different software, modified by humans
This sums up my entire experience of "Enterprise applications".
For any modern SaaS to be enterprise grade, it has to have an excel export feature.
I tried using LibreOffice on Windows, and it was super slow and kept crashing. It is also so ugly & annoying to use that it must be intentional.
I really don't understand how this market is dominated by an abusive platform(MS Office) & a broken POS(LibreOffice).
The only way for a competitor to have a chance at breaking in to the market, they need to be able to open any xls or xlsx file.
You are vastly underestimating the number of people who use pivot tables and even more “advanced” Excel functionality like Power Pivot/Query.
LibreOffice has dynamic tables, an equivalent to pivot tables, for many years already.
They're also just called "pivot tables" in some locales.
> "because 1% of Excel users need pivot tables or something"
It's crazy to me how often Open Source pushers have the vibe "I don't use computers, I don't know what anyone does with computers, but I'm still dismissive and superior". I almost made this comment earlier today in reply to [1] which was another "You have problems with Linux? I daily-drive Linux for years and I've never had any problems" comment and the issues were common/well-known things - fractional scaling in Gnome, HDMI, screen sharing in Slack, crashes in Google Meet, crashes in Chrome, KDE unstable, missing desktop software they use, audio too buggy, constant crashes in another program after days of work.
Nothing anyone would be surprised at, except a Linux user who - apparently - never does anything with their computer and is baffled that other people do. I decided my comment was too trolling and didn't finish it, but here you are bringing that vibe again: you don't know what Excel does or why people use it, but you're confident that you know better; prompting me to actually call it out.
The first thing I looked for when I installed LibreOffice most recently, I found a thread[2] asking: "In excel you can create a table simply by using insert->table. Is there a way to create tables in calc, as well?" and the first visible reply is them explaining that they don't want to create a table in Write, they want Excel's "insert table" feature in Calc. Why would they have to explain that again already, their question was two short lines. Presumably the people replying don't know that feature exists. There are some people being helpful and suggesting ways to get similar effects, but of course there's "Why do you want to insert a table into a Calc spreadsheet? It doesn’t seem like a feature that I’d use much" ("I don't know what the feature does but I know I don't want it"), a couple people commenting explanations of what Excel's tables are and why they are useful including a link to a video demonstration ... followed by someone saying "It already works, they are called database ranges" - no, that's different. Someone who doesn't know what they are, didn't read the explanations or watch the video and still thinks they know better. Crazy.
One of the earlier repliers comes back with "LibreOffice has a database component which is by far more powerful than any fake tables on a calculator’s grid." doubling down on "I don't understand it, didn't read the explanations, don't respect you enough to consider that you know anything about what you want or do on a computer, I still know better" and with namecalling it 'fake'. Crazy.
Note, to avoid the obvious tangent, that I'm not demanding people implement features for me in free software. As the thread ends by kerosene5 "Instead of spending so much time poo pooing the feature request, you could explore it. It really is a good feature. I just downloaded and opened my bank transactions and the very FIRST thing I did was look how to convert it to a table. . . . back to Excel."
It's not "1% of Excel users need pivot tables or something" it was the very FIRST thing they wanted, and multiple people in that thread want, and the second thing I wanted. No this is not the only feature Excel has that LibreOffice hasn't; if you want to know why people aren't using Open Source software? Try actually looking and listening instead of whatever that is you are doing.
[Edit: THIS IS YOU: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43855927 ! Of course it is. Of course it is].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43855663
[2] https://ask.libreoffice.org/t/creating-tables-in-calc/1433
My god the amount of projection in your comment. It seems you've mistaken me for everyone who ever commented in favor of migrating off of Excel.
I"m aware that there are things I'm unaware of. Perhaps I don't know how to use Excel, I'm "no true Excel user" if you will, and therefore my opinion is invalid. Like you I'm baffled not by the technical side of things but by our reaction to it. People say "it powers 10% of the world's economy" but not "and it's a problem".
It's a problem. My point is not that LO is better, it's that we should work to remove our dependency on closed-source software for universal office work. Governments should be doing that. But no, let's just say "the other one sucks" and continue to act like depending on a single for-profit company for all our economies is a good thing.
Not sure how my other comment relates to this. Is it arrogant to have preferences?
Your other comment related because it shows the amount of projection in my comment was just the right amount.
> "Is it arrogant to have preferences?"
No, it's arrogant to not know what people are doing but still tell people that you know better what tools would be good to do what they are doing.
> "My point is not that LO is better, it's that we should work to remove our dependency on closed-source software for universal office work"
If that is what you had said, I wouldn't have replied.
Hear, hear!
Excel powers the world and is the most common programming environment.
Programmers don't like to hear that truth.
Interesting, our company migrated from Jira to Youtrack (by JetBrains) and never went back.
I migrated to a team where you just tell your manager what you're doing and they remember it.
Me too! It's been so much nicer not having scrum and moving jira tickets around. We still have an issue tracker but it doesn't rules our lives.
Apart from Excel, isn't google docs or libreoffice a viable alternative?
Depends on what you do. You lose like 85% of the features but I bet most users never touch any on them.
Lots of documents have to be styled in a very particular way. These rules aren’t laws of physics, they’re made by humans to make other people’s lives more miserable than it’s necessary
Absolute most of the time what is offered by markdown is enough.
When doing my thesis I was asking myself “is it really that important to use 16pt font or 14pt one or this is a made up rule because someone said so many years ago”
There are tons of alternatives, you just need to accept that its missing 1 or 2 features you like, because if the app supported the 1 or 2 features for everyone, it turns into jira/office
There are alternatives. Loads of them. But using them requires thinking about what office software you use, which is too much for the vast majority.
The alternatives are honestly not as good.
Libreoffice has vastly superior CSV support compared to Microsoft office. The alternatives often have different strengths and weaknesses.
I’ve never had a problem working with CSVs in Excel, but I’ll take your word for it. For text operations, I frequently find myself using Notepad++ anyway.
I had a colleague who did most of his work in Excel but used LibreCalc when he had to open a weird CSV and then cobtinued working in Excel.
I've found not to trust excel for CSV's generally unless I build them manually in excel as a concatenation
Notepad++ has no problem displaying characters like checkmarks that Excel will mangle.
Linear.app and it's not even close.
Definitely has everything I need and then some, a breath of fresh air compared to Jira.
It’s not an Excel alternative?
No it's a JIRA alternative.
I'm using OnlyOffice and it's pretty great. Definitely better than LibreOffice.
> 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.
Its because everyone is already locked in to use it
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.
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.
Wait, I have the impression that water torturing is either US or Soviet invention?
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.
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!
Americans go big. They use plenty more water during enhanced interrogation.
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.
> 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.
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.
It's premature in the sense that you need to care about it before you do profiling, which is the usual advice for perf improvements: "you don't know where the hotspots are, so write your code, profile it, and fix the slow bits".
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
So for everyone that doesn't understand, here's the longer quote
Knuth said: "Get a profiler and make sure that you're optimizing the right thing"It is incredible how this became "don't optimize".
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
Was Knuth talking about deployed software when he wrote that?
He wrote that in 1974. Software products were orders of magnitude smaller back then.
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.
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
Sounds like an AVG problem, not a Windows problem.
The very normalization of antivirus on Windows is a Windows problem. For better or worse, Mac users simply don't think about AV.
Like you say: "for better or worse".
FWIW, I haven't ran antivirus software on Windows (other than the included Defender, but that's not something I think about) in literally decades.
I think letting certain software thrive which just blatantly disregards your own certification and validation processes is exactly Windows problem. Some developer(s) paid 600$ and emailed their passport to Microsoft affiliates to get rid of that "SmartScreen" warning, do they have to pay and email their passport copy to AVG as well so their application can be ran without uploading step and needing to wait few hours of "examination"?
What are you saying here, though? That Microsoft should have the monopoly on deciding what software is safe and what is not?
Windows historically allowed a dire situation with security, so no-one really freaking knows what software is safe and what not. Even monopoly they have on deciding what software is safe and what is not (extended validation certification procedure) is not helping anyone, because anyone can circumvent it with photoshop and 10$
Are you saying Microsoft shouldn't care about making a secure system and they can just outsource the subject to a third company which will upload .exe to their server and tell user to wait few hours before it can be launched?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> A recently discovered that Apple has something called "Pages" and "Numbers" - simple apps that serve as alternatives to Word and Excel. They're so straightforward and intuitive that they require no learning curve. They just work.
And yet, weirdly, macOS comes up with absolutely no image editor of any kind. There's no equivalent of MS Paint. It's infuriating.
They just purchased Pixelmator ;)
I assume we should wait and see whether they'll roll up their software into next macOS right?
hey there's preview
yeah preview can do more than it appears it can do.
quicktime pro was like that. it was insanely powerful and things were all hidden behind just a few menu items and a few little added UI elements here and there. quicktime pro was amazing and I miss it a bit.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
LibreOffice, the most popular office suite available for Linux, is comparably slow and bloated.
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.
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.
I haven't used Office tools in over a decade...
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.
I love this idea, and agree with your assessment of office tools in general. You almost make me want to try it, but it's evident the size this body of work would take.
What you might be thinking of is Notion and its cohort: capacities, miro, (maybe) craft, etc
Oh it absolutely is, but at least it’s free
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Well, then they are one in four. The other three were quality, performance and correctness. Simply re-implementing something, or writing something that is poor software isn't sufficient.
As for knowledge: yes, it is more valuable than the software. That does not imply the software is the only place where software is stored. In its most useful form it is stored in people. Which is why you should revisit, and rewrite, code that is important often enough to ensure the knowledge is passed on.
However, don't forget to make room for new knowledge and new ideas. That has hardly happened to Office suites for 30 years. They just tend to become "more".
> 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.
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.
Windows rot used to mean periodically reformatting. With WinMe you had 1 month. With XP I found it unbearable around 9 months.
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.
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.
I love these kinds of comments. It reminds me of the Reddit threads of people complaining about bugs on Cyberpunk 2077's release, only for people to reply with "I played the game, I didn't run into any bugs! What bugs are you talking about?" Meanwhile a quick Google/YouTube search reveals entire montages devoted purely to bugs.
Here are Windows Forum threads talking about each of the problems I've mentioned, with thousands of people saying "I have the same question":
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/unable...
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/window...
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/window...
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/snippi...
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/xbox/forum/all/unwanted-...
This is likely because people take their customizations (like custom setup scripts to “decrapify” windows) that used to work great on previous versions of windows and apply them unchanged to new versions or something, because “windows is the same underneath, this is just a reskin that they charge you $150 for.” Every time I have helped someone with problems like these (when I did see them a lot earlier in my career) it was because they did something goofy to cause it. Like using a PCIe to PCI adapter with a PCI to ISA adapter, so they could plug in a flipping Sound Blaster64 or something. “I’m not buying a new sound card!! I’m not using the onboard sound!! I bought this sound blaster in 1996 and I want to use it!! Microsoft should let me!!”
Others would show me how the computer would act weird after unplugging PCI cards while the computer was running, and blame Microsoft. “See!? SEE?!” Every single WTF moment I had in desktop support with issues like this was user error.
Maybe yours aren’t. Maybe the Microsoft Answers forum is filled with exceptionally smart people who all know exactly how to use a computer, never ask stupid questions, and never give wrong answers, but I think we both know that isn’t really true.
> 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.
THANK YOU.
> 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!)
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
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.
Check out Libreoffice. It's like MS Office, but less resource-intensive.
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.
> 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.
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™).
Makes perfect sense. It recently became clear to me (e.g. [2]) that it's not a cohesive concept but to me personally this is the meaning of POSIWID [1].
Basically making Windows a good desktop OS is not in any meaningful way the "purpose" of that part of MS. The "purpose" of any team of 20+ SWEs _is_ the set of objectives they measure and act upon. That's the only way you can actually predict the outcomes of its work.
And the corrolary is that you can usually quite clearly look at the output of such an org and infer what its "purpose" is, when defined as such.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_w...
[2] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comment...
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.
The only impact values I see on my home machine are "Not measured" and "None".
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.
“I could do this all day!”
Office codebase is soon going to probably be older than most people that work on it.
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".
"but claude.ai guesses"
To my ears this is the equivalent of "some guy down the pub said", but maybe I am a luddite.
You're not a luddite, they disclosed it because you're _supposed_ to take it with a grain of salt
Office was released in 1990, but Excel in 1985 and Word in 1983.
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.
make the apps trade with each other using cpu/memory as money lol and they earn money by usage
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.
Raymond Chen wrote about this.
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.
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.
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.
Mark Shuttleworth (of Ubuntu fame) had quite a bit to say about trying to get AppIndicators into GNOME.
https://archive.is/M1MW2
I guess, those of us who actually like the idea should be more vocal. As otherwise the devs would read the comments and decide nobody likes what they do. Personally, I’m super happy about current Gnome. Coming after 10+ years of macOS. I don’t want to see that ugly mess of visual distractions on my screen all the time. Basic vitals like battery is okay for me. Distractions from apps, I don’t need them. They serve zero purpose to me, and being a computer user of 20+ years, I never interacted with those widgets. Even on Windows. So, kudos to Gnome team, I really like Gnome since 42 or when they started this radical simplicity thing. I enjoy the system each and every day I interact with it, and it does not wear off. It’s not like it looks cool, but after a couple of days I understand it isn’t.
Thing is: That's your preference and nobody should force you to use these indicators. Even on Windows, the tray icons are usually mostly hidden away.
I find them highly useful on macOS, but there I lack the configurability I have on Windows.
Having to interact with them, even having to hide them, is forcing them upon me. I don’t understand a reason for them to exist. They’re simply useless to me and a sign of a complex design.
GNOME is open to adding a system tray. There are even designs for it.
There is just no one working on the technology. TingPing, an Igalia employee and GNOME contributor, was working on a new D-Bus protocol for it, but the work stopped. There is a PR up on the freedesktop xdg-specs repository.
I am personally so glad Gnome does not have a system tray, on every other DE its a disgusting mess of differently scaled and styled icons.
So rather than disable the system tray, or use other applications that don't have inconsistent scaled and styled icons, you'd prefer that nobody who uses Gnome is able to have a system tray?
I prefer not having to worry about it at all, and I don't. Its tidy by default and stays tidy no matter what I install. Many other "deficiencies" in Gnome, like the lack of desktop filing, or the austere file manager contribute to this tidiness.
The first versions of Gnome 3 did indeed have a system tray for backwards compatibility, and it was hidden out of the way until you needed it. Eventually it was scrapped once enough software was updated to not rely on it.
If somebody insists on having a messy UI, they can use literally any other DE available for Linux.
That sounds like an issue that could be solved by forcing icons and sizes for the tray.
Just give users the ability to pin the icons they care about and hide the others in a pop-out panel like Windows does.
That too, very basic feature that should be in every DE.
As much as I'm a diehard Linux defender, Gnome can get bent. XFCE does everything I want, which is to say, almost nothing.
It does a lot of things, though many are somewhat subtle, like screen locking timeout and stuff with networking and a bunch of utility programs and so on. I like to start off Xfce Debian and plaster i3wm over it, it's the best 'power user' setup I've come across.
I wouldn't hesitate to put a 'regular' computer user in front of Xfce, it strikes a nice combination of simple and discoverable with very few annoyances. It's also where I go when I want to use some many-windowed application that doesn't fit into tiling.
XFCE is wonderful. I wish it got more dev time
XFCE is the Win 2000 UI of the Linux ecosystem, perfectly functional and fine; tweaks are possible if needed.
So is https://www.trinitydesktop.org/
While it may seem overblown, it's absolutely RIDICULOUS how fast it flies on contemporary systems, and even older ones.
One can also omit most of their other apps, with the exception of KWIN, drawing the desktop and its window decorations, and konqueror, the filemanager, and the things managing the menu(bar(s)), applauncher.
Using modern apps for the rest, like anywhere else.
And have them styled, themed however you like. With a few mouseclicks.
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.
KDE is great. It gets slept on because of its bad rap circa 2004, but it has low-key become the best DE by far. Sane defaults, nothing tries to fight you, everything is configurable.
If you don't have the time or inclination to tinker with things like tiling WMs - and more power to you if you do, but I don't - KDE is the best there is.
I've been using KDE for a good decade or so, and what a lot of people don't know is that not only is the desktop great, the applications are, too.
Everyone knows Dolphin is by far the best file manager, but not a lot of people know that Kate is fantastic. Konsole is really good too. The new System Monitor basically replaces a ton of programs. Spectacle is a great and snappy screenshot utility. Filelight is so useful.
There's definitely a few misses, though. kmail in particular. But, overtime the applications actually improve, both in performance and features. This seems to be in contrast in gnome, where apps like Nautilus have been getting worse for a long time. And in contrast to Windows.
> The new System Monitor basically replaces a ton of programs.
Like what? Running htop or btop++ in Konsole(or whichever terminal emulator you prefer), as I do?¹ :)
Just opened that thing right now, and it gives nothing to me.
Shrug?
¹ On one of 9 virtual desktops, arranged 3x3, usually upper left.
https://postimg.cc/K35Qv6Pg < btop++
https://postimg.cc/0zGttJMC < htop
https://postimg.cc/pyTLRfPp < Itsatrap!
System monitor can do all this stuff, pstree and all, and you can get really cool visualizations. Pi charts, line graphs, and my personal favorite, color grid. That one's really good for CPU utilization.
But the real icing is that it doesn't just work for processes, applications, CPU usage and whatnot. It works for any sensor, including temperature and fans. And, of course, it's all customizable.
Be that as it may, it is slow to start, or switch between different views. I tested that again just now. Furthermore, it's causing more load by running, than one btop++ or htop running in Konsole. Which btw. both show temperatures, and could also show the rpm of the little 'Miefquirl'...err.. fan if I wanted them to.
That's seems to be common for all the monitoring stuff running graphically, no matter if Gnome, XFCE, or even old KDE (Trinity).
That aside, htop and especially btop++ are heavily customizable, too.
Whatever. To each his own. It's a matter of taste.
Yeah it's pretty fast but it's still a full graphical application. It's probably written using QtQuick so it's fast... ish. Terminal applications are almost always going to be much faster. But, it's a neat application that doesn't get much competition on the GUI side.
> Sane defaults
I have a tiny tiny bone to pick with whoever decided to enable bouncing app launch icons on my mouse that look terrible.
But like you said, it was just a matter of finding the right config setting to turn them off! I have been quite happy with KDE all things considered.
Tiling WMs have more up front cost, but they don't require continuous tinkering if you don't want to tinker. I have been using the same SwayWM config for like 5 years now.
I started using KDE regularly after trying it out on the Steam Decks desktop mode. It works great! I had used it previously over a decade ago and was not impressed with it at first, but now it's my daily driver desktop enviornment.
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
Interesting! Hopefully this is part of a broader change in their attitude.
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.
I've always joked about the eventual evolution of the GNOME desktop converging to a single login screen followed by a full screen button labeled LOGOFF because they will claim anything else is too confusing for their users.
And clicks the button for you, à la https://youtu.be/7OwgyrTnTRM?si=etU_Wk9sUJ-xPx3h
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
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.
That exchange is what happens when CADT and therapy language collide head first.
Not familiar with CADT, and Google wasn't any help for anything that seemed relevant.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250429170348/https://www.jwz.o...
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.
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.
Some of the more influential developers are Red Hat employees, and Red Hat has retasked them with other work in recent years.
That might be enough to prompt a change in direction, I guess time will tell.
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.
I really dislike these turf sitting devs. They try to just defend their throne rather than looking at the merits.
I like Mate. I recommend it.
agree
Weird, I'm using the latest stock fedora with gnome and the option is there to use the power button as "power off" command.
Gnome sucks... KDE is awesome :)
Try plasma.
+1 plasma is pretty nice and also lets you reconfigure things if you like. The rate of "we broke this and you were stupid for ever wanting it" is much lower than for gnome
Plasma was super unstable and janky, and the whole KDE desktop environment feels like developer art.
Early days of Plasma 5 definitely can be described this way. Although I think we all forget just how fucking ugly early gnome 3 was.
But since mid Plasma 5 and on, it's incredibly stable and consistent in design. At this point, more consistent than gnome.
I was using Plasma 6 to get fractional scaling working (wrote the wrong version in original post)
That's what I thought for a long time, until I tried it on the Steam deck since they use it for its desktop mode. I now use it as my daily driver desktop environment
You last tried it 25 years ago right?
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.
I'm not a huge fan of this statement - just because some users prefer simplicity, doesn't make them "illiterate." I'm happy to be a pretty tech-savvy gnome user - everyone uses a computing device for different purposes (as a tool, not a hobby). For example, it's great that KDE offers 2 or 3 kick-off menus, multiple clock plasmoids, etc, but just because a user is fine with a single, well-refined option, doesn't mean they are less "computer literate."
> 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?
Don't give them any ideas!
The best UI is one that stays consistent and doesn't change.
XFCE in other words.
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Of all the reasons to be upset with Gnome, that's the silliest. I could not care less about their political opinions. It's their opinions on how a computer should look and work that are the problem.
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> 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?
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.
> Right now I upgraded my GPU to 9070XT - I'm still not sure if that would work on Linux yet because of driver support delay
You can install AMDs driver from their repo directly, it works just fine (using it every day).
> I still cannot use my LG C4 as a monitor in full capacity because AMD on Linux does not support HDMI 2.1
That will never be possible. To prevent pirates from breaking it (lol), HDMI has decided to keep HDMI 2.1 secret. No open source version of HDMI 2.1 can exist.
That said, AMD's driver repo includes both the open source drivers and some proprietary versions of the driver, maybe that'll work for you.
Another option would be using a displayport output and a DP to HDMI converter, as e.g. Intel is using for their GPUs.
- Fractional scaling: That's because X11 itself does not support it. Many older Windows apps also have problems with fractional scaling.
- HDMI 2.1: The HDMI Forum blocked it, as they don't want the details of HDMI 2.1 publically available. If you can, use DisplayPort, which is an actual open standard, and is better anyway. Nvidia works because they implemented it in closed-source firmware instead. https://www.phoronix.com/news/HDMI-2.1-OSS-Rejected
> That's because X11 itself does not support it.
Strangely enough Plasma was able to handle this regardless (guess it was misreporting the resolution to X11 app or something like that to make it work ?) it was a Gnome/Wayland thing.
DisplayPort isn't an option - the TV only has HDMI in and converters suck (they crash constantly, even the expensive ones)
You can also buy active DP to HDMI 2.1 adapters now - if you already have an HDMI KVM for instance. Cable Matters makes one.
If you're happy to dip your toes into another DAW, Reaper has excellent first-class Linux support, works with all your plugins, and has a 60 day trial* for you to get used to it.
* The free trial is enforced as heavily as WinRAR's, and it's pretty cheap (~$60) to buy a licence if the nag screen makes you feel bad enough
I tried that first but had trouble getting it to launch so I decided might as well goo with the OSS option. Boy was I in for a fun ride with getting the whole jackd and audio subsystems running.
The problem is not only the DAW support, but the support of low-latency audio interfaces in Linux. Audio interface makers rarely create a Linux driver, and a low-latency setup on Linux is its own hell, with real-time kernel patches. On MacOS and Windows, it works out of the box.
rt patches are upstream since about a year ago. You might need to swap to rt Kconfig, sure, but not patches.
Alternatively Bitwig has Linux support and wouldn't be such a big jump.
> When I switched to KDE/Plasma 5 to get fractional scaling it was extremely unstable
KDE Plasma 6 made major improvements and has excellent fractional scaling, the best I've seen in a Linux desktop environment and comparable to scaling in Windows 10-11. I encourage you to give it a try.
Sorry I misspoke - I was using Plasma 6, as that was the only way to get fractional scaling in X11 apps
you can use Carla in linux to run windows VSTs, i do it all the time. Works great. Midi and audio routing is also quite good. Ableton also runs with Wine.
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
Well, don't help him. People(me) grew up without the Internet or Smartphones and broke Windows on the family PC all the time. In 2000 when I got SuSE it only slowed down the breakdowns. He can always fix stuff himself by reinstalling the OS. As long as he doesn't format the /home partition he will not lose data. And he will learn his lessons.
12-year-old me installed Linux on an old desktop tower and I also broke things constantly. The difference is my parents were both humanities majors and I knew full well there was no point in asking them for help. Even at the time, the resources were all there for me to teach myself to Linux. Sure, I spent many many hours troubleshooting things instead of doing whatever it was I had as my end goal, but I was a kid—learning is the point!
It's harder as a parent to know that you're capable of solving their problem and still say no, but by age 12 that's pretty much your primary job: to find more and more things that they can start doing for themselves, express your confidence in them, and let them figure out how to adult bit by bit. Breaking a Linux install and fixing it again is among the lowest stakes ways that dynamic will play out from here on.
> Ubuntu
Well, there’s your problem ;-)
This is great, though, really. I broke our computer so many times growing up, I couldn’t possibly count. I don’t think I ever lost anything of import, other than some savegames of mine. I keep telling people who ask, “how do I learn Linux?” that they need to use it, tinker with it, break it, and fix it, ideally without anything other than man pages and distro docs. It is a shockingly effective way to learn how things work.
There is more to learn / do than anyone has time. My kid is supposed to spend an hour on his violin, half an hour an fitness, then some time on chess, then eat - including clean up and/or cook. somehow he needs to fit some free play in too. He doesn't have time for more.
It isn't that he could do that, but what else to give up?
I think for a lot of us that learned linux this way, it was firmly in the "fun time" category. We would have rather been tinkering than most other things.
I'd say that screen capture probably works under X11 no matter what your graphic card is. However this kind of confirm your general feeling: there is no only one blessed and enforced way to do things so everything can break because of combinations.
Examples (I've been on desktop Linux since 2009): shutdown actually reboots except for a few months with some lucky combination of kernel and nvidia driver. The brightness control keys didn't work for at least half of the years. They currently work. All of that has workarounds but I understand that some people legitimately fold and go using another OS.
> i3 session
Oh he'll figure it out eventually. This kid might be going places.
My Linux desktop experience...
I started with Linux installing it from floppy disks in about 1996.
In 1995, I was back on Windows 95 within a week because I needed to get something done.
In 2000, I was back on Windows 2000 within a week because I needed to get something done.
In 2005, I was back on Windows XP within a week because I needed to get something done.
In 2012, I was back on Windows 7 within a week because I needed to get something done.
In 2015, I was back on macOS within a week because I needed to get something done.
In 2020, I worked out I'm wasting my time on this.
I watch my colleagues and friend struggling with it. Lots of small papercuts. Lots of weirdness. Lots of regressions. Plus many years of server-side experience says to me "I should probably just use FreeBSD" in that space.
I've wasted like 8 hours in the last two days trying to upgrade windows 10 to 11 so my motherboards wifi drivers can be installed.
It just worked in Linux. I don't get where this comes from, because every time I hit a problem in Linux, there's a solution.
In windows, you get a vague hex error code that leads you to a support page where the error could be caused by one of a dozen reasons.
And on top of that, MS is constantly hostile to any user who just wants a basic OS to use their computer with.
So couple of issues there. Never upgrade windows. Fresh install only. Never had a good day upgrading it.
Secondly, there isn't always a solution in Linux. I've got one now where something is utterly broken and it's 5 layers of maintainers down and no one gives a shit.
Windows 11 has begun making it a lot harder to install with local logins. They just disabled the typical method for enabling local only.
I want to upgrade in order to retain that local account.
Install LTSC: https://massgrave.dev/windows_ltsc_links
Then use massgrave hwid activator.
My experience is the opposite. Epgot a hold of a bunch of floppies in 1991. Dual booted so I could play Diablo. Some time around '98/99 got tired of dual booting.
Steam getting proton was a godsend, all those years of games became playable so now I have a huge back catalog.
> Plus many years of server-side experience says to me "I should probably just use FreeBSD" in that space.
Not a bad idea. This is exactly what I do on my daily driver.
Meanwhile people who actually get stuff done all use linux :D
That sounds amazing, well not for you but for your kid :) It has been very valuable for me that I messed around windows and linux as a kid
Put him on debian stable with xfce and no sudo if he is such a bother. Sounds to me this is a people problem, not Linux problem. Do you miss windows or do you miss not having to spend time with kid on things that bother you?
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.
> 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.
It's really funny because this is one of the things I absolutely do not like about Windows. I absolutely hate it that I put the computer to sleep and when I come back the next day it has hibernated. That said, I agree that hibernation has always been finicky on Linux, however, I would say Ubuntu is not the best distro for this use case. I have been using Fedora and they even publish official guides for it[0] that's how seriously they take it.
0: https://fedoramagazine.org/update-on-hibernation-in-fedora-w...
Just have it suspend to disk and shutdown on lid close.
I do this for arch Linux on my framework and it's fine. Startup time is under ten seconds, essentially zero battery drain, right back in your session with all apps/docs open.
Hibernate is definitely better but still finicky even on Mac/Windows, machines can and do fry themselves, or require a hard reset if you unplug a device at the wrong time. Or unexpectedly continue draining the battery.
It's a terrible, funky, poorly documented, exception filled world down in the low power states for hardware.
Never had an issue on Mac, never got it to work properly on a single of my many linux laptops
Try unplugging an external USB-C monitor while it's transitioning between states.
It won't come back up ok, as recently as 6 weeks ago.
Or the rampant reports of things like this: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255642823?sortBy=rank
the number 1 linux user accessory is the word "just"
A computer is a tool - learn to use it like a tool. People spend far more time learning to drive than they do learning to use computers these days, but I'd wager the computer matters more.
But too many companies have discovered that a docile "user" who's fed constant dopamine hits and has no actionable way to use a device other than open their wallet and fork over cash to watch more cats dance, or shop on more stores is exactly what they want.
Why don't you just click here and pay for Onedrive. Or just click there and accept Apple's new ridiculous terms.
If you just want to watch cats dance... you do you. I'll just keep doing me over here.
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.
Could some game programmer say if it's true that kernel level anti cheat is just bad programming?
Primagean recently said that in a video commenting PewDiePie's "I switched to Linux" video. While he's apparently a good programmer (he worked at Netflix), he uses Vim, so I don't trust him. Edit: part about vim is an edgy joke.
Weird reason not to trust someone, and I think prime is a decent programmer.
I work in AAA gamedev and have deployed kernel level anti-cheats before, and I’m aware how unpopular they are; so, sorry for that… you would also accuse us of “bad programming” if there was an overabundance of cheaters that went undetected and/or uncorrected.
The answer is unfortunately complicated, the kernel level anti-cheats themselves aren’t necessarily poorly written, but what they are trying to do is poorly defined, so theres a temptation to put most of the logic into userland code and then share information with the kernel component- but then it’s dangerous for the same reason that crowdstrike was.
Not doing endpoint detection is also a problem because some amount of client trust is necessary for a good experience with low input latency. You get about 8ms in most cases to make a decision about what you will display to the user, that’s not enough time to round-trip to a server about if what is happening is ok or not. Movement in particular will feel extremely sluggish.
So, its a combination of kernel level code being harder in general (malloc, file access etc; are things the kernel gives you in user land after all), the problem space being relatively undefined (find errant software packages and memory manipulation), not being able to break out of the kernel level environment for an easier programming and iteration experience and trying to not affect performance.
Lots of people think they can do it better, I’m happy to hire anyone who actually thinks they have a clue, it’s a really hard problem honestly and the whole gamedev industry is itching for something better: even us gamedevs don’t like kernel level anti-cheat, it makes debugging harder for ourselves too and introduces hard to reproduce bugs.
PS; sorry if I’m not being eloquent, I am on vacation and typing from my phone.
This is well written and quite easy to understand. (I only have cursory knowledge of programming.)
However, what if Primeagen meant that HAVING to IMPLEMENT kernel level anti cheat is a symptom of bad programming, and not the anti cheat per se? (that is, with good enough programming, it could somehow be avoided).
And kudos to you. I appreciate people in game dev, they can get a lot done in short time. I haven't played mmo fps since battlefield 3, and it wasn't that bad then. But I've heard that without kernel level they would be unplayable.
Thank you for your time!
The reason why you need kernel-level anti-cheat for it to be meaningful is because it necessarily needs to sit on a level lower than cheats themselves; and cheats can be very advanced these days.
Long term I'm kinda hopeful that this is something that will be mitigated through AI-based approaches working to detect the resulting patterns rather than trying to detect the cheat code itself. But this requires sufficiently advanced models running very fast locally, and we're still far from that.
The cheaters are very good these days. They will happily sit in the kernel space to hide from the game if needed, because people pay a lot of money to cheat developers to be able to cheat.
> so theres a temptation to put most of the logic into userland code and then share information with the kernel component- but then it’s dangerous for the same reason that crowdstrike was.
I don't understand, how could crowdstrike have avoided their issues by putting more code in the kernel? Or am I misreading your statement?
The crash was caused by a data parsing issue for the code in the kernel (the heuristics database).
If they had not tried to parse data inside the kernel it would not have been an issue.
Good faith question: why is the server not the source of truth? With local interpolation for things like character movement, reconciled in heartbeat updates?
FD: Still on a phone on vacation. :)
The reason is the round trip time mainly.
Server corrections will feel like “floaty” or “banding” behaviour, we used to do that and people get upset because it “feels” wrong.
Not all cheating sends "bad data" to the server. Cheats like wallhacks or aimbots are purely clientside and can't be detected on the server
The opposite is true. He uses vim therefore I trust him.
The two most widely used anti cheat application battle eye and easy anti cheat both natively support linux but game developer have to check a box to enable it.
About 40% of games that use anti cheat currently work on linux. Getting banned for using wine is very rare because anti cheat that don't support linux would complain about not running an prevent you from even joining a game to get banned.
https://areweanticheatyet.com/
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.
Compile sure, but they really had some bad ideas in those days. Remember MDI Multiple Document Interface? Having Windows within windows. It was a terrible idea.
OLE? Sure, let every application talk to the DLL components of every other application! What could go wrong? Data wants to be free right? Spread the love.
Making the desktop into a live webpage? And of course let any webpage happily load whatever binaries it wants from the internet. Super handy stuff. For some people more handy than others (really how this did not cause a mega Wannacry-event back in the day I don't understand)
There is a reason this stuff is legacy. The only reason it still compiles is because some companies have spent millions on custom developments 20 years ago that nobody remembers how it still works. Not because you should still be using it :)
You and I must have had very different experiences in those times.
> Remember MDI Multiple Document Interface? Having Windows within windows. It was a terrible idea.
It was definitely overused - nobody needs Microsoft word to be a window manager for every doc file. But it ends up growing into something really nice where you get to build out the sub windows of your IDE wherever you want them.
> OLE? Sure, let every application talk to the DLL components of every other application! What could go wrong? Data wants to be free right? Spread the love.
This was also incredible. I built one of the first tabbed web browsers by embedding instances of the IE 4 DLL into my tabs. OLE and OCX extended object-oriented programming across program and language boundaries.
> Making the desktop into a live webpage? And of course let any webpage happily load whatever binaries it wants from the internet. Super handy stuff. For some people more handy than others (really how this did not cause a mega Wannacry-event back in the day I don't understand)
This was terrific for pranks. Yeah what were they thinking on this one.
> There is a reason this stuff is legacy. The only reason it still compiles is because some companies have spent millions on custom developments 20 years ago that nobody remembers how it still works. Not because you should still be using it :)
Maybe as I've aged the novelty of building programs has worn off. For some things I don't want to have to port or even recompile it. I just want it to run. If Win32 is the only stable Linux ABI, GDI is the only stable Linux GUI toolkit.
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.
One of the things I wonder about recently is whether there's too many distros, which is dividing effort and there's less drive to find consensus on certain issues when everyone has the freedom to do things their own way and experiment to explore their niche. That freedom is the point of free software to a large extent, but there's costs to it. It also divides the userbase so when something doesn't work you may need to dive deeper into the details than you'd like to see if there's anything particular about your species of the linux animal kingdom.
It'd be interesting if there was a "Ubuntu v2" type effort, over 20 years later. Before ubuntu it's not as though desktop linux was an impossible dream or there was a lack of distros, but Canonical cleaned up a lot of rough edges to the extent it became a lingua franca. It's to the extent you can rely on ubuntu being in instructions for linux software, for example if there's any differences to required package names it'll be the ubuntu names over debian's.
Yes, exactly. To be fair, projects like GNOME and distros like Ubuntu do publish human interface guidelines, but I dont think there is any enforcement and so jankiness creeps in. I suppose it's no different from Windows 11 still having programs that have UIs dating from Win2K. But at least the icons and colors and window chrome are professional looking.
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.
Regarding 3. Battery life - I’ve had a ThinkPad Nano for several years that, on Windows 11 would get roughly 4-6 hours battery, and this was optimized (very few running apps, no junk on startup, power saving settings on, etc). I switched it to Ubuntu (I was surprised that everything worked out of the box too, all of the hot keys and everything), and it will get about 8-10 hours doing the same tasks (primarily Chrome). So there is something to be said about Linux in general just being so much more “light weight” so to speak vs windows, which has become such a bloated mess. But the main issue I had was your point 4, since the thinkpads screen is 2K, everything was either too small (with no scaling) or too big (with scaling on).
Fully agree that Desktop Linux isn’t nearly there. If I need a Linux DE for something, I spin up a Debian VM with XFCE, because that seems to suck the least, and I already have prebaked Debian images.
For headless servers, I want nothing else. For a daily driver, as much as it pains me, nothing comes close to the Apple ecosystem. Apple Silicon is years ahead of everyone, and their interop with (admittedly only their own) other hardware is incredible. Universal Clipboard is magic. The fact that I can do nothing more than open an AirPod case and my phone registers it is magic. Finally, the fact that MacOS is *nix is absolutely icing on the cake.
to me it's such a crime that for all the crowing in the world about the need for operational sovergnity, MacOs is the only OS that can offer such a high standard of operation. I've seen some countries try their hand at modifying android to compete but the lack of a competitive monolith to them has allowed them to become complacent
XFCE? How is this better than KDE (which uses Qt as it's based GUI libs)?
I'll echo archvile here, in that I get excellent battery life running Linux. I've been getting 10-12 hours of battery life from the assortment of Asus and Thinkpad laptops I've had the past 15 years.
To give a very concrete example, I have two identical Thinkpad T14 at work, one running Linux (Debian Bookworm with KDE) and one running Windows 11. When doing normal office work, the Linux laptop easily lasts a whole workday with >20% battery left at the end. The Windows laptop runs out of battery in less than 2 hours.
Use kdeconnect. It is a universal app and works seamlessly
Or Signal app.. it works well for this sort of thing!
what?
Regarding 6 You can do this on Linux while on a LAN...
Perhaps Syncthing would partially cover this? Not the applications, but the files ....
For the applications, you can use NixOS and git
Same here. Linux has been my daily driver for over twenty years now, at home and at work. (Not a gamer though.)
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.
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.
Not to argue with you, but is that Linux Mint specifically? I never used it, and its DE looked very unprofessional to my liking. Personally, I prefer modern Gnome, but I also like KDE. Everything else looks very unfriendly to an average user, I won’t ever install it. I’d go Gnome for Mac users and KDE for Windows refugees.
This is why Linux will always be a terrible OS. Every time someone says "Linux is bad because XYZ" someone will tell you "actually that's your distro, if you used distro ABC you wouldn't have that problem." But ABC has a different set of problems, which if you wasted 2 months to realize them and start complaining about, someone would just direct you to distro JKL.
The fragmentation of Linux leads to a ping-pong of responsibilities. Linux can never be a bad OS because it isn't an OS.
On Windows, if the file manager is bad, that's Microsoft's fault. Period. Nobody tries to say "actually..." it's Microsoft's fault. Period. The same goes for the taskbar, for the control panel, for MS Paint, for even Microsoft Office. If Microsoft will fix it or make it worse depends on them, but nobody denies who is to blame and everyone know where the blame lies. Meanwhile I don't even know if the basic utilities that my distro distributes are under the responsibility of Mint's team or if they will just direct me to some random open source project's issue tracker if I start complaining about Celluloid or the "Drawing" app.
You can't talk about Linux thinking only about the good parts, or you aren't inviting people to try Linux, you're inviting them to try your distro. "Linux" means the whole ecosystem, including all of its problems.
Au contraire, I would say that Mint is probably the closest to stock Win11/macOS experience right now. Gnome, on the other hand, looks utterly alien and non-discoverable
What you mean by Win 11/macOS? I see them as completely different from each other. Or are there some overlaps?
Personally, I like modern Gnome: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43859753
They have been converging for some time now. The taskbar in Win11 is very much a macOS Dock wannabe, for example.
Personally, I find modern Gnome insufferable because it is non-customizable to the extent that even macOS only dreams of, and it doubles down on the modern trend of hiding important UI behind poorly discoverable gestures (active corners etc). Except their take on it is even worse in general for mouse users because of how much more "legwork" it adds - e.g. in a default Gnome setup on Fedora, you need to move mouse cursor in the top left corner for the dock to show up (so that you can switch apps or launch a new one)... but then it shows on the bottom of the screen, so now you need to move the cursor all the way there across the screen.
But that's all subjective and not really my point. The point, rather, is that Gnome looks and behaves very different from Win11 and macOS both, in ways that don't make it easy for users to migrate (and in fact they specifically state that their UX design does not consider that a goal).
I never thought of this, the excessive mouse movements, like top left to bottom. What I thought of is that it killed this silly minimise and full screen option, even when everyone and their granny trained for those three buttons.
I like they ditched all the unnecessary things from the settings. I think all the pro-level settings must be dealt with via terminal. That way, it’s both of two worlds. Me, I don’t mind it. But if I manage the computer for someone, I want them to have only the minimum things, so they won’t be overwhelmed. That’s very wise, and unfortunately all these Win3.1 geeks are complaining it’s bad. Yeah, okay, keep using your favourite XFCE then, or whatever.
I’d install Gnome for elderly, even if they have some previous Windows experience. Because they can afford to just ignore it. My mum, she has no computer, and last time she used Windows was like, idk, a decade ago. Explaining Gnome to her is easy: here is the Windows (or CMD) button, you press it once, you have this iPad like interface. Here is the Dock, you have all the necessary apps in there. More of them if you press that Windows button one more time. But actually you don’t need it 99% of the time, so you can survive with top left corner pressed once. Two times press is for me. Closing the app is that X button. What else does she need?
Now, try to explain the [any other DE basically] to elders the same way. Considering most of these people have iPads. And if they’re not, well, I don’t really get why, they should. My guess is that their interface appeal to that audience. And to me that’s a great thing, that’s most of non-tech people now.
However, I’m (being an obviously pro user) able to use the default Gnome productively. Almost as productively as I use SwayWM. To me, that’s very impressive.
Microsoft Office
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.
At this point you would have to pay me to use Windows or Microsoft Office... which is exactly what is happening at work.
Haha, I’m gonna steal this phrase!
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).
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 :)
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.
I’ve gone to some extent to avoid them.
Assuming your apps are using the XDG desktop portal, they all use the same file picker.
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.
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.
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...
"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
"We will continue to protect the privacy of European data."
Bröther, you're literally the thing we need protection from!
> 3. We will continue to protect the privacy of European data
Then stop fucking collecting shit tons of data that you do not need.
"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.
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.
>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.
> 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
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.
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.
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
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.
Windows: What is my purpose?
Rick: You launch Steam
Windows: OH. MY. GOD.
Rick: Yeah, welcome to the club, pal.
Best comment on here.
How dare you – Steam Launcher 11 makes a pleasant sound upon login, harkening back to its forebears, CD-ROM Launcher 95 and 98.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
The under-the-hood NT stuff is the best thing about Windows.
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.
What Linux distribution can be recommended to someone who wants to try out a desktop OS with experience as close to Windows as possible?
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.
What is really missing for Linux desktop nowadays? Still drivers? And I guess office software and gui configurability.
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.
Games? A good portion of the Steam catalog runs just fine on Linux.
But not all of it, so if you want to play a particular game you might be out of luck.
Single player is pretty much fine, it's multiplayer that really gets you. No Apex, Valo, LoL.
Codeweavers Crossover does an admirable job at filling the gap (shoutout for making AoE II run like it’s native), but yeah, there are some that you can’t get around using Windows for.
What you mean by sysadmin GUI things? Linux is so much simpler, you don’t need any GUI to configure it. And probably there’s no point in that. Actually, there is a way to configure it using code (see Ansible), which is better (I’d say).
I believe this way of configuring is much more efficient. Yes, you have to learn some new things, probably even new paradigm. But once you done, it stays mostly the same for long years, and is dead simple. I am, being Linux user for circa 15 years, see administrating Windows with dread. And most Windows sysadmins I know personally, when I tell them about Linux, and they react like it’s some hidden obscure knowledge they have to spend ten years studying it. Which is vice-versa actually. I cannot imagine what that is, to be a Windows sysadmin, especially supporting all this mediocre engineering.
> Actually, there is a way to configure it using code (see Ansible), which is better (I’d say).
It may be better, but it needs change and retraining.
> I am, being Linux user for circa 15 years, see administrating Windows with dread.
Me too. I do not much like using Windows either and it seems to be getting worse.
> they react like it’s some hidden obscure knowledge they have to spend ten years studying it.
Partly FUD (lots of people make claims like "you have to compile your own software to use Linux") and partly because people hate change, and partly because it took them 10 years to learn Windows (many years ago) and they expect the same again.
It took me many years to accept Unix logic (macOS and Linux) too, but mostly because my first system was Windows.
For some reason, things like disks, C:\ and D:\ were logical to me, while I couldn’t grasp why cannot I put my files into root directory, and I’m forced to live in a subdirectory (/home/user) instead. It takes some time to re-learn, but I’m looking back with some dread. Things I accepted as simple, are actually unacceptably complex.
> Linux desktop environments tend to be more configurable, and you can configure most things end users want to configure in a GUI with the major DEs.
I was mostly thinking about the times I end up needing to tweak something through the terminal. I wouldn't expect most desktop users to want to do this. But maybe you're right that the most important stuff is covered by guis nowadays. There seem to be a lack of guardrails for low to semi-technical users though. I wonder if something like Nix could help with guardrails and being able to backtrack.
Something like nix-gui seems like an interesting approach: https://github.com/nix-gui/nix-gui
>Libre Office is more than sufficient for most people.
Buddy, I love Fedora, but this is nonsense.
The UI for Libre Powerpoint(or whatever its called) doesnt have text size on the main screen. The reddit mods on the subreddit literally ban people for complaining about it.
Libre Office isnt the future.
I just use Google sheets.
> The UI for Libre Powerpoint(or whatever its called) doesnt have text size on the main screen.
I was curious, so opened Impress, typed some text, and saw that the font selection and size was by default open on the right-hand "Properties" panel, alongside all the various text configuration options. So that at least is not true.
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.
There's Qubes, but even its enthusiasts are quick to say in its current incarnation it's not in any shape to be foisted on an end user. The other Linux flavor that sandboxes apps by default would be Android, which seems to have a few users.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
These issues have been the bane of my existence lately, especially your F2 renaming example.
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
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.
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
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.
Don't worry, Principal Engineer Copilot will fix all their issues.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
The customer is not the user for Microsoft products.
> Granted, the corporate malware on my computer doesn't help the situation.
I'd bet on this being the cause before Office itself
It seems like it would be more stable to run windows office under wine instead.
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
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
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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
Check out https://filepilot.tech/
It's in beta and no network drives or CJK yet but feels like a breath of fresh air.
Microsoft Corporation publish Windows File Manager via the Microsoft Store.
https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9p7vbbbc49rb
Give the new FilePilot a try - https://filepilot.tech/
The address bar opens history when you click the delete button too.
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.
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.
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.
Back in 1997, most developers would show a 'splash screen' as their application loaded, because of course it takes time for applications to load.
Now we have web apps that show spinners and throbbers, sometimes forever.
Consult a physician if your web app displays a throbber for longer than four hours.
Just to be clear current Office applications have a splash screen.
To be even more clear, LibreOffice also has a splash screen.
I haven't run it this boot, and I just timed myself taking 7.5 seconds to start Writer, close the welcome popup, and quit. By feel, about half of that was waiting for the loading bar and the other half was figuring out how to dismiss the welcome popup.
On a hot start, with several attempts it takes between 2.1 and 2.5 seconds to start and quit it. For some reason the welcome popup has disappeared.
These experiments were performed using LibreOffice 7.4.7.2 40(Build:2) - wow, are they also copying version numbering from Microsoft? - on the cheapest 120GB SSD I could find in early 2019.
LibreOffice also sucks in this regard.
'Hey, I'm loading! I'm going to steal focus from whatever else you're doing and make your taskbar flash! No, that doesn't mean you can give me any input yet'
I'd really like to own a device that can multitask, one day.
I have this issue with lots of applications: taking focus away from something I'm using, but not being ready to be usable. Apps shouldn't take focus until they're ready.
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.
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.
That app didn't fully load the Office apps despite the name, and if you removed it Office 97 still started way faster than its competitors. As it did on Linux.
The rumours were (that I remember) that Microsoft had a secret/invisible way to hook Office into Windows startup. Otherwise, how did it start so much faster than StarOffice, which appeared to have similar functionality.
Was it not obvious from what I posted that it didn't load the "entire" application? These solutions generally don't do that.
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.
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.
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:
FYI - that is the publicly announced date that MSFT will be officially dropping support for Win10.
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!
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Is this just a fancy name for (re)starting the application in the background?
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)
I disagree, my Windows machine loads into the OS quicker from login than my Mac.
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.
> Windows startup is perfectly fine
No... it's not fine. I don't reboot all the time for work or run a zillion VMs, I'm just a regular user. But sometimes when I'm rebooting - I need to get to necessary information quickly. Waiting 40+ seconds is an eternity when standing at an airport immigration counter pulling up a pre-filed form that they said I did not need to bring but which they're now demanding (because their machines are rebooting).
I'm glad you feel it's fine for you. Not all of us agree. I'm especially annoyed because much of the new bloat slowing my life down during startup is stupid and unnecessary shit I don't even use much (or ever) - like initializing CoPilot, Edge, and now, Office.
Note: I even upgraded my SSD to an expensive Samsung 990 Pro, reportedly one of the fastest available. It's still >40 secs - and I've already gone through and thoroughly pruned all the unnecessary services, tasks and autoruns that I can. It's a top of the line >$3000 laptop that's less than a year old.
Weirdly for me I don't have much trouble with startup, but shutting down windows seems to take an impossibly long time, especially on my work laptop. Like several minutes. Probably some misbehaving program and maybe not windows' fault, but I have no idea what it's doing just sitting there at the final screen after its killed all remaining tasks for eternity.
Something is wrong with your computer if it takes 40 seconds, I have a similar samsung SSD and it takes like 20 seconds maximum from a cold boot to desktop on Win11
> Something is wrong with your computer if it takes 40 seconds
Yes, he just said it, it has Windows on it.
But more to the point: Windows slow boot has been a constant ever since the times when I would boot up Windows ME and go make myself a tea. If anything, Windows has always stayed one step of the technology that would bring its boot times down, to the point where I'd guess (as this article suggests) that it's company policy to dump slow components there.
Yeah my ~1000€ Lenovo Yoga 7 Pro takes 18 seconds from cold boot(power button press) to signed in via windows hello. And that's with Bitlocker and myself having installed a whole bunch of background utilities.
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.
I just timed it, my personal Mac takes 10s to the login screen and then 4 seconds to the desktop after putting in my password. My work Mac takes 3+ min. All of the endpoint monitoring stuff they put on there really takes its toll.
My windows gaming PC starts up in about 30s from a cold boot (though it's not encrypted...), so I would at least put the personal Mac and the Windows machine in the same ballpark. I couldn't have told you which one is faster without timing it. The work machine laptop is clearly noticeably slower.
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.
If you measured with a stop watch I'm sure it would take more than 2 seconds but to be accurate it is perceptibly brief whereas others startup is perceptibly to them slow. Why?
When fast startup is enabled shutting down does a reboot and then a hibernate so that it can wake up from hibernate when you start up but with the same effect as a fresh start. This is generally much faster than a full startup. This should and in many cases must be disabled to dual boot another OS.
Different hardware takes longer to initialize which may delay startup. This is especially true of failing hardware which may whilst in bad shape continue to work after a fashion but take far longer to initialize.
Some hardware is MUCH slower than others.
Oh, I didn't even know fastboot was a thing. That's pretty clever.
Does it still need to be disabled if you're dualbooting and not interacting with the windows partition?
And yeah, I have a desktop computer. I bet hardware failure rates are much higher in laptops. All good points.
The answer is a definite maybe because some hardware will keep state when hibernated and will be unusable if this isn't disabled. For instance the WiFi won't work in the other OS. Also sooner or later you are going to need a file you received on windows or indeed on any fs mounted on windows.
Best just disable the feature.
Because.. it’s slow. My team used to do VDI engineering. We could reduce boot times by 30% with optimized and tweaked out configurations, but it was still slower than my out of the box MacBook Air.
can you come up with any other reasons why an out of the box mac might be faster than something involving vdi engineering?
Less sequential and dependent operations.
Windows has alot of stuff that runs in sequence that takes awhile to churn or times out. It’s much better than it was, but Apple is way ahead.
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
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 :)
That would be an implementation deficiency. If Windows can be FDE and load faster than macOS, then the way macOS has implemented the FDE solution is suboptimal, if startup time is your primary measurement.
I personally don't have issues with startup times on my M2 Air or 5800X3D/Win11, both encrypted.
The way File Vault works nowadays, as I understand it, is that your user data (and maybe even much of the OS) isn't decrypted until you've put in your password on the login screen. This means that even if you devised a way to hijack the login screen, or sniff the keys coming out of the secure enclave, you'd still be stuck without the user's login password.
Windows, by contrast, unlocks the entire OS drive before you get to the login screen. So, a hypothetical login screen hijack would let you get to everything, or cold boot attacks/sniffing keys coming from the TPM to the CPU.
I'd argue the macOS version is better from a security aspect, but it has a necessary downside of being unable to load as much before the user can put in their password.
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.
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.
Love the AM5 memory training two minute POSTs that make you think you didn’t assemble it correctly!
Out of the box ubuntu server boots super slowly, and with terrible defaults, like if a NIC is connected but not configured it will hang on boot.
I have observed that; why is time to POST so high? Does anyone know?
> Why on startup?
Because Windows is usually a lot less optional than Office, for the average user.
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
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.
I wonder if other industries could get away with this. Imagine a drug company that pedalled both a highly addictive toxin and the antidote.
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.
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.
> Then entire insurance industry.
Could you elaborate? How does the insurance industry create problems like bad weather and misfortune?
Car theft is on the rise. Rather than investigate or cooperate with police or policies they can just pay out the loss and lobby against crime reduction in a variety of ways. Then, because they paid a loss they can raise that persons amount they pay due to a rising “risk.” Then everybody’s rates can rise because of this problem.
The larger the cost, the bigger total cash value they can get on their percentage based profit.
Playing into the cost, they can cut deals with manufacturers directly or in lobbying for parts to be artificially inflated to make this problem even worse. Plastic fuel valve maybe costs 30 cents to manufacture but is sold for $900 and that price is doubled to install it. And the car isn’t safe to drive without it so insurance can demand you pay up or deny all coverage or payouts.
Same for medical inflation though that’s more commonly discussed.
If insurance didn’t exist as a service then these inflated prices would be dramatically cut down. We see this when you don’t use insurance at a doctors office or pharmacy checkout. Though insurance can sometimes demand insurance be used regardless of your consent simply if the cashier is aware they have insurance.
Lobbying and passively steering the direction into bloating end users cost is massively incentivized wherever possible for insurance. Then hiding behind a veil of blame to avoid accountability or even just fair payouts when you actually need them.
It’s like insurance is the IRS who runs a casino and they threaten you if you win the jackpot and then threaten to “randomly” select you for audit if you proceed to cash out for the full amount instead of a $25 Red Robin gift card.
Those are interesting theories. The system is a little more complicated and it’s hard for an insurer to directly control theft rates (to continue your example) but they do charge less for vehicle types that are stolen less often.
I do feel similarly that there are huge conflicts of interest in the finance industry. Mortgages and house prices is another one that comes to mind. Finance doesn't just react to the reality, it plays a part in driving the reality. It's a bit of a chicken and egg thing. I feel like in general humans are particularly susceptible to complicated things being abstracted by simple numbers and the finance industry is just cashing in on this susceptibility.
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.
My understanding is that Chrome has been doing this for years. ChatGPT agrees and links to https://ihaveapc.com/2024/10/understanding-chromes-continue-...
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?
Adobe is the worst offender. I just checked and I have no less than 8 Adobe processes running on my macOS machine, without any Adobe apps running, and with all of the settings to run in the background or sync stuff turned off. I even have a script to nuke all of the services they install that I run every once in a while, but they just come back after a while. It's literally malware. If Photoshop and Lightroom weren't the best at what they do I'd be gone, but sadly they are.
I never was a pro at Adobe stuff, but recently I bought Affinity Suite and it seems nice. The only downside for me is lack of Linux support.
At least with a fuji camera, and for my tastes ofc, I prefer capture one over lightroom
I'd also like an app that ran on schedule and reverted everything to the state you want.
Don't know the solution, but one idea - is it possible to change task permissions so that those Chrome update processes will fail to update tasks?
Installers seem to run with the permission level of "Trusted Installer" which is even higher than admin as far as I can tell.
Use FOSS alternatives.
Not to be that guy, but at some point, if you ever decide that fighting a war with Microsoft to have control over your own computer and not be surveilled stops being worth it... linux. Yes, there's an upfront cost you pay to learn, and there are ongoing costs as defaults and tools change over the years.. but at least the relationship is not adversarial.
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.
Safari does it in Mac, not sure about Chrome.
I think Adobe PDF reader loaded incredibly slowly and they used a preloader
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...
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.
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.
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.
Microsoft hasn’t used stack ranking for over a decade. I guess the team level competitive culture has persisted though.
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
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”?
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.
Oof. Yeah it definitely wasn’t this bad, I remember that having an unclearly named app in your startup menu was considered a clear tell that you had a malware infection.
This sounds like Microsoft is failing spectacularly at enforcing strict limits on what software can do.
Autoruns utility still exists.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/aut...
I wonder if old rules still apply:
Uncheck one thing. Reboot. Test system.Proceed to the next item.
I bet that loop is way faster nowadays than when I was messing around as a teen trying to get our new 1Gb hard drive desktop to boot faster.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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-...
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.
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.
That's not Edge the browser, but a separate app called Edge WebView2.
Mmm. It was definitely a problem with IE but you did in fact say Edge.
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.
The real impact is in Microsoft making people throw away perfectly good computers by ending Windows 10 support.
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...
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.
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
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.
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.
My tinfoil hat told me that they're in cahoots with the big PC manufacturers, and use it as a part of planned obsolescence.
Additionally, I suspect there's 4 decades of legacy backward compatibility hacks that doing anything intelligent to help UX is impossible. It might break some peanut butter factory in Indiana that is paying for support.
They have been breaking things left and right for quite some time now, I don't think they care about this anymore.
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.
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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
as in 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
I've found arrow-key scrolling through a LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet on Linux to be quite painful.
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.
Abandoning Windows after 25 years for Fedora gets validated with every "Windows Innovation"
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.
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.
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
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.
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 :(
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!
It's essentially a giant XML file, so it's not going to win awards for speed or efficiency.
Modern hardware can parse XML with speeds measured in hundreds of megabytes per second.
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).
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.
Well, Libre/OpenOffice does the same, but lets not get that in the way of a good Microsoft bashing round.
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?
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Faq/General/148
> LibreOffice can be set to open on Windows startup
So, Windows only, and "can be set", probably not the default?
The installer enables it by default unless you go through custom installation.
That sucks. This is the expected behavior for most programs on Windows, at least in my experience.
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.
Only if ignoring history, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarOffice
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Odd, I don't have it on any of my computers.
Office? I've never seen that.
You still have to deal with the rest of Windows.
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.
I don't like a lot of things about Apple, but one thing I'm sure is I'm never going back to Windows
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
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.
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.
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.
I bought Softmaker Office last year. The Textmaker word processor is better than LibreOffice Writer. It's more MS Office compatible, so I don't get complaints about formatting issues from co-workers.
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.
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).
Surprising to see after their talk about recent improvement due to rust rewrites of some components..
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.
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
They already have the "wallpaper of the day" feature with small description text to keep you busy while waiting.
Microsoft is too slow full stop.
When will there be a viable alternative that runs industry standard software?
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.
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.
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.
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.
You're bringing up an important point. However: As far as I can tell, Linux can very well be integrated into an Active Directory setup.[0,1] Also: If you want to avoid Active Directory altogether, there seem to be plenty alternatives?[2]
[0]: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/linux-active-directory
[1]: https://documentation.ubuntu.com/server/explanation/intro-to...
[2]: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/333/what-is-the-equ...
Are there any alternatives to ActiveDirectory in the Linux ecosystem? Maybe from RedHat?
There are no enterprise alternatives to Active Directory. Just like there are no enterprise alternatives to Exchange.
They're simply too well integrated, too easy to manage, and have more features than their competitors.
Silicon valley is able to shoehorn their Macbooks into "compliance" but somehow it'd be a problem to do the same with linux desktops?
> And if by magic that function would appear tomorrow, it would disappear again the day after tomorrow.
That's incorrect.
> ease of use and tight integration blows everything else out of the water.
Agree to disagree.
macOS has MDM tooling like Microsoft's InTune, or JAMF, and I'm sure a few others. macOS is designed for MDM profiles, just like iOS is.
This is what makes Mac manageable.
Industry standard software like what, MS Office?
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?
Depending on the industrie there is really nothing holding them back other than dirty Microsoft deals and lazy bosses
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
For me it's exactly other way around. First window is fast, another file is slow.
Maybe they're only now making this public so people will believe that Office will start faster!
It changed with O365 a few years ago. Basically office is a big virtual app these days.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’ve been hearing some variation of this my entire adult life and it hasn’t been right yet.
Just like ANN's in the 0s
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.
Here's a crazy idea: Make software that isn't bloated with features that 90% of customers don't actually use.
Anyone else still using Office 2007? 2010 is ok too but I hate the ribbon. One of our clients still uses it though.
I use both: they are extremely fast - faster than Wordpad (on a native windows installation), much faster than libreoffice (on linux with wine).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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…
Autosave has only ever been a SharePoint/OneDrive feature. You may be confusing it with auto recovery.
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)
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?
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????)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
This does not appear to be the case for LibreOffice in my tests.
There's an option in Options->General, called Quickstarter. I think it's disabled by default.
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)
That's it, I'm switching to linux for real this time
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?
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.
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?
It's time for some severance at the office
That's funny. My Emacs config does the opposite. It defers loading stuff until you need it to speed up initially load time.
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?)
> 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)
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.
But Windows is know for a lot of productivity apps other platforms lack. I meant the Everything file search app (doesn't exist on Linux/Mac), not the default Windows search
> "Everything" is a filename search engine for Windows.
Well, on Linux I have `locate` and `fd` which work really well, doing that very thing, and `ripgrep` does even more.
I heard something built-in is also shipped with macOS, it's called something like "Spotlight".
OTOH MS Excel for Windows is one and only, the macOS version barely holds a candle to it, and analogs are even further away.
"that very thing" was instant and anywhere (not your irrelevant generic description), which your suggested tools can't do. You're just content with a poor cli substitute.
There are also GUIs for this, though I haven't compared the two directly: eg. https://www.recoll.org/
There is a list of software several miles long that does not work on non-Windows
The harm that Microsoft and Office has done to global productivity over the last decades is unquantifiable at this point.
Office is a horrible product. Our company left office a few years ago and it turned out to be a huge productivity boost.
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.
Nothing new and closing Office applications don’t necessarily terminate some of the Office processes - notoriously Outlook.
Can anyone with inside information explain why these apps are slow? Why can they not just make startup faster?
Because they did this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17310738
Ehm this is nothing new. They did that decades ago.
Edit: Should have known I wouldn't be the first to remember :)
I think the old Office 97 Shortcut Bar preloaded some Office dlls too, maybe not all of them.
Edge has been doing this for a very long time, since well-before Windows 11 existed.
I think someone said the definition of legacy code is code that makes lots of money.
It is a wrong thing to do ... soon .. no one would want to use Windows ....
Windows is too slow at startup, so microsoft boots it up before you buy it.
So instead of rounds of optimizations, it bogs down everything else..
I’m confused. Doesn’t office 365 online make this completely unnecessary?
Pages, Keynote, Numbers on Mac load in seconds. Thanks I’m good.
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.
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.
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.
I just wish they didn’t shove onedrive down your throat.
I don't want it to load at startup.
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%.
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.
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.
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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).
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.
Microsoft Build 2.0 is going to be a massive joke.
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.
ok but can they just optimize that to the ground or they just get fcked with backward compability and tech debt????
LibreOffice is still fast to start
30% of code is written by AI!
The biggest problem is sharepoint. You save your files "somewhere" and links between them barely work
This is what Linux is for :))
Can they do this for vscode?
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
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.
Node is doing stuff when you just try to open a terminal window? How does that work?!
What useful major features had Office even gained since 97?
What a mess..
and you got no say in it. this is why u need an option like gnu/linux.
What the hell Bruv........
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...
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.
Hmm, wonder if this could trigger another antitrust lawsuit?
How? Any other office suite or program could do the same thing.
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.
Lots of people keep a windows machine around for that one game that doesn't run on linux. Might make a come back!
You made me go back and read TFA, I don't think that's the case.
Where did you saw that?
Update: nowhere, xi was just making stuff up.
Many such cases.
I'm not sure what TFA or xi means, but any program you install can stay open in the background for quick launching. What makes you think microsoft has exclusive access to doing that?
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Derp.
Is the Office dev team part of the 30% id from AI?
It's a great idea and the reason Microsoft are the biggest in the game. Kudos to them, I tip my hat! Here here!