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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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 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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

The Mac version is even worse.

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

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.

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

> 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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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

> 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.

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 solution is simple: New OKRs and KPIs in the next cycle reversing some of the current ones, then new bonuses for reaching them. Repeat.

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

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.

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.

> 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?

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.

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).

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.

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...

>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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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 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.

> 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

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

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

I wonder if other industries could get away with this. Imagine a drug company that pedalled both a highly addictive toxin and the antidote.

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 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”?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

[flagged]

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Industry standard software like what, MS Office?

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

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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?

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

> 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)

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

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

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.

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.

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).

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

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