> 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 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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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"

Only for OS components, I think?

> 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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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).

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 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

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 !!

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

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.

OnlyOffice is not based on LibreOffice. CollaboraOffice does. jfyi

No. It's js, render in qtwebengine.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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

How are you doing Spotify?

> "using Excel for quick decision making"

Could you expand on that?

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.

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.

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.

Only half a century after the creation of grep

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

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.

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

  > people pull the ”Knuth said premature optimization is the root of all evil” card.

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.

It is incredible how this became "don't optimize".

  https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/356635.356640
  (alt) https://sci-hub.se/10.1145/356635.356640

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?

Sounds like an AVG problem, not a Windows problem.

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.

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.

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.

They just purchased Pixelmator ;)

hey there's preview

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 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.

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.

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

> 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.

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 a great comment. I may wipe my Windows machine a 10th time and try again, but I'm sticking with Linux for now.

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-...

> 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.

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.

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™).

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

“I could do this all day!”

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 like Mate. I recommend it.

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.

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.

> 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?

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

[flagged]

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Microsoft Office

Haha, I’m gonna steal this phrase!

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.

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

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.

"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.

> 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.

Windows: What is my purpose?

Rick: You launch Steam

Windows: OH. MY. GOD.

Rick: Yeah, welcome to the club, pal.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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?

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.

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'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.

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'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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Autoruns utility still exists.

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

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

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.

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.

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 :(

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

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

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

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.

You still have to deal with the rest of Windows.

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.