hckrnws

What's old is new again.

Microsoft introduced the "Office Startup Assistant" or "Office Startup Application" (osa.exe) in Office 97, it sat in the system tray and loaded the main office DLLs at startup: https://web.archive.org/web/20041214010329/http://support.mi...

OpenOffice.org (predecessor of LibreOffice) copied this feature, which they called "QuickStarter", I don't know exactly when, but no later than 2003: https://www.openoffice.org/documentation/setup_guide2/1.1.x/...

Microsoft made OSA made non-default in Office 2007, and _removed_ it from Office 2010: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/office/o...

Are they now bringing it back?

I came here looking for this. It's an old idea, from the days when spinning rust was the limiting factor - precache the binaries.

If you ever tried Office 97 on a PC of 10+ years later, it's amazing how fast and lightweight it was. Instant startup, super snappy. And those apps were not lacking in features. 95% of what you need out of a desktop word processor was in Word 97.

> from the days when spinning rust was the limiting factor

How did we get back to this though? We have gigabytes/sec with NVMe and stupid fast CPU's with at least 4 cores in even low end models. Yet a text editor takes so long to load we need to load it up on boot... Such a frustrating field to work in.

I know this is such a stereotypical "get off my lawn" statement but we've lost the art of software engineering. It's all about stuffing as many features in as quickly as we can and pushing it out to as many people as possible. Performance is always secondary.

Not that I'm that nostalgic for the old days, we would have been doing the exact same thing if we were able to get away with it. But performance restrictions meant you had no choice but to care. Modern tech has "freed" us from that concern.

Niklaus Wirth wrote about this in 1995, in his essay A Plea for Lean Software.

About 25 years ago, an interactive text editor could be designed with as little as 8,000 bytes of storage. (Modern program editors request 100 times that much). An operating system had to manage with 8,000 bytes, and a compiler had to fit into 32 Kbytes, whereas their modern descendants require megabytes. Has all this inflated software become any faster? On the contrary, were it not for a thousand times faster hardware, modern software would be utterly unusable.

https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/co/1995/02/r2064/13rR...

That said, as someone fairly young, I still don't think that makes it wrong or something only an old man would think. Software seems to perform exactly as well as it needs to and no more, which is why hardware advances don't make our computers run software much faster.

Aside from slowness, feature creep leads to poor quality, i.e. tons of bugs and user confusion with ever-changing graphical interfaces.

If software was simpler, we could afford to offer some formal guarantees of correctness. Model check protocols, verify pre and post conditions à la Dafny, etc.

There's too much change for the sake of change.

> There's too much change for the sake of change.

+1 to this. Like a lot of issues, I think the root is ideological, but this one in particular very clearly manifests organizationally.

The companies building everyday software are ever bigger— full of software engineers, designers and various kinds of managers who are asked to justify their generous salaries. At an individual level I'm sure there's all sorts of cases, but at a general level there's often almost no other option but to introduce change for the sake of change.

> There's too much change for the sake of change.

+1 to this. Like a lot of issues, I think the root is ideological, but this one in particular very clearly manifests organizationally.

The companies building everyday software are ever bigger— full of software engineers, designers and various kinds of managers who are asked to justify their generous salaries. At an individual level I'm sure there's all sorts of cases, but at a general level there's almost no other option but to introduce change for the sake of change.

This is exactly what I see as well.

At a general level, I believe there are other options - changes/features need to meet some level of usage or it is scrapped out of recognition that supporting all these features make bugs more likely, performance likely to degrade, increase difficulty of adding features, make the product more difficult to use, etc.

> Software seems to perform exactly as well as it needs to and no more

The cynical spin I would put on this idea is that software performs as poorly as it can get away with. MSFT is feeling the need/pressure to have Office load faster, and they will try to get away with preloading it.

Otherwise, there is a strong pull towards bloat that different people will try to take credit for as features even if the cumulative experience of all these "features" is actually a worse user-experience.

I'm also young and heavily favor simple, quality software. Age is a highly coarse proxy for one's experiences, but in this case I think it has more to do with my personality. I have enough experience in computing that I don't think I'm making demands that are unrealistic, although they are certainly unrealistic if we maintain current incentives and motives.

software authors that don't care about performance annoy me (and I am an old man.)

The amount of things a computer can do in a single thread are amazing, and computers now have a dozen or more threads to do work. If developers cared about performance, things would easily be 20x as performant as they are today.

I'm not talking about "write in assembly, duh" I'm talking about just doing things intelligently instead of naively. The developers I support often simply are not thinking about the problem they're solving and they solve the problem in the simplest way (for them) and not the simplest way for a computer.

Software is an inefficiency amplifier, because the number of developers for a piece of code is much smaller than the number of computers that run that code; how much coal has been burned solely because of shitty implementations? I'd wager that the answer is "a LOT!"

Even if you don't care about coal usage, think about how much happier your users would be if your application was suddenly 5x faster than it was previously? now think of how many customers want their software to be slow (outside of TheDailyWTF): zero.

languages like javascript and python remove you so much from the CPU and the cache that even if you were thinking of those things, you can't do anything about it. JS and Electron are great for developers, and horrible for users because of that amplification I described above.

I am dead tired of seeing hustle culture overtake everything in this field, and important things, to me, like quality and performance and support all fall straight down the toilet simply because executives want to release features faster.

things like copilot could help with this, i hope. presumably copilot will help introduce better code into applications than a daydreaming developer would, though the existence of vibe coding sort of nulls that out probably.

one thing that AI will do quite soon is increase the amount of software that exists quite dramatically. and I am kinda concerned about the possibility that it's all going to suck horribly.

I commiserate with your frustration with developers writing things suboptimally all too often. However, I disagree with the assumption that it's a JS/Python vs C issue.

Example: when VS Code came out, it was much, much faster, more responsive and stable than Visual Studio at the time. Despite being based on Electron, it apparently was much better on architecture, algorithms and multithreading than VS with its C++ and .NET legacy codebase. That really impressed me, as a C++ programmer.

Overall, it feels like folks who idealize bygone eras of computing didn't witness or have forgotten how slow Windows, VS, Office etc. used to feel in the 90s.

> Overall, it feels like folks who idealize bygone eras of computing didn't witness or have forgotten how slow Windows, VS, Office etc. used to feel in the 90s.

Let’s normalize speed over time like we do dollars, so we are talking about the same thing.

Given the enormous multiplier in CPU and storage hardware speeds and parallelism today vs. say 1995, any “slow” application then should be indistinguishable from instant today.

“Slow” in the 90’s vs. “Slow” in 2025 are essentially different words. Given unclarified co-use pushes several orders magnitude of either speed or inefficiency difference under the rug.

“Slow” is when the human waits on the computer.

The promise of computing is that what was slow in the 1960s and 1970s would be instant in 1990. And those things were instant, but those things aren’t what people did with computers anymore.

New software that did more than before, but less efficiently, came around, so everything felt the same. Developers didn’t have to focus on performance so much, so they didn’t.

Developers are lazy sacks who are held skyward because of hardware designers alone. And software developers are just getting heavier and heavier all the time, but the hardware people can’t hold them forever.

This cannot continue forever. Run software from the 1990s or 2000s on modern hardware. It is unbelievably fast.

Maybe it was slow in the 1990s, sure. I ask why we can’t (or won’t) write software that performs like that today.

The compiler for Turbo Pascal could compile something like a million lines per second in 1990. We have regressed to waiting for 60+ minute C++ compile times today, on even moderate project sizes.

Debugging in visual studio used to be instant when you did things like Step Over. You could hold the Function key down and just eyeball your watch variables to see what was going on. The UI would update at 60FPS the entire time. Now if I hold down that key, the UI freezes and when I let go of the key it takes time to catch up. Useless. All so Microsoft could write the front end in dotnet. Ruin a product so it is easier to write… absolute nonsense decision.

All software is like that today. It’s all slow because developers are lazy sacks who will only do the minimum necessary so they can proceed to the next thing. I am ashamed of my industry because of things like this.

Counterpoint: single threaded performance hasn't improved much in the past 20 years. Maybe 5x at best. And virtually every UI programming environment still has problems with work done on the main thread.

Single thread performance increased every processor generation, and is still doing so today.

Increased yes, but not by a whole lot. See https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/CPU-p... and https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/CPU-p...

Source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/11/a-history-of-intel-v...

(I'm sure someone could dig up more recent graphs, but you get the idea).

In order to get more performance, your app needs to use multithreading.

Too true!

RAM parallel bandwidth, increased caching levels and size, and better caching rules, instruction re-ordering, predictive branching, register optimization, vector instructions, ... there have been many advances in single thread execution since the 90's. Beyond any clock speed advances.

Office 4.3 loading on Win3.1 was glacial. I haven't forgotten.

> The amount of things a computer can do in a single thread are amazing, and computers now have a dozen or more threads to do work. If developers cared about performance, things would easily be 20x as performant as they are today.

Why? A good portion of programs are still single-threaded, and often that's the correct choice. Even in games a single-threaded main thread or logic thread may be the only choice. Where multi-threading makes sense it should be employed, but it's difficult to do well.

Otherwise, it's up to the OS to balance threads appropriately. All major OSes do this well today.

I think what the author wanted to say is that because computers are very fast today developers have no incentive of writing optimized code.

Nowadays you just "scale horizontally" by the magic of whatever orchestration platform you happen to use, which is the modern approach of throwing hardware at the problem in the vertical scaling days.

It’s not about programs being multithreaded. It’s about computers running multiple programs at once on different threads and they all perform well.

One can write software that uses the CPU cache in non-dumb ways no matter how many threads your program has. You can craft your structs so that they take less space in RAM, meaning you can fit more in cache at once. You can have structs of arrays instead of arrays of structs if that helps your application. Few people think of things like this today, they just go for the most naive implementation possible so that the branch predictor can’t work well and everything needs to be fetched from RAM every time instead of building things so that the branch predictor and the cache are helping you instead of impeding you. People just do the bare minimum so that the PM says the card is complete and they never think of it again. It’s depressing.

The tools to write fast software are at our fingertips, already installed on our computers. And I have had zero success in getting people to believe that they should develop with performance in mind.

So your assertion is that developers should get in a big huddle to decide how they’re going to consume L1 between applications? Which of course no dev has control over since the OS determines what runs and when.

You can make your time in the CPU more efficient by thinking of the cache and the branch predictor, or you can say “nothing I do matters because the OS schedules things how it wants.” Up to you I guess, but I know which of those approaches performs significantly better.

My standard is that software should appear to work instantly to me, a human. Then it is fast enough. No pressing a button and waiting. That would be great.

That is probably the correct measure. If “The Promise of Computing” is ever to come true, people must never wait on computers when interacting with them.

Waiting is ok when it comes to sending batches of data to be transformed or rendered or processed or whatever. I’m talking about synchronous stuff; when I push a key on my keyboard the computer should be done with what I told it to do before I finish pushing the button all the way down. Anything less is me waiting on the computer and that slows the user down.

Businesses should be foaming at the mouth about performance; every second spent by a user waiting on a computer to do work locally, multiplied by the number of users who wait, multiplied by the number of times this happens per day, multiplied by the number of work days in a year… it’s not a small amount of money lost. Every more efficient piece of code means lighter devices are needed by users. Lambda is billed by CPU and RAM usage, and inefficient code there directly translates into higher bills. But everyone still writes code which stores a Boolean value as a 32-bit integer, and where all numbers are always 8-bytes wide.

What. The. Fuck.

People already go on smoke breaks and long lunches and come in late and leave early; do we want them waiting on their computers all of the time, too? Apparently so, because I’ve never once heard anyone complain to a vendor that their software is so slow that it’s costing money, but almost all of those vendor products are that slow.

I’m old enough that I’m almost completely sick of the industry I once loved.

Software developers used to be people who really wanted to write software, and wanted to write it well. Now, it’s just a stepping stone on the way to a few VP positions at a dozen failed startups and thousands of needlessly optimistic posts on LinkedIn. There’s almost no craft here anymore. Businessmen have taken everything good about this career and flushed it down the toilet and turned teams into very unhappy machines. And if you don’t pretend you’re happy, you’re “not a good fit” anymore and you’re fired. All because you want to do your job well and it’s been made too difficult to reliably do anything well.

> languages like javascript and python remove you so much from the CPU and the cache that even if you were thinking of those things, you can't do anything about it.

Even operating systems don't get direct access to the hardware these days. Instead a bunch of SoC middlemen handle everything however they like.

Wait…those dastardly systems architecture engineers with their decadent trusted platform modules, each with an outrageous number of kilobytes of ROM. They are the true villains of software performance?

What's your proposal for a "compromise" language between programmer productivity and performance, especially for multiple threads and CPUs? Go, Rust, a BEAM language?

I don't think the tools are the issue here, they are tools you can do good and bad jobs with all of them. What is lacking are the right incentives. The tech market has never been as anti-competitive as it is today. Let's repeal DMCA 1201 and go from there.

Jai seems to be an excellent start. Possibly Zig as well.

Both are written/designed by people who care a lot about application performance and developer experience.

This is an unserious take. Jai doesn’t even have official documentation and zig hasn’t reached a 1.0 release

[flagged]

> presumably copilot will help introduce better code into applications than a daydreaming developer would

Copilot is trained on Github (and probably other Git forges w/o permission, because OpenAI and Microsoft are run by greedy sociopaths.)

I'd wager that the majority of fleshed out repositories on these sites contain projects written at the "too-high level" you describe. This certainly seems to be true based on how these models perform ("good" results for web development and scripting, awful results for C/++/Rust/assembly...) - so I wouldn't get your hopes up, unfortunately.

I dont know if its just the training data, or that CRUD and webapps are more inherently easy to parrot away.

Low level programming means actual -thinking- about the system, resources, and language decisions etc

Even humans struggle with it, Its much easier to build a website than say a compiler, for anyone, humans and llm's included

That probably plays into it as well. I have yet to see any convincing evidence that contradicts LLMs being mere pattern parrots.

My personal benchmark for these models is writing a simple socket BPF in a Rust program. Even the latest and greatest hosted frontier models (with web search and reasoning enabled!) can only ape the structure. The substance is inevitably wanting, with invalid BPF instructions and hallucinated/missing imports.

imho these tools are great i fyou know what you're doing, becasue you know how to smell test the output, but a footgun otherwise.

It works great for me, but it is necessarily an aid learning tool more than a full on replacement, someone's still gotta do the thinking part, even if the llm's can cosplay -reasoning- now

“What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away”

I saw the writing on the wall when I had to install a couple 150MB IDEs to run 101-level Java programs in the mid 2000's. 150 megabytes. MEGABYTES. I could consume about 1 kilobyte per minute of fantasy novel text in uncompressed ASCI, call it 1/8th that fully compressed. That means this compressed binary you're handing me is around 1.2 billion minutes of work (more if ingesting a novel is faster than writing/testing/debugging a program) for what is functionally a text editor, file manager, syntax library, compiler, and debugger. Pretty sure that got done in 150 kilobytes a generation earlier. A generation later, maybe it will be 150 gigabytes.

I looked it up, you want an illegal taxi? 168 MB: https://apkcombo.com/uber/com.ubercab/

install a couple 150MB IDEs

Not Java, but an IDE in 4K: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_Programming

Having used it quite extensively (Well, five solid days over two weeks, which is about 1000x longer than most people gargling on the internet), it's surprisingly capable.

Imagine if someone with the same talent and motivation was working on today's hardware.

<aside> Someone on Atari Age wrote a LISP for the same machine.

> I know this is such a stereotypical "get off my lawn" statement but we've lost the art of software engineering.

Indeed. I am sure many of us here are burnt out on bloat. I am also sure many of us want to move to smaller stuff but cant simply because of industry momentum. BUT that doesn't mean the dream is dead, only that we must work towards those goals on our own time. I found Plan 9 and haven't looked back. I can rebuild the entire OS in seconds on a fast machine. Even my little Celeron J1900 can rebuild the OS for several supported architectures in minutes. I can share a USB device seamlessly across my network, PXE booted from a single disk without installing anything. Cat(1) is just 36 lines of C.

There's still hope. Just ignore the industry hype noise and put in the effort ourselves.

And just when we think we can't make software any more inefficient, slow, and bloated, they release things like Electron, where you ship an entire browser with your app! And then when we think it can't even get worse, we have Docker and containers where we ship the entire OS with the application.

I'm looking forward to when app developers ship you an entire computer in the mail to run their text editor.

The problem with Electron is that business-wise it is an excellent decision. You can get by with a few people to wrap the web app and integrate it with the OS, and then get updates pretty much for free.

Yet for the user it is bad -- bloated, slow, feels non-native, has specific bugs which are hard to address for the devs, etc.

I don't see any light for the desktop UI development unless there is some lightweight universal rendering engine. Tauri with WebView is somewhat promising, but it has problems on Linux and it is hard to target older systems.

It's a pretty OK example of a negative externality. A little like polluting: Just dumping your waste into the environment is business-wise an excellent decision. You avoid the cost and everyone else has to deal with the downsides.

Polluting is indeed an excellent business decision. The thing about apps is that all of them are polluting, just some of them are worse than others. And we tend to fill all available resources, so over time it only gets worse.

It's an excellent business decision... right up until your customers abandon you because you make bad quality software. Like many businesses have found time and again, deliberately sacrificing quality for profit is a short term gain for a long term loss.

there are quite a few examples of software built with electron that have very large user bases. this sounds like a personal vendetta against electron rather than meaningful insight.

Electron is horrid, but as a user, I prefer bloated "apps" to no support at all.

As for your second point: [1]

1: https://snapcraft.io/

I love that I work at a place (Row Zero) where caring about performance is baked into the culture, and I can spend days fixing weird perf edge cases our users discover without management asking why I'm wasting my time. And it's office software, no less!

My personal theory is there is a threshold of performance. Below the threshold the experience is bad enough it affects revenue so getting the program up to speed becomes a priority. Above the threshold only features are prioritized to drive more revenue. That's why despite computers getting orders of magnitude faster computer programs seem to run about the same speed.

I think the threshold is more about how much more rent can we seek to collect from users, and making things more performant or ergonomic doesn’t do anything to allow sales to add another 10% to the per-user subscription pricing (I assume this is a product with per-user subscriptions, even though it’s almost certainly unnecessary).

But adding yet another gateway to ChatGPT’s API…that’s a $15/mo/user add-on right there, and not just a monkey, but one of the slower intern monkeys, could write the code for such an incredibly innovative and, there’s no other word for it, powerful new feature that everyone should be thrilled to pay for at a 200-300% (or more!) markup. So guess who gets that VP of New Bullshit Development position, and guess what kind of choices get reinforced?

(EDIT: grammar)

How does someone get promoted at Microsoft? How do they avoid being seen as a low performer?

Performance just isn’t on that list, and it’s often more and harder work than a given new feature took to create. Office users are getting what Microsoft is designed to deliver.

I really don't think we've "lost it", I think performance has just not been a consideration in the engineering of Office for a long time, if ever.

> we've lost the art of software engineering

Yes! This is what all my projects are geared towards restoring. The big one is not quite ready to announce yet, but I am very proud of it, and extremely excited to release it, to solve exactly that: it makes engineering fun again!

Well that username matches

we don't have software engineering anymore than the romans had civil engineering

we now DO have civil engineering but that is it

It was always like that

It's a matter of resource allocation. Lowering your design requirements for performance can save significant developer cost. Also, Word in 2025 is doing a lot more under the hood than 97.

>> It's all about stuffing as many features in as quickly as we can...

The problem isn't "engineering" the problem is the culture of product management. (Note: NOT product managers per se).

I ask this basic question, how many Directors, VP's or CPO's do you know who got their job based on "cutting out unused features"? If you can find one, it will end up being the exception that proves the rule. The culture of "add", "new" and "shiny" doesn't reward keeping things lean and effective. T

In the tangible world we look to accountants for this sort of thing (because they tend to have costs). Think cheap Costco hotdogs and free cookies at Double Tree. No one in product, dev and accounting is going to sit down and try to justify loosing some code, features and maybe a few customers to make it faster when you can just "engineer" you way out of it and not have to sell less is more.

> I ask this basic question, how many Directors, VP's or CPO's do you know who got their job based on "cutting out unused features"?

Google goes a step further and kills entire apps

Moment of silence for Play Music. YT Music isn't any less awful now than it was a decade ago.

Ford does. They look at connected vehicle telemetry to strip out features nobody uses in order to save software maintenance, hardware and third party IP licensing costs.

https://www.slashgear.com/1513242/ford-gets-rid-of-self-park...

I'll take the hate for this, but I have been using gemini to build narrow scope apps and they are extremely fucking fast compared to their bloated software package suite $200/user/month counterparts. It's amazing how fast and efficient programs can be when not trying to cover every use case for every possible user at every possible moment on top of a sea of tech debt programming.

While true LLMs fall flat on their face when fed massive codebases, the fact of the matter is that I don't need a 200k LOC program to accomplish a single task that an LLM can do in 2k LOC.

To give an example, we have proprietary piece of software that is used to make (physical) product test systems using flow charts and menus. It's expansive and complex. But we don't need it when we can just spend 30 minutes prompting your way to working test code and it produces way faster and more robust systems.

Maybe the devs of that software package cannot dump that whole codebase into an LLM and work on it. But they are completely missing the forest for the trees.

I will make this analogy:

Have a large ZIP file. Preferably like a few gigs and lots of (small) files.

Try to open it with the built-in Windows 11 tooling from Microsoft. It's going to be super slow to even show anything never mind unpack it.

Now install say 7-zip and do the exact same thing(s) and it's going to be instant opening and unpacking it takes a much much smaller amount of time (only limited by disk speed).

Turns out optimizations / not doing stupid things is still a thing even with all this raw power we now have.

Because an entire generation of developers and their managers believe the hardware is so fast there's no point trying to optimize the software.

Besides, the only thing that matters is getting tickets "done" before the arbitrary sprint deadline in 2 weeks, so best not to spend any extra time cleaning up or optimizing the first thing that works. You can't think about performance until the sprint dedicated to performance.

100% thought process is: why waste internal resources on speeding up software when the user has enough hardware to manage the workload.

Battery use is a pretty big concern these days; also, some users like running several things at the same time.

For the local OS and sustained workloads like video playback, yes, battery optimization is huge. For an individual app with bursty compute, less so, plus some of that inefficient code can run in the cloud instead, which is costly, but premium subscriptions can pay for it, and power plants are now colocated with data centers so power transmission cost is negligible. The incentive to be efficient is insufficient.

I think people forget that some of this software may be relatively fast. The problem is, most corporate environments are loaded up with EDRs and other strange anti-malware software that impede quick startup or speedy library calls. I've seen a misconfigured Forcepoint EDR rule block a window for 5 seconds on copy and paste from Chrome to Word.

Another example: it takes ~2 seconds to run git on my work machine

    (Measure-Command { git status | Out-Null }).TotalSeconds

Telemetry, syncing to the cloud by default…

Neither of which contribute significantly to size though. The size aspect is what these new preloaders would help with.

Skilled programmers working on boring stuff like office. Most programmers today don't have the skills they think they do and would find working on something like Office boring.

Ironically, at the start of my career working on something like Office was my dream, and would actually still be. I reserve to change my mind once I’ve seen the code base, though. ;)

Cruft built on frameworks using libraries with a zillion dependencies, some of which are cruft built on frameworks...

So, we often look back on the old days with rose tinted glasses. But let me recount my IT classes from the 90s.

We'd sometimes go to the library to write something up in MS Word. We always liked this because it would be a good 5-10 mins to boot up some kind of basic Unix menu. You'd then select windows 3.1 and wait another 10-15 minutes for that to load. Then you could fire up word and wait another 5 minutes. Then you could do 5 minutes work before the class was over!

> How did we get back to this though?

By piling up nonzero-cost abstractions left and right.

And it's easy to understand how we get into that trap. Each one of those abstractions is very low-cost, so it seems harmless.

And getting out of the trap is hard too, because no single abstraction is to blame - you can't just hit things with your profiler and find the hot spot. It's all of them. So now you either live with it or rewrite an entire stack of abstractions.

"How did we get back to this though?"

Probably because windows needs to make a connection for every file somewhere else first and wait for the reply, before granting you the advanced software as a service feature called text editing.

It definitely feels like this at times and I fear there is too much truth in my statement.

But it is not just windows only. My old chromebook took seconds to open a folder in the file browser (even if it was already open). But a "ls" on the terminal was instant for any folder. So getting the information was not the problem. But from there to displaying it in a GUI, there seems to be myriads of important (tracking?) layers involved.

My guess is that we're already seeing the consequences of "AI-assisted programming". Just yesterday, Microsoft's CEO revealed that 30% of their code is written by AI.

Given the game of telephone which would have to had occurred for that 30% figure to travel from developers up to the CEO, it's probably including things like autocomplete...

The Plan

In the beginning, there was a plan, And then came the assumptions, And the assumptions were without form, And the plan without substance,

And the darkness was upon the face of the workers, And they spoke among themselves saying, "It is a crock of shit and it stinks."

And the workers went unto their Supervisors and said, "It is a pile of dung, and we cannot live with the smell."

And the Supervisors went unto their Managers saying, "It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong, Such that none may abide by it."

And the Managers went unto their Directors saying, "It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide by its strength."

And the Directors spoke among themselves saying to one another, "It contains that which aids plants growth, and it is very strong."

And the Directors went to the Vice Presidents saying unto them, "It promotes growth, and it is very powerful."

And the Vice Presidents went to the President, saying unto him, "This new plan will actively promote the growth and vigor Of the company With very powerful effects."

And the President looked upon the Plan And saw that it was good, And the Plan became Policy.

And this, my friend, is how shit happens.

from anonymous email

Interesting that this story is not really a game of telephone, but instead a single layer replaced the meaning on purpose.

By software, most of it is probably generated scaffolding.

We stopped developing for users/customers and instead added layers to make developer lives easier.

Why the hell are all my desktop apps written in JS now?!

> Why the hell are all my desktop apps written in JS now?!

Have you seen the state of pretty much every non-js UX framework?

That's why.

JS/css/html won the UX domain in a way that no other language comes close to. If you look at the most recent most modern UX frameworks, they are often just half implemented poor mimics of the js/css/html stack with approximately 0 devs writing new 3rd party extensions.

Intellij uses swing, SWING, as it's UX. A framework written in the 90s filled with warts. Yet, it's still a better experience than the more recent JavaFX experience. Swing simply has more support.

Call me an idiot, but I still gladly take Swing and javafx over JS and monstrosities like react. The state of Qt is also very good. Web won because the distribution model is easier on the user, and because managers thought UX designers would be making whole apps now, saving on rates. Not because it's technically superior.

You're not an idiot for liking the Swing/javafx/QT way of doing things. Or even for thinking they are technically superior.

The bigger issue isn't the tech, it's the ecosystem. While you might like swing, you simply are never going to find the swing version of Material UI or D3.js. That's more the problem that you'll run into.

For some of our apps because we need charting, we are using GraalJS just to run the JS charting library to export to an image that we ultimately put on some of our downloadable reports. It's a huge pain but really the only way to do that.

> you simply are never going to find the swing version of Material UI or D3.js. That's more the problem that you'll run into.

I remember a time when having your application look "out of place" was undesired, and the ultimate goal was to be "as native as possible". If you are running a website selling something, I agree that you want a brand-identity and a unique look. But productive software shouldn't require users to adapt to new UX paradigms (guessing whether the cancel button comes on the left or on the right, dealing with slightly do different input method and entry shortcuts…).

Anyhow, I think things could be worse, since, as you say, we can embed a webview into any JavaFX/Qt/… app and get the best of both worlds.

It's quite something that there hasn't been any real successor living up to Delphi or even goddamn Visual Basic for modern desktops.

There are no financial or career incentives to optimise existing, working things in these institutions. The structures which these large companies use are for people working on new things, so that's what we get. Making office faster doesn't create headlines, but a new product that does the same thing somehow will.

"eight megabytes and constantly swapping"

Ever notice how Windows 7 and 10 and 11 have basically the same features and benchmark the same on performance tests yet 10 and especially 11 completely shit the bed if you try to run them off a hard drive? Like they might all boot in twenty seconds from an SSD but booting from a hard disk might take W7 two minutes and W11 ten minutes to a stable desktop.

How much engineering time do you think is spent optimizing startup time on most modern editors? I’m guessing next to nothing.

I wish companies would go back to building fast apps, but alas. Everything is feature-packed and requires you to download half the internet.

My intellij license just expired so today I'm back using Sublime Text, and honestly it's a breath of fresh air / relief - and it's not even the fastest editor, iirc it uses Python under the hood. I've installed Zed but getting plugins and keyboard shortcuts all lined up is always challenging. That one took ~2-3 seconds to cold start.

> I wish companies would go back to building fast apps

It seems fascinating how much more efficient Windows apps were back in the nineties, capable do to almost everything the same today apps do in a similar manner on orders of magnitude less powerful hardware, often performing even faster.

The last time I expressed this, probably also here, somebody suggested the performance drop is the cost of modern security - vulnerability mitigations, cryptography etc.

I think the performance drop probably has more to do with managers & product folks expecting growth and features at all costs at the expense of keeping performance at some baseline.

I also wonder if it's just harder to continually monitor performance in a way that alerts a team early enough to deal with regressions?

That said, security _can_ impact performance! I work on Stripe frontend surfaces, and one performance bottleneck we have comes from needing to use iframes to sandbox and isolate code for security. Having to load code in iframes adds an additional network load before we can get to page render.

I think you need to add that many more developers, or even teams of developers, are building these apps. They have their own fiefdoms and it's less common for devs to have a complete understanding of the code base.

Over time decisions are made independently by devs/teams which cause the code bases to get out of alignment with a performant design. This is exacerbated by the growth pressure. It's then really hard for someone to come in and optimize top to bottom because there is everything from a bug to a design problem. Remediation has significant overhead, so only things around the edges are touched.

Fast forward a couple of years and you have a code base that devs struggle to evolve and add features to as well as keep performant. The causes are many and we come to the same one whether we complain about performance or maintainability. You probably don't feel this way, but Stripe and other premier engineering companies are way ahead of others in terms of their practices when you compare with the average situation developers are facing.

Independent mobile development is often where I see most attention to performance these days. The situation for these devs is a little bit closer to what existed in the nineties. They have a bigger span of control and performance is something they feel directly so are incentivized to ensure it's great.

> It seems fascinating how much more efficient Windows apps were back in the nineties

I remember everyone complaining about how bloated they were at the time. Pretty sure someone in 2055 is going to run today's Office on 2055 computers and marvel at how streamlined it is.

My recollection is completely different, software was really slow on contemporary PCs in the 90s. Spinning disks, single core cpus, lot more swapping due to memory being so much more expensive.

Contemporary software was slow. You could tell you should consider more RAM when the HDD light and chugging noises told you it was swapping. But if you ran the same software with the benefit of 10 years of hardware improvement, it was not slow at all.

This might match your recollection. x86 Win95 raytracing in javascript on my arm laptop is usable, but sort of slow:

https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows95

Once it boots, run povray, then click run.

It took over 2 minutes to render biscuit.pov, though it did manage to use SSE!

It took over 2 minutes to render biscuit.pov

We used to wait two hours for a mandelbrot to display on a Commodore 64, and were delighted when it did.

How much modern security do I need to write & print a term paper or church bulletin on my own computer?

This depends on whether you want to exchange data with other computers using even removable media, let alone the Internet. Also whether you want to use Unicode. In case you only want to hand-type, edit and print a plain English paper right away by dumping plaintext/PostScript/PCL to LPT you probably are fine with any computer you can find. It's just nobody is using standalone computers anymore, almost every modern computer is a network device.

Nah, it's about favouring bad programming practices, not thinking about the architecture of the software and giving developer experience a bigger role than end user experience. All these stemming from a push to get to market earlier or making employees replaceable.

I'd guess less on "bad programming practices" and more "prioritizing development speed?" Mostly inline with your next point. We value getting things released and do not have a solid process for optimizing without adding new things.

Ironically, it was specifically the longer feedback cycle of long builds and scheduled releases that seems to specifically have given us better software?

Fair, I just think there is a huge overlap between bad practice and speed of development. The latter fuels the former in many ways.

Oh, I likely fully agree with you on it. I'm just pointing at the hazard that a lot of these practices aren't, intrinsically, bad. Rapidly getting something done is, generally, a good thing. I'm not entirely sure how to make it not the priority, but it does feel that that is the problem.

I mean, as mentioned upthread, Office 97 (and Office 95 before it) was slow to load, so slow that they added the start up accelerator.

You can run Office 97 now and it'll start fast because disk i/o and cpus are so much faster now. Otoh Excel 97 has a maximum of 256 columns and 64k rows. You might want to try Excel 2007 for 16k columns and 1M rows, and/or Excel 2016 for 64-bit memory.

The 90s was a time when computers were doubling in speed every 18 months. I remember office 97* being lightning fast on. A 366mhz celeron - a cheap chip in 1998.

You could build fast software today by simply adopting a reference platform, say. A 10 year old 4core system. then measuring performance there. If it lags then do whatever work needs to be done to speed it up.

Personally I think we should all adopt the raspberry pi zero as a reference platform.

Edit: * office 2000 was fast too with 32 megs of ram. Seriously what have we done?

Oddly, I remember timing it, and the startup accelerator didn't seem to speed up Office start time. It slowed everything else down though.

I rebooted a lot though (mostly used Linux by then), so maybe it was just fighting with itself when I immediately fired up office after boot.

If you like fast apps, maybe check out FilePilot, a Windows explorer alternative.

https://filepilot.tech/

It's amazingly fast, though it's missing some features and will be really expensive when it leaves beta.

I made an account to thank you for this. I've been looking for a _fast_ alternative to explorer since Windows XP. But one that doesn't require a change in workflow. This is the fastest I've tried by far. I've only been using it for 5 minutes, but I'm sold. Earlybird discount too!

Thank you for posting this, and if you have any other speedy apps you'd recommend I'd welcome suggestions. Mine top suggestions are Speedcrunch [0] (calculator app) and Everything [1] file search combined with Listary [2]

[0] https://github.com/ruphy/speedcrunch

[1] https://www.voidtools.com/

[2] https://www.listary.com/

(For reference, I've tried Total Commander, DOpus, Files, Explorer XP, XY Explorer, Explorer ++, FreeCommander, Double Commander, Q-Dir)

Listary has slowed down tremendously ever since they included search. For a launcher I'm still using "find as run robot", which truly is a 90s era piece of softer but works blazingly fast. I do have a plug-in to tie it into search everything.

Everything (the tool) is ridiculously fast, I’ve used it for quite a while now and it’s nice to see it mentioned here.

I'll check these out, thanks!

I learned about File Pilot (whose author posts here: https://x.com/vkrajacic) from Casey Muratori (https://x.com/cmuratori) who pushed it a bunch because he loves fast things.

Have you tried xplorer²? I only know about it because I was into Windows programming using the WTL eons ago.

In my opinion Total Commander has always been the most ideal (also fast) file management tool since Windows 3.x. It was named Windows Commander back in the days but it still supports Windows 3.x as Total Commander.

I never knew it was a Windows program. I've been using it on my Android phones for years.

All of these ‘fast’ file managers have a big problem: they don't support system calls to dialog windows.

Mostly users interact with the explorer in this scenario to open/save a file in ‘BrowserOS’

>> they don't support system calls to dialog windows.

It's a little unclear what you mean exactly. Do you want the browsing experience changed for the system's file open/save dialogs? i.e. a third-party file explorer opens instead with all of it's features.

how does it compare to directory opus?

I like dolphin but pcmanfm is fastet

Do you know how it compares to Dolphin for interacting with very large (100k+ files) directories? Dolphin is the only file manager I’ve found that keeps up with the large directories- GNOME (Nautilus) and Windows Explorer are dogshit slow, even after the file list populates. macOS Finder is somewhere in the middle but still very slow.

Check out ROX-Filer https://github.com/rox-desktop/rox-filer

When you have 100k+ files sometimes the filesystem itself matters. Have you set your expectations appropriately, aka compared it to a raw ls/dir ?

I actually use IntelliJ and Sublime interchangeably throughout the day. I default to sublime for most work because of how snappy fast it is. I only load up Intellij when I need to do something that leverages its full IDE capabilities. To second your comment, I encourage people to try Sublime, you will be shocked at how fast it feels.

I still love IntelliJ, its a great product. But it is slow, bloats the computer, needs constant updating. But at least its incredibly powerful as a tradeoff to the bloat.

The Office debate is slightly different. It is slow, bloats the computer, needs constant updating. But unlike IntelliJ i dont feel that there is any advantage to all that added weight. We are using a word processor. We type words onto a blank screen. Why is Word and Outlook the most common applications to crash my computer that has an M1 Max Chip with 48Gb of Memory? I can literally run and build AI models on my computer with no problem but you boot up Microsoft Word to type words onto a blank page and you have a 33% chance of crashing the computer.

Google Sheets and Docs are actually better tools in my opinion for most people. 99% or more of the features you need are available in the google equivalents. These products are fast and run in a browser! The UI is actually VASTLY superior to Microsoft's ribbon. I still can't find stuff that I need on a routine basis and have to google it. I don't have this problem when using Google's office equivalents.

> and it's not even the fastest editor, iirc it uses Python under the hood

The majority of the app is written in C++. Python is used for plugins.

I don't think these apps were ever built to be fast, they were built with the resource constraints of the time. Moore's law is what's making these apps fast.

Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh.

This is even more sad with Apple. My M1 Mac felt incredibly snappy with Big Sur, but is getting ever so slightly slower with each update. My iPhone SE2 is a complete disaster.

They used no networking services either. Now, I open a shared PowerPoint and am stuck waiting for a couple of minutes while it is syncing or doing who knows what. People have no sense of what templates they copy from other documents causing the size of the file and load times to bloat.

Word 2000 definitely was not very quick on a contemporary office PC (Pentium II or III), though I'm pretty certain it was much, much faster than desktop O365 is on a contemporary office PC today, despite those being >100x faster. So Fermi would estimate modern office to probably require at least 1000x more resources than Office 2000.

Instead they decided to build it with React if I remember correctly which is truly one of the fucking dumbest ideas I’ve ever heard of.

Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17310738

>I wish companies would go back to building fast apps

My prediction is that we are about to enter a great winter of poor performance across the industry as AI slop is put in to production en mass. Along with bugginess that we have not seen since the early dotcom days.

> I wish companies would go back to building fast apps...

Similar to the slow-opening glove box in a car, many humans perceive slow computers & software as a signifiers of importance/luxury/prestige. At least at first. By the time they are familiar with the slow software, and impatient to just get their work done - too late, SnailSoft already has their money.

I always think the same thing. 486s could run real-time spell check and do wisiwig layouts and came on floppy disks. Now we have screen recording apps that require 256MB downloads every 5 minutes (yesterday’s story).

I have a small utility app that I sell and make great pains to keep it small and resource light. I really appreciate when other devs do the same.

486's were way past when that became practical. I remember using Prodigy on a 286. Screenshots are rare, since you can't fire it up in an emulator unless you have a modem that can make phone calls to the 1980's. Also, machines from back then didn't really have room to store screenshots:

https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/1063

Their service used vector art to render interactive pages like that over <= 2400 baud modems. Other than it being proprietary and stuff, I'm guessing the web would be a much cooler place if HTML hadn't eaten their lunch. SVG is a decent consolation prize, I guess.

Let me point you to Prodigy Reloaded, https://github.com/ProdigyReloaded. We're reviving the Prodigy server and as many cache files as we can find, using Elixir as the backend language.

It's not merged yet but I've written an Elixir library that writes graphics files in Prodigy's graphics format, NAPLPS. I'm using it to get current weather and creating weather maps that are displayed in Prodigy. https://github.com/rrcook/naplps_writer

You can run Prodigy in DOSBox and get screenshots.

Where is that guy who coded RollerCoaster Tycoon in Assembly?

some of the modern software is slower because someone made a poor decision to fetch something from the network on the critical path of main functionality... kills me

Example: https://old.reddit.com/r/libreoffice/comments/upf8nw/fixed_o...

Opening a spreadsheet, even if you don't want to print it, will hang for 30 seconds doing nothing, because LibreOffice will load the printer settings for the document, which means asking the printer, which if the printer is network-based and turned off, means a 30 second wait for a timeout.

Reported in 2011, still not fixed: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42673

This... 100 times. Everyday wastes my few minutes. 5 figure commercial application, state of art in it's domain, but somehow It has to wait for that unresponsive network printer and hang the startup UI.

I don't recall spreadsheets ever having any visible printer formatting until the point at which you print them? So surely it's not even a case of "even if you don't want to print it"?

Best workaround (still ridiculous that it hasn't been fixed) is to set a PDF printer as your default printer.

I frequently have to do this for a different reason on MacOS/iOS. Printing directly sends bad PCL to my printer and makes it spew garbage pages.

"Print to PDF -> print the PDF" is much more reliable.

sigh

It’s because modern devs by and large have zero concept of latency differences. I had to explain to people yesterday why an on-disk temporary table in MySQL was slower than an in-memory one. “But the disk is an SSD,” was an actual rebuttal I got. Never mind the fact that this was Aurora, so the “disk” is a slice of (multiple) SSDs exposed over a SAN…

Agree. I've heard people say things like "it is slow because it is not C++". When, in reality, the problem was I/O and N^2 algos.

I've been trying to impress upon people from my own research in Python packaging: Pip is slow because it defaults to pre-compiling bytecode (and doesn't invoke multiprocessing for that, although this seems to be in the works from the discussion I've seen); imports literally hundreds of modules even when it ultimately does nothing; creates complex wrappers to set up for connecting to the Internet (and using SSH, of course) even if you tell it to install from a locally downloaded wheel directly; caches things in a way that simulates network sessions instead of just actually having the files... you get the idea.

"It's written in Python and not e.g. in Rust" is simply not relevant in that context.

(For that matter, when uv is asked to pre-compile, while it does some intelligent setup for multiprocessing, it still ultimately invokes the same bytecode compiler - which is part of the Python implementation itself, written in C unless you're using an alternative implementation like PyPy.)

There may be a bit of culture at play sometimes as well. If a language isn't meant to be fast, then perhaps devs using the language do not prioritize performance very much. For some, as long as it is possible to point to some externality ("hey this is Python, what do you expect") this is sufficient.

Of course, not always the case. C++ is a good counter example with a massive range of performance "orientedness". On the other hand, I suspect there are few Rust / Zig or C programmers that don't care about performance.

To me, Python is more of a challenge than an excuse when it comes to performance.

On the flip side, I've seen quite a few C developers using their own hand-rolled linked lists where vector-like storage would be more appropriate, without giving it a second thought. Implementing good hash tables from scratch turns out not to be very much fun, either. I'm sure there are off the shelf solutions for that sort of thing, but `#include` and static compilation in C don't exactly encourage module reuse the same way that modern languages with package managers do (even considering all the unique issues with Python package management). For better or worse.

(For what it's worth, I worked in J2ME for phones in the North American market in the mid 00s, if you remember what those were like.)

Do you have a real world example of a Python project that does selective import?

Not sure what you mean, but I guess you're getting at something like "is it really pip's fault that it imports almost everything on almost every run?".

Well first off, pip itself does defer quite a few imports - just not in a way that really matters. Notably, if you use the `--python` flag, the initial run will only import some of the modules before it manages to hand off to the subprocess (which has to import those modules again). But that new pip process will end up importing a bunch more eventually anyway.

The thing is that this isn't just about where you put `import` statements (at the top, following style guidelines, vs. in a function to defer them and take full advantage of `sys.modules` caching). The real problem is with library dependencies, and their architecture.

If I use a library that provides the `foo` top-level package, and `import foo.bar.baz.quux`, at a minimum Python will need to load the `foo`, `foo.bar`, `foo.bar.baz` and `foo.bar.baz.quux` modules (generally, from the library's `foo/__init__.py`, foo/bar/__init__.py`, `foo/bar/baz/__init__.py` and `foo/bar/baz/quux.py` respectively). But some libraries offer tons of parallel, stand-alone functionality, such that that's the end of it; others are interconnected, such that those modules will have a bunch of their own top-level `import`s, etc. There are even cases where library authors preemptively import unnecessary things in their `__init__.py` files just to simplify the import statements for the client code. That also happens for backward compatibility reasons (if a library reorganizes some functionality from `foo` into `foo.bar`, then `foo/__init__.py` might have `from . import bar` to avoid breaking existing code that does `import foo`... and then over time `bar` might grow a lot bigger).

For pip, rich (https://pypi.org/project/rich/) is a major culprit, from what I've seen. Pip uses little of its functionality (AFAIK, just for coloured text and progress bars) and it tends to import quite a bit preemptively (such as an emoji database). It's very much not designed with modularity or import speed in mind. (It also uses the really old-fashioned system of ad-hoc testing by putting some demo code in each module behind an `if __name__ == '__main__':` block - code that is only ever used if you do `python -m rich.whatever.submodule` from the command line, but has to be processed by everyone).

And yes, these things are slow even with Python's system for precompiling and caching bytecode. It's uniformly slow, without an obvious bottleneck - the problem is the amount of code, not (as far as I can tell) any specific thing in that code.

It's also a Product issue: "fast and snappy" is almost never on their list of priorities. So product managers will push devs for more features, which satisfy the roadmap, and only get concerned about speed when it reaches painful levels.

> only get concerned about speed when it reaches painful levels.

...and by then, the requests for performance are somewhere between onerous and ridiculous.

I'm as wary of premature optimization as anyone, but I also have a healthy fear of future-proofed sluggishness.

But is it actually faster by any significant amount on your workload? Did you benchmark? Temporary tables in databases rarely actually do disk IO in any blocking code path but mostly just dirty buffers in the OS or in the database itself and then something writes it to disk in the background. This limits throughput but does not add much extra latency in the common cases.

Edit: It still might be a bad idea to waste the IO if you do not have to but the latency of a temporary table is usually RAM latency, not disk latency even for temporary tables on disk.

Didn’t have to, prod benchmarked it for us, twice.

If you’re curious, the EBS disks Aurora uses for temporary storage, when faced with a QD of approximately 240, can manage approximately 5000 IOPS. This was an r6i.32xlarge.

My hypothesis is currently that the massive context switching the CPU had to do to handle the interrupts slowed down its acceptance of new connections / processing other queries enough such that everything piled up. I’ve no idea what kind of core pinning / isolation AWS does under the hood, but CPU utilization from disk I/O alone, according to Enhanced Monitoring, was about 20%.

I do want to add that many of the devs I work with and have worked with are genuinely interested in learning this stuff, and I am thrilled by it. What bothers me is when they neither have an interest in learning it, nor in fixing their bad patterns, and leadership shrugs and tells infra teams to make it work.

https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832

That really should include "sync write 4KB to an SSD". People don't realize it's purely in-RAM on the disk these days (you pay a PCIe round trip, and that's about it).

That is what happens when your dev learnt it from an online course instead of going to college or through proper education. "Anyone can code!"

And I thought we were past this sort of gatekeeping and elitism. I've worked with people who had a master's degree in CS who couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag. In my experience there's very little correlation between how someone learned programming and how deep their understanding of the entire stack is.

Yeah, deep understanding I think is a matter of how much time you spend investigating the craft and improving. Maybe the real question is: what motivates that to happen? Maybe it's school type, but maybe it's not.

My personal anecdotes, which are music centric but all apply to my software career:

1. I've studied music my whole life, and baked into music is the idea of continual practice & improvement. Because of this experiential input, I believe that I can always improve at things if I actively put a bit of energy into it and show up. I believe it because I've put in so many hours to it and have seen the results. This is deeply ingrained.

2. When I picked up bass in high school, I spent the first year learning tabs in my bedroom. It was ok, but my ability accelerated when I started a band with my friends and had to keep up. I really think the people you surround yourself with can: push you more, teach you things you didn't know, and make the process way more of a fun hang than doing it by yourself.

3. Another outcome from music education was learning that I really love how mastery feels. There's a lot of positive feeling from achieving and growing. As a result, I try to seek it out in other places as well. I imagine sports/etc are the same?

> I've worked with people who had a master's degree in CS who couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag.

"Programming" consists of an insanely large number of isolated communities. Assuming the respective person is capable, I would assume that he simply comes from a very different "programming culture".

I actually observe a very related phenomenon for myself: the more I learn about some very complicated programming topics, the more "alien" I actually (start to) become to the programming topics that I have to do at work.

Hope this doesn't come off as disrespectful, as in that I don't believe you, but out of personal interest, would you consider expanding on that? I'd love to hear about the particular example you were thinking of, or in what ways self-taught coders surprised you over academically-taught ones, if you've had experience working with both over a meaningful span of time. Also, if the case, in what ways self-taught coders were/are maybe lacking on average.

If you've ever given answers to that in another comments on HN or elsewhere, feel free to link.

It's certainly true in my experience. The main thing that makes a difference is simply how curious and interested you are.

Plenty of graduates simply got into to it to make money, and have no real deep interest. Some of them love the theory but hate the practice. And some of them are good at both of course.

By contrast, self taught people tend to have personal interest going for them. But I've also worked with self taught people who had no real understanding (despite their interest), and who were satisfied if something just worked. Even if they are motivated to know more, they are often lacking in deeper theoretical computer science (this is a gap I've had to gradually fill in myself).

Anyway, the determining factor is rarely exactly how they acquired their skills, it's the approach they take to the subject and personal motivation and curiosity.

Makes sense, out of all the potential differentiators the source of skill attainment simply isn't the necessarily dominant one. Thanks for the answer :)

Not disrespectful at all. I agree with the sibling comments, I think what allows someone to become a great software developer, to have great intuition, and to understand systems and abstractions on a really deep level is their curiosity, hunger for knowledge, and a lot of experience.

There are many college educated software developers who have that sort of drive (or passion, if you will) and there are just as many who don't, it's not something college can teach you, and the same is true for self-taught developers.

At the end of the day "self-taught" is also a spectrum that ranges from people who created their first "hello world" React app 2 months ago to people who have been involved in systems programming since they were 10 years old, and have a wealth of knowledge in multiple related fields like web development, systems administration, and networking. That's why I think it's silly to generalize like that.

Software development is extremely broad so depending on the discipline self-taught developers might not be missing anything essential, or they might have to learn algorithms, discrete mathematics, linear algebra, or calculus on their own. I learned all of that in college but I'd probably have to learn most of it again if I really needed it.

Thanks for the answer, very nice of you to take the time even hours after.

Guess it makes sense; I'm self taught myself, but thought academically taught developers should have a leg up in theory and mathematics, at the same time though, at one point I considered further formal education for myself (in at least paid courses and such), I realized that I don't think there's much I can't teach myself with the resources available (which includes high quality university lectures which are available for free).

Thanks for your perspective.

I’ve worked with both (I personally have an unrelated BS and an MS in SWE, which I used purely to get my foot in the door – it worked), and IMO if someone has a BS, not MS, there’s a decent chance they at least understand DS&A, probably took an OS course, etc.

That said, I have also worked with brilliant people who had no formal education in the subject whatsoever, they just really, really liked it.

I’m biased towards ops because that’s what I do and like, but at least in that field, the single biggest green flag I’ve found is whether or not someone has a homelab. People can cry all they want about “penalizing people for having hobbies outside of their job,” but it’s pretty obvious that if you spend more time doing something – even moreso if you enjoy it – you will learn it at a much faster rate than someone who only does it during business hours.

Maybe you should skip bashing modern devs and people who learnt from online courses when the parent poster is the one in the wrong. Unless InnoDB has a particularly bad implementation of disk backed temporary tables almodt all disk IO should be done in the background so the latency cost should be small. I recommend benchmarking on you particular workload of you really want to know hur big it is.

I am an old-school developer with a computer engineering degree but many of the old famous devs were self taught. Yes, if you learn how to code through online courses you will miss some important fundamentals but those are possible to learn later and I know several people who have.

Please see this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43863885

We have excellent metrics between PMM and AWS Perf. Insights / Enhanced Monitoring. I assure you, on-disk temp tables were to blame. To your point, though, MySQL 5.7 does have a sub-optimal implementation in that it kicks a lot of queries out to disk from memory because of the existence of a TEXT column, which internally treated as a BLOB. Schema design is also partially to blame, since most of the tables were unnecessarily denormalized, and TEXT was often used where VARCHAR would have been more appropriate, but still.

I wish. I did my undergrad, and now doing my Masters, at a top 10 uni in Poland.

Trust me so much, some of the stuff I learned there was actively harmful. Half of subjects were random fillers, and so on.

I envy Americans so much with that, their CS education seems to be top notch.

Opening any ms office app with the network disconnected opens up almost instantly...

This is also a classic emacs mistake, so I wouldn't put it all on age.

What I am glad to leave behind and forget like a nightmare is Windows local networking with shared folders etc - these never worked nice and the last time anybody I know used these was pre-2010. Today we just use NextCloud, Matrix, email and Git for all our collaboration needs.

Who's "we"? I work for a company who drank the MS cool-aid, so running Windows on laptops, using Office365 for e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets, teams for chat, sharepoint / onedrive for shared ressources.

Have you tried launching a local app by typing in the start menu on a default win11 install with limited / slow internet access? Good times. How about doing some operation (say delete an e-mail) in one window of "new" outlook and having the others refresh?

I have never understood how some otherwise reasonable people are able to consider this absolute shitshow of a work environment good enough.

A lifetime ago when I was doing MSP work, our law office clients were using the DOS versions of WordPerfect because the Windows version was too slow.

They refused to store files in directories and use good file names (although they were limited to 8.3), so they just scrolled through all their files until they found the right one. But they could open them so fast they didn't care.

In windows you had to use the mouse, click three times, wait for the document to load and render....it was instant under DOS character mode.

I agree with the point about the immediacy of TUIs, but I use MS Office (and Windows in general) almost exclusively by keyboard, so the point about having to use a mouse isn’t completely accurate.

Right, but you could just hit up/down to scroll through the files in the directory listing. Very simple

You can still do that? I mean, there are certainly places where the interaction happens to be more cumbersome than it is in a TUI, because the relevant piece was designed mouse-first. However, one reason I prefer Windows as a desktop UI is that it was designed to be fully operable by keyboard as well.

You could see the files as you scrolled through them. I don't think you understood how it works, I didn't do a great job explaining it. You can see the content of the files instantly on the screen as you go through them. Similar to how preview works on Mac

Ah, I see. Yeah, that’s more rare to come across on Windows for text documents.

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

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

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

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

Ribbon was better for most people who didn't have all the shortcuts in muscle memory. It is much more discoverable.

I find its discoverability is terrible. I am always hunting for what I want to do and it's never anywhere that seems to me to be sensible. I usually end up doing a google search for what I want. Perusing the ribbon takes me much more time than just looking at the various options under the old style menus.

Also traditional menus had some traditional standards. Once you learned what was under "File" or "View" or "Insert" or "Format" it was often pretty similar across applications.

Logically, users have to learn the name of the tool before performing any sort of geographical associations (which menu, symbol, etc to find the tool).

There is no faster discoverability than O(log(N)) search using the letters of the name as a lookup.

The biggest failure of modern operating systems is failing to standardize this innate reality.

Windows,Linux,etc should have 1. keyboard button to jump to search box 2. type 1-2 letters and hit enter. Operating systems and applications should all have this kind of interface.

The most ironic apps have a ribbon named something like "Edit" but then the most used "edit" command lives in an unrelated ribbon.

Hieroglyphics are the opposite of "discoverable". That's why they became uninterpretable for almost two thousand years, until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. And even then it took considerable work to figure out how they functioned. In the Ribbon, in order to discover what some hieroglyph does, you have to mouse over it. Since there are lots of hieroglyphs there, that's a lot of mouse-over. And no, the Ribbon's images make no sense in 99% of the cases.

That might have been true for the first five minutes of using the software (assuming the person had not yet used a CUA application before the first time they used office). After that, it was strictly worse.

CUA ~= "standard menus + keyboard shortcuts for dos and windows": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access

Not really, it is much more discoverable for most people. If interested, MS UI lead has a blog about lot of the reasons for ribbon and on the research backing it https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh

Its probably a case of UI discoverability vs usability. Brand new users might discover better with the ribbon, but as brand new users keep using the product, they transition to experienced users, and the UI needs to adapt to that. My experience is that the ribbon doesn't. Its tolerable, and for me thats enough but I get the points about the ribbon. Its sort of like the new reddit UI, but props to reddit they at least have kept much of the old UI available for longer than I expected them to.

The problem with it was that it constantly moved the buttons around. So, you had to constantly rediscover it.

Sadly, none of the links I tried work anymore. (Though the conversation in the comments where they have to explain how to open a ppt in powerpoint is internet gold!)

I was hoping to figure out what led to design incompetence so spectacular that people would still be discussing it after 17 years.

I think there’s a clue in the abstract: The author claims they made 25,000 mock UI screenshots, but doesn’t mention user studies or even internally prototyping some of the concepts to see how they feel.

Looks like the links in the posts no longer work, but all the posts are readable and he goes through the work they did and why. They did a lot of usability testing for the ribbon. But anyways I have no horse in this race other than liking ribbon over 16x16 icons and menus, so no point in hashing this over.

The Ribbon is more difficult to visually grep for me than the classic menus. Not to mention that a number of functions are still hidden in mini-menus in the Ribbon.

It wouldn’t be so bad if keyboard navigation was as good as with the classic menus, but having to press the Alt key separately, and general increased latency, kills it.

Anecdotal evidence from myself: Although I've been using Word for many decades, I've never had much "muscle memory" in terms of accessing features. It was always a case of learning which pulldown menu held the required function.

When the accursed ribbon came along, "discoverability" went out the window. Functions were grouped according to some strange MS logic I could never understand, and it takes me twice as long to format a page as it used to. Now, I basically just use Word for text entry, and if I want an elegant format, I use a graphic design app like Illustrator.

Judging from what I've read online, you may be the only person who actually likes the ribbon.

I still use Office 2007 on my computer. Super super snappy, I think Word or Excel starts and finishes loading in 0.5 second after clicking the icon. It has 99% of the features I need compared to the newest Office version.

Same ... Office 2007 for the win. Frankly, i do not even use 90% of Office 2007 feature, so why do i even need more? For AI ... no.

And funny thing, barely uses any memory! Makes todays apps look like monsters. Even my music player uses 5x more memory while paused, then freaking Excel with multiple pages open.

Do you have a good way to run multiple versions of office? I do sometimes need some of the newer features but I'd like to default to using the older versions.

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

I remember a laptop in the early 1990's that had Microsoft Office in ROM to load faster. I can't find a reference to it right now.

HP Omnibook 300? https://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=123

`Omnibook300Intro-5091-6270-6pages-May93.pdf` https://www.hpmuseum.net/exhibit.php?hwdoc=123 sez:

> Built-in ROM applications don't use up disk space

- Microsoft Windows

- Microsoft Word for Windows

- Microsoft Excel

- Appointment Book

- Phone Book

- HP Calculator

- Microsoft File Manager

- LapLink Remote Access™

That looks like it. I didn't have one but I remember the magazine ads for it.

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

Lightroom 5 is miles better than what they offer today. Lightroom Creative Cloud is steaming dog shit. Adobe seriously gets to extort over $120 a year out of me simply for the privilege of reading raw files from a new camera. They provide zero positive contribution these days. All of these incumbent tech companies extract rents on algorithms written decades ago. This needs to end. I am very excited for AI to get advanced enough to whip up replacement programs for everything these companies maintain monopolies over.

> I am very excited for AI to get advanced enough to whip up replacement programs for everything these companies maintain monopolies over.

You are wildly off base. The algorithms aren't difficult or special. They were written by people reading text books for the most part.

They are able to sit on an on old algorithm for decades because the DMCA made interoperability and selling cheaper tools like that basically illegal.

Because of the DMCA, the work that was done to make IBM PC clones would have been close enough to illegal to kill all the businesses that tried it. They still tried with the liberal IP laws at the time.

Well that's a bit disappointing but i am aware that their are gaps in my knowledge. I had assumed it was the feasibility of competing with an entrenched firm, not lack of access to research texts. I will chat with Chat to learn more about how DMCA applies, thank you.

> 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.

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.

This has always been the problem with Microsoft. Here is a rant from 2020 about Visual Studio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC-0tCy4P1U and live comparison of performance degradation while loading the same project.

I remember about 15 years ago running Windows + VS in VMWare because I could skip installing Office inside the VM and the system would run noticeably faster.

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

People don't use Office frequently, and then when they do it's slow and a bad look. So they will cheat in a way that prioritize their own software, and then every one else will then that feature loses all value, as all programs launch on startup as not to be "slow"

Only for OS components, I think?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista_I/O_technologies...

SuperFetch was supposed to work with any app. It never seemed to have much effect IMO.

Back in those days it took 15 minutes for Windows to “finish” booting. You’d hit the desktop but the HDD was still going ham loading a dozen programs, each with their own splash screen to remind you of their existence.

If you've had the priviledge of running Windows 10 on a spinning drive, it never gets to disk idle. Who knows what it's doing, but by that metric it never finishes. It probably never gets to disk idle on an SSD either, but SSDs have so much more io capacity it isn't noticed.

Ah the ole slash screen. I remember in high school days writing programs in VB and of course it had to have some "Cool" splash screen.

"I bet somebody got a really nice bonus for that feature" https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20061101-03/?p=29...

> The thing is, all of these bad features were probably justified by some manager somewhere because it’s the only way their feature would get noticed. They have to justify their salary by pushing all these stupid ideas in the user’s faces. “Hey, look at me! I’m so cool!” After all, when the boss asks, “So, what did you accomplish in the past six months,” a manager can’t say, “Um, a bunch of stuff you can’t see. It just works better.” They have to say, “Oh, check out this feature, and that icon, and this dialog box.” Even if it’s a stupid feature.

On the other hand, I very much enjoyed going to Excel 97 cell X97:L97, pressing tab, holding Ctrl+Shift and clicking on the chart icon, because then you could play Excel's built in flight simulator

Huh. Maybe it's because I haven't installed Office since the 2010 version, I assumed OSA was still a thing. My work computer has O365 managed by IT and I could swear I've seen resident daemons (besides, say, Teams) running in the background.

Equivalently useless back in 2004.

Notably, a solution to the current issues with modern office is to use a copy of Office 97.

20+ page XLS uses ~7MB and loads effectively instantly (on a frankly horribly performing laptop that can usually barely run demos on HN)

Yeah, I'm honestly trying to figure out why this is getting so much attention. Applications setting themselves to start up at login in order to avoid doing a bunch of work when they're asked for later is one of the oldest patterns in Windows. It's annoying to regularly have to go in and clear out new startup applications, but it's been part of maintaining a Windows machine for decades, and Microsoft Office is hardly the worst offender.

Why is HN suddenly so interested in Microsoft doing the same thing that has always been done by large, bloated app suites?

> Why is HN suddenly so interested in Microsoft doing the same thing that has always been done by large, bloated app suites?

Probably because it is horrible? It's indicative of how we spend less time optimizing code than we do coming up with computationally expensive, inefficient workarounds.

Let's say a hypothetical Windows user spends 2% of their day using Office (I made that number up). Why should Office be partially loaded the other 98% of the time? How is it acceptable to use those resources?

When are we actually going to start using the new compute capabilities in our machines, rather than letting them get consumed by unoptimized, barely decent code?

> Let's say a hypothetical Windows user spends 2% of their day using Office

I don't know about a "hypothetical" user, but I'd bet a "mean" (corporate) user probably uses office all day long. Hell, I've lost count of the number of e-mails I've seen having a screenshot which is inside a word document for some reason, or the number of excel files which are just a 5x4 table.

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

That's not at all what I asked.

I use Office software at work daily and I don't understand how that piece of shit can be so fucking slow. It's a serious productivity sink too; I often procrastinate small tasks just because I know half of the time doing it is spent waiting for various part of the office to load and that is somehow very stressful. I realise it is not a huge amount of time per se, but the psychological effect of the piece of crap stopping at any random time to load some bullshit becomes unbearable after some time. A bit like the chinese torture method where they would drop single drops of water on your head and over time it becomes painful.

People question why I use vim and live in the terminal. Well... because everything opens up instantly, and I can run email, spotify, my editor, debugger, pdf reader, file browser (with image previewing), and everything I need while using less than a gig of ram and barely any CPU usage. Not only that, but I get to make the things work in the way I want them to, not have to constantly hunt down random menus. If I'm ever confused I just press ? and 99% of the time find the answer faster than it takes to reach for the mouse. Even a shitty TUI usually is faster and easier to use than many GUIs. Yes, there are times GUIs are better. I don't want a TUI Gimp, but for a lot of stuff, I don't need the bloat.

It's because I don't like the Chinese torture you're referring to. We're programmers, we don't have to live that way.

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

Nothing too fancy. I'm not going to dox myself, I like to (pretend to) keep this account anonymous so I'm not going to drop my dotfiles (though I am pretty proud of them). But I don't do anything too fancy. vim, neomutt, spotify-player, yazi, and tdf for pdfs (not still mixed about this one). I'll also maybe play around with a few for random tools but I usually don't use more than these.

Day to day I'm listening to music, reading emails, internet, and writing programs with vim (half my time I'm ssh'd into other machines anyways. I do ML research). So I got pretty much everything covered except Slack and Signal

Thanks! Your use case sounds similar to mine (and some the same workload).

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

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

I always say that there's only one reason to use vim over emacs, and that's that vi is on almost every machine you touch. It's an optional POSIX command[0], but it is as common as `more` or `type`. Though that is a bit of a lie. The other reason is that you're more likely to find vim bindings in random programs than emacs :P

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_POSIX_commands

As someone who came from vim, I find evil to be great tbh.

Why go to emacs then? What do you get that vim couldn't provide?

How are you doing Spotify?

I'm using spotify_player[0]. It is pretty bare-bones but honestly, what do you need? I got album art, a progress bar, and can search and go to my library

Note that if you google you will probably get spotify-tui[1] which DOES NOT work

[0] https://github.com/aome510/spotify-player

[1] https://github.com/Rigellute/spotify-tui

side note: man... I really wish I had the time to write or rewrite some TUIs. I'm sure I'm not the only one... Problem with a lot of open source is that they're side projects. I'd imagine there could be state of things could be a lot better if some small org just paid a few engineers to make and maintain a few of them.

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

> "using Excel for quick decision making"

Could you expand on that?

not op, The long story short is that a lot of data analysis that would normally require days of development can be done with a few clicks in excel. Would you get a better result if a team of 7 people spent en entire week working on it? Yes. Can a normal competant accountant get 99% of the way there by spending 2 hours in Excel, also yes.

Excel takes care of a lot of things that are a massive pain in the ass the deal with with any other solutions. It starts witht he ability to import data with a simple ctrl-c + ctrl-v instead of having to write code, but it doesn't end there.

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

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

Yes.

The Mac version is even worse.

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

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

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

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

It's crazy to me how because 1% of Excel users need pivot tables or something we're all stuck on it. LibreOffice is enough for the vast majority of use cases.

> It's crazy to me how because 1% of Excel users need pivot tables or something we're all stuck on it.

Finance and insurance industries are full of Excel powerusers.

> LibreOffice is enough for the vast majority of use cases.

Often (from my job experience I can at least attest this for the finance and insurance sectors), Excel is an integrated part of many large workflows. Changing from Excel to LibreOffice would mean rewriting important parts of central business applications, so you better have a really good reason why you want to do the switch from Excel to LibreOffice.

We are working on backend for life insurance. They have a separate pricing team who creates calculations for different insurance products. The results are usually presented as excel files with heavy scripting inside. Really heavy! Have you seen 100mb excel files? I did!

On the funny note: as powerful excel is, it cannot open two files with the same name from different folders! Or at least my version can't.

I used to work on Excel extensibility. I’ll never forget when we were talking with one of the top 5 insurance companies in the US and they showed us this huge VBA macro and told us they processed the top 10% of their claims using this file. That moment made me realize Excel powers at least 10% of the world economy.

Oh yeah, because references to the book name would conflict. If you open a new instance of Excel (e.g. shift-click the taskbar icon), you can open one file in each, but they can't reference each other.

I have seen 600mb+ geodata based, script bloated, slow as hell, make your MB Air commit sucide type of excel every day for 4 months, working on a project.

Excel is also used and abused. In finance and insurance, often Excel isn't used as a spreadsheet and visualization application. It's used as a database and application engine.

This is really bad for a lot of reasons. Of course it's painfully slow, but it's also incredibly brittle and foot-gunny. Excel IS NOT a competent database engine or application engine. It makes JS and C++ look sane and safe.

Excel shouldn't be switched out to LibreOffice. It should be switched out to a proper application with a proper database. What, finance bros don't know how to navigate a database. Tough fucking luck! In the 70s, secretaries could do that. They better figure it out. Because these existing "systems" are a disaster waiting to happen.

I mean, it's not as if Libreoffice was created yesterday. Its predecessor OpenOffice is now 25 years old. Your question becomes: Why did you choose the expensive version where you never know what it will cost next year in the first place?

Concerning

> Why did you choose the expensive version

Big companies have (sometimes hard negotiated) volume contracts with Microsoft, which makes Excel much cheaper to them than to, say, small companies. Thus Excel is not really expensive for them.

Concerning

> where you never know what it will cost next year in the first place

For open source software there exists a similar risk that you don't know into which direction the product will develop.

In the past, Microsoft has been quite reliable in keeping backwards compatible, and continue selling office for decades.

In my observation, the zigzag course that Microsoft starting doing with Windows (but is now also doing with office), and, relatedly, deviating from the course of being very insanely dependable in delivering the software that companies need from them, is what by now got big companies at least have a look at what possible alternatives to Microsoft products could be.

> For open source software there exists a similar risk that you don't know into which direction the product will develop.

You know what's really interesting to me about this argument point?

It is actually the proprietary solution that is at risk of this, and we feel it daily. The next version of Microsofts own flagship product (Windows) is nearly universally denigrated, but people are forced to upgrade.

With FOSS, there's significantly less risk, if the product changes direction you and your other company friends can just use old versions or in the worst case.. fork it.

As a counterpoint, Microsoft is in the process of discontinuing Publisher and plans to remove it from M365 installations next year.

Entire departments run on the "pivot table" button. Most companies have at least one person who needs some Excel feature that isn't available in the common alternatives.

I've worked on software that communicated with other software using custom Excel spreadsheets exported by yet different software, modified by humans. Every stage of the process was specs-incompliant and was using edge case features, but this process oversaw transport for goods worth millions every day. I tried my very best not to reach for a Windows VM, but there was nothing that could work on these files.

For the vast majority of times, bikes are good enough for the majority of travels, yet there are cars everywhere.

> For the vast majority of times, bikes are good enough for the majority of travels, yet there are cars everywhere.

Wow that was a very Dutch comment! I wonder whether it resonates with the Americans here :D

> software that communicated with other software using custom Excel spreadsheets exported by yet different software, modified by humans

This sums up my entire experience of "Enterprise applications".

For any modern SaaS to be enterprise grade, it has to have an excel export feature.

I tried using LibreOffice on Windows, and it was super slow and kept crashing. It is also so ugly & annoying to use that it must be intentional.

I really don't understand how this market is dominated by an abusive platform(MS Office) & a broken POS(LibreOffice).

The only way for a competitor to have a chance at breaking in to the market, they need to be able to open any xls or xlsx file.

You are vastly underestimating the number of people who use pivot tables and even more “advanced” Excel functionality like Power Pivot/Query.

LibreOffice has dynamic tables, an equivalent to pivot tables, for many years already.

They're also just called "pivot tables" in some locales.

> "because 1% of Excel users need pivot tables or something"

It's crazy to me how often Open Source pushers have the vibe "I don't use computers, I don't know what anyone does with computers, but I'm still dismissive and superior". I almost made this comment earlier today in reply to [1] which was another "You have problems with Linux? I daily-drive Linux for years and I've never had any problems" comment and the issues were common/well-known things - fractional scaling in Gnome, HDMI, screen sharing in Slack, crashes in Google Meet, crashes in Chrome, KDE unstable, missing desktop software they use, audio too buggy, constant crashes in another program after days of work.

Nothing anyone would be surprised at, except a Linux user who - apparently - never does anything with their computer and is baffled that other people do. I decided my comment was too trolling and didn't finish it, but here you are bringing that vibe again: you don't know what Excel does or why people use it, but you're confident that you know better; prompting me to actually call it out.

The first thing I looked for when I installed LibreOffice most recently, I found a thread[2] asking: "In excel you can create a table simply by using insert->table. Is there a way to create tables in calc, as well?" and the first visible reply is them explaining that they don't want to create a table in Write, they want Excel's "insert table" feature in Calc. Why would they have to explain that again already, their question was two short lines. Presumably the people replying don't know that feature exists. There are some people being helpful and suggesting ways to get similar effects, but of course there's "Why do you want to insert a table into a Calc spreadsheet? It doesn’t seem like a feature that I’d use much" ("I don't know what the feature does but I know I don't want it"), a couple people commenting explanations of what Excel's tables are and why they are useful including a link to a video demonstration ... followed by someone saying "It already works, they are called database ranges" - no, that's different. Someone who doesn't know what they are, didn't read the explanations or watch the video and still thinks they know better. Crazy.

One of the earlier repliers comes back with "LibreOffice has a database component which is by far more powerful than any fake tables on a calculator’s grid." doubling down on "I don't understand it, didn't read the explanations, don't respect you enough to consider that you know anything about what you want or do on a computer, I still know better" and with namecalling it 'fake'. Crazy.

Note, to avoid the obvious tangent, that I'm not demanding people implement features for me in free software. As the thread ends by kerosene5 "Instead of spending so much time poo pooing the feature request, you could explore it. It really is a good feature. I just downloaded and opened my bank transactions and the very FIRST thing I did was look how to convert it to a table. . . . back to Excel."

It's not "1% of Excel users need pivot tables or something" it was the very FIRST thing they wanted, and multiple people in that thread want, and the second thing I wanted. No this is not the only feature Excel has that LibreOffice hasn't; if you want to know why people aren't using Open Source software? Try actually looking and listening instead of whatever that is you are doing.

[Edit: THIS IS YOU: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43855927 ! Of course it is. Of course it is].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43855663

[2] https://ask.libreoffice.org/t/creating-tables-in-calc/1433

My god the amount of projection in your comment. It seems you've mistaken me for everyone who ever commented in favor of migrating off of Excel.

I"m aware that there are things I'm unaware of. Perhaps I don't know how to use Excel, I'm "no true Excel user" if you will, and therefore my opinion is invalid. Like you I'm baffled not by the technical side of things but by our reaction to it. People say "it powers 10% of the world's economy" but not "and it's a problem".

It's a problem. My point is not that LO is better, it's that we should work to remove our dependency on closed-source software for universal office work. Governments should be doing that. But no, let's just say "the other one sucks" and continue to act like depending on a single for-profit company for all our economies is a good thing.

Not sure how my other comment relates to this. Is it arrogant to have preferences?

Hear, hear!

Excel powers the world and is the most common programming environment.

Programmers don't like to hear that truth.

There are tons of alternatives, you just need to accept that its missing 1 or 2 features you like, because if the app supported the 1 or 2 features for everyone, it turns into jira/office

Interesting, our company migrated from Jira to Youtrack (by JetBrains) and never went back.

I migrated to a team where you just tell your manager what you're doing and they remember it.

Me too! It's been so much nicer not having scrum and moving jira tickets around. We still have an issue tracker but it doesn't rules our lives.

Apart from Excel, isn't google docs or libreoffice a viable alternative?

Depends on what you do. You lose like 85% of the features but I bet most users never touch any on them.

Lots of documents have to be styled in a very particular way. These rules aren’t laws of physics, they’re made by humans to make other people’s lives more miserable than it’s necessary

Absolute most of the time what is offered by markdown is enough.

When doing my thesis I was asking myself “is it really that important to use 16pt font or 14pt one or this is a made up rule because someone said so many years ago”

There are alternatives. Loads of them. But using them requires thinking about what office software you use, which is too much for the vast majority.

The alternatives are honestly not as good.

Libreoffice has vastly superior CSV support compared to Microsoft office. The alternatives often have different strengths and weaknesses.

I’ve never had a problem working with CSVs in Excel, but I’ll take your word for it. For text operations, I frequently find myself using Notepad++ anyway.

I had a colleague who did most of his work in Excel but used LibreCalc when he had to open a weird CSV and then cobtinued working in Excel.

Notepad++ has no problem displaying characters like checkmarks that Excel will mangle.

I've found not to trust excel for CSV's generally unless I build them manually in excel as a concatenation

Linear.app and it's not even close.

Definitely has everything I need and then some, a breath of fresh air compared to Jira.

It’s not an Excel alternative?

No it's a JIRA alternative.

I'm using OnlyOffice and it's pretty great. Definitely better than LibreOffice.

> It's so shitty and slow because it's a bloatware

Bloatware is unwanted software, usually pre-installed or otherwise not installed by the user, that slows down your computer and takes up space.

So if a user wants Office, it is, by definition, not bloatware.

Even if we do consider it bloatware -- pre-installed, unwanted by the user, and using up system resources -- that isn't an explanation of why Office itself is slow.

If only slow... it has tons of accepted bugs and nobody seems to care.

Yesterday I was using Outlook 365, there was one URL in one of the emails and I needed to find other emails containing it. Trivial and one of main use cases, right.

Put URL in search box, 0 finds (including email I just copy&pasted it from). Mkay, maybe non-alphanumeric chars are messing with some internal regex or similar, stripped those into bare hostname, still 0 finds (when searching all mailboxes, including body).

Maybe its some exchange settings, who knows, who cares. Pissed off fighting such basic tech instead of doing actual work.

I use Mail.app on macOS as my daily these days, and it’s somehow even worse than this. Especially the search function, which works in even more bizarre ways.

It’s truly amazing that we have seemingly regressed in basic desktop functionality since the early 2000’s.

I think people overestimate 2000s desktop functionality. macOS's mail application is still the good old crap app that it was since its inception. Outlook Express, Windows Live Mail, and the Windows 8/8.1/10 mail apps are all terrible in their own ways. Thunderbird looks like a skinned version of a late 2000s mail client and works exactly like it. Search is quirky and unpractical, but in completely different ways Outlook's and Mail.app's are!

Just for fun, try installing an old OS in a virtual machine. Marvel at how fast the old OS runs at modern SSD speeds. Get frustrated at the random hangs, freezes, glitches, and plain bad behavior of the programs you know and love, because the slowness of computers at the time hid it all. 20 cores of unused CPU power, dozens of gigabytes of RAM laying at the ready, disk I/O hitting dozens of megabytes per second, but still loading screens everywhere.

I once tried to go back, for nostalgia's sake, just doing the things I do on an old OS for fun. The grass wasn't much greener back then, I just had lower standards.

> and plain bad behavior of the programs you know and love, because the slowness of computers at the time hid it all.

Can't really blame the devs though because very often they only had single threads and definitely single cores to work with.

I mean, it was common knowledge even back then that Outlook Express etc was far from the best email client. That's why people used alternatives, so much so that some of them were paid and yet had enough people buying them to remain in business - e.g. The Bat!

I am genuinely confused why search is so bad in the major email webapps/clients. Search is a well studied feature, and it seems like it's something that should just work but I can never find the thing I'm searching for in my email (especially O365). Knowing the date and then scrolling often seems to be the most accurate way of finding things...

Search just seems bad in general in many applications. So many these days do not even support a verbatim (as in, find what I typed, exactly) search. They insist on ignoring certain characters, fuzzy matching, or treating everything as individual words and if it finds one it has done its job and earned a gold star.

I have a feeling it's based on tokenising the input rather than a string scan like we'd do in the old days. Harder to match a literal string if all you have is a tree of tokens or something, I guess.

Opengrok was the first time I ran into this years ago. We had a perl code base, perl syntax is well known as "an explosion in an ASCII factory", so it was a real pain trying to find exact text matches using it.

As I’m professionally working on a niche search engine, let me offer this: it’s a notoriously hard problem that seems simple at first, but requires catering to a bazillion different edge cases; every optimisation you do makes another case worse.

Having said all that: I also hate how shitty search almost everywhere is. It’s hard, but not that hard.

I’d be happy if it catered to exactly one edge case: ”Show me all emails that contain this word”

…which is the problem I was referring to: by optimising for that—your—use case, those of other people will invariably suffer.

We only have a single text field as the input; how are we supposed to guess whether you want to find an exact match of the phrase, a fuzzy match, at least one of the words provided, or any other possible variation? Also, are you interested in the content, the subject, the recipient, the sender address you used, a header field, an attachment, what have you? Do you want them ranked by the frequency of the word, or the position from the start of the text? Does it count those occurrences in quoted passages of previous mails downthread multiple times? What if it’s a stop word?

There are of course sensible ranking solutions and heuristics for these questions. I just want to highlight it’s not as trivial as it first sounds. Most mail clients probably don’t ship with a Lucene index—while they should.

You could always... you know... ask?

I use Thunderbird and it's approximately 100x better at searching for emails than Excel. I just tell it if I'm looking in the subject, in the body, in the sender, whether it's fuzzy, etc, and then it pulls up the emails.

Whereas Excel doesn't ask shit and, in return, doesn't have a working search.

Outlook on the other hand has an extremely powerful search

Having only a single box is a fully self-imposed leg wound

I think search has been deprecated in general because it gives the user too much control over the output. Through search, people can quickly find what they are looking for, which is bad. The goal has instead become to feed people tiny scraps and hints of what they're looking for, while leading them on a long trip past any number of sponsors to where the thing they're looking for might be.

I have to assume that Outlook email searches have already been set up to have ads injected into them, when/if one day Microsoft decides to flip the switch. Actually, I'm so out of touch with Windows they might already be doing this.

> The goal has instead become to feed people tiny scraps and hints of what they're looking for, while leading them on a long trip past any number of sponsors to where the thing they're looking for might be

The airport approach to computing!

The answer, as always is Emacs :-)

With mu4e (an Emacs package), you can have lightning fast searching across multiple mail accounts. And with a bit of work (https://stuff.sigvaldason.com/email.html) it will happily interoperate with Microsoft Exchange systems that require the OATH2 dance.

Haha, I love your reply because it brings up auth. You can't do the slightest search or action without first pinging a web server with an auth token. Yet another source of wasting milliseconds.

Have to make it bad so when they inevitably force AI into it, it looks amazing.

Spotlight search on macOS is in general kinda…spotty. Now that we have super fast SSDs it should be instantaneous very reliable. How hard can this be? BeOS seem to have figured it out 30 years ago. Apple missed a chance to fix this once and for all when APFS was developed, but they are fat and happy, no fire in their guts. Craig Ferengi must go.

> Spotlight search on macOS is in general kinda…spotty. Now that we have super fast SSDs it should be instantaneous very reliable.

Which is maddening because back when it was released on Tiger it was great, and on spinning disks.

What’s infuriating is, `find` and `grep` are snappy, they find everything you need in microseconds per gigabyte, and they have no index!

If the macOS or Windows searches were just wrappers for find/grep, it would already be an improvement!

On KDE systems, we have baloo which forms a filesystem index for universal (spotlight-like) search. It's very, very fast and the ranking algorithm for krunner is quite good. I think commercial software should have no issue matching this.

IIRC, VSCode packages a rg binary and uses it for search.

Probably explains why it's something that works well and works fast.

Strong agree. Wrote a blog post about it here:

https://marcoapp.io/blog/marco-an-introduction

We're building an IMAP-primitive, cross-platform, multi-account email client that is single-digit-ms fast in terms of search.

I've given on on macos' mail app too, mailspring isn't perfect but I had mail crash and lose my emails and I couldn't have that happen again. never been an issue with mailspring

Wouldn’t the server always have your mail?

Not in the old days of the POP3 protocol, as opposed to today's IMAP.

Do you really have trouble with Mail.app search? Because I find it STARKLY better than Outlook.

Granted, creating any kind of complex multi-clause query is a pain, but for simple searches it never lets me down whereas Outlook often just fails to find things I know are present.

Yeah the Outlook search function is... exotic.

It's so annoying when I KNOW I sent an email to someone a year ago and I put TO: Their name and it still doesn't come up.

Also: Smart folders still don't exist (e.g. a folder that automatically lists every email with a flag on it or some other condition). At least not in the "New Outlook" which we have to use at work. Apple had this back in 2007.

Same with OneNote by the way and the web version can't even search in whole notebooks, just single folders.

We are a small software company.

We use Office 365 and their hosted Exchange for email. I manage my mail in the native Mac Mail tool; my boss uses Outlook. For commercial exchanges (ie, dialog about sales with customers), we're almost always both on copy.

SEVERAL TIMES A MONTH he asks me to find a mail for him, because Outlook search is letting him down, often on bone simple searches (e.g., for something like a specific PO number or software serial number).

I find it immediately. Outlook strikes out. How do you break search so badly?

Yeah it's because Mac Mail downloads every single email and indexes it locally. Outlook (especially the new one) is just electron-based webmail. So every search happens in the cloud and it doesn't have a full copy of all your emails.

This would not be a problem for searching of course, if the cloud-based search worked properly. But yeah... About that. :X

The "classic" outlook should do it better but it also doesn't in my experience. Though I can't use it anymore at work lately.

It's just so bad because how can they screw this up? It's not some fluff feature, it's a core feature in an email client.

PS: If you have copilot, it does a lot better at finding stuff somehow, though like every AI it can be a bit hit and miss.

AI in search is just evil, something either exists or it doesn't, maybe on a Tuesday isn't good enough.

Well I have mixed feelings about it.

For general searches, I agree. I want those to be highly deterministic. But in that case I need to know exactly what I'm looking for.

There's also the other kind of thing though. "Who was that guy that I emailed with a year or two ago about this issue with MacBook Enrolment?". Yes I can filter by company or other details if I remember those things but sometimes I don't. And that's when AI search can really shine. Or not, it can also totally make up stuff out of its ass. But at least when it comes to emails that's easily verifiable.

I can see the usefulness.

But I'm already sick and tired of search not returning stuff I know is in there, because I forgot to check the blessed combination of boxes.

At that point i would switch to thunderbird or something

It's really a PITA to use standard protocols on M365 now though. They try to make it as difficult as possible. And you need lots of exceptions from your admins. Everything is "legacy", the Microsoft word for Not Invented Here and they make it sound like something super dangerous.

Of course that third party clients don't give them any telemetry, "insights", cross-marketing opportunities like copilot, has nothing to do with it.

How bad the search features in outlook and teams are, is part of the reason I don't bother trying Bing. If you can't get local search right, global search is going to suck too.

They are completely unrelated teams (or at least used to). Might as well be different companies.

Aye, I was being at least a little facetious. The team of indexing global content is quite different to that of searching my local mail and chat logs. The various "English language search" features attempted for SQL Server are different again.

But they are still all search functions, and the Outlook & Teams search functions seem so terrible that you'd think they'd try do something about it to support the pubic view of their other search related efforts.

Only half a century after the creation of grep

Its because everyone is already locked in to use it

They switched to hardware acceleration in the last few years and they removed the toggle to disable it. It still sucks (perf & rendering issues, eg. scrollbar not updating when scrolling) and there's no way to go back to the old rendering engine unless you disable hardware acceleration on Windows as a whole. Lmao.

what kills me about things like this is if you load a 1-2 decade old version of office on a computer today, things are fast.

all they had to do was keep up with whatever features are different in excel between now and then and implement those. leaving the menus and UX mostly alone, only improving things as time went on. update the engine to do the new features, and update the UI only enough to expose the new features and make them accessible.

but no... UX people don't have jobs if they can't redesign shit for no obvious reason. PMs don't have jobs if they can't force nonsense features no one ever asked for. Developers don't have jobs if they don't aggressively chase every new fad and tool and be in a constant state of learning (and thus unlearning).

this whole world is stupid and was a mistake.

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

From Wikipedia on Chinese Water Torture:

> Despite the name, it is not a Chinese invention and it is not traditional anywhere in Asia. Its earliest known version was first documented by Hippolytus de Marsiliis in Bologna (now in Italy) in the late 15th or early 16th century, and it was widely used in Western countries before being popularized by Harry Houdini in the early 20th century.

It turns out that there are lots of different water tortures (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_torture) but the "Chinese" one was first documented in Italy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_water_torture

However, I don't recommend reading those articles beyond the first paragraph and list of contents!

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

Between Office's increasingly bloated size, slow booting and super annoying CoPilot icon right where I'm working (which still can't be turned off in OneNote) - I'm on the edge of dumping Office. I pretty much only use OneNote and a little OneDrive (3% of the included storage plan) to sync files between machines and I run Word and Powerpoint less than a dozen times a year combined.

Even as a paying customer, all the Office apps and services are now so aggressively pushy it's gone beyond "Rude", is now passing "Annoying" and accelerating toward "Yeah, I can't do this." I just want to ask Satya "How much more do I have to pay you to simply STFU and let me NOT use (and not even know about) services I already pay for but don't need?"

I bought three 12 month Office subs for $49 each on a black Friday blow-out three years ago. The last one will expire in January and if it doesn't get better, I'll be ending my 30 year Office relationship. I'll probably go to Libre Office and replace OneDrive cloud storage with SyncThing + my own server. I'd be fine to keep paying $50 a year for the 5% of Office I actually use - but only if I can use the exact Office I had around three years ago before it was so annoying.

This is one of those times when I wish HN still displayed comment karma publicly, not only to the author of the comment. Because I'm sure various Microsoft employees read HN, and they should see what I assume will be a large number of upvotes on that comment, especially for this:

> «Even as a paying customer, all the Office apps and services are now so aggressively pushy it's gone beyond "Rude", is now passing "Annoying" and accelerating toward "Yeah, I can't do this." I just want to ask Satya "How much more do I have to pay you to simply STFU and let me NOT use (and not even know about) services I already pay for but don't need?"»

Office used to be software that justified its cost, it's now just consistently annoying to use.

The windows experience is trash for regular users, it looks like a casino now unless you are aggressive about turning _everything_ off.

However: raising concerns is a bad career move apparently. These ideas... aren't proposed by devs; if that makes sense.

In a conversation with a pal yesterday, I realized I had LONG since stopped doing any actual writing in Word. It's just too huge and slow and clunky. I write in a plaintext environment (options vary, but probably Obsidian or emacs). If or when I fire up Word, it's to structure the document and format it for distribution.

Word is no longer useful to me for composition. This seems like a bad thing.

Does it still have the smooth-animated cursor as you type? That thing messes with my brain, so that I lose my train of thought.

Every time I reinstall office, I am actively googling how to disable that within 5 minutes of using word. I don't get why all these companies keep trying to add flashy crap to what is essentially a hammer.

It reminds me of that college humor sketch about the CEO of Oreo shouting at his team for trying to innovate on the Oreo... It's a solved problem, we made the perfect cookie 100 years ago. Just stop

Office 2003 still works absolutely fine and is free if you bought a licence some time in the past. It doesn't have the stupid ribbon or any other annoying new feature.

I recently wrote a macro so that Word could call an AI API to do AI-assisted translation, works like a charm.

Main problem with office 2003 is that it can't reliably open docx and friends making it more or less non compatible with anything newer. Being able to open only docs you create yourself isn't very useful in a collaborative environment.

The main advantage of office 2003 of course is that it's the last office without activation and other crap: you pass the serial and own it for life, it won't bother you again.

I wantwd to only use 2003 but after the 10th time I argued with a person that sent me a docx for editing I gave up.

Office 2003 can absolutely open docx and xlsx and pptx files. It is annoying because it usually opens those in read-only mode, and then you need to "save as" to do your modifications. But it works fine otherwise.

“View” unfortunately isn’t the same as “Open and edit”, and in business you need to do the latter. Otherwise we’d be 100% libreoffice from the start. Yep, that’s the moat.

It's been a while, but I think what they're saying is that you have to "save as" in order to be allowed to edit. Office 2003 thinks of the compressed versions as export formats rather than internal formats.

> I think what they're saying is that you have to "save as" in order to be allowed to edit.

The issue is that roundtripping between Office 2007+ and Office 2003 is unreliable and will often result in corrupted files.

Using Office 2003 (with Compatibility Pack add-on to open xlsx and docx) is ok for isolated work but can be unreliable for collaborative back & forth editing depending on what features are used. E.g. cell colors used in Excel 2007 xlsx get corrupted in Excel 2003 xls.

Yes that's what I meant. You can edit xlsx in Excel 2003; you open, modify and save as. It's a little annoying but it works.

It's a completely different format. Iirc .doc files are basically implementation defined files and consist of c-structs dumped to disk. .docx is a properly specified format of compressed xml.

It's not "C structs dumped to disk". It's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COM_Structured_Storage, which is basically a filesystem-in-a-file. And it has been documented for a long time, ever since Microsoft was forced to write docs for Office file formats because of antitrust:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/windows_protocol...

> The main advantage of office 2003 of course is that it's the last office without activation and other crap: you pass the serial and own it for life, it won't bother you again.

That's actually not true, Office has had activation since XP (2002), so 2003 is included in that.

There is an addon for 2003 that enables OOXML support. Look for FileFormatConverters.exe.

I used to love Office 2003, and I still do. But... just use LibreOffice at this point. It has an interface that reminds a lot of classic Office, but at least it's more updated and probably safer. It also supports newer file formats.

>Office 2003 still works absolutely fine

It works fine if the user is ok with the features from 2003. E.g. Excel 2003 is limited to smaller spreadsheets of 65536 rows by 256 columns but Excel 2007+ can handle larger worksheets of 1048576 rows by 16384 cols.

I also recently used Excel's new LAMBDA() function which was introduced 2020. In earlier versions, it required writing a VBA UDF to accomplish the same task of assigning a temp variable with a ephemeral value to calculate on intermediate values. VBA is a workaround but LAMBDA() is nicer to use because Excel will throw up scary security warnings whenever the xls file containing VBA macros is opened.

I might be able to get by with Word 2003 more than Excel 2003.

You're right about Excel; however, I think big data files should be handled in a db rather than in a spreadsheet. And sqlite can query Excel files (with an extension), and it's super fast and you can use any function you want, or write your own.

>; however, I think big data files should be handled in a db rather than in a spreadsheet. And sqlite can query Excel files (with an extension)

A lot of normal users of Excel are not users of database software like SQLite or MS Access. That's too cumbersome. E.g. they download a csv file that has ~100000 rows (which really isn't that "big") and clicking on it gets them an instant visual grid as a GUI in Excel. Slicing & dicing and pivoting data is way faster in Excel than coding SQL WHERE GROUP BY statements. I've commented previously on why databases are not substitutes for the workflow ergonomics made possible by spreadsheet tools : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30987638

It's similar to reasons why Python/R or Jupyter notebooks are also not substitutes for Excel for the typical users of Excel.

The low row count of 65536 in Excel 2003 was just a legacy limitation of 1980s 16-bit computing that was carried over into 32-bit computing for many years for backwards compatibility reasons. Spreadsheet users don't really want to switch to databases or Python just to get more usable rows than 65536.

From your linked comment:

> The scenario of "I just sent you an xlsx where the rows highlighted in red are problems and if you can just add your notes to column K, that would be great. Thanks!" -- is not easy in other tools that are not spreadsheets.

There are no words to tell how much I hate that!!! ;-) Users are too creative. Some will merge some cells and not others and boom the file can't be properly sorted anymore. Many will use font color, font weight or background color to mean wildly different things, which is very difficult or impossible to sort or do a sumif over. Others will add footnotes, because why not?, and links to spreadsheets that never leave their own device, or mini-blank-rows for spacing and general layout, etc. It's completely insane.

> I think big data files should be handled in a db rather than in a spreadsheet.

Your side lost completely. Pop a signal flare or build a bonfire, maybe someone can rescue you from the island you've been living on since the war ended.

I don't want to be rescued.

duckdb is doing fine.

If Microsoft had adopted this attitude, then by now Excel's market share would probably be 0% and Google Sheets' would be 100%. Microsoft doesn't add features because they like bloated software; they add features because the market demands them, and the market demanded support for more than 65,535 rows.

I've thankfully never had to deal with anything close to that size, what kind of super computers are they running?

Although I agree about the ribbon and UI, I think Excel 2003 in particular feels quite limited today - it can deal with a max of 255 columns in a sheet and is missing some of the most useful functions (SUMIFS and XLOOKUP spring to mind especially but also the newer array functions like SORT).

Sumif (without the s) worked in Excel 4 (1992), you just had to enter it with CTRL+Enter and use curly braces IIRC. I used it to build dashboards. Not sure what problem sumifs solves beyond sumif.

XLookup sure is useful but again you can probably replace it with a combination of vlookup and hlookup (or index match).

Regarding the size... If you're dealing with huge spreadsheets it's really better to use a proper db. Or even manipulate data with sqlite. sqlite can query xlsx files directly (with an extension), it's extremely fast and stable.

The problem with the column limit is not so much about huge datasets as limiting flexibility in how you can lay things out - 65k rows and 16.7m cells are plenty and I’d be wanting to use a database well before I got there. But 255 columns does feel quite constraining.

And whilst you can work around lack of XLOOKUP or SUMIFS using the older functions, again it constrains how you lay things out (eg VLOOKUP needs you to presort your table by the lookup column if you don’t want an exact match) and this can often result in sheets which are much more unwieldy and slow to calculate.

I seem to recall some layout issues running on a 4k display, or with scaling set to 150% or higher.

I remember Outlook clipping the last character off the email subjects, for example. Might have been Office 2010.

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

I think the user meant that it's "free to keep", it's not a recurring subscription like modern Office versions.

Yes.

No subscription. "Free" to use forever once to obtained the licence, unliie the current crop.

I switch to Google Docs/Sheets/Presentations many years ago as my primary tool and I haven't installed any type of local office in 6 years. Google Workspace has built in digital signature tools and the change tracking in Google Docs is also really good.

Google workspace is awful , it’s super dooper awful with Gemini shoved up my ass all the time , which is impossible to disable, and trains on all my data. Gsuite makes office look good !!

The workspace admins can disable Gemini, among many other things. Google also does not "steal" your data if you read the ToS; any training is strictly scoped to that workspace.

If you thought for a few seconds, you would realize that companies with big legal teams would not sign a contract that would give Google the right to their data.

> any training is strictly scoped to that workspace

Are they really doing training separately for each workspace? I thought LLM training was enormously expensive and needed lots of data, which wouldn't make sense to do separately.

they're no so much training as providing context just when you invoke it

Yeah google does not steal your data and that's why companies like amazon dont even send you full details of your online shopping order so google can't crawl what you bought and what price you bought it for.

my recent amazon order emails actually came with a full itemized list with prices

Is it reasonable to assume that individuals and small companies get the same friendly terms as companies with big legal teams and expensive contracts?

That may be the case, but I wouldn’t count on it. Probably it can change with one email from Google that has “oh btw we’re changing some contract terms, you have 14 days to opt out, no big deal” buried deep down.

I find Google docs very frustrating.

What blows my mind is how dreadful search is in Google docs. The thing that should be really good is really bad.

Strange days

Now that even Google search is garbage, can't really claim they're good at search. It's also always been true that their search at anything aside from the main search product is horrible. YouTube search is its own level of colossal uselessness and has always been that way and has only gotten worse over time. These days it doesn't even show you 10 videos related to your search before going out of its way to show other "related" categories.

I use LibreOffice for 99% of documents completely fine, and generate my own documents via Pandoc. The setup has served me really well so far.

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

True, I had a large contract recently with this issue, but it worked out in the end.

The problem is that we thought "let's switch to the online MS Word editor", which then proceeds to delete your text as you write [1]. Bare in mind that my company pays an Office subscription per employee for that crap.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Office365/comments/11be6wd/firefox_...

[2] https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/how-c...

There are considerable formatting issues when you're working collaboratively on documents with other people who use MS office when you are using MS office too.

We gave up for large documents, assigned an editor and just send them chunks of text.

I can’t stand libreoffice - between tons of bugs (waiting for printers on startup is a default..), extremely janky UI from 20 years ago, poor performance, exceptionally slow load times, and bad formatting issues and incompatibilities.. it’s just an awful experience overall.

> between tons of bugs (waiting for printers on startup is a default..),

Never had issues with printers to be fair, but it sounds like something that could be done in a background thread.

Bare in mind that we are contrasting this with Office, which is itself incredibly slow to start.

> extremely janky UI from 20 years ago

I love this about Libreoffice, everything can be located super reliably.

> poor performance

For a Java application I think it's crazily fast?

> and bad formatting issues and incompatibilities

It's certainly not a 100% drop-in replacement. A lot of the formatting issues I have experienced is because a Office user did something that assumes a perfect renderer - something we don't even get in browsers. Like people pressing enter multiple times to create a new page and not just CTRL+ENTER.

> For a Java application I think it's crazily fast?

LibreOffice isn't written in Java. It can optionally use Java for extensions and for some database reporting features: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Faq/General/015

I believe you're correct, I saw some error message on start-up and always assumed it was a Java application.

I've been using OnlyOffice lately. I'm not a hardcore office user so maybe someone else can comment on how it is compared to Libre/MS Office.

https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DesktopEditors

I used to always have an Office installation on my computer, whether it's pirated (many years ago)/using my personal license/using my school license/etc.

Then I got a new computer without bothering to do the installation. It was a long time before I discovered that I need any of Word/Excel/PowerPoint. And I was able to get by with Google Docs. If that's not good enough, I go to the free version of Office 365. In the rare occasions where I need the actual, native Office software for compatibility/functionality reasons, I do it on another machine I have access to. This has worked out surprisingly well.

I've been pretty happy with OnlyOffice. I'm pretty sure it's based on Libre or OpenOffice but looks much more similar to 2012~ era MS Office.

OnlyOffice is not based on LibreOffice. CollaboraOffice does. jfyi

No. It's js, render in qtwebengine.

I guess you already know, but you do not necessarily need a server for Syncthing if the devices are on at the same time. If they are not, a simple low-power rpi-like device would be more than enough to implement a star topology, with the pi being receive-only.

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 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.

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

you use OneNote? I had text search randomly stop working in that thing, no explanation just nothing found. For me this was the Microsoft last straw.

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

> LibreOffice 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.

LibreOffice should have provided a theme/icon pack "Office Icons" - half the time I can't tell what an icon is for because most of us have been raised on MS Office. Also, it would do well with a "Simple" mode ala Google Docs that is sufficient most of the time for most folks.

Otherwise it works fine, haven't had any issues with the documents it produces and I particularly like the direct export to pdf feature.

LibreOffice has several themes that makes it look like MS Office (e.g. ribbons, modern UI, etc).

Select TOOLS > OPTIONS > ADVANCED > Enable experimental Options (WARNING this is experimental and may be unstable) > OK and then RESTART LIBREOFFICE. On restart VIEW > TOOLBAR LAYOUT > NOTEBOOKBAR. You can then play with the options with VIEW > NOTEBOOKBAR > CONTEXTUAL GROUPS/ CONTEXTUAL SINGLE / TABBED.

It is actually View -> Toolbars -> Customize -> Notebookbar but within that there is only "Tabbed" option which doesn't really show a way to change themes.

This is a perfect example of actions that make adoption harder. This should have been at most 2 clicks and prominently displayed assuming LibreOffice wants to be a great alternative to MS Office and make the transition easier. I have been using Linux daily for over 20 years now and it is not intuitive to me - it doesn't make me very optimistic about the experience for a new user.

Nope, it's actually Menu -> User Interface: https://postimg.cc/sMhhFvC1

Then this dialog appears: https://postimg.cc/YhVWyQVJ

Found it - thanks! I wish this was more easily accessible to new users - it actually makes a difference in terms of organization of icons and ease of finding things.

It probably depends mostly on what you're used to. I find that LibreOffice looks fine - no worse than most apps, and much better than Microsoft's UI.

For the occasional user, various online office suites are also an option.

On my personal computers, I haven’t use MS Office in close to 20 years.

I use it at work, because that’s what we’re given to use, but 95% of my usage is opening CSV files in Excel. I find documents are rarely written in Word anymore, and the use of PowerPoint is actively discouraged at this point.

If the parent commenter only uses Office a dozen times per year, they should quite easily get by with something else. Google Docs, iWork, a simple text editor… there are options beyond LibreOffice. Which specific options would depend one what those dozen uses actually are.

My work pays for a full O365 subscription for me. The web apps are more than I'll ever need as someone who basically uses Excel and Word as an interchange format.

Oh, that's too bad. I haven't checked it out in a long time. However, in recent years the Office UX has been getting increasingly worse for me too. Not ugly, just bigger and fatter, taking up more screen space to show less info.

If open source alternatives aren't suitable, my fallback is to get whatever the last retail box versions were of the few Office apps I actually occasionally use and then never update them. There hasn't been a single new Office feature I care about added in about ten years.

OpenOffice/Libreoffice lets you choose between multiple UX styles, which rearranges the buttons like old office, the ribbon stuff, and many more. I was amazed when I first noticed this (kind of hidden) feature. You should check it out.

LibreOffice also does this.

Correct. Thanks for the hint. I keep mixing up openoffice and libreoffice even though I only use libreoffice on my system.

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

Check out Only Office

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).

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

Wow, this takes me back.

I actually worked on Office performance many years ago. We did a lot of very clever stuff to improve the product, even to the point of optimizing the byte ordering on disk (spinning rust) so that the initial boot would be faster.

That said, it always felt a bit like a losing battle. The goal was "make Office not get slower". It's very hard to convince app teams that their new shiny abstraction or graphics object is actually the reason everything is worse, and it's even more challenging when there's no direct impact- just a broad increase in system memory pressure.

Typically, perf isn't a few bad decisions. It's a very large number of independently reasonable decisions that add up to a bad result. If the team loses that discipline for even one moment then it's very very difficult to fix. I wonder if my former team still exists or if they've all been reassigned elsewhere.

> Typically, perf isn't a few bad decisions. It's a very large number of independently reasonable decisions that add up to a bad result. If the team loses that discipline for even one moment then it's very very difficult to fix. I wonder if my former team still exists or if they've all been reassigned elsewhere.

This is precisely where the adage "premature optimization is the root of all evil" falls apart. You really do need everyone to care about performance to an obsessive, unreasonable degree to keep the entire, massive system performant. Companies with good engineering leadership understand this. The thousand cuts can come from language, libraries, feature creep, and pure ignorance or carelessness.

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

It's premature in the sense that you need to care about it before you do profiling, which is the usual advice for perf improvements: "you don't know where the hotspots are, so write your code, profile it, and fix the slow bits".

And if you try to bring up perf at any point during the design phase, people pull the ”Knuth said premature optimization is the root of all evil” card. As if you could design and build a Ford Pinto, then hotspot optimize it into a Saturn V

  > 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?

He wrote that in 1974. Software products were orders of magnitude smaller back then.

I recently discovered that Apple has something called "Pages" and "Numbers" - simple apps that serve as alternatives to Word and Excel. They're so straightforward and intuitive that they require no learning curve. They just work.

It seems like things like this are no longer possible for Microsoft. They keep producing clunky tools which, although functional, always come with a horribly frustrating UX (as usual).

I've been working within the Microsoft tech stack for around 25 years now (mostly SQL Server). I used to be a huge fan of their products because they were one of the best companies when it came to developer experience (developers! developers!). Unfortunately, that was a long time ago. Things are very different now. Of all the things I once liked, only SQL Server really remains (ironically, it's a technology they acquired - it used to be Sybase). I still think C#, F#, and PowerShell are great, but I actively discourage people from using most of their so-called "products" because the quality is just appallingly low.

Even something like Visual Studio is better replaced with Rider + LINQPad. Their GitHub repositories are full of open issues that have been dragging on for years. There's virtually nothing left of the old Microsoft that I still respect or admire.

That said, I have to admit that most other corporations aren't any better - there's a general trend of maximizing profit while offering the lowest quality that customers are still willing to tolerate. If I were starting IT studies today, I would go 100% down the open-source path.

I'm a Macbook user, but I often have screen sharing experiences with people using Windows laptops, god, it's painful watching them. Brand new, solid book with decent specs, only used for few months and everything is visibly very slow. Opening some documents and presentations while being on screen share takes minutes, file explorer lags, screen compositor lags. Notifications with weather, STOCKS info, murders and clickbait news around just pop up mid-conferences.

The most funny part? I was debugging application .exe not starting. Reason? AVG antivirus UPLOADED EXE to their server for EXAMINATION. EXE with an 600$ Extended Validation license. There was a message for the user TO WAIT FEW HOURS before they studied it and exe could be unblocked from launching. All was completely normal to the said windows user. What a dystopian thing they are used to

Sounds like an AVG problem, not a Windows problem.

The very normalization of antivirus on Windows is a Windows problem. For better or worse, Mac users simply don't think about AV.

I use Pages as my default word processor. It doesn’t have all of Word’s features but I seldom need them, and it’s much faster than Word. I highly recommend it.

Same. I use Word only to edit Word files that I have to send back to someone outside my company. That's not often for me. Pages is vastly better for every other use case I have.

Numbers used to be painfully slow. It was just maybe 3 years ago or so it improved a lot. It was practically unusable for large spreadsheets. I swear spreadsheets from 20 years earlier performed better on much slower hardware. If you haven't used Numbers for a few years, maybe give it another try.

Also shout out to Keynote which is the best presentation software. PowerPoint is so clunky in comparison. Nice features like making image backgrounds transparent are huge wins.

Pages is also pretty nice. Its definitely enough for home usage, and if my colleagues could read the pages files natively I would find it completely sufficient for professional use. I find it does layout much better than MS Office. Which honestly is a much bigger concern for home users: professional users will just switch to professional layout tools when they need it, but Sam doesn't need that cost/complexity for some bake sale fliers.

Numbers can also be nicer for home use cases, but is a bit weird if you're used to excel. And unlike pages or keynote quickly hits upper limits on complexity. I would never use numbers in a professional setting.

Meanwhile Microsoft removed WordPad in the latest version of Windows 11. It was a great simple word processor and text editor. It even supported docx and odt files.

Numbers has it's issues as well. I have to open .csv files dozens if not hundreds of times a day - always the same format. Numbers will not allow me to default to freezing the first/header column or _not_ show the formatting sidebar on open. I have to set the freeze header option and close the sidebar every time.

At this point, I've started using IDE extensions when I just need to view/filter

If you’re doing it often enough, you might benefit from using AppleScript to automate opening it in an app and changing setting . Not ideal, but it’ll make it a lot less annoying.

Microsoft's free web app office suite is a slimmed down, quick version of Office that does most of the stuff most users want most of the time, for the cases where Pages or Google Docs would also suffice.

The alternative to the full office suite with decades of backwards compatibility and hundreds of features, is the quick, free version Microsoft made to fight off Google Docs.

We've reached peak bloat when the version of an app that lives in a fucking browser is "slimmed down" and "fast" compared to the real app.

> A recently discovered that Apple has something called "Pages" and "Numbers" - simple apps that serve as alternatives to Word and Excel. They're so straightforward and intuitive that they require no learning curve. They just work.

And yet, weirdly, macOS comes up with absolutely no image editor of any kind. There's no equivalent of MS Paint. It's infuriating.

hey there's preview

yeah preview can do more than it appears it can do.

quicktime pro was like that. it was insanely powerful and things were all hidden behind just a few menu items and a few little added UI elements here and there. quicktime pro was amazing and I miss it a bit.

They just purchased Pixelmator ;)

I assume we should wait and see whether they'll roll up their software into next macOS right?

yeah I was surprised to find myself donwloading gimp for image editing. However, Microsofts modern paint (paint3d? I dont remember what they call it) is atrocious imo so I can't really fault apple.

I use Numbers daily for simple local spreadsheet math / tables. It works for what I need and I'm glad every new Mac comes with it.

Windows is bafflingly bad. It's gotten so much worse in the last four years, but it's always been bad. I've never gotten bluetooth to work correctly on Windows. Apps randomly crash. Three different versions of settings pages, and they crash. Snipping Tool only works half the time. I had to run a debloater on my system because searching for something in the Start Menu would never give me the results I wanted. Xbox ads during gameplay... I mean the list goes on.

I'm done with it. I've switched to Ubuntu and I haven't looked back. I only boot up my Windows installation when I need to do game development on Unreal or use an incompatible program. But for now, MacOS and Linux are covering everything.

I used to be a big gamer but I've basically given up on playing games that don't work on Linux. The selection of games is steadily growing and some games work at launch (like Oblivion Remastered).

I know there's a lot of animosity for GNOME, but it's the best Linux desktop in my opinion. In terms of polish it's definitely the closest to MacOS.

Application installs are still an absolute pain, but it's gotten better. At the very least I can now go through the Ubuntu App Center to get the most common apps. There's the occassional app that doesn't work (like VLC) and then I'll have to look into Snap or Flatpak or whatever other variation of app packaging Linux devs decide to unleash on the masses... but then it works and I don't think about it again.

One last gripe for me is the lack of HDR support in Ubuntu. I can't use my LG C2 with it. But I've switched to using two Dell monitors with DisplayPort and now it doesn't matter... and I use the LG C2 with something else.

For the average user this experience sucks. But for me, I'm okay putting up with this pain if it means never using Windows again.

> Windows is bafflingly bad. It's gotten so much worse in the last four years, but it's always been bad. I've never gotten bluetooth to work correctly on Windows. Apps randomly crash. Three different versions of settings pages, and they crash. Snipping Tool only works half the time. I had to run a debloater on my system because searching for something in the Start Menu would never give me the results I wanted. Xbox ads during gameplay... I mean the list goes on.

Not to defend Microsoft, as I've firmly believed them to be a shitty entity for a loooong time now, but as a counter example and many years going on Windows 10/11, I don't have any of these issues and I've only run debloater maybe a few times in the last 5 years.

I don't know wtf people are installing on their PCs to make them so shitty like this, but I've not encountered these things across dozens of personal or employer devices in recent in times. Like not even once. Maybe you're downloading beta drivers? Maybe the manufacturer of your devices are cheapo brands with poorly made chipsets? Maybe you have bloatware installed by your manufacturer that you haven't uninstalled? At this stage, it's hard to believe this is not some kind of user error. Be it a lack of research before acquiring a device, or lack of knowledge on how to navigate the device.

Edit: to put into perspective a bit more, I use my main laptop - a Lenovo Legion laptop - for gaming (many acquired through the "dark waters" even), full-stack software development, AI video up-scaling, photo-editing, running a media-server (Jellyfin), torrenting, office programs, running virtual machines, running WSL2 with docker, running many various open-source programs, producing music with Ableton and a plethora of third-party VSTs, etc.

No issues.

Windows doesn't have "issues", per se. As in the system is pretty stable and it works, presumably, like it's designed.

The problem is the design is just bad. Lots of things are just sucky and they're meant to be that way. Search is ass, explorer is half-decent only in Windows 11. There's way more than 3 settings panels, and yes, they all look different. You still have to edit the registry for some random tweaks. Apps put there files god knows where. Every app updates independently. You still have to go online and download random .exe and .msi files to install things. If you get errors the message is typically worthless. The system tray is a fucking mess. IIS sucks. powershell is okay but cmd is still around and yes, sometimes you have to use it. And, cherry on top, everything is slowwwww. Especially the file system. You don't really notice it until you have a version controlled code base but NTFS has to be, like, 1000x slower than competing Linux filesystems.

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

There are other like Anyoffice or Caligra Office. Or you can use any web based one...even office365 ;-)

If your needs are smaller you can do a lot with just abiword and gnumeric. They launch instantly.

Gnome evolution is much nicer to use than Outlook in my experience.

Personally, I live the Office license my workplace pays for untouched, and use LibreOffice on my work Windows computer instead.

Yes, it's slow and bloated. But it's comparably faster and leaner, and it doesn't use undocumented APIs to take resources away from everything else running on the same computer and make every other thing unusable.

And yeah, calc lacks features when compared to excel. So, avoid spreadsheets for complex problems.

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

I haven't used the office tools on Linux for years, but since they are based on the same 30 year old idea of an office suite, would you expect them to be much better? I don't think it is productive to choose among equally antiquated and poor quality alternatives. It isn't going to advance the status quo.

In terms of word processing (which is perhaps an archaic term by now) I would ask people to look at what Visual Studio Code is. A rather minimal, skeletal, code editing platform that derives nearly all its value from the extensions people make for it. There are lots and lots of editors and IDEs. But extremely few of them serve as platforms. As the infrastructural basis for creating applications.

Yes, there are IDEs that are possibly marginally better at editing, say, Java or Go code. But VSC is pretty good at almost every language that is in common use today. And it manages to compete pretty well with more specialized solutions. It does this because an editor that does 90% in all the languages you use is far more valuable than switching between two editors that perhaps achieve 95%.

Word, and its open source counterparts, are antiquated and obsolete. I don't think the field can be advanced by building word processors that are just iterations of 30 year old ideas. Yes, you can probably extend them, but people don't. You have to understand what it is that makes some pieces of software work as platforms (like VSC), and why other pieces of software do not inspire people to build on them.

I think Microsoft should reinvent Word as a platform that is designed to be extended and that is easy to extend. I would then release the base software platform as open source. Much of the functionality that resides in Word today I would move to paid extensions - including useful bundles of extensions. This way Microsoft would retain its revenue stream, and I wouldn't have to deal with all of the crud Word contains.

I would also create a marketplace for both paid and free (open source) extensions. Which in turn would make the product more valuable (even though the base product is free). Because other companies and people invest in it and have a shared interest in its health beyond mere existence.

Of course, not only Microsoft can do this. Anyone could create an editing platform. But it would have to be someone with a bit of money who can spend perhaps 5-6 years supporting the effort to see if it takes off. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't.

One reason I see this as perhaps the only way forward for this class of application is that I'm doing some work for a company that manufactures physical products. A would-be advanced user of office automation tools. This kind of business has a very complex document structure where there's a vast hierarchy of thousands of documents that goes into every project and even spans projects. Doing this with Word, Sharepoint and whatnot is complicated, fragile and requires a lot of work. It doesn't work very well. It also means you have to memorize a lot of procedures. This could have benefitted from very narrow, domain specific tooling. Including LLMs that allow you to ask questions with context derived from sources other than the Word documents. Yes, Microsoft is trying to stuff this into their products, but it isn't actually all that useful because it is generic. It is never going to support what our customer needs.

I don't think Office, LibreOffice etc are the right kind of tools. They are children of the 1990s. We have better starting points today and better technology. It is time to re-think this.

What you might be thinking of is Notion and its cohort: capacities, miro, (maybe) craft, etc

I love this idea, and agree with your assessment of office tools in general. You almost make me want to try it, but it's evident the size this body of work would take.

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

Most of what Microsoft does is indeed bafflingly bad. With a few exceptions. The baseline for software from Microsoft appears to be slow, bad UX and very buggy. And it isn't like this is some image thing; Microsoft products are always worse than I could remember when I'm confronted with them after some time away from them.

Developers at Microsoft are obviously not rewarded for quality. You have to assume that this is because managers and leaders in Microsoft are not rewarded for quality. You would think that a company that has deep pockets would be in a great position to do more ground-up re-implementations. And to do so with quality, performance and correctness as the main focus.

For instance the office suite. The last 20 or so years have taught me that an Office suite can be a lot simpler and it will actually work better if it is simpler. Just in the last 5 years I have observed three different companies where people routinely perform most of their writing and editing in other tools and then insert what they have written in Word. Because it is far better than creating the content in Word itself. At my current consulting gig a lot of people write things in Google Docs and then import them into Word documents to produce the official versions of documents.

Word is a mess. It is packed with too many features you will never use. Those have a cost because they take up screen space, and make the features you do care about harder to find and use. Word constantly distracts you because it misbehaves and you have to somehow try to deal with its quirks and interruptions. It is slow, complex and resource intensive.

Word is objectively not a very good piece of software. I have never met anyone who loves it. Who feels that Word makes them more productive than any alternatives. It is software you have to cope with. Software that must be tolerated. Or not.

I do not understand why Microsoft, with its deep pockets, has made no attempt to reinvent, for instance, Word, to create a word processor from scratch. With focus on quality, correctness, performance, usability, and perhaps most importantly: easy extensibility.

They could draw some inspiration from Visual Studio Code. There are many things that are wrong with VS Code, but they got a few things right. The most important being that unlike other IDEs it is essentially just a skeletal platform that derives its value from extensions. Third party extensions. This means that VS Code can be adapted to fit your individual needs, or more importantly, the needs to segments of users. It means that people who want to make tools can build on VS Code rather than having to do a lot of work orthogonal to their goal to create tooling.

Yes, you can probably wrangle special functionality into Word. But nobody does. Not at any meaningful scale.

Word is rooted in a world that existed before many of you were born. A world that is long gone. There has been decades of technology evolution. If you were to develop a word processor today, you would be starting from a point that is completely different.

And let's not get started on Azure. I have to deal with it about every two years. And every two years I try to approach it with an open mind and with optimism. Surely they have fixed things now? I am always disappointed. Things look slick on the surface, but then you start to use them, and you are confronted with systems that are slow, slow, slow, ugly and buggy. AWS is certainly not the belle of the ball. Its constant complexity and the awkwardness and just overall badness of the tooling makes me limit how much of it I make myself dependent on AWS services.

But at least AWS isn't as bad as Azure.

I don't get why Microsoft can't seem to invest in quality. Yes, I get all the arguments that it just needs to be good enough for their customers to keep using them, but surely, at some point it has to hurt your pride.

If I were in Nadella's shoes I would invest heavily in quality. In stripping things down. In starting over. In making sure that I understand the required cultural change required to make products that are objectively speaking, good. If not great. And perhaps that requires getting rid of a lot of long-time leaders that just can't change gears. Perhaps it requires creating teams that are isolated to a greater degree from other teams so they don't drag each other down.

> You would think that a company that has deep pockets would be in a great position to do more ground-up re-implementations. And to do so with quality, performance and correctness as the main focus.

Why is this always the go-to? The Windows 11 start menu and task bar are exactly that, from scratch re-implementations of what existed before and they are garbage. There is a lot of institutional knowledge in that old code and to pretend it holds no to little value gives us half-hearted replacements which never quite ascend to the heights they were supposed to replace.

Sure, there are some exceptions where the concept around "what the thing is" needed to change and a new product needs to re-imagine a solution (VS -> VSCode). However, I feel that we, the software development community, put way more hope that this is true way more often than it is in reality.

Well, then they are one in four. The other three were quality, performance and correctness. Simply re-implementing something, or writing something that is poor software isn't sufficient.

As for knowledge: yes, it is more valuable than the software. That does not imply the software is the only place where software is stored. In its most useful form it is stored in people. Which is why you should revisit, and rewrite, code that is important often enough to ensure the knowledge is passed on.

However, don't forget to make room for new knowledge and new ideas. That has hardly happened to Office suites for 30 years. They just tend to become "more".

> 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.

> I had to run a debloater on my system

Hot take: your ""debloater"" screwed up your system.

I've had problems with Windows, but none of the ones you've described.

> For the average user this experience sucks. But for me, I'm okay.

I guess this describes my Windows experience. I _know_ some people have problems. I don't, because I guess either I got used to it or I know how to avoid it.

Windows kind of has this property where it rots. Both in time between reboots and in time in general. Running Windows 1+ week without a reboot and it just... gets a little more buggy and a little more slow each day. And then after a few years, it's time for a reinstall.

Windows rot used to mean periodically reformatting. With WinMe you had 1 month. With XP I found it unbearable around 9 months.

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

> Snipping Tool only works half the time.

This started happening to me too like six months ago. I figured, "yet again they broke something with an update, but it'll probably fix itself eventually."

Nope!

I'd switch to some 3rd party tool but my employer doesn't allow any since we all got upgraded to Windows 11. Why don't they allow it anymore? Because the snipping tool (Snip & Sketch).

At least they still let me install Ditto (I never liked how the Windows clipboard history feature works... No, I'll paste when I want to paste—not when I select the item!)

stupid question: why haven't we even heard of an attempt to say rewrite office from scratch or how about even bigger like write windows from scratch for the next version and scrap all the 20 yr old+ workarounds hardcoded into it

because it's not worth the risk of breaking plenty applications out there (or in the case of office, documents). I have heard stories of MS making changes to keep older apps working. Imagine carrying all that to a new rewrite.

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

this is like a word-for-word repeat of a comment that i've seen probably 1,000 times in my career.

> never gotten bluetooth to work on windows

I seriously doubt this. seriously. if true, it is a user problem, because i've never had an issue, nor has anyone I know.

> apps randomly crash

true of any operating system, also that's not what "randomly" means. you mean "unexpectedly" I think.

> settings pages crash

never happened to me, ever. if it has, it was infrequent enough that i have no memory of it, and i've never heard this complaint before from anyone.

> snipping tool only works half the time

again, I use that thing continuously on Windows and it always works.

> xbox ads during gameplay

what game? what [everything]? I've never seen this and I play games on windows all the dang time.

it very much sounds like you've cherry picked experiences that others have had and piled them all here and declared that they happen to you. Maybe they have, I don't know, but if this has all happened to you in the last 4 years, you are the only person on the planet who has experienced this. Not even in the depths of Microsofts online communities and the Microsoft Discord do I read of a single person with all of these problems.

I don't know what your problems are underneath, but they're not Microsoft. If they were, I would have those problems, and I don't. Some of these were common 10 years ago when Windows 10 came out, but only for a month or two. Certainly not in the past 4 years. not unless you're intentionally avoiding upgrades or something.

I love these kinds of comments. It reminds me of the Reddit threads of people complaining about bugs on Cyberpunk 2077's release, only for people to reply with "I played the game, I didn't run into any bugs! What bugs are you talking about?" Meanwhile a quick Google/YouTube search reveals entire montages devoted purely to bugs.

Here are Windows Forum threads talking about each of the problems I've mentioned, with thousands of people saying "I have the same question":

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/unable...

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/window...

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/window...

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/snippi...

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

This is likely because people take their customizations (like custom setup scripts to “decrapify” windows) that used to work great on previous versions of windows and apply them unchanged to new versions or something, because “windows is the same underneath, this is just a reskin that they charge you $150 for.” Every time I have helped someone with problems like these (when I did see them a lot earlier in my career) it was because they did something goofy to cause it. Like using a PCIe to PCI adapter with a PCI to ISA adapter, so they could plug in a flipping Sound Blaster64 or something. “I’m not buying a new sound card!! I’m not using the onboard sound!! I bought this sound blaster in 1996 and I want to use it!! Microsoft should let me!!”

Others would show me how the computer would act weird after unplugging PCI cards while the computer was running, and blame Microsoft. “See!? SEE?!” Every single WTF moment I had in desktop support with issues like this was user error.

Maybe yours aren’t. Maybe the Microsoft Answers forum is filled with exceptionally smart people who all know exactly how to use a computer, never ask stupid questions, and never give wrong answers, but I think we both know that isn’t really true.

> I seriously doubt this. seriously. if true, it is a user problem, because i've never had an issue, nor has anyone I know.

I have about a 50% success rate with Bluetooth devices pairing and reconnecting properly on Windows, so at least I’m doing better than OP.

The Bluetooth software stack on the whole is a disaster, but the only platform where I’ve had a trouble free experience is macOS.

THANK YOU.

Team X is responsible for feature Foo; feature Foo is slow; team X introduces Foo-preload, metrics go up, person responsible gets a bonus.

Multiply that by tens (or even hundreds) of teams and your app startup (either on desktop or mobile) is now a bloated mess. Happened to Office, Facebook iOS and countless others.

One solution is to treat startup cycles as a resource similar to e.g. size or backend servers.

> One solution is to treat startup cycles as a resource similar to e.g. size or backend servers.

The only way to achieve performance metrics in a large org IMO.

Google Search is still fast because if you degrade p99 latency an SRE will roll back your change. Macbooks still have good battery life because Apple have an army of QA engineers and if they see a bump on their Ammeters that MacOS release doesn't go ahead.

Everything else (especially talking about "engineers these days just don't know how to write efficient code") is noise. In big tech projects you get the requirements your org encodes in its metrics and processes. You don't get the others. It's as simple as that.

Never worked at MS but it's obvious to me that the reason Windows is shit is that the things that would make it good simply aren't objectives for MS.

As an ex-Microsoft SDET who worked on Windows, we used to test for those things as well. In 2014.

Then Microsoft made the brave decision that testers were simply unnecessary. So they laid off all SDETs, then decided that SDE’s should be in charge of the tests themselves.

Which effectively made it so there was no test coverage of windows at all, as the majority of SDE’s had not interacted with the test system prior to that point. Many/most of them did not know how to run even a single test, let alone interpret its results.

This is what Microsoft management wanted, so this is what they got. I would not expect improvement, only slow degradation as Windows becomes Bing Desktop, featuring Office and Copilot (Powered By Azure™).

Makes perfect sense. It recently became clear to me (e.g. [2]) that it's not a cohesive concept but to me personally this is the meaning of POSIWID [1].

Basically making Windows a good desktop OS is not in any meaningful way the "purpose" of that part of MS. The "purpose" of any team of 20+ SWEs _is_ the set of objectives they measure and act upon. That's the only way you can actually predict the outcomes of its work.

And the corrolary is that you can usually quite clearly look at the output of such an org and infer what its "purpose" is, when defined as such.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_w...

[2] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comment...

Then the OS team will fight back with options to disable all of these startup things. Like the Startup tab in Windows Task Manager with an "impact" column and easy button to disable annoying startup programs. It's interesting to even see it play out within the same company.

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

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

“I could do this all day!”

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

That could already be the case. The initial release is from 1990, so the codebase is at least 35 years old.

I don't have a good guess for the average age of software developers at Microsoft, but claude.ai guesses the average "around 33-38 years" and the median "around 35-36 years old".

"but claude.ai guesses"

To my ears this is the equivalent of "some guy down the pub said", but maybe I am a luddite.

You're not a luddite, they disclosed it because you're _supposed_ to take it with a grain of salt

Office was released in 1990, but Excel in 1985 and Word in 1983.

I'm told from MS friends that there are still files with the intact 1987 changelog in Word; as well as workarounds for dot matrix printers that were released 40+ years ago.

Also, the Office codebase is significantly larger than Windows (and has been for a while), that was surprising to me.

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

No. No. No.

Microsoft need to update the spec for all new personal computers to include mandatory pre-load hardware. This would have a secondary CPU, RAM and storage used for pre-loading licensed Office products before your laptop boots. AI would analyse your usage patterns and fire-up Office for you before you even get to work in the morning.

Perhaps, this could even allow you to have Office on-hand, ready-to-use on its own hardware module, while you develop Linux application on your main CPU.

Further down the line. Someone see an opportunity to provide access to compatible modules in the cloud, allowing re-use of older incompatible hardware. But there would be the danger that service (without the support of MS), may go bust, leaving those users without their mandatory instant access to licensed Office products, forcing upgrades to even newer hardware.

Raymond Chen wrote about this.

At this point I view Windows as a legacy/compatibility OS, all the news about Windows is how they are making it worse for everyone.

And using it now and then it feels like that too. Windows 10 Mail app had integration with system calendar, you would get itsycal built into the OS. Windows 11 removed that and made the OS Mail app spam infested shit, and they expect me to pay a subscription for something that comes bundled with the OS I paid for.

Linux desktop is getting better but I still wouldn't daily drive it, so MacOS it is until Linux desktop gets to a more reliable state. I wouldn't be shocked it gets there - I believe Valve made relatively low investments and got a lot out of it, GPU vendors have an incentive to support it - for compute workloads and the gaming on Linux is becoming a thing. Also for office stuff the EU-US hostility could force EU to look for alternative software providers and move away from Microsoft.

Actually thinking about this just made me donate some $ to Gnome project.

I really want to like GNOME, but GNOME's developers have almost as much arrogance and contempt for their users as Microsoft.

As an example, the power button can no longer be configured to power off the machine, because this is "too destructive". I'm not talking about defaults -- they removed the ability for me to make this choice for myself. Not even Microsoft has done that.

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=755953

On my machine, the power button is recessed and requires quite a bit of force to press. It is impossible to press accidentally, but the GNOME developers apparently know best.

My favorite GNOME developer's hill to die on is their refusal to implement a system tray or work with the rest of the Linux desktop community to create an alternative to the system tray. Don't get me wrong there has been a abuse of the system tray but the refusal to acknowledge that there is a use case for persistent notifications or status indicators is ridiculous. there suggestion is that notifications are the solution is so inadequate. It's pretty telling that their arguments aren't sound when they have chosen to implement traditional system tray items such as a battery indicator and volume indicator as built in items on the task bar but they dismiss the idea that a chat app status indicator would be useful.

Mark Shuttleworth (of Ubuntu fame) had quite a bit to say about trying to get AppIndicators into GNOME.

https://archive.is/M1MW2

I guess, those of us who actually like the idea should be more vocal. As otherwise the devs would read the comments and decide nobody likes what they do. Personally, I’m super happy about current Gnome. Coming after 10+ years of macOS. I don’t want to see that ugly mess of visual distractions on my screen all the time. Basic vitals like battery is okay for me. Distractions from apps, I don’t need them. They serve zero purpose to me, and being a computer user of 20+ years, I never interacted with those widgets. Even on Windows. So, kudos to Gnome team, I really like Gnome since 42 or when they started this radical simplicity thing. I enjoy the system each and every day I interact with it, and it does not wear off. It’s not like it looks cool, but after a couple of days I understand it isn’t.

Thing is: That's your preference and nobody should force you to use these indicators. Even on Windows, the tray icons are usually mostly hidden away.

I find them highly useful on macOS, but there I lack the configurability I have on Windows.

GNOME is open to adding a system tray. There are even designs for it.

There is just no one working on the technology. TingPing, an Igalia employee and GNOME contributor, was working on a new D-Bus protocol for it, but the work stopped. There is a PR up on the freedesktop xdg-specs repository.

I am personally so glad Gnome does not have a system tray, on every other DE its a disgusting mess of differently scaled and styled icons.

So rather than disable the system tray, or use other applications that don't have inconsistent scaled and styled icons, you'd prefer that nobody who uses Gnome is able to have a system tray?

I prefer not having to worry about it at all, and I don't. Its tidy by default and stays tidy no matter what I install. Many other "deficiencies" in Gnome, like the lack of desktop filing, or the austere file manager contribute to this tidiness.

The first versions of Gnome 3 did indeed have a system tray for backwards compatibility, and it was hidden out of the way until you needed it. Eventually it was scrapped once enough software was updated to not rely on it.

If somebody insists on having a messy UI, they can use literally any other DE available for Linux.

That sounds like an issue that could be solved by forcing icons and sizes for the tray.

Just give users the ability to pin the icons they care about and hide the others in a pop-out panel like Windows does.

That too, very basic feature that should be in every DE.

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

XFCE is wonderful. I wish it got more dev time

XFCE is the Win 2000 UI of the Linux ecosystem, perfectly functional and fine; tweaks are possible if needed.

So is https://www.trinitydesktop.org/

While it may seem overblown, it's absolutely RIDICULOUS how fast it flies on contemporary systems, and even older ones.

One can also omit most of their other apps, with the exception of KWIN, drawing the desktop and its window decorations, and konqueror, the filemanager, and the things managing the menu(bar(s)), applauncher.

Using modern apps for the rest, like anywhere else.

And have them styled, themed however you like. With a few mouseclicks.

It does a lot of things, though many are somewhat subtle, like screen locking timeout and stuff with networking and a bunch of utility programs and so on. I like to start off Xfce Debian and plaster i3wm over it, it's the best 'power user' setup I've come across.

I wouldn't hesitate to put a 'regular' computer user in front of Xfce, it strikes a nice combination of simple and discoverable with very few annoyances. It's also where I go when I want to use some many-windowed application that doesn't fit into tiling.

I've never been big on the Windows UI patterns but I recently started using KDE on one of my machines and it feels more polished than the Windows desktop. It has a few quirks but it's one of the most satisfying out-of-the-box desktops I've used, and I primarily use a niche dynamic tiling wm on all my other machines.

KDE is great. It gets slept on because of its bad rap circa 2004, but it has low-key become the best DE by far. Sane defaults, nothing tries to fight you, everything is configurable.

If you don't have the time or inclination to tinker with things like tiling WMs - and more power to you if you do, but I don't - KDE is the best there is.

I've been using KDE for a good decade or so, and what a lot of people don't know is that not only is the desktop great, the applications are, too.

Everyone knows Dolphin is by far the best file manager, but not a lot of people know that Kate is fantastic. Konsole is really good too. The new System Monitor basically replaces a ton of programs. Spectacle is a great and snappy screenshot utility. Filelight is so useful.

There's definitely a few misses, though. kmail in particular. But, overtime the applications actually improve, both in performance and features. This seems to be in contrast in gnome, where apps like Nautilus have been getting worse for a long time. And in contrast to Windows.

> The new System Monitor basically replaces a ton of programs.

Like what? Running htop or btop++ in Konsole(or whichever terminal emulator you prefer), as I do?¹ :)

Just opened that thing right now, and it gives nothing to me.

Shrug?

¹ On one of 9 virtual desktops, arranged 3x3, usually upper left.

https://postimg.cc/K35Qv6Pg < btop++

https://postimg.cc/0zGttJMC < htop

https://postimg.cc/pyTLRfPp < Itsatrap!

System monitor can do all this stuff, pstree and all, and you can get really cool visualizations. Pi charts, line graphs, and my personal favorite, color grid. That one's really good for CPU utilization.

But the real icing is that it doesn't just work for processes, applications, CPU usage and whatnot. It works for any sensor, including temperature and fans. And, of course, it's all customizable.

> Sane defaults

I have a tiny tiny bone to pick with whoever decided to enable bouncing app launch icons on my mouse that look terrible.

But like you said, it was just a matter of finding the right config setting to turn them off! I have been quite happy with KDE all things considered.

Tiling WMs have more up front cost, but they don't require continuous tinkering if you don't want to tinker. I have been using the same SwayWM config for like 5 years now.

I started using KDE regularly after trying it out on the Steam Decks desktop mode. It works great! I had used it previously over a decade ago and was not impressed with it at first, but now it's my daily driver desktop enviornment.

I don't think that's the case any more. I'm running the latest Fedora release.

https://pics.mos6581.com/misc/gnome-power.png

Interesting! Hopefully this is part of a broader change in their attitude.

At some point, the GNOME folks are going to have to hire people to go door-to-door and take hardware away from people, because they won't have any software left to remove features from.

I've always joked about the eventual evolution of the GNOME desktop converging to a single login screen followed by a full screen button labeled LOGOFF because they will claim anything else is too confusing for their users.

And clicks the button for you, à la https://youtu.be/7OwgyrTnTRM?si=etU_Wk9sUJ-xPx3h

From your link:

>> gsd

> gnome-settings-daemon.

>> no-longer

> Don't think that's in the OED

>> This is rather unfriendly and considerably more effort than editing logind.conf

> I don't like the tone in this sentence.

I am dumbstruck that someone can be so utterly full of themselves that they can smugly correct someone’s grammar, and an obvious acronym, only to turn around and clutch their pearls that their victim said mean things in the nicest way possible about their software.

I knew there was a reason I haven’t liked GNOME for years. XFCE is the way.

That exchange is what happens when CADT and therapy language collide head first.

Not familiar with CADT, and Google wasn't any help for anything that seemed relevant.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250429170348/https://www.jwz.o...

I currently use Gnome on my machine (plain vanilla Ubuntu with no mods). It's such a love hate relationship. On the one hand everything you said and everything the child comments mention are totally valid and very annoying. But on the other hand (at least in my experience), Gnome has been the only solid DE that is "consistent", the only other one that got close was XFCE.

I might eventually switch back to XFCE but for now I just need a DE that works and gets out of my way so I can write code, and for all it's faults Gnome still gets the job done.

Oh wow, that Nocera is great, correcting spellings to be passive-aggressive.

> Review of attachment 312719 [details] [review]:

>> gsd

> gnome-settings-daemon.

>> no-longer

> Don't think that's in the OED

>> gsd no-longer facilitates users overriding power key actions

> And include references about when this happened.

>> This is rather unfriendly and considerably more effort than editing logind.conf

> I don't like the tone in this sentence.

So helpful.

I really dislike these turf sitting devs. They try to just defend their throne rather than looking at the merits.

Weird, I'm using the latest stock fedora with gnome and the option is there to use the power button as "power off" command.

I like Mate. I recommend it.

agree

Gnome sucks... KDE is awesome :)

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

That's because you're not the target audience: both Windows and GNOME primarily target the computer illiterate. If you know what you're doing and understand how the computer works, these desktops at best are a nuisance and more than likely to get in your way.

My go-to comparison is power tools: there's a consumer line that's underpowered but pretty easy to use by anyone, and then there's the professional tools for people that know how to handle these tools properly: more power, versatile, and user serviceable.

Smartphones take this to the extreme: on both Android and iOS every user is illiterate, because the OS is deliberately opaque to the user.

I'm not a huge fan of this statement - just because some users prefer simplicity, doesn't make them "illiterate." I'm happy to be a pretty tech-savvy gnome user - everyone uses a computing device for different purposes (as a tool, not a hobby). For example, it's great that KDE offers 2 or 3 kick-off menus, multiple clock plasmoids, etc, but just because a user is fine with a single, well-refined option, doesn't mean they are less "computer literate."

Try plasma.

+1 plasma is pretty nice and also lets you reconfigure things if you like. The rate of "we broke this and you were stupid for ever wanting it" is much lower than for gnome

Plasma was super unstable and janky, and the whole KDE desktop environment feels like developer art.

Early days of Plasma 5 definitely can be described this way. Although I think we all forget just how fucking ugly early gnome 3 was.

But since mid Plasma 5 and on, it's incredibly stable and consistent in design. At this point, more consistent than gnome.

I was using Plasma 6 to get fractional scaling working (wrote the wrong version in original post)

That's what I thought for a long time, until I tried it on the Steam deck since they use it for its desktop mode. I now use it as my daily driver desktop environment

You last tried it 25 years ago right?

> the power button can no longer be configured to power off the machine

Seriously?

Are they removing ways to access the terminal or you can still at least do shutdown -h now?

Don't give them any ideas!

No Linux desktop delivers what the user wants, needs or expect. Only what the developers think they need and find interesting to fix. It's more fun reinventing wheels badly than fixing shit generally. Some people are lucky this aligns with their needs, but for most it doesn't. It's jarring and unproductive.

It needs corporate (or government!) drive behind it or that won't change. I'm not talking about Redhat either who appears to just be a holding pen for the above.

Some of the more influential developers are Red Hat employees, and Red Hat has retasked them with other work in recent years.

That might be enough to prompt a change in direction, I guess time will tell.

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

XFCE in other words.

[flagged]

Of all the reasons to be upset with Gnome, that's the silliest. I could not care less about their political opinions. It's their opinions on how a computer should look and work that are the problem.

[dead]

> Linux desktop is getting better but I still wouldn't daily drive it,

I'm genuinely interested what Linux is missing for you? I've been daily driving it for years and do all my work and gaming on it. Is it specific software or?

It's just general polish. Like I was daily driving fedora last year and :

- fractional scaling did not work in Gnome with Wayland for X11 Apps

- I still cannot use my LG C4 as a monitor in full capacity because AMD on Linux does not support HDMI 2.1

- Screen sharing was very buggy - in Slack especially - it would constantly crash the slack app during calls, ditto for camera, but even in Google meet and Chrome I've had desktop crashes

- When I switched to KDE/Plasma 5 to get fractional scaling it was extremely unstable

- Right now I upgraded my GPU to 9070XT - I'm still not sure if that would work on Linux yet because of driver support delay

- Guitar Amp simulator software I use does not support Linux, neither does Ableton (which supposedly can run on proton but with many glitches)

- The audio DAW situation was way too complicated and buggy

- I spent days to get the distro functional and usable with Ardour and it would still crash constantly - I just wanted to run some amp sims :(

It's just the little things and rough edges, but for example the fractional scaling stuff already improved because more apps that I use added Wayland support. And the emulation is getting better, with more users I could see larger DAWs supporting Linux as well. Not sure about the audio progress - JACK was a complete mess.

> Right now I upgraded my GPU to 9070XT - I'm still not sure if that would work on Linux yet because of driver support delay

You can install AMDs driver from their repo directly, it works just fine (using it every day).

> I still cannot use my LG C4 as a monitor in full capacity because AMD on Linux does not support HDMI 2.1

That will never be possible. To prevent pirates from breaking it (lol), HDMI has decided to keep HDMI 2.1 secret. No open source version of HDMI 2.1 can exist.

That said, AMD's driver repo includes both the open source drivers and some proprietary versions of the driver, maybe that'll work for you.

Another option would be using a displayport output and a DP to HDMI converter, as e.g. Intel is using for their GPUs.

- Fractional scaling: That's because X11 itself does not support it. Many older Windows apps also have problems with fractional scaling.

- HDMI 2.1: The HDMI Forum blocked it, as they don't want the details of HDMI 2.1 publically available. If you can, use DisplayPort, which is an actual open standard, and is better anyway. Nvidia works because they implemented it in closed-source firmware instead. https://www.phoronix.com/news/HDMI-2.1-OSS-Rejected

> That's because X11 itself does not support it.

Strangely enough Plasma was able to handle this regardless (guess it was misreporting the resolution to X11 app or something like that to make it work ?) it was a Gnome/Wayland thing.

DisplayPort isn't an option - the TV only has HDMI in and converters suck (they crash constantly, even the expensive ones)

You can also buy active DP to HDMI 2.1 adapters now - if you already have an HDMI KVM for instance. Cable Matters makes one.

If you're happy to dip your toes into another DAW, Reaper has excellent first-class Linux support, works with all your plugins, and has a 60 day trial* for you to get used to it.

* The free trial is enforced as heavily as WinRAR's, and it's pretty cheap (~$60) to buy a licence if the nag screen makes you feel bad enough

The problem is not only the DAW support, but the support of low-latency audio interfaces in Linux. Audio interface makers rarely create a Linux driver, and a low-latency setup on Linux is its own hell, with real-time kernel patches. On MacOS and Windows, it works out of the box.

rt patches are upstream since about a year ago. You might need to swap to rt Kconfig, sure, but not patches.

I tried that first but had trouble getting it to launch so I decided might as well goo with the OSS option. Boy was I in for a fun ride with getting the whole jackd and audio subsystems running.

Alternatively Bitwig has Linux support and wouldn't be such a big jump.

> When I switched to KDE/Plasma 5 to get fractional scaling it was extremely unstable

KDE Plasma 6 made major improvements and has excellent fractional scaling, the best I've seen in a Linux desktop environment and comparable to scaling in Windows 10-11. I encourage you to give it a try.

Sorry I misspoke - I was using Plasma 6, as that was the only way to get fractional scaling in X11 apps

you can use Carla in linux to run windows VSTs, i do it all the time. Works great. Midi and audio routing is also quite good. Ableton also runs with Wine.

Our 12 year old recently switched from Windows to Ubuntu…

and now I’m constantly getting these complaints “I can’t get screen capture to work under Wayland… I switched from lightdm to sddm and I can’t work out how to switch back… I accidentally started an i3 session and I can’t work out how to log out of it.”

It makes me kind of miss Windows, in a way. It is good he’s learning so much. But the downside is Linux gives him lots more ways to break things and then ask me to fix them for him. And a lot of this stuff I then have to learn myself before I can fix it, because most of my Linux experience is with using it as a server OS, where desktop environments aren’t even installed

Well, don't help him. People(me) grew up without the Internet or Smartphones and broke Windows on the family PC all the time. In 2000 when I got SuSE it only slowed down the breakdowns. He can always fix stuff himself by reinstalling the OS. As long as he doesn't format the /home partition he will not lose data. And he will learn his lessons.

12-year-old me installed Linux on an old desktop tower and I also broke things constantly. The difference is my parents were both humanities majors and I knew full well there was no point in asking them for help. Even at the time, the resources were all there for me to teach myself to Linux. Sure, I spent many many hours troubleshooting things instead of doing whatever it was I had as my end goal, but I was a kid—learning is the point!

It's harder as a parent to know that you're capable of solving their problem and still say no, but by age 12 that's pretty much your primary job: to find more and more things that they can start doing for themselves, express your confidence in them, and let them figure out how to adult bit by bit. Breaking a Linux install and fixing it again is among the lowest stakes ways that dynamic will play out from here on.

> Ubuntu

Well, there’s your problem ;-)

This is great, though, really. I broke our computer so many times growing up, I couldn’t possibly count. I don’t think I ever lost anything of import, other than some savegames of mine. I keep telling people who ask, “how do I learn Linux?” that they need to use it, tinker with it, break it, and fix it, ideally without anything other than man pages and distro docs. It is a shockingly effective way to learn how things work.

There is more to learn / do than anyone has time. My kid is supposed to spend an hour on his violin, half an hour an fitness, then some time on chess, then eat - including clean up and/or cook. somehow he needs to fit some free play in too. He doesn't have time for more.

It isn't that he could do that, but what else to give up?

I think for a lot of us that learned linux this way, it was firmly in the "fun time" category. We would have rather been tinkering than most other things.

I'd say that screen capture probably works under X11 no matter what your graphic card is. However this kind of confirm your general feeling: there is no only one blessed and enforced way to do things so everything can break because of combinations.

Examples (I've been on desktop Linux since 2009): shutdown actually reboots except for a few months with some lucky combination of kernel and nvidia driver. The brightness control keys didn't work for at least half of the years. They currently work. All of that has workarounds but I understand that some people legitimately fold and go using another OS.

> i3 session

Oh he'll figure it out eventually. This kid might be going places.

That sounds amazing, well not for you but for your kid :) It has been very valuable for me that I messed around windows and linux as a kid

Put him on debian stable with xfce and no sudo if he is such a bother. Sounds to me this is a people problem, not Linux problem. Do you miss windows or do you miss not having to spend time with kid on things that bother you?

My Linux desktop experience...

I started with Linux installing it from floppy disks in about 1996.

In 1995, I was back on Windows 95 within a week because I needed to get something done.

In 2000, I was back on Windows 2000 within a week because I needed to get something done.

In 2005, I was back on Windows XP within a week because I needed to get something done.

In 2012, I was back on Windows 7 within a week because I needed to get something done.

In 2015, I was back on macOS within a week because I needed to get something done.

In 2020, I worked out I'm wasting my time on this.

I watch my colleagues and friend struggling with it. Lots of small papercuts. Lots of weirdness. Lots of regressions. Plus many years of server-side experience says to me "I should probably just use FreeBSD" in that space.

I've wasted like 8 hours in the last two days trying to upgrade windows 10 to 11 so my motherboards wifi drivers can be installed.

It just worked in Linux. I don't get where this comes from, because every time I hit a problem in Linux, there's a solution.

In windows, you get a vague hex error code that leads you to a support page where the error could be caused by one of a dozen reasons.

And on top of that, MS is constantly hostile to any user who just wants a basic OS to use their computer with.

So couple of issues there. Never upgrade windows. Fresh install only. Never had a good day upgrading it.

Secondly, there isn't always a solution in Linux. I've got one now where something is utterly broken and it's 5 layers of maintainers down and no one gives a shit.

Windows 11 has begun making it a lot harder to install with local logins. They just disabled the typical method for enabling local only.

I want to upgrade in order to retain that local account.

Install LTSC: https://massgrave.dev/windows_ltsc_links

Then use massgrave hwid activator.

My experience is the opposite. Epgot a hold of a bunch of floppies in 1991. Dual booted so I could play Diablo. Some time around '98/99 got tired of dual booting.

Steam getting proton was a godsend, all those years of games became playable so now I have a huge back catalog.

> Plus many years of server-side experience says to me "I should probably just use FreeBSD" in that space.

Not a bad idea. This is exactly what I do on my daily driver.

Meanwhile people who actually get stuff done all use linux :D

Not the OP, but hibernate support is one thing that sent me back to windows on my Framework laptop.

In windows, I can just shut the lid and not worry about it, because it will sleep first, and eventually hibernate. Ubuntu would just sleep until the battery dies.

I found instructions for enabling hibernate in Ubuntu, and they did make it show up in the power menu, but it didn't seem to work. (Which is presumably why it was hidden to begin with.)

I also tried NixOS, but I couldn't even get it to boot the installer.

> In windows, I can just shut the lid and not worry about it, because it will sleep first, and eventually hibernate. Ubuntu would just sleep until the battery dies.

It's really funny because this is one of the things I absolutely do not like about Windows. I absolutely hate it that I put the computer to sleep and when I come back the next day it has hibernated. That said, I agree that hibernation has always been finicky on Linux, however, I would say Ubuntu is not the best distro for this use case. I have been using Fedora and they even publish official guides for it[0] that's how seriously they take it.

0: https://fedoramagazine.org/update-on-hibernation-in-fedora-w...

Just have it suspend to disk and shutdown on lid close.

I do this for arch Linux on my framework and it's fine. Startup time is under ten seconds, essentially zero battery drain, right back in your session with all apps/docs open.

Hibernate is definitely better but still finicky even on Mac/Windows, machines can and do fry themselves, or require a hard reset if you unplug a device at the wrong time. Or unexpectedly continue draining the battery.

It's a terrible, funky, poorly documented, exception filled world down in the low power states for hardware.

Never had an issue on Mac, never got it to work properly on a single of my many linux laptops

Try unplugging an external USB-C monitor while it's transitioning between states.

It won't come back up ok, as recently as 6 weeks ago.

Or the rampant reports of things like this: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255642823?sortBy=rank

the number 1 linux user accessory is the word "just"

A computer is a tool - learn to use it like a tool. People spend far more time learning to drive than they do learning to use computers these days, but I'd wager the computer matters more.

But too many companies have discovered that a docile "user" who's fed constant dopamine hits and has no actionable way to use a device other than open their wallet and fork over cash to watch more cats dance, or shop on more stores is exactly what they want.

Why don't you just click here and pay for Onedrive. Or just click there and accept Apple's new ridiculous terms.

If you just want to watch cats dance... you do you. I'll just keep doing me over here.

Anti-cheats are not really compatible on Linux IIRC. Maybe there have been improvements on this front but I think this was the main issue for a lot of gamers. This and there were cases when they were getting banned for playing through Wine.

I once tried to set up a GPU passthrough setup to a Windows VM to play WoW but there were a ton of report that Blizzard just banned players for using QEMU VMs because they were marked as cheaters.

The two most widely used anti cheat application battle eye and easy anti cheat both natively support linux but game developer have to check a box to enable it.

About 40% of games that use anti cheat currently work on linux. Getting banned for using wine is very rare because anti cheat that don't support linux would complain about not running an prevent you from even joining a game to get banned.

https://areweanticheatyet.com/

Could some game programmer say if it's true that kernel level anti cheat is just bad programming?

Primagean recently said that in a video commenting PewDiePie's "I switched to Linux" video. While he's apparently a good programmer (he worked at Netflix), he uses Vim, so I don't trust him. Edit: part about vim is an edgy joke.

Weird reason not to trust someone, and I think prime is a decent programmer.

I work in AAA gamedev and have deployed kernel level anti-cheats before, and I’m aware how unpopular they are; so, sorry for that… you would also accuse us of “bad programming” if there was an overabundance of cheaters that went undetected and/or uncorrected.

The answer is unfortunately complicated, the kernel level anti-cheats themselves aren’t necessarily poorly written, but what they are trying to do is poorly defined, so theres a temptation to put most of the logic into userland code and then share information with the kernel component- but then it’s dangerous for the same reason that crowdstrike was.

Not doing endpoint detection is also a problem because some amount of client trust is necessary for a good experience with low input latency. You get about 8ms in most cases to make a decision about what you will display to the user, that’s not enough time to round-trip to a server about if what is happening is ok or not. Movement in particular will feel extremely sluggish.

So, its a combination of kernel level code being harder in general (malloc, file access etc; are things the kernel gives you in user land after all), the problem space being relatively undefined (find errant software packages and memory manipulation), not being able to break out of the kernel level environment for an easier programming and iteration experience and trying to not affect performance.

Lots of people think they can do it better, I’m happy to hire anyone who actually thinks they have a clue, it’s a really hard problem honestly and the whole gamedev industry is itching for something better: even us gamedevs don’t like kernel level anti-cheat, it makes debugging harder for ourselves too and introduces hard to reproduce bugs.

PS; sorry if I’m not being eloquent, I am on vacation and typing from my phone.

This is well written and quite easy to understand. (I only have cursory knowledge of programming.)

However, what if Primeagen meant that HAVING to IMPLEMENT kernel level anti cheat is a symptom of bad programming, and not the anti cheat per se? (that is, with good enough programming, it could somehow be avoided).

And kudos to you. I appreciate people in game dev, they can get a lot done in short time. I haven't played mmo fps since battlefield 3, and it wasn't that bad then. But I've heard that without kernel level they would be unplayable.

Thank you for your time!

The reason why you need kernel-level anti-cheat for it to be meaningful is because it necessarily needs to sit on a level lower than cheats themselves; and cheats can be very advanced these days.

Long term I'm kinda hopeful that this is something that will be mitigated through AI-based approaches working to detect the resulting patterns rather than trying to detect the cheat code itself. But this requires sufficiently advanced models running very fast locally, and we're still far from that.

The cheaters are very good these days. They will happily sit in the kernel space to hide from the game if needed, because people pay a lot of money to cheat developers to be able to cheat.

> so theres a temptation to put most of the logic into userland code and then share information with the kernel component- but then it’s dangerous for the same reason that crowdstrike was.

I don't understand, how could crowdstrike have avoided their issues by putting more code in the kernel? Or am I misreading your statement?

The crash was caused by a data parsing issue for the code in the kernel (the heuristics database).

If they had not tried to parse data inside the kernel it would not have been an issue.

Good faith question: why is the server not the source of truth? With local interpolation for things like character movement, reconciled in heartbeat updates?

FD: Still on a phone on vacation. :)

The reason is the round trip time mainly.

Server corrections will feel like “floaty” or “banding” behaviour, we used to do that and people get upset because it “feels” wrong.

Not all cheating sends "bad data" to the server. Cheats like wallhacks or aimbots are purely clientside and can't be detected on the server

The opposite is true. He uses vim therefore I trust him.

Frontend stability.

I've been through enough KDE, QT, and Gnome API changes. It's just not where I want to burn my limited time.

My first GDI programs still compile.

Compile sure, but they really had some bad ideas in those days. Remember MDI Multiple Document Interface? Having Windows within windows. It was a terrible idea.

OLE? Sure, let every application talk to the DLL components of every other application! What could go wrong? Data wants to be free right? Spread the love.

Making the desktop into a live webpage? And of course let any webpage happily load whatever binaries it wants from the internet. Super handy stuff. For some people more handy than others (really how this did not cause a mega Wannacry-event back in the day I don't understand)

There is a reason this stuff is legacy. The only reason it still compiles is because some companies have spent millions on custom developments 20 years ago that nobody remembers how it still works. Not because you should still be using it :)

You and I must have had very different experiences in those times.

> Remember MDI Multiple Document Interface? Having Windows within windows. It was a terrible idea.

It was definitely overused - nobody needs Microsoft word to be a window manager for every doc file. But it ends up growing into something really nice where you get to build out the sub windows of your IDE wherever you want them.

> OLE? Sure, let every application talk to the DLL components of every other application! What could go wrong? Data wants to be free right? Spread the love.

This was also incredible. I built one of the first tabbed web browsers by embedding instances of the IE 4 DLL into my tabs. OLE and OCX extended object-oriented programming across program and language boundaries.

> Making the desktop into a live webpage? And of course let any webpage happily load whatever binaries it wants from the internet. Super handy stuff. For some people more handy than others (really how this did not cause a mega Wannacry-event back in the day I don't understand)

This was terrific for pranks. Yeah what were they thinking on this one.

> There is a reason this stuff is legacy. The only reason it still compiles is because some companies have spent millions on custom developments 20 years ago that nobody remembers how it still works. Not because you should still be using it :)

Maybe as I've aged the novelty of building programs has worn off. For some things I don't want to have to port or even recompile it. I just want it to run. If Win32 is the only stable Linux ABI, GDI is the only stable Linux GUI toolkit.

For me its the UX. It just feels off, amaturish, messy. I can't really put my finger on it. I think the frankly crap fonts a lot of distro's choose to have as default dont help. And then the very "designed by a developer" feel to a lot of the UI.

And I know someones franticly typing away right now - yes, I am fully aware you can customise things, but out of the box it should be pretty damn well polished so that you don't need to.

Ubuntu's probably got the closest but it still just doesn't quite feel like they've nailed the experience.

One of the things I wonder about recently is whether there's too many distros, which is dividing effort and there's less drive to find consensus on certain issues when everyone has the freedom to do things their own way and experiment to explore their niche. That freedom is the point of free software to a large extent, but there's costs to it. It also divides the userbase so when something doesn't work you may need to dive deeper into the details than you'd like to see if there's anything particular about your species of the linux animal kingdom.

It'd be interesting if there was a "Ubuntu v2" type effort, over 20 years later. Before ubuntu it's not as though desktop linux was an impossible dream or there was a lack of distros, but Canonical cleaned up a lot of rough edges to the extent it became a lingua franca. It's to the extent you can rely on ubuntu being in instructions for linux software, for example if there's any differences to required package names it'll be the ubuntu names over debian's.

Yes, exactly. To be fair, projects like GNOME and distros like Ubuntu do publish human interface guidelines, but I dont think there is any enforcement and so jankiness creeps in. I suppose it's no different from Windows 11 still having programs that have UIs dating from Win2K. But at least the icons and colors and window chrome are professional looking.

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.

I am extremely experienced with Linux. Every single one of my servers is running RHEL/Rocky. I daily drove Linux back in the early 2000s. I have spent more time in sysctl.conf testing tunables than I have spent with my family, so it seems.

1. My capture card doesn't work reliably in any distro. I'm not a gamer so I can't use a cheap and ubiquitous USB V4L card, I capture retro computing screens at weird resolutions and refresh rates so I have to use an enterprise-grade solution that can handle strange things like sync-on-green from 13w3 connectors and extremely rare outputs from UNIX workstations from the 80s and 90s.

2. If someone sends me a link on my phone it is difficult to copy and paste it to a Linux system.

3. Battery life on laptops, despite decades of improvements, is atrocious on Linux. If my laptop gets twelve hours of real-world use under OS A and six hours under OS B, I've got to use OS A.

4. All of my screens are 4K. Today, in 2025, a full decade after 4K became standard, the way various DE/WMs handle scaling is embarrassing.

5. Nvidia. Yeah, it "works" for about 2-3 kernel upgrades then you're greeted with a blinking cursor upon boot because of DKMS or some random reason like patching the system and not rebooting for a couple of days and then patching again.

6. There's little consistency across devices. When I log in to system A I want every single icon, file, and application to be the same as system B. iCloud/Onedrive do this. You can do this on Linux while on a LAN with remote home folders. I don't work exclusively on a LAN. Or I can set up puppet/ansible for my non-infrastructure systems and that makes me throw up in my mouth.

Almost none of that is the fault of the kernel. That's irrelevant.

Regarding 3. Battery life - I’ve had a ThinkPad Nano for several years that, on Windows 11 would get roughly 4-6 hours battery, and this was optimized (very few running apps, no junk on startup, power saving settings on, etc). I switched it to Ubuntu (I was surprised that everything worked out of the box too, all of the hot keys and everything), and it will get about 8-10 hours doing the same tasks (primarily Chrome). So there is something to be said about Linux in general just being so much more “light weight” so to speak vs windows, which has become such a bloated mess. But the main issue I had was your point 4, since the thinkpads screen is 2K, everything was either too small (with no scaling) or too big (with scaling on).

Fully agree that Desktop Linux isn’t nearly there. If I need a Linux DE for something, I spin up a Debian VM with XFCE, because that seems to suck the least, and I already have prebaked Debian images.

For headless servers, I want nothing else. For a daily driver, as much as it pains me, nothing comes close to the Apple ecosystem. Apple Silicon is years ahead of everyone, and their interop with (admittedly only their own) other hardware is incredible. Universal Clipboard is magic. The fact that I can do nothing more than open an AirPod case and my phone registers it is magic. Finally, the fact that MacOS is *nix is absolutely icing on the cake.

XFCE? How is this better than KDE (which uses Qt as it's based GUI libs)?

to me it's such a crime that for all the crowing in the world about the need for operational sovergnity, MacOs is the only OS that can offer such a high standard of operation. I've seen some countries try their hand at modifying android to compete but the lack of a competitive monolith to them has allowed them to become complacent

I'll echo archvile here, in that I get excellent battery life running Linux. I've been getting 10-12 hours of battery life from the assortment of Asus and Thinkpad laptops I've had the past 15 years.

To give a very concrete example, I have two identical Thinkpad T14 at work, one running Linux (Debian Bookworm with KDE) and one running Windows 11. When doing normal office work, the Linux laptop easily lasts a whole workday with >20% battery left at the end. The Windows laptop runs out of battery in less than 2 hours.

    > Today, in 2025, a full decade after 4K became standard, the way various DE/WMs handle scaling is embarrassing.

Regarding 6 You can do this on Linux while on a LAN...

Perhaps Syncthing would partially cover this? Not the applications, but the files ....

For the applications, you can use NixOS and git

Use kdeconnect. It is a universal app and works seamlessly

Or Signal app.. it works well for this sort of thing!

what?

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

Microsoft Office

Not OP, but my experience with Linux is that seemingly absurd usability issues just keep piling up the more you use it and at some you just kind of give up and abandon any expectation of even a decent level of common sense from whoever is developing the system.

I've listed some of which I encountered on Mint here https://www.virtualcuriosities.com/folders/273/usability-iss... Among them: AppImages just don't run unless you know how to make them run. This could be fixed with literally a single dialog box. There is no way to install fonts by default other than knowing where to put them and knowing how to get there. Every app that uses Alt+Click, e.g. for picking a color, won't work because that's bound by default by the DE.

These issues may sound small at first but think of it this way: did nobody making this OS think about how users were going to install fonts? Or ever used an application that used the Alt key? Or did they just assume everyone would know what to do when they download an appimage and double click on it and nothing happens?

And you can just feel that the whole thing is going to be like this. Every single time in the future you want to do something that isn't very extremely obvious, you'll find a hurdle.

I even had issues configuring my clock because somebody thought it was a good idea to just tell users to use a strftime code to format the taskbar clock. I actually had to type "%Y-%m-%d%n%H:%M" to get it to look the way I want. And this isn't an advanced setting. This is right clicking on the clock and clicking "Configure." When I realized what to do I actually laughed out loud because it felt like a joke. Fellas, only programmers know these codes. Make some GUIs for the normal people.

Not to argue with you, but is that Linux Mint specifically? I never used it, and its DE looked very unprofessional to my liking. Personally, I prefer modern Gnome, but I also like KDE. Everything else looks very unfriendly to an average user, I won’t ever install it. I’d go Gnome for Mac users and KDE for Windows refugees.

Au contraire, I would say that Mint is probably the closest to stock Win11/macOS experience right now. Gnome, on the other hand, looks utterly alien and non-discoverable

What you mean by Win 11/macOS? I see them as completely different from each other. Or are there some overlaps?

Personally, I like modern Gnome: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43859753

They have been converging for some time now. The taskbar in Win11 is very much a macOS Dock wannabe, for example.

Personally, I find modern Gnome insufferable because it is non-customizable to the extent that even macOS only dreams of, and it doubles down on the modern trend of hiding important UI behind poorly discoverable gestures (active corners etc). Except their take on it is even worse in general for mouse users because of how much more "legwork" it adds - e.g. in a default Gnome setup on Fedora, you need to move mouse cursor in the top left corner for the dock to show up (so that you can switch apps or launch a new one)... but then it shows on the bottom of the screen, so now you need to move the cursor all the way there across the screen.

But that's all subjective and not really my point. The point, rather, is that Gnome looks and behaves very different from Win11 and macOS both, in ways that don't make it easy for users to migrate (and in fact they specifically state that their UX design does not consider that a goal).

This is why Linux will always be a terrible OS. Every time someone says "Linux is bad because XYZ" someone will tell you "actually that's your distro, if you used distro ABC you wouldn't have that problem." But ABC has a different set of problems, which if you wasted 2 months to realize them and start complaining about, someone would just direct you to distro JKL.

The fragmentation of Linux leads to a ping-pong of responsibilities. Linux can never be a bad OS because it isn't an OS.

On Windows, if the file manager is bad, that's Microsoft's fault. Period. Nobody tries to say "actually..." it's Microsoft's fault. Period. The same goes for the taskbar, for the control panel, for MS Paint, for even Microsoft Office. If Microsoft will fix it or make it worse depends on them, but nobody denies who is to blame and everyone know where the blame lies. Meanwhile I don't even know if the basic utilities that my distro distributes are under the responsibility of Mint's team or if they will just direct me to some random open source project's issue tracker if I start complaining about Celluloid or the "Drawing" app.

You can't talk about Linux thinking only about the good parts, or you aren't inviting people to try Linux, you're inviting them to try your distro. "Linux" means the whole ecosystem, including all of its problems.

I just installed Pop!_OS about 4 days ago since I had some money to spend and managed to get a new SSD on the cheap, dual booting with Win10 (I would rather get beheaded than ever use W11 again, I don't care if I get ransomwared every day for the rest of my W10 life once support ends).

Honestly, there's literally nothing missing from the experience for me. Dev tooling works way better (obviously), it feels much faster than both W10 and especially W11, I can still play Factorio and most other games in my 900-game Steam library (minus MP games with rootki- err, "advanced" anticheats), GPU and CPU drivers were a non-issue and bundled with the install, speakers work, bluetooth works, Wifi works (I'm on LAN but still).

The only thing is that it's kinda ugly (personal taste, I actually like W10 aesthetics :p), but one GNOME Tweaks install later and I got it looking more like how I like it, plus they're (System76) working on Cosmos or whatever they're calling it and it's looking promising. Also text is a bit blurry/hard to read for me, but it could also just be my shitty monitors (and me being used to the excellent Macbook screens)

Now, if you have some software you rely on like the Adobe suite, understandable, but I think for most people it's honestly the superior OS compared to Windows. I'm sure the experience on other friendly distros like Mint are similar, too.

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

Haha, I’m gonna steal this phrase!

The toolkit inconsistency between apps drives me crazy more than it should.

Loading up a GTK app and switching to a Qt app is jarring, especially with basic things like a file picker.

Daily driving desktop Linux feels like you are living in a lower-middle income family. Yes, you have some nice things, but you can usually tell they are cost-cut versions that have filler plates or missing features present on higher-end versions of the product (i.e. macOS).

Yeah but on the flip side if your usecase is not blessed by daddy Apple - or you're not a fan of their hardware design - there is zero variety in the ecosystem and full lockdown. Like iPad is great hardware - but they will never let you run unlocked OS on it because it cuts into their profit source. In fact I suspect they will try to push MacOS into that direction more.

So I'm hoping to be able to transition out of the ecosystem because I hate their model and like choice. But at the same time I have work to do and last time I tried it wasn't there yet. It was better than it was 3 years ago, and that was better than 5 years ago, etc. I would say not a lot left and the momentum is building, I just don't have the 20 year old energy to be the early adopter anymore :)

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

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.