I’m planning on not supporting Microsoft in any way in the future myself. I wish they would stop making their suite of products less usable and more bloated
I cannot believe how slow and laggy even the most basic of Microsoft applications are on Windows 11. Launching something as simple as the calculator takes a second or two to load in. What could it possibly be doing to warrant such a long load time? The 'classic' calculator on previous versions would appear near instantly once clicked.
I am also baffled as to how something like the new right click context menu can have items loading in and then changing the order of icons once they do finish loading on every single click. For example, why does Skype need to have its menu item load every time the context menu is opened? Why not pre-load this on boot? The classic context menu had no such issues.
Rather than go on and on, I sense Product Owners at Microsoft no longer care about fast and performant code.
The Windows app development situation has become such a mess even Microsoft devs want to use Electron style containment for everything. That is the result.
Edit to add: I'm sure other people can chip in with more, but what I was told was the .net teams and Windows teams pulled in completely different directions. WPF/XAML was really widely liked by many developers for quite a while, then they put it on ice for no apparent reason (supposedly because the core Windows team had better ideas), and their on/off stance on this ever since has just driven everyone away.
The straw that broke the camel's back for me was with Outlook. They replaced the regular desktop Outlook app with "New Outlook", which is just a wrapper around Outlook.com, which is horrible and slow and buggy and even shows ads to the user. I guess they think it's a waste of money to develop a proper mail client app.
I also copied over the 'old' windows photo viewer. The delay in loading simple screenshots was such an annoyance that I couldn't stand it. Folks on forums suggested turning off any analysis plugins, such as those meant to identify faces in photographs to speed things up. It barely made a difference.
I've noticed this as well since our company laptops updated to Windows 11. Launching everything is slower but especially the built-in Microsoft apps like calc, notepad and mspaint. It's incredibly frustrating.
> Launching something as simple as the calculator takes a second or two to load in.
You can get this feature on Linux if you use flatpaks or snaps on an older computer. I got used to bearing with it because it allows me to have a stable core OS combined with modern applications that have been released today. It's a price I'm willing to pay. Nevertheless, I don't know how slow it is on a more modern machine, I guess it is probably quite fast.
Also, gnome-calculator is not an application I would install through a flatpak or snap.
When my laptop is on energy saving mode, the calculator crashes when opening. The snippet tool breaks the drag in the middle and delivers a partial screenshot. The system generally feels like slideshow.
These didn't happen under Windows 10.
Few weeks ago I also had my share of problems under Debian and I'm really thinking about getting the cheapest Mac Mini M4 and re-learning every possible computer habit I have including shortcuts because I hate the current status in any non-mac os/hardware so much.
I used to think gaming would always keep me pinned to Microsoft but with Valve and Playstation out competing them (while spending a fraction of the money) I think I'll never be in their gaming ecosystem again.
The only thing keeping me there on my desktop is games. If CoD would run on Linux, I would delete the Winders partition. I run Mac for my daily driver.
I moved to Linux Mint from Windows 10 last year. Haven't looked back.
Anytime I need to start up the Windows machine, there are a million things popping up, updating, Windows update notifications, etc... and no I don't have any viruses. Just good ol' first party malware from Microsoft.
True, I use the web version of Office when it makes sense. I only reserve an actual desktop for things like Word because it doesn't work as well in the browser. I'm not a heavy Office user though, so YMMV.
My work can afford to do things the Windows way. If I need an expensive tool like Visio, I tell them I need it and it (and the licence for it) appears. Some of our refresh laptops are on Windows 11, I'm still on Windows 10. Some annoyances creep through, e.g. every time you open an Edge window you're presented with a screen full of distracting stuff, even in the work installation.
For home, free tools on Linux are more than adequate. Google Docs, or LibreOffice. For creating things, no problem. No need to perfectly parse two decades' worth of slightly malformed Microsoft Office documents. In fact, the token Windows machine has only been booted up for the following tasks in the past 12 months: Update the maps on an "LM" version Garmin car GPS, and do income taxes.
The stuff Microsoft is doing to their desktop environment looks like a lot like a private equity outfit trying to milk the last bit of "brand value" out of a company that it's pillaging by cutting engineering, switching to cheaper manufacturing but still enjoying "premium brand" cachet for a while.
Google Docs is every bit the same hell, they just try to pretend they don’t and since it’s been bloated shit since day one no one wants to admit otherwise.
Microsoft has been failing on the gaming front, trying to make their buggy "current gen" OS relevant by force, and is losing ground to other online competitors (i.e. Google docs). Azure is still growing, albeit slower than their top competitors. Bing has actually been doing good thanks in part to ChatGPT, but even there they still resort to bizarre tactics, like pretending to look like Google. [0]
I would love to hear from others truly in the know, but it looks at times like the company is less an organism and more a writhing mass of creatures in a thin, shared skin trying to make it appear as one.
It’s less desperate than you think. Windows 11 is 4 years old, so this is just pushing the straggling organizations into an overdue upgrade.
Office and Windows have been a decreasing proportion of Microsoft’s revenue for years. The real money is coming from cloud services in its many forms. Microsoft may not be #1, but they are clearly in a strong position with good growth. Specifically Microsoft is great at onboarding mid sized businesses onto Azure/Teams and then building a big enough moat to keep churn low.
Look at their growth numbers and you’ll see their business is in a strong position. Their cloud position is entrenched. Windows, Office, and Bing are all just bells and whistles to attract people to their real offerings (Teams, Azure, other subscriptions)
> but it looks at times like the company is less an organism and more a writhing mass of creatures in a thin, shared skin trying to make it appear as one.
This is pretty accurate. A bunch of disjointed orgs who get sometimes seemingly random direction from the overlord. The random direction isn't really random, it's whatever move the overlord believes investors will respond to.
Copilot is a great example - shoved ungracefully into every product with the effect of making basic tasks more difficult. But hey - early movement on LLMs makes the stock go up.
I'm done with Microsoft. Switched to Ubuntu last week after a long break from daily driving Linux desktop (not since about 2013) and not looking back. It's much better here.
What about people running extended versions of windows 10?
Either way, 80% of the people don't even need 365 desktop apps, unless they're heavy into word/excel. Most would survive with those and/or libreoffice, the only issue is that sometimes things get buggy or icons look different and because of user training, we still recommend 365 premium.
With that said, I have been working for 3rd year like that on linux with very few issues. Now that Outlook users will be forced into the crappier web version, very few use access and it is just about word, excel and powerpoint, it makes even less sense to pay for the desktop apps.
Exactly - curious how this plays out with Win10 LTSC (officially supported by security updates for years and years). Plus it has no bloat and crap and runs amazingly lean and fast.
Also just realized I use LibreOffice anyways (or something similar) so I suppose this does not even apply to me
Good, I hope this brings companies to change their setup. Office competition is strong, MS office is a huge and costly vendor lock in. Also many ransomware attacks start with someone allowing macros or clicking on a link in Outlook.
I agree more companies should look into MSFT alternatives. Not sure I agree with the rest.
Is there any real competitor to Office 365? I know my current employer would never switch as we need an on-premise email server and that basically means Exchange.
Also, we can blame Microsoft for a lot of things, but I’m pretty sure if Office and Outlook didn’t exist people would find another way to spread ransomware …
Windows 11 is so bad. But I also don’t like what Apple does, with locking down their devices, the terrible iOS 18 changes, the upselling of their other services, the censorship, etc. There’s really no alternative though - I still find Linux to be unusable for daily use because random things don’t work well with it, but also mainly because battery life on Linux laptops is terrible. How do we get out of having just these two choices?
and 10 months of support for a PC/Laptop which is being sold right now (like Dell Mini PC 6th-gen model). So is it? Why they were still selling OEM licenses to manufactures for W10 if it was going soon to expire?
That would be reasonable. What's not reasonable is claiming that millions of perfectly good computers that still perform great must be thrown out and replaced.
That's flat out not ok, end of conversation. This is not the 90s where a computer was obsolete in 6 months anymore.
Apple also deprecates hardware with new OS versions, but they don't do it to millions simultaneously. Additionally, they don't turn their entire previous OS into nagware about upgrading every time they release a new version.
None of these link to a real source, and don't show how they collected the data.
Steam's statistics (https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/), for example, are pulled straight from their app, and are updated every month. According to that Win 11 is at 55% vs Win 10's 42%.
What? The Register, PC World, and Tech Spot aren't "real sources"?
>Steam's statistics
Show the percentage of market share for people who game. Not total market share.
Habits of gamers are very different than corporate. Gamers are a relatively small percentage of all Windows installs. There are millions and millions of machines in corporate, institutional, and government sectors that run Windows but don't run Steam.
They are blogs. If you read the articles you will see that they all point to the same statcounter link as their source. And the statcounter page gives zero info on what source they used.
>In other words we calculate our Global Stats on the basis of more than 5 billion page views per month, by people from all over the world onto our 1.5 million+ member sites.
Not sure why visitors to a bunch of sites that have installed the "statcounter" tracker would be considered more representative than everyone who has installed steam.
Because visitors to those sites include corporate and government users -- the majority of windows installations. Corporate and government computers don't have Steam installed.
Those website stats also include home users, people with Steam, etc. It's a way bigger sample across all sectors, including the sector that Steam measures.
However, Steam stats only measure windows installations of people who play Steam games (i.e. not corporate and certainly not government computers, and probably missing a large chunk of home installs). That is a much less representative sample of windows installations.
It's likely hardware; things like POPCNT which we encountered in the wild when some folks were trying to run our software on ancient (15+ years old) CPUs that technically still supported Windows 10; so we changed our support story to Windows 11 only because that forces newer hardware requirement as well.
I don't think they will actually crash on Win10 on purpose; this likely just means they won't be running automated tests on Win10 at some point (though probably not now considering companies can keep paying big bucks for back-compat support).
I’m currently using a tiny11 modified installation of win11, I had to go through some extra steps to debloat the OS properly, after that it’s more usable. But last month, despite of all my efforts to not have windows update checked and applied, it booted with latest “upates”. With copilot and reinstalled edge as default browser.
Since then I have blocked windows update related on DNS/Router and on device firewall.
Mature? Yes. Better than Gdocs, debatable, but IMO yes. Replacement for the desktop app? Not quite, but it depends on which feature you specifically need.
Interestingly my wife is offered O365 online as part of her Master's school as a way to write research papers. When she submits them in canvas, it cannot link to the document she wrote online, so it must be downloaded to her laptop which is a Mac. When that happens the only way to look at it is in our personal version of Word, locally, which distorts quite a bit of things, losing indention or adding spaces is common. It was surprising to me that a docx file is rendered so differently between the 2. This is a common problem for the professors it seems as they are asking people to download the docs to personal office apps and export them to PDF, negating the entire purpose of O365 online that they provided...
The web app versions are slower/laggier, have fewer features, and require an internet connection. They’re not quite as performant as google docs, but in some cases have more features (while missing features in other cases). The UI/UX is marginally worse than the desktop apps, which already aren’t great unless you’re already used to them.
If you don’t care about quality and aren’t an Office power user, they’re fine.
I'm using PowerPoint online to make a presentation where .pptx is required.
It's annoying. A lot of features (video cropping, changing slide master title, ...) do not work in the online version.
I literally had to ask a colleague to edit the slidemaster title for me.
Also, it's quite slow in loading pictures, videos.
Mature - maybe? It's certainly not a replacement for the application, as the online Word still falls flat on its face when trying to open, or even worse, modify, some of our larger documents.
The online versions are subject to warrantless government surveillance, whereas the local versions can still operate solely on local files and be denied access to the internet entirely.
This is the last private and secure way to use MS products. When that is gone, we’ll be stuck using fake f/oss wannabe-Excel.
Ouch! So much for the sustainability of all the work we pour into this ecosystem. I don't get why freedom to operate is so low on corporate priorities.
It's remarkable how much they have neglected the upgrade process if you compare it to macOS Time Machine/Migration Assistant (which is hands off and totally easy). Why do you have so many people with ten year old PCs? Because for some people, it is a week of lost work to get a new one.
A lot of people are on a ten year old machine because they'll get no additional value out of a newer one. Other than gaming, compiling, video editing or LLMs, what's the use case for a new machine?
In some cases, power efficiency. Modern software is quite bloated in general, so a newer CPU/GPU on a more efficient architecture could actually have an effect on power bills in some parts of the world - especially over a 10+ year life span.
Indeed, switching Windows PCs is like pulling teeth because of having to re-discover all of the little programs you had downloaded previously. I was a supporter of the "Windows Store" they added in Windows 8 and 10 for this reason, it let me try to keep as much of my software in one place. MS also used to have a "digital locker" service for this kind of thing but that's long gone from the Vista days.
Well it had happened in the past when they phased out lead from gasoline. Older would run poorly because they were tuned for that particular gasoline type
Meh. Windows 10 launched in July 2015, and Windows 11 in October 2021. Not really a surprise that they aren't going to keep testing their apps against a decade old version.
Apple for example supports an OS release for just 3 years after launch.
