I’m a teacher and our division just “upgraded” to W11 with a new version of outlook that is basically a web app on desktop. Several times a day my laptop comes to a complete crawl while Teams decides to open itself. Can’t open or close programs, Firefox won’t register mouse clicks, nothing. Graphical glitches appear al the time with menu bars and task bars disappearing regularly, requiring force quitting the app or logging out of the desktop.
When I first switched to Linux I assumed my experience would be like this. But now it’s the other way around.
Rant over.
TL; DR
My experience between Windows and Linux is not much different with how often I have issues. But given the choice I much more prefer my Linux experience.I hate Windows just as much as the next guy, but this comment section smells a little of confirmation bias.
From my experiece (web dev in a mainly MS branded stack) Windows mostly just works. Yes there are horrendous design, UX choices forced upon me, but I can usually force the OS to do what I need and how I need it.
Now comparing it to my home Pop setup it also mostly just works. There are occasional freezes that require a restart and such, but I wouldn’t say it’s much more different from Windows.
Now what does differ a lot is that I don’t need to fight the OS to do shit. It’s way better productivitywise, when I know what I’m doing. Which is deffinetly not the case everytime.
Guh. Amen to this! I’m in the same boat. Sometimes I just bring a Linux laptop with me to work just to have a break from the work computer.
Same
My first job I was using Windows, thankfully I was able to use Linux my next 3 jobs in a row. It really helps justify Linux when our production servers are always running Linux.
Our production servers are all Linux and we have a fully Linux dev stack. My request for a Linux work machine was denied and we have to work in WSL.
I feel the same way about having to use Mac for work and going back to a Linux PC at the end of the day. God damn I hate Mac’s UX. From the entire UI, to the CMD key, to the fact that END functions as PGDN and goes to and of page instead of end of line.
It’s bad enough when I have to use a keyboard that moves the pg up/pg dn/home/end keys around. That would absolutely kill my productivity so I’m glad I don’t have to use macs.
It is basically http://mail.office365.com in an electron shell. I’m pretty sure all the non ‘classic’ apps are this way now. I’m currently trying out Thunderbird to see if I like it.
Personally I’ve been using outlook via pwa for months anyway
If they’re gonna put it in an electron container anyway you be may as well cut out the middleman and just use the web app Microsoft’s ones are actually quite good now
I thought outlook had been electron for a while
I’ve been using the outlook pwa on Linux for some time with no issues, maybe try that instead if it’s causing problems for you on windows?
My experience exactly. My current company is rolling out new W11 laptops as the old ones age out.
I’m consistently amazed at how poorly Windows 11 runs on these brand new, $1500 enterprise grade machines. They all have the latest Intel i7 chips, 16GB of DDR5 memory, Nvme 1TB drives, 1440p beautiful screens, and they perform like ass.
Constant lockups, stuttering, slow to wake up, slow to open programs, the fans constantly spin up super loud with almost nothing running in the foreground.
I see frequent GUI glitches and bugs, literally had the WiFi stop working on one yesterday, just wouldn’t connect to anything and the tray app wouldn’t pop up when clicked. Had to restart the whole computer and log in again to get it to connect.
Meanwhile, the 11 year old retired desktops that I repurposed for internal company resources like Open Project, Uptime Kuma, and Ansible are running plain old Debian with KDE Plasma and are rock solid. They never crash, never freeze up, are always super responsive, and are fast to update. The longest one of them has taken to update was maybe 3 minutes?
Windows on the other hand… Lets just say there’s a reason I push updates at the end of the day.
Vista all over again?
Microsoft is due a terrible release, 7, 8, & 10 were all above average.
What are you talking about, Windows 8 was a complete shitshow. It wasn’t until 8.1 that it became respectable.
I stopped after 7 🤷
The last week 10 was an easy, free upgrade, I upgraded then gave the machine to a friend to do some very, very early LLM training to never see it again.
I think Win 8 was a YMMV release. I used it heavily for work, (CAD/CAM) and it ran very well. With no more issues than one expects to get from /windows.
Worse, Vista you could wrestle into submission, Windows11 is so deeply embedded with ads, spyware, bloat, and spaghetti code, it’s almost impossible to get it clean.
And even when you do, you have to constantly fight to keep it that way. The fact that Windows will change your settings for default apps and privacy preferences without your permission after a major update is absolutely insane and disgusting.
I shouldn’t have to constantly be on guard for my OS Which I paid $200 for professional licensing to just sneak its own preferences and settings back to what it wants.
Yeah no, the experience really is ass.
We use Lenovo IdeaPads at work, a model with an i7 and a Nvidia GPU, and Windows constantly chugs and has weird UI issues, even though the machines are not running heavy software and are on a pretty fresh install.-
Sometimes when I wake the laptop from sleep, it sits and the lock screen showing my wallpaper and NOTHING else.
Clicking, typing does nothing, I just have to sit there and wait like 2 minutes until it finally decides to show the input field and let me login again. -
The Network/Sound/Battery tray flyout frequently stops responding. Only goes back to normal after restarting explorer.exe
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The internal display has scaling while the external doesn’t. So every time you drag a window across it “snags” in between them while the application flickers and struggles to switch the scaling.
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Switching between virtual desktops is so sloooow, if you use a different wallpaper on each you can literally see Windows struggling to swap the wallpapers in time.
It’s impressive how a native OS feature feels like a third-party kludge.
Great work Microsoft.
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What a big pile of shit software, I swear I’m just gonna quit because of this ass smelling garbage.
Today I discovered that C:/Users/MyUser was silently an alias of C:/Users/OneDriveBullshit/MyUser only in the explorer. So I just figured out why some documents were often disappearing for months, I’m just working on a multiverse were depending on the application the same path don’t lead to the same folder.
Earlier this week I unzipped a file and couldn’t remove resulting files without administrator privileges.
I’ve never lost so much time for any fucking software, let alone a paid one. And don’t even get me starting on the fucking ads they put everywhere even if you unchecked the 154 options in 42 different menus.
Earlier this week I unzipped a file and couldn’t remove resulting files without administrator privileges.
To be fair, this kind of stuff happened to me when I first switched to Linux, before I got a better grasp on file permissions.
Yeah I can totally see that happening 🫣
Here it was especially infuriating because it’s mixed with all the company policies, like the 1 month process it took me to have administrator privilege in the first place.
These process also make some sense as I’m in a company of several hundred thousand employees, but all of this mixed together is exhaustingly anoying.
My current company just got bought out earlier this year, we are in the process of rolling all our stuff into their IT infrastructure.
I was lucky enough to get to use Debian as my OS on my old company laptop because I was the only IT at this company. Last week they finally issued me my new corporate laptop, which of course is Windows because the company that bought us out is a 100% Microsoft house.
One of their sys admins was on a call with me to get the laptop set up and working on their VPN, MFA enrollment, it was supposed to be a “quick 15 minute call.”
I watched him as he fought remotely with my machine for almost an hour. The VPN wouldn’t work no matter what he tried, then the GUI started acting up, then RDP wasn’t working right, then MFA wasn’t working. This was a brand new installation from their golden image too on a brand new high end laptop.
After about 20 minutes, I told him I was gunna stay on the call muted and to just let me know when everything was working properly. Then I hopped back onto my Linux laptop and spent the rest of the call getting actual work done while their new Windows machine was pooping the bed.
He didn’t actually even get it working at the end of the hour lol. He had to remote in later that evening to finish doing a bunch of registry fixes and file purges to finally get the VPN to connect.
Also, I don’t get how people just accept that any input they perform will require an average of 1s for feedback.
But at least now I understand why macs are so popular…
This is the thing I hate most about windows. Did it register the thing I clicked? Is something happening? If I click again will it do the task twice? Complete opposite of how my Mac works.
I also experienced less “hiccups” since switching to Linux with KDE but I’d like to know on what combination of hardware and Windows you experienced anywhere close to an average of 1s response time to “any input”.
It’s a ~5 years old thinkpad. It may be due to it not being well managed but it really disn’t up to the task. Being in a Teams call while using an external displays makes the framerate drop to ~10fps for example 🤷
That’s mostly down to Teams though (being the bloated web app that it is), and not the underlying operating system.
I just dealt with my directories secretly being in one drive. It actually was only found because the system was buggy and I couldn’t find the desktop directory in Explorer.
I had to edit the registry to fully resolve the issue.
At least now I know that I’m not crazy. Also that this issue is on Microsoft and not on my company’s IT department.
Yeah, Microsoft is super buggy. It’s a wonder that people think that Linux is unreliable.
Wow thank you I needed that.
When I started my new job I got a pretty unrestricted Windows machine, so I decided to try and use that. WSL is pretty impressive and I managed to work with Emacs and some other tools installed in it until Windows decided stuff should run way slower now. Magit got especially slow doing any git operation.
That weekend I installed Linux (with permission) and it’s perfect now.
There was an issue, don’t know how relevant now, with WSL 2 that caused awfully slow host filesystem operations. Not sure if it got fixed by now
Software neutrality in the entire public sector should be a law. Leverage of proprietary software and media like professor published book scams are criminal extortion.
People say shit like this, then move over to the thread about Russian maintainers, and lose their shit about it…
These are one in the same. Sanctions have been imposed on Russia because working with Russian people/companies is a national security risk at the moment.
And yes, I know that the Russian people are not the Russian government. But one thing many of you don’t seem to grasp (perhaps due to the massive holes in basic understanding that your STEM degree left you with?) is that, in an authoritarian country where numerous people have been thrown out of windows for less, you cannot trust that the government is not actively interfering. In fact, given recent history, it would be pretty surprising if they weren’t.
Would you put in a backdoor if your government (very credibly) threatened to kill you and/or your family if you didn’t? I can’t say that I wouldn’t.
Yeah they transferred all of our network files held on our own private servers over to Teams. I didn’t even know that teams did file storage. I guess through one drive.
It doesn’t do storage. It puts it in SharePoint somewhere. Where? Nobody knows. You may find it someday and bookmark it. It will also show up in OneDrive and maybe even Outlook! Because Microsoft doesn’t believe in your concepts of “location” man.
Yeah it’s just OneDrive/Sharepoint with a trench-coat
You can access basically everything O365 through Teams, this is one of the factors making Teams such a shitshow.
Everything is through OneDrive. Even stuff that doesn’t need to be. Desktop shortcuts…really?
Also - I hate Teams, refuse to use it. The one time I did use it for some irrelevant confirmation message, it stuck and now not only does it load every time I log on (to get closed immediately), it also has the history of that one message. That I’ve tried to delete, and it keeps coming back.
Hm. Not sure if it’s because I’ve stuck with gnome and kde. But both definitely freeze often during high I/o or intense processing times.
On multiple machines and multiple distros. It’s one of the most annoying things about it really.
Yeah, I noticed that on GNOME as well
Maybe it’s because of Wayland, but that hasn’t been my experience with KDE. It has been lightning quick lately (though I recently switched to an immutable distro so that could be part of it)
Can’t comment on Gnome as I don’t use it, but that hasn’t been my experience with KDE. Previously running Tumbleweed and now running EndeavourOS
We have Linux workstations at work…and these can only be used to access a remote desktop of a Windows 10 virtual machine. 👍
You can control what programs open on boot in the task manager. Teams was one of the first things I disabled.
That is, if the laptop isn’t totally locked down by IT. But knowing school’s IT budget that probably isn’t the case.
I can’t even change the length of time before the screen locks.
IT “locking down” Laptops often means they just give all power to Microsoft I assume
For us you get a popup that sends a ticket to IT and you have to fill out a reason why you need to do whatever it is you are trying to do. Then you wait like 10 minutes and try again to see if it was approved. If it asks for permission again then you need to assume they rejected it
Hate to say but in our office it’s the other way around. Teams HAS to start automatically before outlook can be opened manually otherwise the addin for meetings won’t load. Every morning I log in, make some coffee and then go talk to colleagues… Thanks Microsoft for the slow morning, other see this as luxury!
I started using Outlook in my Firefox browser during COVID, and have not gone back. Seems to connect to Teams just fine
No, I can’t.
