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.
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
And here I am looking to move away from Linux after they started rejecting contributions for political reasons.
They removed maintainers that work for Russian corporations, they are not blocking submissions from any Russian citizen.
That doesn’t invalidate my statement though.
The reason I replied is because of the “submissions” part. They aren’t doing that, everyone can still submit code that might get accepted. What they did was remove some of the people in charge of deciding what gets accepted from the team.
I think that entire comment is actually incorrect. My understanding is that they did not “remove” any maintainers, but actually rejected patches from Russian citizens (because of their employer), and also removed some Russian names from the maintainers list who already have code in the kernel.
My home desktop has been on Linux for almost a decade, and a few months ago, my employer certified Linux as a choice for our corporate laptops. I couldn’t be happier. If only I managed to convince my wife to take the plunge, but she is the most anti-change person I know when it comes to technology. It took her months to stop complaining when she had to upgrade to Win 10 and her 9 years old computer is slow as it gets right now, it was never re-installed and she rather not risk trying to make it better in fear of breaking something…
You can still use the classic version of Outlook, that comes with latest Office. It is literally called “Outlook (classic)” in the start menu.
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
As an admin who manages windows devices, it’s not only a pain for the end users. I will readily admit that the management tools are quite extensive and somewhat easy to use, but they’re damn near impossible to debug when they don’t work, and that’s quite often. Gpo’s often refuse to apply without reason, those ads on the Lock Screen? You can remove those if you pay for enterprise or education edition. Running pro? Nope you get ads.
Heres a programming (merge sort?) trick applied to troubleshooting GPOs: turn off half the policies in the GP, did the issue go away? if yes its in the turned off half, if no, turn off another half of the active policies, repeat
deleted by creator
For me, at work it’s more MS sharepoint and MS dynamic (+oracle clod shit of course) that fk me over on a daily basis - that’s possibly due to the way our IT people don’t seem to know how to use them or set them up - and won’t let us query(just SELECT) the dynamics tables directly using SQL for whatever reason. (i suspect we have to pay MS to acces our own data). And of course things like MS excel being used to mangle data by default all the time - yeah i know always use power query import . . . just everything takes six extra steps and the easy way is always the worst way.
W10 is mostly okay. I mean it’s slow and hard to use, blasts the cpu fan all the time, is still annoying with updates, and I have to “right click open with” to open anything in the application that i want (even when there is only one native appllication for the file format). You get used to working around that shit.
That is just not true for sharepoint and other MS apps, it gets worse, and as soon as you think you get used to a workaround for one thing, something else changes or an old thing resurfaces. and dynamic has just “upgraded” the colour scheme of the status colum so that there is no contrast between the background and the text. black text on white background, good enough for every other column, but no upgrade that one to black on dark blue, thanks bill you’re a F-ing-C. how do they screw up things like that as a bajillion dollar company.
So I was going to say that W10 is more or less stable and it is other MS stuff that I hate more. that is probably true. but actually sitting down and writing out the above, W10 is still pretty horrible to . . . whether it’s our IT or MS itself, it’s shit.
I much prefer my home linuxes, it is just as stable (for me) - and just so much easier to use - and most of all it is quieter on the fan. So much more relaxing.
W11 had better be “not worse” or i’ll probably have to quit.
For dynamics you have to ask MS for access to the sql back end. Then its granted for several hours as read only. That’s why you have to use synapse link to a data lake etc.
I don’t know what a “synapse link” is i’m sure we’d not be allowed access to that; though I can think of at least one manager who would have parrotted that for a few monts if they’d heard it; “data lake” was also one of those for a while, it seems to have given way to “lakehouse” now. I just want to put on concrete boots, jump off the boat and hope it’s deep enough.
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?
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.
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)
Yeah, I noticed that on GNOME as well
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
My main gripe with windows is that it’s gradually turning to adware/spyware after MS decided to go for that sweet data collection revenue. That also means a shift in the focus of the development of the OS, as it’s not being developed for the benefit of the users anymore.
That, and software development processed are more tedious. Although today I’m sure I could find a workflow to that works with WSL or vcpkg.
Gradually? By 10’s launch, it was already adware/spyware. 11 is not even attempting to hide it, if you look at it objectively past the PR.
Yeah, fair enough. I’ve just noticed that a clean setup requires more and more workarounds in regedit and policy editor etc. Updates reenabling stuff like that is just infuriating
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
As someone who has a good windows laptop at home, windows at work is actual garbage. We had a month where you just couldn’t use the search function, because the act of typing in the search bar caused enough problems it would close the search bar.
Odds are your home computer is somewhat competent and your work one is a steaming pile of trash not fit for purpose.
We just had Windows Update brick itself due to a faulty update. The fix required updating them manually while connected to the office network, making them unusable for 2-3 hours. Another issue we’ve had is that Windows appears to be monopolizing virtualization HW acceleration for some memory integrity protection, which made our VMs slow and laggy. Fixing it required a combination of shell commands, settings changes and IT support remotely changing some permission, but the issue also comes back after some updates.
Though I’ve also had quite a lot of Windows problems at home, when I was still using it regularly. Not saying Linux usage has been problem free, but there I can at least fix things. Windows has a tendency to give unusable error messages and make troubleshooting difficult, and even when you figure out what’s wrong you’re at the mercy of Microsoft if you are allowed to change things on your own computer, due to their operating system’s proprietary nature.
I ran arch on it for about a year - it’s a gen 9 i5. During that time I had a desktop that ran W10 on a gen 3 i5 and was quite a competent machine. Then with W11 and the TPM requirement that perfectly good windows box became ewaste.
The laptop is fine. Windows 11 is just garbage.
The funniest thing is it doesn’t even have to be this way with Windows. I’ve unfortunately had to go back to dual booting lately but I’m using Win 10 LTSC and I have to say I’m surprised how tolerable it is. I’d still rather not use it but eeh it’s fine.
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.
Pop setup it also mostly just works. There are occasional freezes that require a restart and such
Weird. I used Pop for 3-4 years and not once did it freeze, stutter, or require a restart that wasn’t related to an update.
For me the pop shop always froze. At least that thought me how to use the terminal. But even regular GNOME software was miles ahead of their shop…
Oh… Now that you mention the shop, you’re right. Mine would freeze up too. I stopped using it, which is why I forgot about it.
That last paragraph is exactly what i feel. In Windows it started to feel more and more like I’m fighting against Microsoft and have to be on edge all the time whereas if in Linux something doesn’t work it’s not because of ill intentions of the people behind the OS.
I had lots of issues on Pop. Switched over to Manjaro and its much better for me. Laptop runs cooler, doesnt slow down, etc.
I’d recommend switching off Manjaro to pure arch or something like endeavour or cachyos, manjaro is not really considered the most stable arch distro
im not gonna change anything rn. I had tried Mint, OpenSuse, Debian, Pop Etc all trying to find an OS that had proper touchpad drivers for my laptop. The touchpad works on them but will randomly get very sluggish and have really bad input lag. Manjaro so far is the only one that has been working for me so unless i can figure out what magic they did to make it work, or if i have some other issue i dont see myself switching.
