by masfoobar | 2025-05-01 11:49:57+00:00
I have been enjoying the comments on this one. :-)

There are sooo many things to unpack in the world of Windows. We could talk about Windows 11. We can talk about bloated software like Office or Visual Studio. We could even compare the performance difference between old version from the 90s to what people use today.

On one end.. I get it. Microsoft are throwing so much "features" at you, whether part of the OS or particular software like Office. If they dont their competitors will.

Microsoft "Office" use to be a Desktop Publishing suite which included the likes of Excel, Word, Access, etc. Now, Office is just a category of hundreds of applications accessed via the cloud. To think, whether on Windows bootup, or launching an modern application involves many API calls to something, somewhere in the world. No wonder applications like MS Teams takes 8-20 seconds to load (and that is sometimes being nice!)

Considering the specs of my PC.. it should load incredibly fast. Yet, for some reason, I could run something like Visual Studio 6.0 from the late 90s and will load INSTANTLY on a modern machine -- and it will be single threaded! Some may be thinking "but modern Visual Studio has these features I cannot live without!" -- are these excuses why it take so long to LOAD?

The problem we have is.. to some degree.. you have a development team who do not care about performance or memory. On the other end, you have a development team that are frustrated because it is outside their control what is considered IMPORTANT. If they speak up it might cost them their job.

I will always remember during my College days I had a project which was about doing 3D animations. We had to do a Presentation on our work at the end of the assignment. I think most people spend 50% of their project time on Microsoft Powerpoint. For its day, on the hardware available.. even that was bloat! They were fiddling with their text and images on screen. I was sooo fed up with it I decided to amend my program so it could be used as a presentation slideshow as well. Once added, all I had to do was use a text editor, writing scheme-like code to a file, covering how build each slide and animations. It was running smooth and fast and everyone was asking "how did you get it to look so good" thinking I am doing some cool trick in MS Powerpoint. Nope... just OpenGL in C.

Things like Office has always been bulky and slow. The funny thing is -- I bet Microsoft Powerpoint from 1997 would run EXTREMELY fast on todays hardware.

At home, I moved away from Microsoft and Windows since 2006-ish trying Ubuntu. I did experiment with Suse Linux before that but once home internet became solid.. so did Linux in my opinion. Sure, I still use Windows as my job requires it... and I can see Microsoft keeping their power/control thanks to cloud/azure and other things. Also, Excel has such as legacy to it that many people in Finance and other dept RELY on Excel! Point is many will stick with Windows because of that.

You have Valve helping Linux thrive in the gaming space. We need something that can help Linux thrive in the Office space. I am suprised there is not modern Spreadsheet application that takes us away from Excel. Sadly, you need a full DTP suite.