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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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".
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.
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":
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.
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.
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.