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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
XP had a bunch of problems early on, just like 8. The hate for 8 was mostly because of ui changes. Me and 95 were irredeemably bad.
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.
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.
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.
Wow thank you I needed that.
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.
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 think, it’s both.
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Had the same issue with outlook last weeks. 60% CPU usage, doing nothing.
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
You can still use the classic version of Outlook, that comes with latest Office. It is literally called “Outlook (classic)” in the start menu.
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.
One of the first things I do while migrating user to a new PC (or just giving one for newly employed person) is that I disable all useless Microsoft shit automatically starting up in the task manager.
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
Are you serious? “Assuming” is the streamline? DAMN!
I remember this kind of shit when I worked at Caterpillar. I always assumed the requested permission messages just disappeared into the void. Of course, I was IT so my requests were usually asking for more than they’d want their help desk staff to have.
Haha I assumed we had like a corporate IT that was just always there approving and denying requests. Until one time I had requested a photo editing app and weeks later I got an email from my local IT guy saying it wasn’t going to be approved. I was shocked he responded and shocked that he was the dude that was getting all my angry requests all along lol. I couldn’t even install our own companies software to test our products it’s insane
Haha crazy. Well SECURITY
I can’t even change the length of time before the screen locks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
@maxprime same lol. Somehow the whole os feels like one gigantic advertisement… That is trying it’s best to not let you use your computer
It is
I have to use SharePoint on a daily basis.
We pray for you
You’re fucked.
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
I spend a lot of my workday looking at windows that have turned white and “not responding”, or clicking on things and waiting a minute to see whether the click worked, or waiting for the Start menu to allow me to type, or waiting for the indexing service to spare me a little bit of my computer for my own use, etc. Then I come home to Linux and remember how computers can actually be fast and satisfying to use.
Oh W11 start menu is so damn slow… I usuall smash Win and then immediately start typing the Application I need. After the Windows 11 upgrade, the menu chokes on the first two letters leaving me with having to redo everything slowly.
When teams is just doing chat things, it’s fine. But the fact that it’s the only program that doesn’t remember which monitor it is supposed to be on, and never remembers the show on all desktop settings, drives me insane. Not to mention that it seems to restart itself multiple time per day and makes me fix its location each time.
This is why I insisted to not have two monitors on my work desk. I don’t use it because it introduces so much more problems.
1 out of many problems less I have to worry about on Win11.
Btw., virtual desktop switching on Win11 is very slow. It needs time to register an then finally starts a stuttering transistion to the next desktop. This laptop has a 3 year old i7 in it. Switching virtual desktops on Gnome would run very smooth and responsive on it. I tested it even with VirtualBox with that Win11 as a host OS and GPU acceleration enabled: smoother! Only minor lags.
Oh yeah, I have noticed that the virtual desktop switching on windows 11 sucks. It’s extra shitty if you set a different wallpaper for each one.
I am glad that I’ve set only a solid color. <_<
We have Linux workstations at work…and these can only be used to access a remote desktop of a Windows 10 virtual machine. 👍
My boss told me to get a laptop and I’d be reimbursed, so I got a System76 with Fedora. “How are you going to use (company proprietary software that only works on Windows)?” I told him I could run it on wine (and I have). But he ended up assigning me a Windows 365 cloud, so now I have a very nice laptop that just works, and I only fire up the cloud crap if I really need to.
Suffice it to say that I’m the only upper management member that barely interacts with the IT department, I don’t need to 🤣🤣
Yeah now add Dynamics to all that and you get my day. Eyeroll
