2mo ago

Having to use windows at work makes me appreciate my desktop Linux experience at home.

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.

115 comments

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.
- 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".
- 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.
- 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.
- Wow thank you I needed that.
- 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.
- Wow, you just... described the problem we had on our Windows PCs that I never managed to describe

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.

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.

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.
  
  IT "locking down" Laptops often means they just give all power to Microsoft I assume
  
  I can’t even change the length of time before the screen locks.
  
  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.
- 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.

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.

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 🤣🤣

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

@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

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...
- 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

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 that works with WSL or vcpkg.
Edit: Oh, and everything turning to webapps on the desktop. Love staring at white canvas while it waits for a server response.
- 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

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.
- 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.
- 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.

We’re being forced to move everyone to W11 by the end of the year. It’s gonna be hell.
- My company already did - it was a shitshow and my laptop sucks even more now.

I have to use SharePoint on a daily basis.
- We pray for you
- You're fucked.

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
- Yeah my org is about to ban using anything but the outlook client for email access for "security" reasons, and ban all other logins. We're on a Kubernetes cluster, so historically you've been able to login via Thunderbird or use the Gmail web interface as well.
  If they go through with it I will riot.

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.

I requested a Windows machine at work a few years ago, because the specs were amazing, and I was getting frustrated with Mac OS. After using the Windows machine for a couple days I was reminded why I don't like Windows anymore, and returned the machine, despite its amazing specs. It just wasn't worth it.

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.

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
- I whish I had permission to do that.

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 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.
  
  Sounds like a pretty shitty place to work for then lol

I kinda wish more pcs shipped with linux.

Had the same issue with outlook last weeks. 60% CPU usage, doing nothing.

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.

I use both but windows 11 has been generally stable and visual artifact free for me even more than windows 10. Like i have never seen BSOD on 11 yet but on 10 it was regular.
Btw did you tweak it to remove bloat and crapware? Windows will break if you do it even if the bloat removing tool call it stable.

Same

Debian in WSL is my single favorite thing about Windows work laptop. Real tools! 😃
I’m back on windows for work after a decade away, and all the reasons I left are still there. The tools are still lacking, the layout is non-sensical, prototyping requires expensive subscriptions, and it’s not designed to get work done.
*nixes and macOS, to a lesser extent, are much nicer. The *nixes are designed to get work done. I have my gripes, but good lord they’re small comparatively.

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...

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.

Yeah now add Dynamics to all that and you get my day. Eyeroll

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.
- 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
- 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)
- Not completely sure, but I believe that is a kernel thing. Hence present on all distros. Perhaps because the kernel is turned for throughput/server workloads. I hope this will be resolved with new schedulers though (e.g., through sched_ext).
- Yeah, I noticed that on GNOME as well

You can still use the classic version of Outlook, that comes with latest Office. It is literally called "Outlook (classic)" in the start menu.

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.

And here I am looking to move away from Linux after they started rejecting submissions 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.

115 comments