Up until 2019, Windows was my daily driver and had been for the prior ~20. years. I had been regularly ssh-ing into Linux machines, but it didn't seem like a place I could live. Then, in 2019, I built a PC and, wanting to get more proficient in Linux environments, I made it a dual boot setup with a Ubuntu desktop partition and a Windows partition, expecting I'd inevitably get frustrated on the Linux partition by sidequests debugging driver issues or setting up peripherals, unproductive yak-shaving stuff. I had to google a setting or two over the first couple days, but other than that, everything just worked on the Linux partition. Things opened quickly, things installed easily, and things I was worried about (e.g. nvidia and printer drivers) were either automatic or a one-time step so small I don't remember it. After a couple weeks, I noticed there hadn't been a single moment where I had to switch to the Windows partition, and a month after that I reformatted the Windows partition ssd and added the storage to the Linux partition.
If you have considered switching to Linux and worried that it would be a chore, give it a shot (if you have the freedom to choose). It has been polished and ready since at least 2019. I have to use a Windows machine for work and, like this New Outlook issue shows, MSFT has concluded most users can't or won't leave so there's no margin in improving UX and some margin in doing things that make UX much worse. I don't think I'll elect to have a personal Windows machine ever again in my life.
> It has been polished and ready since at least 2019.
Linux people said things like this in 2019 too. It's always "been improved a lot in the past few years" (not saying this statement can't be true.)
At this point I'm convinced that no matter how much or little Linux desktop is improved, its market share is solely dependent on how much Microsoft fucked up.
I actually agree, Linux is well past the point a minimally tech competent person can use it fine, but it doesn't solve the fact that even if Linux was flawless, there is still a switching cost in time, relearning a new system, and worst (best?) of all of you decide you are willing to do all of that now you can get entirely lost in the weeds picking a distro. I used Linux all through university, then went back to windows out of convenience and needing to use it for work anyways.
Until one day I got so frustrated with constant settings resets, reboots at the worst times for software updates that fail, highjacking my pc after every update for a guided tour of the latest things Microsoft decided to break, and telemetry that can only be disabled with an obscure registry hack that changes every few months, I just couldn't anymore.
Linux has been good enough as a daily driver for a while now, but even with proton I don't know if the pull factors towards Linux will ever be strong enough for most people. For me though the push factors away from Microsoft had gotten so strong I couldn't take it anymore.
Theres a lot of friction from enterprise Microsoft admins, too. "But how will I group policy and Entra xyz?" is a concern I hear regularly, but still struggle to educate them away from.
This is more desktop linux's certification and standardization problem than technical problem.
Because "It works" is insufficient for regulated industries that require "Prove is works using ___ standard" (where proving takes a ton of
people-time), and more and more industries are soft-regulated as a condition of cyber insurance.
MS has inertia on its side, and its abusive marketing and lock-in strategies of the 90s. Remember when you couldn't buy a PC without Windows from most vendors? Meaning you were paying MS, even if you immediately uninstalled it?
The long term outcome of that is that 90+% of industry still buys Windows PCs. And non-industry: once non-techie people are on an OS (Windows/MacOS), many don't move off it, though Apple's ecosystem has been a good carrot+stick.
One of the more interesting indicators is (even though desktop software is in decline) - the number of apps that are Windows and Mac and maybe linux, and the increasing number of apps that Mac-only or Mac+Linux but do NOT have a Windows download. Something unimaginable in the 90s and 00s.
MS are certainly accelerating adoption of other platforms due to their own mismanagement.
I just realized, when I got my HP laptop I've never even booted its default Windows install, but MS still got paid. I'd rather have that money to go HP so the laptop could be made better. Insane how they're getting paid for nothing, almost like a tax. HP could just have offered an OSless option, but no. A silly world we live in.
> At this point I'm convinced that no matter how much or little Linux desktop is improved, its market share is solely dependent on how much Microsoft fucked up.
Lifelong Windows user here. If you could get the kind of driver support you have with Windows for just whatever the fuck you have lying around, I'd probably use my Ubuntu laptop as more of a daily driver.
Not lifelong, but I've been using Linux since 1993. Through subconscious selective pressure, I only have things lying around that are useful with Linux.
It's kind of liberating, to be able to ignore a huge amount of crap in the market because you can tell it is just some sort of delivery vector for proprietary Windows drivers and their dodgy installers.
Ubuntu 26.04 has a bug in their pc-kernel snap causing it not to ship firmware for some devices (like my iwlwifi chipset), and because it mounts read-only directories into /var/lib/firmware/ you can't install the updated firmwares from apt either. Unless you're willing to do something like unpack the .deb file manually and extract the relevant firmwares from it, your wifi card won't work.
This isn't an issue with the hardware being too new or anything; it all works and the firmwares are all available, but Ubuntu's kernel snaps don't ship them and they make it much harder to get them yourself either.
I bought the Lenovo's proprietary Ethernet adapter from Lenovo directly for my Thinkpad X1 Extreme because I wanted to keep a USB-C port free. It didn't work at all under Fedora. A third-party USB-C to Ethernet adapter I bought works flawlessly.
If Lenovo's own adapter doesn't work on one of the most well supported product lines on Linux, that is not a good look.
To be very clear, I am a long time Linux user and most of the third-party stuff usually just works.
I remember handing an Ethernet cable to a friend and he said I was getting old. His laptop didn't have Ethernet! I still haven't recovered from the realisation.
My [old] laptop had a a card reader, hdmi, vga, a serial port and rows of usb2 ports, a plug for power, headphone jack etc etc
Back at his place he showed me the USB hub and the Rube Goldberg dongle collection. I said, ahh there you have all those connectors you didn't need.
I now think USB is magic. Not wanting to use it for everything means you are getting old. The future is a desk full of dongles.
On the desktop that's true, but when I last used linux laptops (Debian, probably in 2021 or so), there were significant driver issues for the touchpad, touchscreen, buttons for brightness, and audio on every laptop I tried.
I eventually gave up and bought a Macbook and installed Homebrew and Rectangle on it. I haven't thought about drivers or firmware updates for that device since I bought it.
If I did own a desktop, I would use linux on it, and I solely use linux when I'm using VMs or cloud providers.
Recently started working at a company that uses windows and .net and it's so bad.
I would say even 2021 is long enough ago for that landscape to have changed quite a bit. For one thing, Framework was barely a company back then, now they’re a mature and highly viable OEM choice.
As a small tip, I prefer using Arch-based distributions as they get new kernels rapidly and therefore new hardware support comes fast. They’re also an obvious choice for people who play games on Steam since SteamOS is arch based.
In the AI age, almost any problem with Linux is a quick query or copy/pasted error message away. The days of spending hours on troubleshooting are over.
If you were willing to buy a whole new piece of hardware with a MacBook, perhaps you’d be willing to buy a Linux-first laptop in the future? For example, the Framework 13 Pro has purportedly caught up to many of the advantages of a MacBook Pro (battery life, haptic trackpad, CNC aluminum chassis), judging by early press impressions. Over half of Framework 13” customers install Linux and it’s Ubuntu certified. Besides being the premier Linux laptop, you also get all the repairability and modularity benefits the brand has on offer.
I personally own the current non-Pro model and despite its shortcomings that the new model doesn’t have (I have my preorder in), the overall package is a pretty modern laptop where 100% of the hardware works flawlessly with Linux.
Even if you aren’t looking for that type of machine and just want something from a more common OEM like Lenovo or ASUS, I have found that solid Linux support is not tough to find. Basically any common laptop that’s older than 6 months old is well-supported. One of my friends bought a $500 ThinkPad T14 on eBay and of course 100% of the hardware works.
Macs are the gold standard for not having any need to mess with drivers, but I have found my AMD graphics driver to be a lot more stable in Linux than in Windows. That was the major decision point in wiping my desktop gaming PC and installing CachyOS.
My “final straw” motivation to leave macOS on my laptop last year was Liquid Glass. Other motivations included my frustration with certain Apple services and the level of abstraction and lock-in they have, running out of storage space in my system, as well as frustration with my laptop being capable enough but unable to play any of most of my PC games from a software standpoint.
Returning to speaking of something relevant to this article, now that I have no macOS or Windows, I am no longer tied down with Thunderbolt as the only viable desktop email client anymore as I don’t need to support all three operating systems. I’m enjoying Evolution a lot more than Thunderbird, but of course there are numerous Linux-only choices I could have gone with.
LOL, preach. Work worst with Dell XPS series (have to power cycle the laptop so the dock would display something again), work better with ThinkPad and Framework laptops.
Dell Docking stations are practically free, yes. Even on Windows, I've had issues, because of the Dell fuckery with docking stations - single cable docking doesn't work if your docking station is too new, and your laptop too old. Bananas.
On Ubuntu, I've purchased 3 different docking stations, and tried 2 existing ones, and none has worked quite right (some just flat out don't have all the drivers they need). The Windows laptop I have (which is extremely similar in hardware and generation), if you get a video signal out to a monitor, it's a very safe bet everything else works.
Back to "Practically Free" for old Dell docking stations. I acquired 3 of them for about 15-20 each shipped off eBay. lol At least I'm not sinking hundreds of dollars into each attempt at a docking station that may or may not work.
> Unless your hardware is exotic (or actively anti-consumer)
Bruh.
2 weeks ago I was getting full kernel crashes on Ubuntu Server due to an Intel iGPU on a Dell Laptop with a 7th gen i7. Fortunately Claude Code fixed it after a couple of attempts, but still.
Audio was completely corrupt on a Bazzite HTPC I tried to set up 6 months ago, until I changed some setting on my TV related to 10-bit colour. Then, when that was sorted Kodi would only run in 30Hz despite the fact that other apps supported 60.
My previous laptop with Arch (circa 2020) sometimes wouldn't wake from sleep.
When I ran an OpenSUSE Desktop (circa 2019) I picked Noveau instead of the proprietary drivers, and the picture was all corrupt. Then when I installed the proper Nvidia drivers, I did the wrong thing and my whole screen turned black, Linus-style.
I then switched the same desktop to Ubuntu, which was better out of the box, but would stop reading my USB SD card reader after unplugging it a few times. WiFi would also randomly drop out until I rebooted the whole system every few hours, and when talking to my Brother Laser Printer it would only print in like 30dpi or somthing ridiculous. I was emailing the files to myself, rebooting back into Windows and then printing from there because it was so bad.
The 5 year gap between the current Linux attempts and the last one had less to do with Linux improvements and more to do with agentic LLMs being able to paper over all the cracks. To be fair, though, I expect regular people having access to Opus 4.5-tier or higher models will result in all kinds of minor issues that would normally be overlooked actually getting fixed on Linux. (Thinking about it a bit more, regular users will have access to subsidised tokens too, so a million open source devs running $20 Claude Pro subscriptions might between them be able to do way more with that $20 million than Microsoft could with Enterprise API access).
I'm not really using anything too exotic... my hardware all works, and my printer has generally been without issue (HP Color Laser on ethernet) regardless of what I use to print from.
For me, I switched when the start menu started showing internet ads as part of the results... I ran insiders for years, often joking that WSL was my favorite Linux distro... I love the new MS Terminal, and pretty happy with a lot of things. That said, there's far more that annoys me... it's too in your face trying to sell you additional software/services/features that frankly I find offensive from an OS. It's like built in malware ads. They might as well try to sell me an X10 camera in those popups, I'd feel just as irritated about it.
I went from dual booting, to just Linux for my personal use a few years ago and been pretty happy. I'm not a gamer, and was already using Linux as my dev target for server software. It wasn't a big deal for me. Even the growing pains for Cosmic have been less annoying than some of the "features" of Windows.
Having no one to ask if you can't get things to work was a big issue until LLMs came along. You can ask things online but people are reluctant to keep asking and/or keep explaining what they've tried.
I'm sure the lone Linux experimenter just gave up some place half way configuring the HP printer.
I don’t know if Linux has improved a lot in the last few years. I’ll observe, though, that it always feels like it has for the first few years you use it, since it becomes intuitive and natural.
Agreed. 2026 was the year. The degradation of win 11 , forced win accounts everywhere. I switched to Linux Mint, and I haven't switched back. Missing out on a few random games that aren't supported yet, I decided it was time to get rid of windows on my desktop.
I do have one windows machine still, and thats my simrig, this is a purpose built computer+rig specifically for iRacing and iRacing have said that they won't support linux, and so w/ that, I'll keep it in windows, until they change their position.
I read your blog and I can't agree, i've installed arch Linux before and only had to read the arch wiki page on it and it worked fine with none of the issues you described.
Same thing with gentoo, that I am daily driving now.
I sure had hickups but I managed to solve them by sitting and reading the manuals/wikis of the distros directly, or the programs I was dealing with. Maybe the problem is that you read an obscure forum to get your answer? I don't know.
Whenever Steam released Proton is when Linux started to get way better. I used to daily Linux at work in 2017 onwards. Been dailying at home since 2022.
Man, I just realized it's been 20 years for me. I vaguely remember sometime in 2006 that Windows Vista was inevitable and decided to switch to linux.
I don't care about fussing around and just need a useful machine for work and fun. Linux is far from perfect for me but the amount of crap windows or macos throw at me when I have to use them is almost comical.
I moved long ago to use a fully legally free OS, but at that time, win7 or even win10 weren't bad neighbors to visit from time to time. But win11 became a weird new-trend copycat with even more bloat.
Same for me. Possibly longer. I just never think about Windows anymore. I think it helps these days that "programs" aren't so much a thing anymore. A lot of what used to be an OS program is now a free online service.. like email, word processing, chats, multimedia, etc..
> It has been polished and ready since at least 2019.
Linux has been a fine desktop since almost its beginning.
My first work-issued laptop was in 1994, running Linux. Using a PCMCIA modem to connect to the internet via dialup. Worked perfect. Every year since then (that's 32 years now) I've had Linux desktop(s) and laptop(s) and it all works fine.
If one looks for excuses, excuses can be found, but it has worked fine since the beginning.
All Operating Systems suck. Linux sucks less for things I care about, and has done for a long time - much longer than 7 years for my purposes.
I too am required to use a Windows machine for work, which seems to get worse with every release. They even ruined notepad.exe. The bloat is unavoidable. The new laptop I got one year ago that seemed more than enough when new, is now struggling under the bloat. It takes me in excess of 10 minutes to log in, connect VPN, start teams, outlook and putty in a citrix session. Madness!
Pretty much the same here. A happy Ubuntu user for 4 years now. Here and there, there's still minor issues, but nothing a quick search or AI can't help you with. And we're hackers here after all.
get back to me when you will be able to install easily Chinese keyboard/input into Linux as you can with Windows and when you will be easily switch keyboards with alt+left shift, I was setting up computers with Linux and it's major PITA for such basic thing, same with reassigning right alt and windows menu keys to different buttons (Home/End) on laptop
Have you tried a Mac? Apple silicon is fantastic, build quality is the best on the market, you're still running a unix OS, and there's a huge community of developers + companies making things work.
Yeah, and I'm a big fan of the the hardware. I bought a refurbished MacBook Air in 2022 (M1 or M2, I don't recall) to try it on and see how I liked it. I mainly used it as a thin client to ssh to my homelab, but it was far and away the best laptop hardware on the market and I loved the battery life. I found that I couldn't use it with two (non-duplicating) external monitors, so I considered the test a success, gave the MacBook Air to my wife, and bought a MacBook Pro (which I'm still using mainly as a thin client and ssh-ing to a Linux machine and working there; plug for Tailscale, it makes everything really nice and easy).
I know it's silly to have a MacBook Pro just for the screen size, its ability to drive two external monitors, and the battery life Apple Silicon achieves. And I feel a bit rude not really learning much about the dev tools the community has made for MacOS. But it is just really nice hardware (I just wish it wasn't such a chore to configure my Macbook to have the same ctrl+c, ctrl+v keyboard shortcuts when using an external keyboard, but the hardware is sufficiently better than anything else on the market that I tolerate it).
Macs are even at a good price point compared to similar hardware these days, and don't seem to have the same level of planned obsolescence of windows laptops.
A mac with homebrew and rectangle installed works well enough as a hobby development machine for me that I rarely feel the need to ssh into something else.
They are trying so hard to destroy that, basically nothing is left.
Just yesterday I needed to run equivalent of strace on a mac to trace system call. Great, it has dtruss (truss was the command on Solaris). Turns out dtruss is still there, but apple has completely broken it, it doesn't work.
Just an example of how extremely developer-hostile Apple is.
I found AI (Claude) to be extremely effective in setting up, managing and maintainimg Linux, just like it was in managimg Windows for those of us incapable of memorizing 1.000's of Powershell commands.
I have some fond memories of getting into computers around 2000. Building PCs, installing Windows, re-installing Windows ever so often.
At some point Windows just crashed and couldn't be brought back to life, straight up refused to be installed on that disk again.
(Funfact: the crash happened while playing some opensource sci-fi game... Produced by Microsoft)
I had a Gentoo Linux partition back then thanks to a friend from school and used that for everything from that point on.
Interestingly I never really had major issues. Running Warcraft 3 on Gentoo, writing my thesis (theseses actually) on Ubuntu and later switching to Arch Linux just worked.
I still remember switching to Gnome 3 (from KDE) and being impressed by how fast the Shell felt.
...
Fast forward to two years ago and I am forced to use Windows for the first time in 20+ years, in a locked down corporate setting nonetheless.
My favourite part of these success stories when Nautilus can,t replicate some functionality which Windows has since forever, eg copy-pasting tex and files across 3 RDP sessions deep. Sure, someone who uses their computer as a glorified SSH terminal with an occasional Google.Docs edition wouldn't see a problem, but I, who works everyday - do.
It's reductive to say that people who aren't "copy-pasting tex and files across 3 RDP sessions deep" are not "working everyday." While Windows fits your use case, some people do use SSH for their real work as well, even if it is simpler.
> some people do use SSH for their real work as well
Somehow all that 'real work' boils down to configuring servers. Most people don't configure servers 24/7 or even 8/5. They need to work with files of different formats and with different apps. Now tell me, how would you use SSH (not SSH tunneling, lol) to loot at some .jpegs to decide to what would be used in somewhere.
Hell, VS Code + Remote SSH is pretty freaking awesome.. edit locally run remote. The integrated terminal pretty much makes this as smooth an experience as working locally.
Yes, exactly what the problem is. Every Linux fanboi has a lot of problem solving CLI incantations. While Windows users just use the default and working copy-paste (and don't need root/Administrator rights for that too).
IME running the new outlook in an actual web browser (through outlook.office.com) is waaay faster than the heavy (heh) client.
Bonus points for it running fine on Linux, too. I understand there are some missing features compared to the old one (can't recall which), but for basic corpo emailing it works perfectly for me.
I now have 0 reasons to use Windows at work, so, for once, I'll nonironically cheer MS for a job well done!
1. You can't run all the rules on your inbox to sweep the piled up email after a weekend reboot. No such option while it is still present in the legacy native Outlook.
2. You have no option of deleting an entry in your calendar without sending a decline. I am in many groups and sometimes just want to clean up my calendar without sending declines. Again, very much present in the native program.
No one expects genuine innovation from MS, but at least they could put some effort into feature parity. Too much to ask for in the days of Copilot I guess.
> 1. You can't run all the rules on your inbox to sweep the piled up email after a weekend reboot. No such option while it is still present in the legacy native Outlook.
I'm not sure what you mean. I have rules running regularly to move messages around, delete messages older than X in some folders. It all runs fine. Maybe there are some other kinds of rules I'm not aware of? But I do remember that back when "old outlook" was still the main thing, I needed to be running for the rules to apply, which meant that interacting with a different client was always... funny.
> 2. You have no option of deleting an entry in your calendar without sending a decline
Could this be a config flag somewhere? I've just run a test and invited my MS account from a personal mailbox. On the event, once accepted, there are two separate actions: decline and delete. I've received the "accepted" mail, but haven't received anything after "deleting" the event.
Clicking delete doesn't send any notification to the other side, where this account still shows as having accepted the invite (the other side is a different Office 365 organization).
That is interesting. I'm using the PWA on Linux - I can't share a screenshot but basically pressing the delete key shows two buttons: Cancel and Decline Event? - I don't get the Delete option like you do.
Public Folders is what makes us stick with the old Outlook client. For 25 years Public Folder has been a simple drag and drop, hierarchical archive system for communications with clients and vendors at team level.
I haven't really been able to use outlook.office.com in anything but Edge, which on my Windows machine automatically authenticates with M365. In other browsers I regularly get stuck in an auth redirect loop between different Microsoft domains when I open the site. Sometimes it helps to clear all cookies and re-login (which is a real pain with 2FA and all) but it only ever helps once: If I close and re-open the site, I'll have to do it again.
How people voluntarily pay for this crap is beyond me. (In my case it's forced upon me by my client. On my own machines I switched to Linux in 2010 and never looked back.)
Even their Office Suite runs okay in the Web. For heavy lifting, like getting an md file into our Corporate Design, I still use libreoffice combned with our template.
> I understand there are some missing features compared to the old one
There are some people that use Outlook for...well I'm not sure what but things that go way beyond email and calendar. I've been using the web app for several years now, it's fine. When I was new in IT, I always struggled to see what the big deal was with Outlook desktop. The web mail has folders, rules, shared mailbox support, integrated calendar, etc.
What more do you need out of email?
Well, turns out a lot. People treat email has a permanent data store. I've encountered folks with multiple PST files archiving 10+ years of email. I ran into people that needed to queue up a bunch of offline emails in their outbox to send when they're on network again (ok, I kind of get this use case), and I came across all manner of horrors of COM Add-ins.
Anyway, the root of the problem is people using email for everything it was never intended to do or be. If "new" Outlook can break some of those habits, we'll all be better off for it.
I'll be trying to solve some problem, half-remember an email conversation from several years ago on something relevant, and want to look it up.
This feels like the most natural thing in the world to me, and it's not like the ability to save emails is new. Why, exactly, would a forced change of habits be for my own good?
>Why, exactly, would a forced change of habits be for my own good?
At the personal level, it wouldn't be. It makes a lot of sense, and I do the same with Fastmail.
At the corp level where it's often in M365 cloud, you've got hard limits from Microsoft on one hand (100GB primary mailbox - period), and corporate data retention limits on the other. Legal often has strong opinions on how long you are allowed to retain emails which you may or may not be able to personally override. Could be just a few years, which forces a different strategy.
I'm not sure on the details of Google, but one imagines corp workspaces have equivalent interests.
I don't recall any kind of retention limits at Microsoft, at least not for engineers. My mail archives went all the way back to my hire date even 15 years later.
When I worked at Capital One there was a policy of automatically deleting everything that had not been subpoenaed as soon as it was legal to delete it. Usually 3 years or so. Retaining longer was viewed as creating legal risk for future lawsuits. They didn't want to leave evidence lying around if they could help it.
My company moved to a 3 year retention for legal purposes a few years ago. Somewhat annoying from a nostalgia point of view when I’d get mails pop up from 2095, but everything I need has been in jiras for the last 10 years.
No, not conversations, actual data. Think reports, invoices, large PDFs, etc. Emailing files to yourself, that sort of thing. Then they end up with multiple PSTs.
Outlook COM addons + AutoHotKey was one of the ways that I learned programming back in the day.
Email arrives > check the sender > if sender is $company > check for keywords and then run excel macros based on that > generate PDF report and automatically generate an outlook email, attach and send the file.
Good times, it feels like we're getting less and less flexible with the hackability of our corporate workflows as time goes on.
> If "new" Outlook can break some of those habits, we'll all be better off for it.
It won't, since email is in fact the best data store available to most people in enterprises (especially compared to things like Sharepoint). It might finally accelerate the move away from Exchange though. Here's hoping.
I don't know about that... unless a good open-source option comes out for corporate email that matches what Outlook/Exchange/M365 offers for calendars and scheduling.
That last part is the real point of integration... then real time chat and messaging status baked in... it's hard to beat. You have services and applications that offer pieces, but none integrate as well.
In the early 2010's I think that both Blackberry and Mozilla had an opportunity to create their own competition in the space and neither did. Google is pretty close, but IMO still a much lesser experience, reinventing a new chat app every other year didn't help their cause at all.
Google seems most likely to capitalize. GSuite is standard practice even among many large companies provided they were founded in the past ~15 years and aren't on the Microsoft teat. Their search is also _so much_ better than Outlook that it's even more useful as a forever-store.
Anyway, the root of the problem is people using email for everything it was never intended to do or be. If "new" Outlook can break some of those habits, we'll all be better off for it.
If ever there was a recipe for doing a terrible job at building software, that's as good a way to put it as I think we will ever see.
>and I came across all manner of horrors of COM Add-ins.
It works both ways, I ran into a situation where a random Add-in was enabled on the web client and affecting the desktop client behavior despite not being in the list of Add-ins, and could only be disabled from the web client.
Yeah this is pretty much the only thing protecting us from Records Retention Policy(tm). Because the legal office thinks discovery is toooooooo risky, we have to delete all of the information we used to develop long lived business processes.
When I wrote this god and I understood it, now god only knows.
The last [US] BigCorp I worked for deployed (in Outlook) automatic deletion of all emails older than their Records Retention threshold. It was incredibly frustrating to have essentially all design/rationale history (from the key players involved) go into the auto-shredder with nobody but me caring. The only workarounds that could avoid the auto-shredder were enormously labor intensive, and of course, debatably violated Record Retention policy.
I never understood the mindset which seemed to interpret “we must preserve this for 5 years” as “we must _delete_ everything after 5 years”. I understand they want to minimize storage costs but they are destroying institutional knowledge. I have recently wanted to refer back to my notes on some older services and discovered that all my old notes have been deleted.
I think the rationale is that they don't want any liable behavior to be discoverable. Institutional knowledge could be in a controlled document storage and the email thread where you negotiated some kickbacks 6 years ago is shredded.
Pretty much any app that's been around a while will have all kinds of advanced features that the average user will never use, and eventually becomes detrimental. Hence there's always a group of users and product managers asking to rewrite the app to focus on "the basics".
There's all flavors of "lite" apps and Firefox started as a stripped down version of Netscape.
A lot of older email apps have a prominent "offline" mode that if you accidentally activate it, basically stops the app from sending or receiving any email. I guess a lot of executives demanded the feature because they were handling all their email while on a plane without connectivity.
Beyond just email, the group scheduling and calendar experience is pretty much the best you're going to find. Google does pretty good, but it's still not nearly as good as the integrated corp experience with Outlook for scheduling... that said, I hate that I now get teams messages for meetings more than a business day in the future... I have outlook for that, I don't need it in teams... having a calendar and notifications in teams is fine, but limit notifications to things in the near future.
The Fastmail client is good when it's up and running, but not as good as well-implemented native apps. The initial startup is much slower, and the iOS / iPadOS app (which is the same webapp iirc) is pretty bug-ridden, with the webview freezing or app not progressing past the loading animation without a close swipe / reopen.
You can definitely make a webview app that starts as quickly as most native thing (sub-1s start). We used Tauri and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
That's a pretty simple view of native app vs web. Web will always have a lot of baggage that native apps simply won't have, layers and layers of abstractions that still needs to load.
It's true that a blank canvas loaded as a web view will start fast, though. But in practice, when web applications grow - performance tends to take a hit, and the developers also tend to be careless with resources.
Web developers are not magically worse at this than native devs. See: much of the windows OS lately. The performance of a web view app is more to do with the quality of the devs than the platform it's built on.
Generally though, web developers are of lower quality than native app devs. Often little or no consideration to the layers below, and their focus is more on security rather than speed.
Funnily, I'd say the reason web apps tend to be worse than native apps is because the web is so much more powerful and flexible.
For a native app, I'm often limited to just a small set of components and maybe images I can put on those components. Animations are out of the picture. Configuring colors is sometimes not available but always painful (every component needs it tweaked, there's no universal way to change it). I can't really change things like border margins, rounding, or adding crazy stuff like wobbles or splash effects on click. And really, the more I try to add those things, the worse experience it ultimately ends up being as the OS style and theming moves on. My best bet is keeping everything as close to native styling as possible because that has the best shot of still being usable in windows 20.
Because web apps allow configuration of everything, everything is configured. There are libraries and frameworks that do mass configuration. You can always add 1, 2, or 20 new layers and webdev has abstracted that away into a simple <MyButton /> component. And because of all these capabilities, you need a pretty beefy runtime to be assured you can do them all. Coupled with the fact that this is all also powered by a javascript engine.
Although technically speaking, native is much more flexible as you can literally do anything. But yes, most devs will just use standard UI components and that's it. So your point holds.
Well, to do literally anything outside of standard components, you effectively end up in a realm of programmatically drawing your own "anythings". Certainly possible because obviously browsers are examples of this. But a lot harder.
The downside of the native app is the open abuse of surveillance. Why does Teams _need_ local network access to function on my ipad? Why does outlook want access to bluetooth from my phone?
Users don’t want to have to configure every app to fuck off, and native web apps (the world we _all_ live in) work way better than some hodgepodge of shit baked together by copilot that’s using unsafe calls and/or libraries.
The teams conferencing solution probably needs it. It’s pretty spiffy when it works - it detects whether you’re in the same room as the conferencing device and potentially suggests muting
> That's a pretty simple view of native app vs web. Web will always have a lot of baggage that native apps simply won't have, layers and layers of abstractions that still needs to load.
Well, as I say, you can definitely have webview apps that start fast and aren't taking ten seconds to do things. Not just blank canvasses.
My main gripe with the Fastmail client is that it doesn't work offline. This is of course absolutely possible to do with a webapp, and IMO ought to be a priority for an email client.
I literally switched on "Enable offline support", caching "All mail" offline on my iPhone a few months ago. Tons of free space, only using 4GB for offline.
But when my phone is actually offline (on a plane or elevator) it beachballs when trying to find something.
I didn't, but I'll do so now. I usually don't bother with support, because I forget that good companies like Fastmail actually have a competent support team.
Not OP, but I had to change the mail cache from all mail to recent, I think because it couldn't handle how much mail I had? It would often get stuck not syncing, and offline would be unreliable and showing a blank screen. Recent works fine, but it would be worthwhile folks testing more with all mail enabled, especially if they have larger inboxes.
Got an example of a well-implemented natice app for email? I'm bugged by some bugs with the Fastmail app, but have generally had a better experience with it than any other client I've tried. Search in particular is far better on the Fastmail app.
It’s really tempting - uses their API for that speed.
I’m worried Google won’t like it someday. It’s such a hassle if they shut you off that I want to seem like the most normal user to them. Pay Mimestream, skip ads, avoid Gmail app telemetry… any incentive for Google to permit it longterm? (Like maybe you’d switch to Fastmail if they killed Mimestream… or maybe not!)
I've heard good things about it, for sure, but I'd argue that it isn't really an Email client. It is a Gmail client as it doesn't work with anything else. Fastmail is in the same bucket, but it is part of my contention about there not being good Email apps generally.
> Got an example of a well-implemented natice app for email?
Mail.app isn't total shit. It's not great. But it doesn't fumble the basics, like Outlook for Mac, which thinks it's fine to take like 10s to show me my inbox.
Why does it seem to take so long to get & read one new email?
I can use get new mail or synchronize in Mail.app, but always spoiled by the instantaneous Gmail app notification. Often don’t have patience to wait for Mail.app for 2FA codes (just OCR or manually type from the Gmail notification mirrored on Mac).
Also should back up a bulk of ancient emails clogging the app, might be partially my fault.
It has its quirks. For example it can’t attach an image without inlining it. Or if the sender has several email addresses saved it can’t show which one sent you a particular email. And it can’t show you which of your email addresses received a given email.
it really feels like that not progressing past the loading animation all of a sudden has gotten worse. like yea, used to happen like once a week for me, but now it's probably once a day
Gmail used to offer a low bandwidth / performance webmail interface, that was essentially their original UI. Ran like greased lightning, used barely any memory. Emails loaded almost instantly.
Isn't it still the case then? I used the basic HTML version when I was working at Google to try to understand whether or not it was slow because of the (unoptimal) frontend or not (it was the backend that sometimes took >=600ms to load messages unfortunately, not the frontend).
Active Directory and MS SQL Server are both solid products, as is .NET. The windows NT kernel is very well thought out, too. The last iteration of windows phone was quite good, if too little too late.
Don't get me wrong, MS will enshitify anything it can to make a quick buck. They're much like Disney in that regard.
> SQL Server is a fork of Sybase. Not a MS invention.
It's long-since been rewritten. Pre-SQL Server 2000 it was garbage, but it's been improved significantly since then. I'd still use alternatives given the choice, but it's a solid DB.
>Active Directory is probably based on someone's LDAP server, though I don't know for sure.
So you don't know. It was written in house, using a bunch of standardized protocols (LDAP, X.500, kerberos), though with proprietary extensions (GPOs, etc).
> .NET is a copy of Java
That's a gross oversimplification. It's arguably a rip-off after MS tried to sabotage java, but it's their own implementation.
> NT kernel is good, thank Digital/Dave Cutler for that.
Yes, MS hired an experienced OS person for it. Probably one of the best things they ever did.
---
I'm not saying MS deserves kudos or the benefit of the doubt, but they can put out good software, and these are all mission-critical examples of what they have to (having AD go down would bring a whole corporation to a halt). The problem is that with almost everything else, MS has the incentive and capability to ruin. And ruin they do...
For early history about Active Directory, you can't get much better than straight from the horse's mouth ( manager of the Exchange / Active Directory group ).
I will say that in the era when they came out with AD they really took "enterprise configuration management" seriously and made Windows by far the best mainstream ecosystem to manage hundreds or thousands of corporate desktops.
A copy which has had value types (Java's ongoing Project Valhalla) from the start, and reified generics for as long as it had generics. They're quite different once you take a deeper look.
Yeah, somehow we've lost lessons learned. Used to be, you knew it would take forever to display all of something, so you displayed what you could as you had time to render it. For instance a long report. As you render each page you would make that available to display instead of waiting for the entire 200 page report to render first. "Feeling" fast was often as good as "being" fast.
The decision to use web technology and the decision to not give a shit about performance (or usability for that matter, unstyled text as buttons anyone?) are often made together, even though they are theoretically independent.
My company recently switched from Google Suite to Office 365.
Both are web apps.
It’s NIGHT AND DAY. Google did everything instantly. Outlook
doesn’t.
This morning Outlook decided to spin for 30+ seconds (at which point I gave up) showing a folder. I get a modal pop-up telling me I have to “refresh” teams multiple times a day. Search always fails the first time. Always. Then it works. Some.
Depending on if you have Microsoft365, you don't get ads either. It's not ads, it's fact that browsers are still not native performance to Win32 application. However, companies hate maintaining multiple applications (Win32/MacOS) and Sysadmin at companies hate maintaining Win32 Applications as well so everyone starts building WebView2.
I do get ads. I constantly get notified about copilot features and whether I've used them 'enough'.
This is done by my employer but the "adoption" team at Microsoft provide the tools to do this monitoring and advertising, and they even provide the emails they send me verbatim. I have some stuff to do with the organisation around that. God I hate those guys, they are trained to be literal shills, corporate puppies. Completely brainwashed.
The "new" Outlook is older than Copilot, so we can't blame the AI here. Don't take this as defense of the new Outlook - I hate it with the same passion.
The problem with web apps isn't that they're slow but that they enable the Room 641As of the world to spy on you, just by virtue of making network connections. Encryption doesn't even matter. Just behavior patterns are enough.
I think that the usage of WebView2 is a moot point. It effectively is an Edge browser just the same as Edge itself. There may be other underlying issues, but I'd be shocked if WebView2 was to blame.
WebView2 can be a fantastic experience when the application is designed around it with intent. It can't be a technological afterthought. Taking an application that was designed for web and throwing it in a desktop shell is how you wind up with bad experiences. A hybrid of WebView2 and native elements seems to be the best approach. You can completely hide the browser startup delay with these techniques. The Discord engineers decided to just throw a splash screen in front and call it a day. You could do that too. It seems to fly.
Until you look at memory consumption in Task Manager or Process Explorer. WebView2 spawns ~400Mb worth of various browser processes. Your main app process by itself might look nice and slim, but all that (somewhat hidden) cost is atrocious.
Microsoft Schedule+ was Microsoft's workgroup calendaring app before the Office division merged email and calendar into one app.
Outlook was late so Schedule+ was included in Office 95 for the Win95 release and so Schedule+ got a wider retail consumer release than if it had been just included with the Microsoft Exchange Server 4.0 release.
I've been using Schedule+ 95 to keep track of my daily activities since forever. I even modified my Windows install to keep it fully compatible after WinHlp32 was nixed in Windows 10. However, it is increasingly showing its age, and there are certain aspects where I would prefer a more modern solution; I can't integrate Sched+ with my smart phone easily ...
I'm explicitly NOT looking for any cloud or web apps. I don't have reliable internet nor are all of my daily use machines fast enough to reliably, and responsively, display 90% of the bloated webapps out there. I want something lean, fast, and native for the desktop. Schedule+ uses a max of about 7MB of RAM and I don't want to go over 10-20.
7MB RAM is a lot when Win95 was designed for a 80386 with 4MB RAM. But a modern day x86 (okay, x64) with 8GB, that's about 0.1% of total RAM.
I have 16 GB of RAM on my laptop, and I'm told that's relatively little nowadays. Even after the OS's 2 GB cut, I can run 35 applications that use 400 MB each. I don't even have 35 applications that I care about. (and I'm certainly not going to want to run more than, say, three email clients)
RAM usage at that scale might not be desirable, but any engineer knows that it's the result of a tradeoff where the other options take longer to develop. I would rather have an application that uses 400 MB now than a slimmer one in several years, or one that uses less memory but is extremely slow in some corporate environments (like older Outlook).
(please don't respond to quibble about the napkin math)
Which doesn't make a whole lot of sense because you can run all the Chrome components in-process, and in this case WebView2 is rendering trusted code written by Microsoft that isn't going to try and exploit the renderer (HTML email is very limited, doesn't support JS at all).
Processes in Windows are very expensive objects. They could probably reduce the overhead by allowing more customization of the Chrome codebase for this. Mojo abstractions service location.
And to think that the "old" Outlook's splash screen is there for a reason: it used to take a while to open before SSDs became commonplace! Windows in general used to be usable on HDDs; SSDs would blow everyone's pants off making everything open instantly. These days we have 20+ Gbps SSDs without the AHCI latency tax and they're no longer enough to open an e-mail.
What steams my clams is that I can press Reply in Outlook and be halfway through the first sentence of my message before the reply window even opens. (M4 Pro)
Almost every time I use Outlook, I have to rewrite my first sentence because half of it was typed before Outlook was finished doing whatever it does in the background. This doesn't happen with other mail clients on the same machine.
It's not 1982 with 8 character keyboard buffers. I shouldn't be able to type faster than a computer can handle the input.
I've been doing software engineering for 20+ years. I've been at a lot of different companies and at almost every single one I'm always kind of flabbergasted at how shabby the engineering is. I think maybe ONCE in my career did I work somewhere that I was proud of the engineering we were doing and it was a 18 month consulting gig at a startup with 3 engineers.
This isn't hubris, I am part of the problem. Too few engineers working with overly vague requirements with not enough time always results in the same thing. We are all churning out products we should be embarrassed about.
Microsoft might be the largest, most flagrant example, but code base entropy is a rampant force of nature. It is everywhere. Google Home gets steadily worse every week. How? They have like 100,000 engineers. Can they not spare a dozen of them to keep that product from being abject shit?
Is there a solution? I don't know, but maybe LLMs replacing 80% of us is exactly what we deserve.
> I don't know, but maybe LLMs replacing 80% of us is exactly what we deserve.
Been there, done that, but I wouldn't put the blame on engineers. You said there it yourself:
> Too few engineers working with overly vague requirements with not enough time always results in the same thing. We are all churning out products we should be embarrassed about. [...] They have like 100,000 engineers. Can they not spare a dozen of them to keep that product from being abject shit?
You know the big O thing. If your algorithm is inefficient, it will ultimately slow down to a crawl at one point, no matter how many cores you throw at it. Now replace 'algorithm' and 'cores' with 'corporate processes' and 'employees' and you get a picture of what is exactly happening at large bureaucracies. Even worse so now that they can no longer afford to infinitely expand and have to cut costs (through LLMs and offshoring) while maintaining an illusion of growth for stakeholders.
The funny thing is that, despite all of this, the core problem (IMO) of managers playing political games and reaching for short-sighted quick fixes like "new agile methodologies" [0] instead of doing their jobs well remains unaddressed. Meta has been recently letting go of middle managers in a (frantic?) attempt to tame the explosion of bureaucracy and the associated loss of efficiency, but the rest of the industry just appears to be repeating "AI" like a mantra. Even though coding itself has already been the most "over-optimized" part of the whole software development process and optimizing (the costs of) it further only results in further "Outlookization" of software.
The solution is competition in software. But it's a really, really dysfunctional market. Outlook persists because it can speak to Exchange. Too many bad software products persist because they're part of a lock-in with something that's difficult or expensive to swap out. Ultimately, Windows itself.
The same question can be asked in this case: if there's no money in it, why did Microsoft pay for the creation of a new Outlook that's apparently worse than the old Outlook?
I think it might be less about making money and more about burning less. From what I understand, the new Outlook is a wrapper around the code that already powers Outlook.com. Since they're already maintaining Outlook.com, they might as well integrate the functionality of the Office Outlook into it and only maintain one of the two moving forward.
Actually the answer is quite simple, their servers are the ones retrieving emails so they have access to the email contents (perhaps for training data?)
Prior to this new version, Outlook did not pull emails through Microsoft servers but pulled them directly from the mail server configured. Now, when you retrieve email from Outlook New, Microsoft servers are "proxying" the emails through their systems.
I get a weird feeling when I watch vga/dos programs like Quattro Pro 5. These were large programs quite well done, on very very limited machines. Today apps may not even provide that much (but they are fully networked, maybe more extensible).
Since Classic Outlook was developed in the glory days of OLE2.0, it's got OLE Automation baked in. VB and JScript code can access emails and appointments and perform relevant operations on those objects.
Yep, let the AI write efficient code in a compiled language.
Switch everything to C++/Dlang/Rust. You are not writing the code anyway, so all arguments against those languages are moot now.
Replace Node.js, Electron, and even Java/C#.
In web Outlook I *very" often begin typing as some element is loading a popover and end up hitting some key that archives the message and leaves me scrambling to click Undo. I guess it's usually some contact comes into focus of my mouse and starts trying to load the org chart or whatever. Ughhhhhh.
Not everything. VS code is still good. Odd, but true. Runs like a dream. I do use an old version though from a couple years ago, never bothered to update.
Imagine that. There would be a company wide "max one reboot per year", planned well ahead (during vacation periods) since it would mean people can't work for days on end. Haha.
Easier and faster software development frameworks have made it cheaper to ship garbage software. Nobody really knows how to measure software quality, but agile development makes it very easy to measure software quantity, so that is what companies prioritize.
It's why AI-driven development isn't actually yielding better products even though it makes developers more efficient. It's just being used to pump out garbage faster.
I also see this bad design pattern - tried to clone an outlook calendar event, a meeting with a teams link it that I need repeatedly at sporadic new times (thus can not set it up as repeating).
Outlook native is unable to do that - I am then forced to use Teams to clone the event, likely because Teams need a new meeting id - but why the f••• is Outlook native not able to do that (oh - it’s a webthing).
Too bad they are making changes for the sake of changes (and $$$) in stead of user needs …
Schedule+ had the concept of exceptions to a recurring appointment (RA) - meetings that didn't follow the recurring pattern (e.g. every week on thursday at 4pm).
This was exposed through the UI by letting the user adjust the date & time for the RA instance (e.g. move this week's thursday 4pm meeting to 2pm) via drag-drop or editing the RM instance and change the time in the appt dialog.
So I assume with Outlook you could schedule a recurring appt for the common case - weekly appt on wednesday at 1PM. Adjust as your needs require - no meeting needed? Delete this week's instance. Need to move the meeting earlier or later? Go and reschedule this week's instance.
Obviously wouldn't work if you needed two meetings in a week.
The recurring events calendar spec is crazy powerful, but also crazy bc its just a flat text file. For a bit i was attempting to stream-parse a huge calendar on my esp32 lcd display board and went down the rabbit hole.
Personally that's why I think 'async' in most languages is a farce - it could've never occured to 90s programmers, as back then applications frequently swapped out parts of their program code and state onto the disk - and there's no 'async' to save you from that.
Nowadays disks are fast, but a lot of apps are heavy - your Electron-based webapp is hundreds of megs of binary - there's no saving you from having to load that the same way. In fact most likely your app will have less assets to load than the sum of binaries.
Started a new job, with Windows 11. notepad.exe now takes 3 to 4 seconds to load on my work system... (even after closing the last tab and reopening the program).
Hah, it even has in-app purchases, for AI writing...
As slow as Windows is (very), once you start adding the corporate security tools on top of it (Crowdstrike) and have to deal with a slow and buggy corporate DNS system, it just becomes unusable.
The only way I can do anything timely now is through WSL.
Yeah, I'm worried about the day when infosec turns it's eye toward WSL. So far they have turned a blind eye, but just wait until someone cooks up an exploit targeting WSL...
They don't explicitly block it in my org, but connecting to VPN while it's running breaks the networking inside WSL.
Sometimes it is routed from the VPN, sometimes it is DNS, sometimes it just needs a restart. I'm not sure if that situation has improved. There were some workarounds at one point.
True, those things make Windows unusable. They also make the Mac worse, but not so much worse that it isn’t an absolute breath of fresh air compared to any corporate provided Windows device.
That's nothing. He have Surface Pro laptops, and of course it has Copilot built in. I tried to open an app by typing in a search. On versions without Copilot turned on, instantly finds the app. On a Surface Pro, takes a good 20-30 seconds for it even start the search.
Complete rubbish. Not a single person in the organisation likes the new Outlook.
The amount of applications on the average consumer's laptop is such a tiny space to search over that there really is no excuse for this being anything other than instant.
iOS and macOS suffer this too, it's like I open search and the operating system awakes from a hangover and makes sure it's wearing pants first
One of the first things I do on any Mac device is to disable Spotlight, install and bind Alfred to Cmd-Space, and then change Finder's preferences so that Cmd-F searches the current directory.
At some point I assume somebody had to explain why the start menu is 40-50 times slower than previous releases. Or they simply vibe-code something and ship it not caring what they created.
Big assumption there that they even have an end goal.
Given that making Windows' market share is more or less impossible to make any bigger at this point (every human on earth has used Windows in some capacity by this point; there are no new markets to expand to, the only option left is to not bleed old users, but that requires significant effort and a good strategy), they've opted to not really bother with Windows and shifted focus completely, leaving Windows out to dry, resulting in this and gestures vaguely at Windows 11 and everything else Windows.
Remember that all of microsoft's divisions are competing against each other and they all have to turn a profit. So windows has to include AI, xbox, both onedrive and sharepoint, teams, etc. and so you end up with the worst of all worlds
At thsi point i think the current goal is the annoy the tiny ants in the consumer market who complain and are a nuisance , but don’t make them much money compared is the big boys in the enterprise world.
It's sad. Further compounding the problem like siblings have said is enterprise security stack stuff - EDRs/XDRs, app control, firewalls, productivity police nonsense.
The second thing is that enterprises typically don't have someone fighting for the desktop UX to remain usable when PC fleets go up for purchase - pick the cheapest toilet paper is often the strategy of the day. Now you have a PC that hits a bargain price point that seemed attractive on some analysis to the CFO, it's been saddled with security software that saps 50% of the limited performance to begin with.
Lot's of enterprises are enabling whitelisting of apps launching using some sort of tooling - I think Microsoft provides one, and CrowdStrike etc. It's likely the delay involves a call to a backend application or even sometimes a web server. This would be on top of real-time scanning of every file before it's opened.
True ... my company recently started deploying endpoint protection like crowdstrike, beyondtrust, zscalet onto our macs and these have slowed my machine considerably. They somehow spike the CPU just when I am doing something important.
I cannot believe how ridiculously heavy this stuff is. On my corporate laptop with a modern i7 and 32GB RAM (running Windows plus Crowdstrike, Zscaler, and probably some other junk), it feels like I’m on a netbook. It’s awful.
Microsoft has AppLocker (since Win7, I think). If you give it a curated whitelist it's actually quite alright and manages well via GPO. (until you manage to lock yourself out ;)
Much less overhead than any 3rd party tool that hooks the kernel.
Yes, it's usually a filter driver that delays execution until something like a hash is checked or other rules evaluate. Some products hash every interesting/executable file on the PC. They're powerful tools but can be extremely performance-sapping.
I can't even start notepad.exe since upgrading to 11. It complains about a missing DLL. I'm only down to a few pieces of daily-driver software that I absolutely need a non-VM Windows installation for. Once I migrate from those, it'll be a full switch to Linux for me. I've hated Microsoft with a passion for far too long
To everyone reading this, Win 11 Notepad CAN BE UNINSTALLED.
Old one lives in c:/windows/notepad.exe which you can open with Win+R, type notepad to open good old non-slop non-ai notpead. Or do some registry shenanigans (you can find them online) to bring that one in start menu or make it a default editor.
At my last job I was responsible for 70 windows 11 machines. At my current job it’s 20. These are i7/i9 spec with 64+GB memory and NVMe drives. No endpoint management software, just Intune for device registration.
They all have _very significant _ performance issues out of the box, with very long app startups, and very confusing slowdowns. I am 99% sure it’s windows defender doing an absolute crap ton of work on every single file open, and ignoring file and folder exclusions.
I'm not IT, I'm' just the senior most engineer in a game studio. Ive got WPA captures that point to windows defender, even with processes and folders excluded. But I have literally no idea what to do with those traces, hence my 99% conviction.
If it is mostly your own tooling you may want to look at setting up a dev drive. It is supposed to be more optimized around workloads that would normally spin stuff like defender off the rails.
System -> Advanced ->
-> For developers -> Developer Mode [on]
-> Dev Drive -> Create Dev Drive
I need to write the blog post. I keep being told this, and it’s not the solution.
After a reboot, on an NVMe dev drive with no disk encryption, first launch of our internal application (unreal editor) takes 9 minutes on my workstation. If I disable windows defender before launching it, it takes 30 seconds. If I add all the processes as exclusions, and add the workspace folder as an exclusion to defender… 9 minutes.
edit:
I didn't mean to direct this at you. I mean that it's somehow gained traction as being the solution to slow filesystem access, but the reality is it's just broken.
I ran a quick test this morning - it took 7 minutes to load the app after a reboot, 90 seconds to load the second time, and 50 seconds after a reboot with windows defender disabled. All on an NVMe drive with basically nothing else running (no browsers or anything). The WPA capture showed msmpeng. That’s with the folder, and UnrealEditor.exe excluded from defender.
Disk encryption is also mandated in most enterprises.
I do not mean to patronize, it's just the enterprise-y stuff has tried locking down the PCs for exactly this reason - deleting the security tools when they're not loaded would be of course very effective.
On top of that, showing such motivation can expose people to violating the 782 commandments of whatever corporate IT policy someone had to sign to get a paycheck.
Rare is the security vs usability compromise in these companies that accounts for the need for high performance desktops, sadly.
I replied above but basically we still need something; some people are just incapable of not making a total mess and they will literally go to Trojan.com and install dangerous.msi, ignore all the optional dismissible pop ups that say this is bad, and then still drop me a DM that the cracked plugin they got for maya to try out before asking to spend $8 isn’t working…
The person mentioned is a special case but the reality is that most people do need _something_. What happens if one trusted person makes a mistake and submits an exe to perforce? Now absolutely everyone is hosed.
Why would everyone be hosed just because a binary got committed to version control? Either way, surely you can set up some policies or monitoring for that sort of thing.
I don't know, I've been developing on Windows for decades without an antivirus and I've never had these issues. Are your people downloading and installing random software all the time? In my experience, once I'm set up with my usual tools I rarely need to install anything else.
>Are your people downloading and installing random software all the time?
Yeah, just looking at the app control logs, they evidently wanted a weird notepad app, someone else tried a bespoke browser, random browser extensions, some audio tool instead of using the licensed Adobe products, whatever. That's before we get into the people who try to install games or cursors or custom wallpaper and amusement widgets. There always seems to be someone who uses the work tools for porn and clicks on things. These things show up in 5-person and 5000-person offices alike.
Good judgment gets individuals pretty far but it's not workable with a critical mass of people. Many orgs are under attack from convincing and intentional spearphishing, and the common denominator in how most attacks start is people. Not all attacks, but lots.
On top of that, I think we'd fall behind on some of these attacks without stuff like 3rd party 24/7 SOCs - the last few incidents I read, cookies were re-used in seconds after being phished, and command and control sessions were detected almost immediately in a different attack.
I find all of this exhausting stuff as the norm when I talk to people across the industry, and yet I don't bother at all at home - I'm living both realities.
> Why would everyone be hosed just because a binary got committed to version control?
We’re hosed if someone submits malware to source control and other people run it?
> Either way, surely you can set up some policies or monitoring for that sort of thing.
Like a tool that comes with windows that checks that nobody has done that, called windows defender? The tool I have a problem with?
> I've been developing on Windows for decades without an antivirus and I've never had these issues
This is a 100 person company with maybe 30 programmers, 30 artists and 30 designers. I don’t know which of those people are “capable” - and the people who say they are are the people I probably trust least. In a perfect world we’d tell everyone to be careful, and not click on random phishing links, and they’d listen. But they don’t, and we have to take some basic precautions. Using the OS provided, historically good, tools is a good starting point.
> Are your people downloading and installing random software all the time?
Dunno, we don’t monitor what people do. We just get an email if defender quarantines something. But we’re dealing with people working from home, and being given gaming spec machines. I would put money in the fact that people are using these for personal use.
>Like a tool that comes with windows that checks that nobody has done that, called windows defender? The tool I have a problem with?
No, like a tool that's running on a machine of its own, monitoring what gets pushed to version control, or a policy on the version control server that rejects attempts to push files of the wrong type.
In an ideal world sure. But we have versioned closed source third party tools that need to be shared with the team. The industry standard in games is to dump that stuff in perforce. I’ve only got so many battles in me.
"It's what everyone does" is not per se a good reason to do something. A version control system is not for file sharing, it's to collaborate and track changes over time.
Eugh. Well, whatever. Not like it makes any difference to the employee. They get paid whether they're waiting for the computer to finish spinning or doing useful work.
We’re spending $4-8000 on these machines to try and offset these problems.
The problem is that there’s 100 of these “little” issues - and I have a full time job that _isnt_ doing IT support. If someone can help me find an IT support contractor that I can hire that will fix it I’d love to chat to them, but it goes in the pile alongside “why on earth does teams take longer to boot than my entire machine” and “why are we using zoom (because the person who makes the decision there prefers zoom to teams”)
Because the alternative is worse - no protection. Because we have everything in Intune we get the per device scan reports (I lied - we do enforce _some_ stuff as a group policy. We disable turning off certain features and we manage the windows update cadence) and thrrr have been multiple people who still need it… it’s generally non tech people who just download the absolute worst crap imaginable and ignore all the bypassable warnings too.
Windows defender has the uncanny ability of spiking up its resource usage at just the wrong time. Add in MS teams into the mix and the system just starts screaming.
I know nothing about how defender works internally but it seems to do a synchronous scan on every single file access and an extra long one on a DLL or exe. It seems to cache them but throws the entire cache away on restart. The behaviour is worse on C than another partition even if the partition is on the same drive. Anything that accessed a hunch of files on startup will bring your computer to its knees on first launch.
The best demonstration of the delay is typing Calc in the Win+R Run dialog. There's a difference between instant and "way faster than Word".
On Windows 7, you could hit enter and immediately start typing numbers and it would work. I have never worked on a Windows 10 or 11 machine where it launches instantly.
I get a similar lag when launching Notepad. Not a huge disruption to the day, but annoying to see on a simple utility that used to be better.
in windows 11 i launch calc from win+r and it opens right when i hit enter. the delay is not from the launch dialog/OS but from the app (i use windows 7 calculator, i've replaced it because i don't like win 10+ calc design)
I work in what used to be Exchange. (my opinions are my own).
There is no one reason for the quality issues. It's a thousand small decisions and problems that have compound against each other over decades, coupled with the sheer feature complexity+scope+impact and multiplied by the titanic scale and volume the platform handles.
Additionally, the engineering culture really prioritizes backwards compatibility for customers (for good reasons) which bleeds into all aspects of the platform/decisions in both good and bad ways - and means that the big and obvious step-change platform improvements that could be made internally to make things better are not really invested in, or are deemed to expensive.
It's still a great place to work, and I'm proud that my work is in some small way directly contributing to and helping billions of people's work lives but there's still a long road ahead to improving the customer experience of using the platform for both internal and external customers.
Hard to blame (new) Outlook issues on backward compatibility... seems like it's a ground-up electron app that supports basically nothing from the classic version.
I clicked, saw this "The email app with its own AI agent" and closed. Another "Let's shove AI into something".
Outlook already provides me this, it's terrible at it since context is key and context is probably buried in several places it has access to and despite that access, it still falls flat.
As I build this out there's actually less and less AI in the product and more good old-fashioned UX, writing and data entry tools, and automations.
Some examples...
We're simply bringing a CRM CRUD form into an email thread, populated from email sender / domain, for the end user to review and submit.
You can add your own notes into a thread, and copy / paste from
Similarly good pre-defined templates with variables perform way better than AI generated drafts.
Context is indeed key. The person at their email inbox has most of the context in their head, they need good tools to organize that context down for their future self and their team. AI can help but its really about just building a great tool for the operator.
I second this feedback. The demo video was also clicking on emails and having Claude research and answer them automatically? Is this really the inhumane kind of communication we want to be pushing and normalizing? The UI looks nice, and I would love a better e-mail client, but the egregious pushing of AI convinces me not to try it.
If the developer is suggesting answering emails with agents without reading it, how do I know this project is shoved full of unchecked vibe-coding? Don't want to be so harsh, but I wanted to second this feedback since you seem serious about hearing it. All the best with the project, aside from the immediate AI turnoff it looks great.
At some point they gave up on quality control. Not sure why but things went downhill at Microsoft years ago already. With the rise of AI slop and Microsoft turning into microslop, this trend just became amplified.
They fired all of their SDET, eliminated the SDET role/discipline, and made SDEs responsible for quality and shipping their features, a major conflict of interest.
Microsoft has always been careless about performance. Two anecdotes:
A friend of mine used to work for Microsoft (long ago). One day I was complaining to him about some package that Microsoft had put out. "It's so slow!" I said. He replied, nonchalantly: "buy Intel stock. People will have to upgrade their PCs!"
Second one is from about 15 years ago. At one of the local meetups, I was chatting with a long-lost friend who worked for Yahoo. He was describing their recently-concluded Search deal with Microsoft, and how it worked in practice. This was an issue he had raised with Microsoft engineers and gotten no traction on their side. (This is all from memory). Basically, he described how a search request from an European user was handled by Yahoo Search. So, say someone goes to "search.yahoo.de" and enters a search term and it triggers a request at some Yahoo server in an EU datacenter. According to the deal, that would be forwarded to a Microsoft server, based in Virginia. Now, since the request was from EU, the Microsoft server would turn around and make a request to a MS server based in EU. Which would then respond with the search results to the MS server in VA. Which would then send the response back to the Yahoo server in EU. So, basically, 4 cross-Atlantic hops for one search request. He claimed latency figures of around 1500ms, when their internal goal was to keep latency below 300ms (after which it becomes noticeable and hurts metrics?). But when he brought up this massive latency spike to his counterparts in MS, they just shrugged it off.
Calculator taking measurable seconds to load was the last straw for me for Windows 10. Exclusively Linux at home for a couple of years now, and there's a relatively steady stream of headlines to remind me of how good a decision it was to switch away.
I use Windows exclusively for games, but I don't like playing the game of disabling upsells, dodging unkillable Edge, and restoring secret pre-AI versions of Windows components.
Anecdotal, but I've never had issues with any game outside of competitive shooters that require kernel-level anticheats. If you're not playing those, it could be worth a try.
Yeah, I've been exclusively on Linux at home since 2019. I have to do work on Windows though and it's a daily reminder that Windows is a piece of shit and gets worse with every update. WSL is the only thing that makes it bearable. It's like releasing a long relaxing breath when I can finally get on my home computer.
I switched in 2023 or so, I have not seen one headline per your example or anecdote or comment or tea leaves that have made me question moving away from windows.
Not one, not once. Even my worst day on Linux where something does work for seemingly no reason, still better than Windows.
Probably a cache thing. Win11 precaches a lot of stuff if you hover over it or have excess RAM. It's not as smart as SuperFetch and ReadyBoost (with an HDD) was but it's still doing similar things.
How big is the calculator app on Windows 11 that you need to cache it in RAM? On macOS, the calculator app is 6 MB. And that's containing both x64 and ARM code. How long does it take a modern SSD (6 GB/s?) to read that?
Reminds me of the early days of MacOS X when the Calculator app was written in Java as a demo of how fantastic and native their Java integration with Cocoa bindings was. This of course made it horribly slow to launch since initializing the JVM back then was a massive chore.
I had already done lots of things to make Windows less in the way of what I wanted to do. It was this Calculator app thing, plus the constant reconfiguring of settings (at install time and sometimes after updates) to turn off a whole swathe of Windows services that serve Microsoft, not the user.
Calculator was the final straw.
I actually use the old calculator on my work computer, and it's still not as fast to load as it was 20 years ago (but my work computer is also chock full of 'security' software, so runs like a pig).
They have enough employees to build native apps that run super quick but are still seduced by the web portability argument which, as we all know, is mostly untrue even now and which introduces all kinds of non-deterministic latencies/errors, which cannot all be handled neatly.
To be honest, this is the same in almost all apps that have any more than 10 developers working on them (my estimate!). Death by dependencies and a lack of coherent design.
As someone else said, though, some things like fastmail work OK in the browser so it is possible.
Native software is incredibly difficult to build well.
There are at least 4 platforms they would need to support: Win, Mac, iPhone, and Android.
That's 4 different software engineers at least, just for the frontend.
Then, there's various backend engineers, who could be shared, yes, but not always. Android's weird runtime requirements are bespoke enough that just because the database is written in C++, doesn't mean it's the same C++ database as what the Windows backend would use.
Finally, there's the designers, who end up consolidating all the unique things about each native platform into a common design language so they can have a shared vision on all of the platforms. So engineers end up building UI that works identically on all 4 platforms, and you're basically building a bespoke "browser" at that point.
I have to agree here but I would like to add: every single web app I have ever had to build or was part of building was heavily biased and towards adding more features and exorbitant amounts of tracking that me or the other engineers had to practically beg the product owners to do do perf optimisations or reduce technical debt that accumulates after a couple of years, even with lots of low hanging fruits to pick from.
The latest version of "Legacy Outlook" on Mac has a huge bug now: "Replying to or forwarding an email does not include the original message in the email body in legacy Outlook for Mac" [1]
So now i am forced to use this New Outlook crapware at last. And it is crap. Its slow as a dog, every action takes 1s. Why do they rearrange all the buttons, change all the fonts... why don't they just copy the old interface 1:1 ? Who knows...
If I have to use this new version for longer than 2 weeks I am switching to some other client.
And also, who knows, maybe they are purposefully inserting these show-stopping bugs to get people to switch.
I second the sentiment, it’s unbelievably annoying. Even more so when the suggested solution from the “support” appears to be “You can downgrade to a version before we introduced this bug”. I’m not even gonna try switching to that new crapware, I’m just going to change client altogether.
Thanks for the tip, instead of enduring any longer, i decided to downgrade, which was easier than I expected, and this old version works, doesn't have this bug.
Just delete the Outlook app from the Applications folder, and run the Outlook installer from version 16.109.3 (June 02, 2026) [1]. All data is there, no need for any backups or anything.
Then, delete (or rename) the Microsoft AutoUpdate App, which lives in:
/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/MAU2.0
Man, I've really been falling into his stuff. So refreshing to hear someone speak from a perspective of care. It's good for my soul in this world of slop.
I highly recommend consuming Casey Muratori content, particularly if it’s blue shirt Casey standing in a black void with yellow handwriting. Those are his high-production serious lectures, and they’re worth every minute. (It took me a while to find his YouTube channel because it’s called “MollyRocket”.)
It's really hard to understand how these trillion dollar companies somehow can't afford to maintain quality apps. Seems every new Office release makes things worse. I assume the WebView2 makes things a little easier for devs but how much are they really saving at the expense of quality? And I have no idea what the product managers are doing. They are certainly not thinking about improving the product. The new Outlook and Teams feel like they are being hacked together by a bunch of interns that are trying out Scrum.
I'm reminded of the Teams team making a comparison video between their old and new versions, which only went to show that the new version was also really slow (9 seconds).
> Windows 11 ships with two versions of Outlook. There is Outlook Classic, the long-running Win32 desktop app built for power users, and there is the new Outlook, which Microsoft is pushing as the future of email on Windows. The newer one is built on WebView2 and is, in essence, a browser window that loads Outlook.com. If you have ever used both side by side, you already know which one feels faster and which one does not.
This is bizarre. Kyle Rubenok, according to his LinkedIn and GitHub @krubenok, is the senior manager for the outlook product. Isn't he taking any responsibility for how poorly his product performs? In many regular companies, such a manager would be fired for managing a product into decline. I guess I don't understand how big US corporations work.
This year, for the first time since 2006 I've have Outlook and friends in my life. I run Linux, so naturally I turned to firefox.. Not a win. Fair, I use Chrome only for these products.
Dear Lord, how has the software gotten this much worse in 19 years? I thought that Thunderbird was bloated and awful... until I tried Outlook, in a browser, on Linux. Now, the Thunderbird experience is shockingly pleasurable, compared.
Don't even get me started on the horror that is trying to mix left-to-right and right-to-left languages within the same document. OpenOffice figured this out a decade ago. Google Docs has done this perfectly since the beginning. When I learned that it was genuinely this bad on Windows too, my mind was blown.
Just a classic example of bloating degradation that happens to any software which has saturated all basic needs decades ago.
The issue is, as the product continues to generate revenue, the product team continues to get funding and they are forced to add bloat as new features.
Same with security and compliance standards at companies. You keep pouring more money, and you keep getting more fort walls and dungeons, without any regard to productivity and performance impact.
and now you can use AI to create even more unnecessary features even quicker.
i think that having teams for each product is an antipattern. if the team was purely a "mail task force", the workers could be placed to work on Exchange or the Azure related bullshit. But now, the Outlook team has to constantly create unnecessary work for itself.
From my experience using Outlook, they could keep the Outlook team for bugfixes only and still have enough work for the next 5 years just improving/fixing the classic version.
Hardware has become insanely fast, while software has become absurdly inefficient. During the Windows XP era, I use to browse the internet even on dial-up connections, use Yahoo Messenger, and run everything on a desktop with just 512 MB of RAM and a 40 GB hard disk, everything worked, but today basic use on Windows often need a minimum 8gb ram. I wish I could go back.
I will say, a positive thing that has come out of msft's 20ish year run of consistent incompetence and piss poor leadership, is that there are quite a few former msft engineers (now retired) that are posting great lectures and educational content on youtube.
also, idk when, but the talent level of a "msft engineer" from 90s to early 2000s feels like they runs laps around the msft engineers of today. it's hard to not feel that the suits cannibalized what was at one point an extremely profitable company with great engineering culture for nothing but shortsighted gains
That is why I said the 2x improvement about Webview they said earlier doesn't matter. And I believe the 10sec already accounted for the 2x improvements.
>the new Outlook uses between 490 MB and 636 MB of RAM while idle, with individual sessions varying based on mailbox size. Outlook Classic, doing the same job, uses around 117 MB to 148 MB at idle. A roughly fourfold difference.
In the old days, we would have cried about 150MB memory usage idle as being bloat. Why isn't it 30 to 60MB. Now 150MB is still so much better than 600MB.
I am not sure if Native will ever win. I do wonder if we could somehow make webview, or may be a subset of webview that is as fast as native.
> In the old days, we would have cried about 150MB memory usage idle as being bloat.
I'm curious how much of those 150 are things that can't be boiled down to 'text', since that should be roughly the same size as on completely un-bloated software. The database of emails, the plain text of said emails, and all the basic UI should all be nothing but text and take up next to nothing.
Images on the other hand. I'd imagine Outlook Classic hasn't been made with 1 MB PNGs for all their icons, so it's probably not that that's pulling the memory usage, although it's probably contributing. Meanwhile, New Outlook (New) probably didn't optimise a single thing, so it probably is using 1 MB icons, which then quickly piles up. Not to mention the whole webview rendering backend, since we apparently can't make anything without going through a few layers of abstraction first.
The "free" version of outlook that replaced Mail is so bad that it made me finally switch to Thunderbird and I don't see myself going back anytime soon.
The only thing I'm missing sometimes is the Copilot integration, but copy and paste with Thunderbird is still faster than using Copilot in Outlook...
When I was using Thunderbird on Windows back years ago, i abandoned it in a week because it was absolutely slow when fed with years of archives as compared to Outlook 2010. Seeing recs for Thunderbird recently says something for sure.
I don't even think Thunderbird has gotten any significant speed improvements over the years (unlike Firefox). The only real reason it's gotten better on that front is that processors and I/O have gotten faster. Meanwhile, Outlook as managed to take every morsel of improved hardware, and squandered it.
I've never had problems with Thunderbird on that front, but then again, I've never had email accounts with 100k emails archived.
What was really behind the push to get everything browser based in the first place? Is this all to make everything cloud based, software as a service, or did some exec see a demo of Windows 8 and think "web is the future" and over-rotate?
Turns out the browser is an incredibly sophisticated and highly performant layout engine that works on almost every platform out there. Native UI frameworks are always going to be more efficient and let you access more of the hardware, but it's more expensive to maintain 2 or 3 separate codebases.
The push is that web developers are easy to find, and native software developers barely event exist anymore (and if they do can get paid to work on things like trading software, though web is even picking up there!).
Microsoft don't even _have_ a reasonable desktop UI stack, having been through at least 4-5 which gained minimal traction before being abandoned. The last successful one was Windows Forms, which is what I'd pick up today if I ever had to touch Windows again.
The least cynical argument is internationalization. Rendering engines already implement robust text layout when multiple languages are involved, so it makes sense to leverage it. The more cynical argument is that it's easier to find web designers than desktop UI designers. The more-cynical-still argument is the one you said.
> Speaking of memory, the new Outlook uses between 490 MB and 636 MB of RAM while idle, with individual sessions varying based on mailbox size. Outlook Classic, doing the same job, uses around 117 MB to 148 MB at idle. A roughly fourfold difference.
They really picked the wrong timeline in which to 4x RAM usage for no benefit.
hey, I have a question for any product managers who are in charge of making decisions re: rebuilding app UI in Electron, like 1Password with their entire app, Adobe with their dialog boxes, Windows with their Start Bar (!#@!$!)
My understanding was that the proposition of Electron is that it’s there's some cross-platform advantages, also it’s basically easier and you can hire a junior dev to wing it.
My understanding of AI is that you can just tell a junior dev to vibe it.
So can't you turn your AI’s on making native UI via vibe apps? Shouldn't that be really easy for any idiot, and also performant?
Not a product manager but I habitually try to play devil's advocate as one. I think it's popularity, full stop. You _could_ vibe code a native app no problem - but then you're targeting one set of hardware. If you're already just vibing it, why not make something that will work cross-platform while you're at it? And if an LLM is prompted with that, they'll usually go with the popular choice: web app on Electron.
Adobe is but they have a ginormous multi-decade codebase that mastered cross-platform UI ages, an LLM coding assistant ought to be able to "add a range input here using our standard UI library" much more easily than "rebuild this with Electron."
1Password at least has a decent excuse for a rotten decision.
Yes but Qt comes with the drawbacks of being tied to Qt.
With Electron + React, you'd be able to rip out any components you need and place them in other web apps. The browser is (psychologically) avoiding vendor dependencies to a greater degree than other options.
New outlook is quite honestly a joke. I tried to like it but went back to the old outlook as crucial features were missing. Simple things such as shift+f3 to change case to upper/lower/sentence case. This I believe stems from spell check being missing, another big issue for those with custom dictionaries. Poorly implemented template and template file management, I could go on...
If I intended on using a basic email editor, I would not have installed Outlook on my PC, I think the product manager or whoever is in charge of it's direction completely misunderstands the purpose/use-case of their programs.
I had no idea shift+F3 was there. If I even thought to look for such a feature I would assume it is in the right-click context menu and wouldn’t need a shortcut for it since I would use it once a decade. Now I wonder what kind of environment you work in where that is needed (and I work in an environment where a critical application requires Caps-Lock on for any extended usage).
This shows the problem with people who think the features in Office apps that they don’t use are bloat. If you made a new app using the 80% of features all the users regularly used, you’d discover you need 100% of those features because 20% of the users use a different set of obscure features.
I have always been amazed at how outlook just seems to always get worse. When I first used it decades ago I found it awful but it had a logic to it, now it is worse and makes no sense in the current world of options.
JavaScript needs to do whatever JavaScript needs to do.
It's incredible when we have AI assistants that slow shit like that still ships in products affecting millions of users. Imagine how much totally wasted energy that costs just because the companies are cheap. Just port it to Rust and run it as webassembly at least.
On the subject of Microsoft gripes, MS Purview removing focus from a text box for several seconds every time I paste something is driving me insane. Was just enabled recently at my org, but apparently has been a problem since 2024 at the earliest:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/answers/questions/1791527/...
At this point I’m convinced that the only people working at Microsoft are those who nobody else would hire. There is no way a self-respecting person would be ok creating garbage like this, day in and day out.
Maybe they do respect themselves and have decided the money in the job is just a means to other ways of respecting themselves that don't involve benefiting MS or customers or users.
I start Outlook every morning to check work emails. Sometimes it opens, sometimes it doesn’t, nothing shown on the screen, no loading dialogs, it’s as if you never opened it. Then five minutes later it opens.
Happens on Windows/Mac
It seems to do an update check before rendering any UI, if there’s an update it must download and apply it before showing the UI. To a user trying to open the app, it’s as if it’s broken not loading.
It’s a massive pain, trying to access email but need to wait five minutes as the app decides it’s not going to open and update instead of giving the option not to, or doing it transparently in the background so app useable and prompting to restart when ready
Trying to save files in office is just as frustrating. Some dark UX going on making it difficult to save locally instead of in one drive.
The switch to hardware-accelerated rendering was poor. It's still causing issues today. Is it the graphic drivers' fault or their poor implementation? Who knows, but they also disabled the switch that allowed to turn it off, which is just classic Microsoft being annoying.
I wouldn't trust an "Excel guy" who said that, they aren't staying current/using new functionality.
Just off the top of my head:
IFNA, FORMULATEXT, DAYS, CONCAT, IFS, SWITCH, XLOOKUP/XMATCH, FILTER, UNIQUE, LET, TEXTBEFORE/TEXTAFTER, LAMBDA, et al.
But my favorite improvement is the "don't intentionally corrupt CSVs" options found in Settings -> Data -> Automatic Data Conversion (hint: Disable everything). Only took them 30-years to add that. Absolutely absurd these are enabled by default still.
Excel is one of Microsoft's best pieces of software and one of the very few they haven't turned into slop YET. Still don't understand why we don't have local-only Python to replace VBA at all license levels (i.e. non-cloud).
I gave up on Excel for working with CSV years ago, but it sounds like I need to go back and try again. It used to drive me crazy how the import function was all "just fuck my shit up, Fam" every time.
Reminds me of the old joke about it: How is Microsoft Excel like an Incel? Both think everything is a date.
that people still buy this, businesses still rely on their infrastructure, and their stock is somehow world-class is outstanding for the fact that its operating system can't do what middle school level coders can accomplish
Why can't we see the taskbar in the classic notification video? In the new version it's launching the app cold. We can't see if that's happening in the classic video or not. It seems like it's just opening a document window instead of the whole app.
I don't doubt the new one is slower, but it seems odd that that's the only video that doesn't show the taskbar.
Up to middle 2000s, softwares were required to be installed either via downloading an EXE or CDROM.
Nowadays everything is cloude based including e-mails, you have zero reasons to use Windows as an end user.
Adobe is RIP and the alternative supports Linux, gaming is no longer excuse and in fact, games anti-cheat require kernel level access on Windows, that will never happen on Linux.
Companies still use Windows because they can track everything, Microsoft Teams is more than just a chat, it tracks your status, keyboard usage, interaction with teams, camera on/off during meeting, mic, etc.
Companies can build a whole profile from your Teams data.
Windows is the most unsecure OS, it has always been, so companies can spend millions or billions of dollars on tools and services to make Windows somewhat usable.
Also, forcing engineers to use Windows to manage Linux servers has to be the most nonsense thing ever.
I have 5 computers at home, running Mac, Windows, and Ubuntu Linux. I've been using PC's regularly since the 286 age, and Windows 11 is terrible, I don't want to logon to your online services in any shape or form.
The windows operating system does more to disrupt my work flow than it does to assist it, the WSL layer so you can do any development helps, but I'm only using Windows at this point for games, and even then I barely play them so I'm mostly running Windows on one of my systems because it is already installed.
If apple / linux up the game support I would most likely never use Windows again.
Congrats to the new outlook team on the performance improvements, I certain it used to take 30 seconds to do it, and they've cut it to 10s !!
But seriously, can we please make desktop productivity apps not suck on windows? I started programming on windows, old school Win32 with a little MFC. Still have the super thick MFC book from MikeB somewhere in the closet. It was better than the alternatives at the time.
Now I look at the windows developer site and I can't even figure out what happened since I stopped Win32 programming at around 2004. It's a total train wreck of abandoned technology, each worse than the previous ones.
Office (and to some degree visual studio), used to be the lighthouse, best in breed application, often using api's that were not yet public and styles that were not yet adopted. I remember buying component libraries that emulated these to make better looking and performing apps.
I'd look at windows again if they would make apps not suck and be ones that the industry strives to emulate. Without that, Linux or Mac is just as good (actually better since they have decent userlands).
If i was in charge at MS, I'd go full return to monke and put a lot of devs into making winforms work great with 4k and high DPI. Then rebuild the most critical apps with winforms using a new layouting engine and some wpf concepts carried over. Nothing new or fancy, just old but gold.
History shows that there have been many Microsoft executives with a vision of building a new, perfect GUI toolkit. They all were released half done and quasi supported to this day.
I mean like you take the old thing and enhance it a bit but dont make a new thing from scratch because the idea and architecture has always been perfect. Most GUI toolkits from microsoft are drilled for ease of use so you dont have to have many devs to get something running (looking at dual way data binding and xaml).
Imho thats the wrong approach, make it perfect for experts and approachable for juniors, winforms was very easy to click together, WPF not so much, too much framework magic.
That one feature may be fast but anyone who ever used Outlook with multiple shared mailboxes, mailboxes over a few years old, archiving to PST files, etc. will know that Outlook Classic could hardly have ever been considered fast.
Although I don't love it and avoided it for many years I've noticed a lot of these issues went away with the new Outlook. I can load and unload shared mailboxes on demand and I stopped worrying about cache mode settings about five minutes after I switched to it.
It's not great, it's not terrible, like most software I use. But I would have always said the same about Outlook Classic.
Bottom line for me is that MS has Classic on maintenance mode and it's only a matter of time before it's gone.
The biggest issue I have with new outlook is meeting notifications (reminders) on Windows.
I see a freaking loading screen with the Outlook logo for 5 seconds before the window is updated with the meeting name along with a button to dismiss it. Yes that's everything in there.
Clicking a Teams meeting link from Outlook Calendar opens the pre-meeting screen to allow enable/disable of camera/microphone, plus it also loads up a little reminder window with Join and Dismiss buttons _over the top_ of the Join button of the pre-meeting screen.
Every time.
And then there's the fact that, if Teams wasn't already loaded, you can be up five minutes late for a meeting waiting for Teams to roll out of bed despite having clicked Join bang on meeting time.
I don't have the most up to date system at work, but it feels like 90s wait-computing.
Quite often when I use a 1990s system, I encounter several things that are instantaneous, while modern machines take several seconds.
Like, sending an empty folder to the bin:
Win 10 this afternoon took seconds to display a dialog box with no content, the a couple seconds to add a progressbar, then a second to add the cancel button, then multiple seconds to finish showing progress.
But at home a 1991s system with System 7 completes the same task instantly without needing a progressbar.
Why are you not on thunderbird yet? Why do you get Windows notifications? Are you using Windows? I don't understand how there are people who can notice such things but still use windows in 2026. Also, please don't write with AI. This post was written with AI.
Often people have no say in the matter. Major of forced Microsoft usage comes from corporate IT. Corporate IT likes Microsoft because the amount of tooling available to manage it. Often these same people run Linux or Mac at home.
Rest of the people do not know the difference or know how to change out the software with better alternatives. Example, Firefox keeps loosing customers to Chrome and yet Firefox fully supports Manifest V2 with proper Ad-Block support, which increases computer security. Show these people an Ad heavy website with Chrome vs Firefox & U-Block Origin, this looks like magic to them.
Personally, you have to pay me to use Microsoft products. I have been game exclusively on Linux for nearly 10 years now. Before that, 5 years of dual booting just to game.
I might be an email simpleton, but I don't think I've ever used a native email application on a desktop/laptop machine ever in my 20+ years on the web. I always just used the website, starting with EarthLink, then Hotmail, then Gmail, and now Proton.
What email power feature are folks using that necessitates using Outlook natively?
I couldn't even get new Outlook to sync with some email accounts. And my Office 2019 licenses will stop working next month due to a cert expiry Trojan horse baked in by Microsoft. Why does MS think I will ever want to pay them for anything ever again?
Some years ago, Microsoft got the security religion internally. While it doesn't mean that they've been issue-free since then, it largely worked. They were dangerously close to acquiring a reputation as being too insecure to do real work on, and they resolved that enough for the market.
I wish someone would give them the performance religion. The saying that what Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away is pretty old, but I will defend Microsoft in the past with the observation that, you know, 32MB of RAM to 64MB is a pretty small change in the modern sense. It doesn't take very many bitmaps or fonts or colors to burn through that sort of increase in power, even at the older resolutions of the past. There's a reason we don't all build our UIs to run on 386-class machines.
But it's gotten freaking absurd. I've got a 8-core monster that cranks up to near 5GHz at the drop of a hat, more RAM than I could have dreamed of in the 1990s, and a disk with numbers that I would have asked if you were accidentally talking about RAM back then (NVME SSDs still have ~500-1000x the latency, but the modern SSD wins handily on bandwidth). Modern code has more to do, more fonts, more graphics, more Unicode, but still it has gotten really absurd. 10 seconds on a modern computer is a lot of time. 12,000 frames of a AAA game ought to be enough computational power to check my email, not to have my email checker still choking and stuttering as it barely manages to start up.
Outlook has been an embarrassment for years. Poor defaults, bugs that have existed for years, and sub-par performance.
Search for a meeting: it shows you the oldest first.
Busy search calendars? It may or may not show working hours. It’s incapable of helpfully locating a mutually agreeable time in the way more modern agents can.
Search for mail? It’s an abomination trying to prioritize what you actually want.
The settings aren’t intuitively organized and a hodgepodge of UI standards.
We’re still on old Outlook and I’m not sure what we are going to do when Microsoft cancels it. The New Outlook preview release came out 4 years ago. If it was ever going to not be a piece of crap it would’ve happened by now.
Outlook is probably the worst software I encountered. I have seen relative being reduced to tears because she was not able to find her important emails and genuinely thought they were gone only to find out Outlook search is so crap it wouldn't find them despite getting literal sentences that were in those emails.
I also particularly like merging unrelated email threads into one so you end up not following what the threads are about. The focused view is the best. It hides the emails you actually care about from you.
Software like this should be illegal to distribute.
There's also an unresolved bug when a certain email is both coming from an on-prem exchange and at the same time is used as a registered account at Microsoft, outlook seems to have continuous disconnections and prompts to login into the Microsoft account in outlook rather than sticking to the already logged in exchange email. Frustrating to say the least.
[even when the top-level tracking preferences look full off, if you dig down you'll find some “part” on, and you can't set them full-off (you are blocked from disabling tracking by Amazon at least)]
[Mental note to self: add “windowslatest.com” to “are you really sure you want to go there?” DNS greylist]
Linux doesn’t define a GUI. I think you mean ”Now if only there were a distribution of Linux that implemented my personal idea of what a GUI should be.”
To which, I bet someone does. If you think Windows nails all the right ideas, there is Mint.
New Outlook doesn't actually do IMAP at all. What it does is sending your IMAP credentials in clear text to a remote Microsoft server, which will then fetch email for you.
> “Microsoft listed 15 productivity features [including] richer Copilot integration…”
Dumb-@$$ Copilot in Outlook. The other day I needed to list all of the file attachments for a particular email. Copilot couldn’t do it. But it could suss my impatience.
It's not so bad here in Orange County. City/county politics are more balanced and provide pretty good counterweights to the state party. It's much better than the Seattle area, which truly has uniparty rule and it shows. People are less civil and tolerant there, crime and schools are worse, quality of life is lower.
I agree with the parent comment though. MS just doesn't have meaningful competition for Windows and Office, and the terrible software quality/experience is what we get.
At this point I would pay up front (one-time fee) for a Windows email client that rendered fast, worked with multiple account types including Outlook, had a nice simple interface so I can focus on the messages, and didn't have AI stuffed into it. Seems like we just don't have that.
New outlook also pre loads ads and it takes a few seconds for the paid verification to go through before the ads go away. Very frustrating clicking on the first email at load time only to realize it is an ad. Just the icing on the sh*t cake.
I have ~3 lower/mid range Linux laptops and 1x mid/high range windows gaming laptop. It's amazing how slow the windows machine is despite being an absolute beast compared to the linux machines, which have way worse specs.
The mobile app does this too. When you open a notification it first brings you to an old email you already had open and it takes a number of seconds before that's replaced by the one you were notified for.
My first week at a new job that forces me back into Windows (with WSL). I'm about ready to throw my machine out the window and follow after it. I understand that a lot of the performance issues are things like crowdstrike and Defender and maybe some poorly configured network proxy stuff but Jesus, this sucks. I write embedded software for machines with 1 ten thousandth the compute of my dev machine, I should not be encumbered by issues like this.
A pool of notifaction-agents trying to upsale copilot or staying quiet, is stateful aka a turing machine. If you use enough of these agents they can draw and behave like any software e.g. outlook
The Outlook web app breaks browser navigation, I thought we had that figured out in SPAs like, more than a decade ago. But it does load almost-instantly (less than a second) so that's nice at least.
Where does it break nav? Honest question, because I have been living inside it for almost 7 years now and actually prefer it to any of the desktop clients (except on the Mac).
On desktop (Firefox) at least if I navigate to another folder, the URL changes but the browser back button doesn't change the view back to inbox. On mobile (iOS Safari), if I open an email, then try to navigate back, it takes me all the way back to the login page. The app also seems to use old-fashioned #anchor-based URLs rather than the navigation API.
(Hilariously, I found a feedback link but it points to a 404.)
Literally was just googling yesterday about why Windows File Explorer genuinely takes longer to boot up than microsoft edge. Insane how fast they are enshittifying.
yea I do think you're right. Really dislike that they've truly stuffed it down as everything getting auto-uploaded to OneDrive. Would be happy to use it to store certain docs but can't control how work sets it up ya know? stuck suffering instead lmao
Teams, the new outlook are both piles of garbage. They've been garbage for years, and will probably still be garbage in a decade from now.
Teams takes 2gig of memory on launch, and still misses keystrokes because it is so unresponsive. Click on someone and start typing and half your chat isn't recorded. Absolute hot garbage.
Outlook isn't much better.
People who worked on them should be ashamed to consider these products shippable.
its faster to use an LLM + MCP (chatgpt or claude integration cloud integration) to search your email than to use the search field in the web browser now
its also possibly cheaper than the monthly licence fee for the desktop app suite
Yea, everyone is trashing on Outlook web while Gmail is over there doing same exact shit. Even worse, Gmail has never well integrated all its features. Apparently having easy access to my full calendar requires a new tab.
They so screwed Outlook. The stupid thing refuses to respond after switching to a diff network or SSID till it’s completed some synchronization of some kind. The stupid app refuses to come into focus.
I really don’t need the freshest view at once. Maybe I just need to look at an open email you dog of an app!
Why did they castrate Outlook? Does MS hate itself? What in the name of shit are they thinking? Who does this make happy?
What I don't understand is why search is so broken.
If I do a search of my inbox with a lot of results, it gets lazy-loaded. Fair enough. But why, when I scroll to the bottom and it loads the new batch of email, does the view need to jump back to the top of the list?
Why has Gmail been able to recognize and properly group/deduplicate prior conversations in top-posted email threads for 20 years, but Outlook can't bother? That also breaks search, since every email with the result somewhere in its body (even prior emails) will appear.
While I don't like the new Outlook much, half the time I use it is through a browser on my Linux box anyway, when I check work email from my own hardware...
I'm also don't agree with the assertions that you cannot address performance issues in a web based application. The actual email rendering in Outlook classic is still an embedded browser engine. Now it's just doing more of the application. If anything VS Code and the underlying editor system should show that you really can create pretty responsive applications on a browser surface... no, it's not the fastest, but if you're comparing to a lot of "full" IDE applications, it's a massive improvement... Visual Studio around 2010 was absolutely horrible for building web based applicatons, with common freezes and input lags.
There's plenty of room for improvement in these applications... I think the web shift is more to support cross platform better than it is to avoid optimization. At this point, they really want to be able to support Android, iOS, Windows, Mac and maybe unofficially Linux. The browser is the best bet to make that happen. I think that wasm can bridge a lot of the performance issues where service interactions go beyond the immediate state. With the rust ecosystem as good as it is for wasm target usage, I'm frankly surprised more of the logic isn't already there instead of JS. That said, I don't know how much is effectively asm.js or electronic translations to JS, or relying on server functionality. I haven't dug that deep.
That said, there's plenty of room to optimize web based applications. Even if it comes down to single-channel RDP application shells to a server-running application remotely. I think the point is to share as much as possible and support as broad an audience as they can. I think this is still happening in a context where three are still those that are trying to keep Windows on top and ignore Linux, while others in the org want to fully embrace it.
Surprisingly good is a stretch. Barley adequate more like it.
Now that they've hidden mail access behind oauth (imap and SMTP, additionally SMTP behind global default off policy) and graph api behind oauth2 - it looks like they don't have to worry about real mail clients competing.
Actually fighting [f] to get mail in/out working with freescout right now - and having had learn more than I care to about o365 and PowerShell etc - I wonder how hard it would be to write a couple of stand alone tools to get fetch/send/sync mail working with o365 and local maildir - to get my/sup/any sane Mua to really work with o365/exchange/outlook.
Then there's calendar and teams to deal with..
[f] Thankfully our o365 reseller does most of the fighting - I'm happy to not have tenant-wide admin in AD/entra/whatever kerberized LDAP is called today.
Are we talking about the same Outlook here? And I mean that sincerely. I just joined a new company and now have to use MS software for the first time since Windows 7. Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, you name it, are all a clunky mess (at least on MacOs).
No, that's a very uninformed take, and contradicted on two fronts:
1. Microsoft's other native apps have gotten unusably slow lately, too.
2. There's definitely plenty of fast web apps.
I don't mind snark, but make it factually accurate.
This is just Microsoft's poor strategic decision to try to drive as many as possible to Linux. Hell, weren't they bragging recently about managing to make opening the start menu take only a tenth of a second? It should be instant.
Maybe they think we'll replace users with AI, too. AI is the only thing slower than Microsoft's UIs lately.
Web apps tend to be a mixed bag. After a while they become slow because of dozens of async operations relying on network.
That can be an issue for native apps too, but they tend to be designed in a local-first manner, which means that they'll always have a speed advantage, assuming your typical dev team.
Also, at a typical turbo speed of 5 GHz you get half a billion clock cycles and multiple instructions can be retired per clock for about one or two billion total in those 100ms.
That’s about 1,000 instructions per pixel of the Start Menu!
All web apps are in fact slow compared to native apps. They are also clunky (though that's my opinion, not a fact). There are better and worse web apps, yes. And it's possible to make native apps which are even worse than a web app. But "like all web apps, it's slow" is a perfectly fair statement.
Email is still (and IMO always will be) the defacto method of communication for anything professional, regardless of whether it's 1994, 2026 or 2095. I'm not even totally convinced that something else could come along and usurp it; it would have to be something so easy, so ubiquitous, fully-supported across every piece of software and internet that you encounter, while serving as a form of identity and "fixed geography" (think about how email addresses serve similar purposes as postal addresses), trustable, comprehensive, and completely open and free (not as in beer, but as in protocol-level free) ... and even then, the value prop would have to be cheaper, seamless to migrate all existing email-related stuff to, and backwards compatible with / significantly more compelling than email itself, to convince the world to adopt it.
I'd love to see it though, because email really is long in the tooth at this point.
> Everybody I know uses IM systems like Wechat, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal.
Great, instead of having a single, standard and interoperable way to communicate (albeit with its defaults), now we need to have 5, 6, 7 different closed systems that can't speak with each other, most of which require a working smartphone in order to even have an "address". What a wonderful evolution...
IM is fine for quick, ephemeral communications ("I just arrived at the restaurant") or automated processes ("Your authentication code for $BANK is 9975"), but for meaningful, thoughtful communication between human beings, email works better for me. The main advantages:
- I use my own domain, so I'm not tied to any single provider
- I can keep a copy of everything (I still have some emails from 30 years ago)
The article mentions that new Outlook uses a Webview2 control as the UI. You can call it JS/Webview.
Similar to Electron, but using an MS Edge browser window control as the webview control instead of Google Chrome.
It's lighter weight than Electron, if you consider that Webview2 ships with Windows and is shared with other Webview2 consumers as opposed to Electron apps which each ship with their own self-contained web browser.
Microsoft Classic has COM+. It can be automated. U can automate it via POSH or whatever u like. It is super solid piece of software. Bloated or not is a very wrong move to take automation away from ppl.
Up until 2019, Windows was my daily driver and had been for the prior ~20. years. I had been regularly ssh-ing into Linux machines, but it didn't seem like a place I could live. Then, in 2019, I built a PC and, wanting to get more proficient in Linux environments, I made it a dual boot setup with a Ubuntu desktop partition and a Windows partition, expecting I'd inevitably get frustrated on the Linux partition by sidequests debugging driver issues or setting up peripherals, unproductive yak-shaving stuff. I had to google a setting or two over the first couple days, but other than that, everything just worked on the Linux partition. Things opened quickly, things installed easily, and things I was worried about (e.g. nvidia and printer drivers) were either automatic or a one-time step so small I don't remember it. After a couple weeks, I noticed there hadn't been a single moment where I had to switch to the Windows partition, and a month after that I reformatted the Windows partition ssd and added the storage to the Linux partition.
If you have considered switching to Linux and worried that it would be a chore, give it a shot (if you have the freedom to choose). It has been polished and ready since at least 2019. I have to use a Windows machine for work and, like this New Outlook issue shows, MSFT has concluded most users can't or won't leave so there's no margin in improving UX and some margin in doing things that make UX much worse. I don't think I'll elect to have a personal Windows machine ever again in my life.
> It has been polished and ready since at least 2019.
Linux people said things like this in 2019 too. It's always "been improved a lot in the past few years" (not saying this statement can't be true.)
At this point I'm convinced that no matter how much or little Linux desktop is improved, its market share is solely dependent on how much Microsoft fucked up.
I actually agree, Linux is well past the point a minimally tech competent person can use it fine, but it doesn't solve the fact that even if Linux was flawless, there is still a switching cost in time, relearning a new system, and worst (best?) of all of you decide you are willing to do all of that now you can get entirely lost in the weeds picking a distro. I used Linux all through university, then went back to windows out of convenience and needing to use it for work anyways.
Until one day I got so frustrated with constant settings resets, reboots at the worst times for software updates that fail, highjacking my pc after every update for a guided tour of the latest things Microsoft decided to break, and telemetry that can only be disabled with an obscure registry hack that changes every few months, I just couldn't anymore.
Linux has been good enough as a daily driver for a while now, but even with proton I don't know if the pull factors towards Linux will ever be strong enough for most people. For me though the push factors away from Microsoft had gotten so strong I couldn't take it anymore.
Theres a lot of friction from enterprise Microsoft admins, too. "But how will I group policy and Entra xyz?" is a concern I hear regularly, but still struggle to educate them away from.
This is more desktop linux's certification and standardization problem than technical problem.
Because "It works" is insufficient for regulated industries that require "Prove is works using ___ standard" (where proving takes a ton of people-time), and more and more industries are soft-regulated as a condition of cyber insurance.
I.e. what RedHat was created to solve
Suse has filled that niche pretty well also.
How do you educate them though?
I've found a clue-by-four to be a relatively effective tool.
MS has inertia on its side, and its abusive marketing and lock-in strategies of the 90s. Remember when you couldn't buy a PC without Windows from most vendors? Meaning you were paying MS, even if you immediately uninstalled it?
The long term outcome of that is that 90+% of industry still buys Windows PCs. And non-industry: once non-techie people are on an OS (Windows/MacOS), many don't move off it, though Apple's ecosystem has been a good carrot+stick.
One of the more interesting indicators is (even though desktop software is in decline) - the number of apps that are Windows and Mac and maybe linux, and the increasing number of apps that Mac-only or Mac+Linux but do NOT have a Windows download. Something unimaginable in the 90s and 00s.
MS are certainly accelerating adoption of other platforms due to their own mismanagement.
It still can't be a PC without windows, when going to the shopping mall stores normies use.
The computers on display are gaming PCs with windows, PC laptops with Windows, macOS laptops, and Chromebooks, which in Europe are largely ignored.
Normies aren't going to Tuxedo website asking for a Linux desktop.
I just realized, when I got my HP laptop I've never even booted its default Windows install, but MS still got paid. I'd rather have that money to go HP so the laptop could be made better. Insane how they're getting paid for nothing, almost like a tax. HP could just have offered an OSless option, but no. A silly world we live in.
> HP could just have offered an OSless option, but no.
At HP-scale, I wouldn't be surprised if most of the money for a Windows license does go to HP.
I expect the major vendors, today, have fairly equal bargaining power with MS over unit license costs, in the volumes they're buying.
2026 is the year of Linux on the Desktop!
> At this point I'm convinced that no matter how much or little Linux desktop is improved, its market share is solely dependent on how much Microsoft fucked up.
Lifelong Windows user here. If you could get the kind of driver support you have with Windows for just whatever the fuck you have lying around, I'd probably use my Ubuntu laptop as more of a daily driver.
Not lifelong, but I've been using Linux since 1993. Through subconscious selective pressure, I only have things lying around that are useful with Linux.
It's kind of liberating, to be able to ignore a huge amount of crap in the market because you can tell it is just some sort of delivery vector for proprietary Windows drivers and their dodgy installers.
Unless your hardware is exotic (or actively anti-consumer), most devices are well supported. If you wouldn't mind, what issues did you have recently?
Ubuntu 26.04 has a bug in their pc-kernel snap causing it not to ship firmware for some devices (like my iwlwifi chipset), and because it mounts read-only directories into /var/lib/firmware/ you can't install the updated firmwares from apt either. Unless you're willing to do something like unpack the .deb file manually and extract the relevant firmwares from it, your wifi card won't work.
This isn't an issue with the hardware being too new or anything; it all works and the firmwares are all available, but Ubuntu's kernel snaps don't ship them and they make it much harder to get them yourself either.
I bought the Lenovo's proprietary Ethernet adapter from Lenovo directly for my Thinkpad X1 Extreme because I wanted to keep a USB-C port free. It didn't work at all under Fedora. A third-party USB-C to Ethernet adapter I bought works flawlessly.
If Lenovo's own adapter doesn't work on one of the most well supported product lines on Linux, that is not a good look.
To be very clear, I am a long time Linux user and most of the third-party stuff usually just works.
I remember handing an Ethernet cable to a friend and he said I was getting old. His laptop didn't have Ethernet! I still haven't recovered from the realisation.
My [old] laptop had a a card reader, hdmi, vga, a serial port and rows of usb2 ports, a plug for power, headphone jack etc etc
Back at his place he showed me the USB hub and the Rube Goldberg dongle collection. I said, ahh there you have all those connectors you didn't need.
I now think USB is magic. Not wanting to use it for everything means you are getting old. The future is a desk full of dongles.
https://resolume.com/forum/download/file.php?id=5430&mode=vi...
Excuse me! I hide them in a rats nest under my desk like a civilized person.
Civilized people have a box full of dongles in a cabinet drawer, right next to the box with ethernet cables and the video cable box.
On the desktop that's true, but when I last used linux laptops (Debian, probably in 2021 or so), there were significant driver issues for the touchpad, touchscreen, buttons for brightness, and audio on every laptop I tried.
I eventually gave up and bought a Macbook and installed Homebrew and Rectangle on it. I haven't thought about drivers or firmware updates for that device since I bought it.
If I did own a desktop, I would use linux on it, and I solely use linux when I'm using VMs or cloud providers.
Recently started working at a company that uses windows and .net and it's so bad.
Did you install the nonfree Debian ISO? Debian back then by default did not ship non-free drivers, meaning half your stuff won't work.
You should have used their special (released by them) nonfree ISO or Ubuntu and you would've been fine.
Your stuff is probably supported by official debian repos, just not ones that are enabled by default.
Try Linux sometime again! You won't regret it.
I would say even 2021 is long enough ago for that landscape to have changed quite a bit. For one thing, Framework was barely a company back then, now they’re a mature and highly viable OEM choice.
As a small tip, I prefer using Arch-based distributions as they get new kernels rapidly and therefore new hardware support comes fast. They’re also an obvious choice for people who play games on Steam since SteamOS is arch based.
In the AI age, almost any problem with Linux is a quick query or copy/pasted error message away. The days of spending hours on troubleshooting are over.
If you were willing to buy a whole new piece of hardware with a MacBook, perhaps you’d be willing to buy a Linux-first laptop in the future? For example, the Framework 13 Pro has purportedly caught up to many of the advantages of a MacBook Pro (battery life, haptic trackpad, CNC aluminum chassis), judging by early press impressions. Over half of Framework 13” customers install Linux and it’s Ubuntu certified. Besides being the premier Linux laptop, you also get all the repairability and modularity benefits the brand has on offer.
I personally own the current non-Pro model and despite its shortcomings that the new model doesn’t have (I have my preorder in), the overall package is a pretty modern laptop where 100% of the hardware works flawlessly with Linux.
Even if you aren’t looking for that type of machine and just want something from a more common OEM like Lenovo or ASUS, I have found that solid Linux support is not tough to find. Basically any common laptop that’s older than 6 months old is well-supported. One of my friends bought a $500 ThinkPad T14 on eBay and of course 100% of the hardware works.
Macs are the gold standard for not having any need to mess with drivers, but I have found my AMD graphics driver to be a lot more stable in Linux than in Windows. That was the major decision point in wiping my desktop gaming PC and installing CachyOS.
My “final straw” motivation to leave macOS on my laptop last year was Liquid Glass. Other motivations included my frustration with certain Apple services and the level of abstraction and lock-in they have, running out of storage space in my system, as well as frustration with my laptop being capable enough but unable to play any of most of my PC games from a software standpoint.
Returning to speaking of something relevant to this article, now that I have no macOS or Windows, I am no longer tied down with Thunderbolt as the only viable desktop email client anymore as I don’t need to support all three operating systems. I’m enjoying Evolution a lot more than Thunderbird, but of course there are numerous Linux-only choices I could have gone with.
Not OP, but I have an Asus StudioBook 17.
Of what is builtin, the fingerprint reader and the numberpad functionality of the touchpad don't work.
Everything else works fine though.
3 Words: Dell Docking Stations
LOL, preach. Work worst with Dell XPS series (have to power cycle the laptop so the dock would display something again), work better with ThinkPad and Framework laptops.
They're at least free :)
Dell Docking stations are practically free, yes. Even on Windows, I've had issues, because of the Dell fuckery with docking stations - single cable docking doesn't work if your docking station is too new, and your laptop too old. Bananas.
On Ubuntu, I've purchased 3 different docking stations, and tried 2 existing ones, and none has worked quite right (some just flat out don't have all the drivers they need). The Windows laptop I have (which is extremely similar in hardware and generation), if you get a video signal out to a monitor, it's a very safe bet everything else works.
Back to "Practically Free" for old Dell docking stations. I acquired 3 of them for about 15-20 each shipped off eBay. lol At least I'm not sinking hundreds of dollars into each attempt at a docking station that may or may not work.
I have the opposite experience. With the HP docking station, we were unable to drive a 4k monitor using windows. On linux thisnjust worked.
> Unless your hardware is exotic (or actively anti-consumer)
Bruh.
2 weeks ago I was getting full kernel crashes on Ubuntu Server due to an Intel iGPU on a Dell Laptop with a 7th gen i7. Fortunately Claude Code fixed it after a couple of attempts, but still.
Audio was completely corrupt on a Bazzite HTPC I tried to set up 6 months ago, until I changed some setting on my TV related to 10-bit colour. Then, when that was sorted Kodi would only run in 30Hz despite the fact that other apps supported 60.
My previous laptop with Arch (circa 2020) sometimes wouldn't wake from sleep.
When I ran an OpenSUSE Desktop (circa 2019) I picked Noveau instead of the proprietary drivers, and the picture was all corrupt. Then when I installed the proper Nvidia drivers, I did the wrong thing and my whole screen turned black, Linus-style.
I then switched the same desktop to Ubuntu, which was better out of the box, but would stop reading my USB SD card reader after unplugging it a few times. WiFi would also randomly drop out until I rebooted the whole system every few hours, and when talking to my Brother Laser Printer it would only print in like 30dpi or somthing ridiculous. I was emailing the files to myself, rebooting back into Windows and then printing from there because it was so bad.
The 5 year gap between the current Linux attempts and the last one had less to do with Linux improvements and more to do with agentic LLMs being able to paper over all the cracks. To be fair, though, I expect regular people having access to Opus 4.5-tier or higher models will result in all kinds of minor issues that would normally be overlooked actually getting fixed on Linux. (Thinking about it a bit more, regular users will have access to subsidised tokens too, so a million open source devs running $20 Claude Pro subscriptions might between them be able to do way more with that $20 million than Microsoft could with Enterprise API access).
Pretty sure something in your hardware failing
We regularly buy dell latitudes or ThinkPad TPX series NEW ones for a large University. 100% Linux only usage.
Usual sleep/resume problems. No other problems
All problems with gfx you state are often listed in all dell forums - with windows.
Aliexpress style mini HT PC are always with poor drivers - even on Windows. Not just bazzite.
I switched to Ubuntu a few months back, and I didn't have any issues. It was faster than installing Windows.
I'm not really using anything too exotic... my hardware all works, and my printer has generally been without issue (HP Color Laser on ethernet) regardless of what I use to print from.
For me, I switched when the start menu started showing internet ads as part of the results... I ran insiders for years, often joking that WSL was my favorite Linux distro... I love the new MS Terminal, and pretty happy with a lot of things. That said, there's far more that annoys me... it's too in your face trying to sell you additional software/services/features that frankly I find offensive from an OS. It's like built in malware ads. They might as well try to sell me an X10 camera in those popups, I'd feel just as irritated about it.
I went from dual booting, to just Linux for my personal use a few years ago and been pretty happy. I'm not a gamer, and was already using Linux as my dev target for server software. It wasn't a big deal for me. Even the growing pains for Cosmic have been less annoying than some of the "features" of Windows.
Try mint on a live boot. I’ve found it to be the most “just works” on various laptops
Desktops too, and I've been preferring the Debian version known as Linux Mint Debian Edition since they came out with LMDE 7.
>Linux people said things like this in 2019 too.
They've been saying it since it was competing with Windows XP at least.
I find it hilarious. I’ve been using Linux for over 25 years and people keep telling me “now it’s ready”
Yep. I removed the last Windows98SE partition from my PC in 2003. Never looked back.
Having no one to ask if you can't get things to work was a big issue until LLMs came along. You can ask things online but people are reluctant to keep asking and/or keep explaining what they've tried.
I'm sure the lone Linux experimenter just gave up some place half way configuring the HP printer.
I don’t know if Linux has improved a lot in the last few years. I’ll observe, though, that it always feels like it has for the first few years you use it, since it becomes intuitive and natural.
Agreed. 2026 was the year. The degradation of win 11 , forced win accounts everywhere. I switched to Linux Mint, and I haven't switched back. Missing out on a few random games that aren't supported yet, I decided it was time to get rid of windows on my desktop.
I do have one windows machine still, and thats my simrig, this is a purpose built computer+rig specifically for iRacing and iRacing have said that they won't support linux, and so w/ that, I'll keep it in windows, until they change their position.
Yep, see also "lies, damn lies, and feedback on arch linux":
https://www.bitecode.dev/p/lies-damn-lies-and-feedback-on-ar...
I read your blog and I can't agree, i've installed arch Linux before and only had to read the arch wiki page on it and it worked fine with none of the issues you described.
Same thing with gentoo, that I am daily driving now.
I sure had hickups but I managed to solve them by sitting and reading the manuals/wikis of the distros directly, or the programs I was dealing with. Maybe the problem is that you read an obscure forum to get your answer? I don't know.
You are exactly the too good to realize all the problems you solve profile from the article.
Whenever Steam released Proton is when Linux started to get way better. I used to daily Linux at work in 2017 onwards. Been dailying at home since 2022.
Man, I just realized it's been 20 years for me. I vaguely remember sometime in 2006 that Windows Vista was inevitable and decided to switch to linux.
I don't care about fussing around and just need a useful machine for work and fun. Linux is far from perfect for me but the amount of crap windows or macos throw at me when I have to use them is almost comical.
I moved long ago to use a fully legally free OS, but at that time, win7 or even win10 weren't bad neighbors to visit from time to time. But win11 became a weird new-trend copycat with even more bloat.
Same for me. Possibly longer. I just never think about Windows anymore. I think it helps these days that "programs" aren't so much a thing anymore. A lot of what used to be an OS program is now a free online service.. like email, word processing, chats, multimedia, etc..
> It has been polished and ready since at least 2019.
Linux has been a fine desktop since almost its beginning.
My first work-issued laptop was in 1994, running Linux. Using a PCMCIA modem to connect to the internet via dialup. Worked perfect. Every year since then (that's 32 years now) I've had Linux desktop(s) and laptop(s) and it all works fine.
If one looks for excuses, excuses can be found, but it has worked fine since the beginning.
All Operating Systems suck. Linux sucks less for things I care about, and has done for a long time - much longer than 7 years for my purposes.
I too am required to use a Windows machine for work, which seems to get worse with every release. They even ruined notepad.exe. The bloat is unavoidable. The new laptop I got one year ago that seemed more than enough when new, is now struggling under the bloat. It takes me in excess of 10 minutes to log in, connect VPN, start teams, outlook and putty in a citrix session. Madness!
Pretty much the same here. A happy Ubuntu user for 4 years now. Here and there, there's still minor issues, but nothing a quick search or AI can't help you with. And we're hackers here after all.
8 years here. Mint->Arch->NixOS. Basically zero Windows use in that time outside of niche needs.
I agree. Sometimes one needs Windows for some legacy software, but for 99% of use cases Linux works, is faster and respects your privacy more.
get back to me when you will be able to install easily Chinese keyboard/input into Linux as you can with Windows and when you will be easily switch keyboards with alt+left shift, I was setting up computers with Linux and it's major PITA for such basic thing, same with reassigning right alt and windows menu keys to different buttons (Home/End) on laptop
Have you tried a Mac? Apple silicon is fantastic, build quality is the best on the market, you're still running a unix OS, and there's a huge community of developers + companies making things work.
Yeah, and I'm a big fan of the the hardware. I bought a refurbished MacBook Air in 2022 (M1 or M2, I don't recall) to try it on and see how I liked it. I mainly used it as a thin client to ssh to my homelab, but it was far and away the best laptop hardware on the market and I loved the battery life. I found that I couldn't use it with two (non-duplicating) external monitors, so I considered the test a success, gave the MacBook Air to my wife, and bought a MacBook Pro (which I'm still using mainly as a thin client and ssh-ing to a Linux machine and working there; plug for Tailscale, it makes everything really nice and easy).
I know it's silly to have a MacBook Pro just for the screen size, its ability to drive two external monitors, and the battery life Apple Silicon achieves. And I feel a bit rude not really learning much about the dev tools the community has made for MacOS. But it is just really nice hardware (I just wish it wasn't such a chore to configure my Macbook to have the same ctrl+c, ctrl+v keyboard shortcuts when using an external keyboard, but the hardware is sufficiently better than anything else on the market that I tolerate it).
Macs are even at a good price point compared to similar hardware these days, and don't seem to have the same level of planned obsolescence of windows laptops.
A mac with homebrew and rectangle installed works well enough as a hobby development machine for me that I rarely feel the need to ssh into something else.
> you're still running a unix OS
They are trying so hard to destroy that, basically nothing is left.
Just yesterday I needed to run equivalent of strace on a mac to trace system call. Great, it has dtruss (truss was the command on Solaris). Turns out dtruss is still there, but apple has completely broken it, it doesn't work.
Just an example of how extremely developer-hostile Apple is.
Macs are on their way to enshittification, too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46322556 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243075
Also, see this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25074959
I found AI (Claude) to be extremely effective in setting up, managing and maintainimg Linux, just like it was in managimg Windows for those of us incapable of memorizing 1.000's of Powershell commands.
I have some fond memories of getting into computers around 2000. Building PCs, installing Windows, re-installing Windows ever so often.
At some point Windows just crashed and couldn't be brought back to life, straight up refused to be installed on that disk again.
(Funfact: the crash happened while playing some opensource sci-fi game... Produced by Microsoft)
I had a Gentoo Linux partition back then thanks to a friend from school and used that for everything from that point on.
Interestingly I never really had major issues. Running Warcraft 3 on Gentoo, writing my thesis (theseses actually) on Ubuntu and later switching to Arch Linux just worked.
I still remember switching to Gnome 3 (from KDE) and being impressed by how fast the Shell felt.
...
Fast forward to two years ago and I am forced to use Windows for the first time in 20+ years, in a locked down corporate setting nonetheless.
... what a hot mess :-)
My favourite part of these success stories when Nautilus can,t replicate some functionality which Windows has since forever, eg copy-pasting tex and files across 3 RDP sessions deep. Sure, someone who uses their computer as a glorified SSH terminal with an occasional Google.Docs edition wouldn't see a problem, but I, who works everyday - do.
It's reductive to say that people who aren't "copy-pasting tex and files across 3 RDP sessions deep" are not "working everyday." While Windows fits your use case, some people do use SSH for their real work as well, even if it is simpler.
> some people do use SSH for their real work as well
Somehow all that 'real work' boils down to configuring servers. Most people don't configure servers 24/7 or even 8/5. They need to work with files of different formats and with different apps. Now tell me, how would you use SSH (not SSH tunneling, lol) to loot at some .jpegs to decide to what would be used in somewhere.
Hell, VS Code + Remote SSH is pretty freaking awesome.. edit locally run remote. The integrated terminal pretty much makes this as smooth an experience as working locally.
The only people who I’ve ever known to use tex are honours students & academics. Comedy gold saying that’s work.
Comedy gold is what it didn't occur to you what that was a typo in my comment.
Now go consistently copy-paste text (at least) and files over your VNC connection.
I used latex on occasion for about a decade after graduation, but now it’s only my CV I use, and I’m getting rusty. Markdown is far more covienient.
Never used Tex specifically.
Mount a shared drive? Use sshfs?
Yes, exactly what the problem is. Every Linux fanboi has a lot of problem solving CLI incantations. While Windows users just use the default and working copy-paste (and don't need root/Administrator rights for that too).
> Outlook is based on WebView2, and like all web apps, it’s slow
Fastmail also has a web based email client, which is as fast as (if not faster than) Outlook Classic.
The new Outlook is just bad. Load order is wrong, it renders everything on every window, loads unnecessary data, etc. Plain annoying.
IME running the new outlook in an actual web browser (through outlook.office.com) is waaay faster than the heavy (heh) client.
Bonus points for it running fine on Linux, too. I understand there are some missing features compared to the old one (can't recall which), but for basic corpo emailing it works perfectly for me.
I now have 0 reasons to use Windows at work, so, for once, I'll nonironically cheer MS for a job well done!
That is terribly hobbled. Examples:
1. You can't run all the rules on your inbox to sweep the piled up email after a weekend reboot. No such option while it is still present in the legacy native Outlook.
2. You have no option of deleting an entry in your calendar without sending a decline. I am in many groups and sometimes just want to clean up my calendar without sending declines. Again, very much present in the native program.
No one expects genuine innovation from MS, but at least they could put some effort into feature parity. Too much to ask for in the days of Copilot I guess.
> 1. You can't run all the rules on your inbox to sweep the piled up email after a weekend reboot. No such option while it is still present in the legacy native Outlook.
I'm not sure what you mean. I have rules running regularly to move messages around, delete messages older than X in some folders. It all runs fine. Maybe there are some other kinds of rules I'm not aware of? But I do remember that back when "old outlook" was still the main thing, I needed to be running for the rules to apply, which meant that interacting with a different client was always... funny.
> 2. You have no option of deleting an entry in your calendar without sending a decline
Could this be a config flag somewhere? I've just run a test and invited my MS account from a personal mailbox. On the event, once accepted, there are two separate actions: decline and delete. I've received the "accepted" mail, but haven't received anything after "deleting" the event.
1. You can run selective rules, but when you have a whole bunch, running all is more sensible.
2. When you select a slot in the calendar screen and press delete, the only options you get are cancel and decline.
All this is applicable for the PWA. The native client works fine.
I don't understand what you mean by your first point.
The delete button I was talking about is in Outlook running in a browser: https://i.imgur.com/k4ejdw4.png
Pressing the delete key on my keyboard brings this up: https://i.imgur.com/SBVkpVf.png
Clicking delete doesn't send any notification to the other side, where this account still shows as having accepted the invite (the other side is a different Office 365 organization).
That is interesting. I'm using the PWA on Linux - I can't share a screenshot but basically pressing the delete key shows two buttons: Cancel and Decline Event? - I don't get the Delete option like you do.
> after a weekend reboot
Isn't new outlook lives in the cloud? So this shouldn't be a usecase.
How is being in cloud relevant if you are rebooting weekly.
Public Folders is what makes us stick with the old Outlook client. For 25 years Public Folder has been a simple drag and drop, hierarchical archive system for communications with clients and vendors at team level.
> Bonus points for it running fine on Linux, too.
I haven't really been able to use outlook.office.com in anything but Edge, which on my Windows machine automatically authenticates with M365. In other browsers I regularly get stuck in an auth redirect loop between different Microsoft domains when I open the site. Sometimes it helps to clear all cookies and re-login (which is a real pain with 2FA and all) but it only ever helps once: If I close and re-open the site, I'll have to do it again.
How people voluntarily pay for this crap is beyond me. (In my case it's forced upon me by my client. On my own machines I switched to Linux in 2010 and never looked back.)
Same experience when I worked somewhere using outlook.
I exclusively used the web UI because it always ran faster for me, except for a small number of things it couldn't do.
Same experience here. Web version works just fine.
Even their Office Suite runs okay in the Web. For heavy lifting, like getting an md file into our Corporate Design, I still use libreoffice combned with our template.
> I understand there are some missing features compared to the old one
There are some people that use Outlook for...well I'm not sure what but things that go way beyond email and calendar. I've been using the web app for several years now, it's fine. When I was new in IT, I always struggled to see what the big deal was with Outlook desktop. The web mail has folders, rules, shared mailbox support, integrated calendar, etc.
What more do you need out of email?
Well, turns out a lot. People treat email has a permanent data store. I've encountered folks with multiple PST files archiving 10+ years of email. I ran into people that needed to queue up a bunch of offline emails in their outbox to send when they're on network again (ok, I kind of get this use case), and I came across all manner of horrors of COM Add-ins.
Anyway, the root of the problem is people using email for everything it was never intended to do or be. If "new" Outlook can break some of those habits, we'll all be better off for it.
> People treat email has a permanent data store.
Is this strange?
I'll be trying to solve some problem, half-remember an email conversation from several years ago on something relevant, and want to look it up.
This feels like the most natural thing in the world to me, and it's not like the ability to save emails is new. Why, exactly, would a forced change of habits be for my own good?
>Why, exactly, would a forced change of habits be for my own good?
At the personal level, it wouldn't be. It makes a lot of sense, and I do the same with Fastmail.
At the corp level where it's often in M365 cloud, you've got hard limits from Microsoft on one hand (100GB primary mailbox - period), and corporate data retention limits on the other. Legal often has strong opinions on how long you are allowed to retain emails which you may or may not be able to personally override. Could be just a few years, which forces a different strategy.
I'm not sure on the details of Google, but one imagines corp workspaces have equivalent interests.
I don't recall any kind of retention limits at Microsoft, at least not for engineers. My mail archives went all the way back to my hire date even 15 years later.
When I worked at Capital One there was a policy of automatically deleting everything that had not been subpoenaed as soon as it was legal to delete it. Usually 3 years or so. Retaining longer was viewed as creating legal risk for future lawsuits. They didn't want to leave evidence lying around if they could help it.
Edit: We were on GSuite.
My company moved to a 3 year retention for legal purposes a few years ago. Somewhat annoying from a nostalgia point of view when I’d get mails pop up from 2095, but everything I need has been in jiras for the last 10 years.
No, not conversations, actual data. Think reports, invoices, large PDFs, etc. Emailing files to yourself, that sort of thing. Then they end up with multiple PSTs.
I very much prefer Outlook's indexing compared to Sharepoint's shitty UI and search capabilities.
Copilot search is great for searching SharePoint
I came back to reread this last sentence three times. Well done, sir, well done!
In my experience it is. Unless your IT leadership blew it on Sharepoint governance, which isn't MS's fault.
Yet Sharepoint remains slow garbage.
I mean, yeah if your choice is between Email or SharePoint, email wins every time.
But I've seen enough corrupted PST files in my days to never trust Outlook/Exchange as permanent file storage.
Now with "New" Outlook you don't even get that, you get an ODT cache file, everything else is permanently server side in Microsoft land.
Enterprise "productivity" software is fundamentally broken.
Not even counting Sharepoint syncs...
Outlook COM addons + AutoHotKey was one of the ways that I learned programming back in the day. Email arrives > check the sender > if sender is $company > check for keywords and then run excel macros based on that > generate PDF report and automatically generate an outlook email, attach and send the file.
Good times, it feels like we're getting less and less flexible with the hackability of our corporate workflows as time goes on.
so true - I use some outlook vba to send mass emails programmatically
> People treat email has a permanent data store.
Email the protocol has this built in.
> If "new" Outlook can break some of those habits, we'll all be better off for it.
It won't, since email is in fact the best data store available to most people in enterprises (especially compared to things like Sharepoint). It might finally accelerate the move away from Exchange though. Here's hoping.
I don't know about that... unless a good open-source option comes out for corporate email that matches what Outlook/Exchange/M365 offers for calendars and scheduling.
That last part is the real point of integration... then real time chat and messaging status baked in... it's hard to beat. You have services and applications that offer pieces, but none integrate as well.
In the early 2010's I think that both Blackberry and Mozilla had an opportunity to create their own competition in the space and neither did. Google is pretty close, but IMO still a much lesser experience, reinventing a new chat app every other year didn't help their cause at all.
Google seems most likely to capitalize. GSuite is standard practice even among many large companies provided they were founded in the past ~15 years and aren't on the Microsoft teat. Their search is also _so much_ better than Outlook that it's even more useful as a forever-store.
Anyway, the root of the problem is people using email for everything it was never intended to do or be. If "new" Outlook can break some of those habits, we'll all be better off for it.
If ever there was a recipe for doing a terrible job at building software, that's as good a way to put it as I think we will ever see.
More like email became stripped down and no longer what it was. Mailboxes were always a permanent data store, there were mail files on disk.
>and I came across all manner of horrors of COM Add-ins.
It works both ways, I ran into a situation where a random Add-in was enabled on the web client and affecting the desktop client behavior despite not being in the list of Add-ins, and could only be disabled from the web client.
Yeah this is pretty much the only thing protecting us from Records Retention Policy(tm). Because the legal office thinks discovery is toooooooo risky, we have to delete all of the information we used to develop long lived business processes.
When I wrote this god and I understood it, now god only knows.
The last [US] BigCorp I worked for deployed (in Outlook) automatic deletion of all emails older than their Records Retention threshold. It was incredibly frustrating to have essentially all design/rationale history (from the key players involved) go into the auto-shredder with nobody but me caring. The only workarounds that could avoid the auto-shredder were enormously labor intensive, and of course, debatably violated Record Retention policy.
I never understood the mindset which seemed to interpret “we must preserve this for 5 years” as “we must _delete_ everything after 5 years”. I understand they want to minimize storage costs but they are destroying institutional knowledge. I have recently wanted to refer back to my notes on some older services and discovered that all my old notes have been deleted.
I think the rationale is that they don't want any liable behavior to be discoverable. Institutional knowledge could be in a controlled document storage and the email thread where you negotiated some kickbacks 6 years ago is shredded.
Pretty much any app that's been around a while will have all kinds of advanced features that the average user will never use, and eventually becomes detrimental. Hence there's always a group of users and product managers asking to rewrite the app to focus on "the basics".
There's all flavors of "lite" apps and Firefox started as a stripped down version of Netscape.
A lot of older email apps have a prominent "offline" mode that if you accidentally activate it, basically stops the app from sending or receiving any email. I guess a lot of executives demanded the feature because they were handling all their email while on a plane without connectivity.
Funny enough, COM is still the fastest way to read calendar data.
A self sorting shield against to much information if you are at the hub of some organization..
Beyond just email, the group scheduling and calendar experience is pretty much the best you're going to find. Google does pretty good, but it's still not nearly as good as the integrated corp experience with Outlook for scheduling... that said, I hate that I now get teams messages for meetings more than a business day in the future... I have outlook for that, I don't need it in teams... having a calendar and notifications in teams is fine, but limit notifications to things in the near future.
The Fastmail client is good when it's up and running, but not as good as well-implemented native apps. The initial startup is much slower, and the iOS / iPadOS app (which is the same webapp iirc) is pretty bug-ridden, with the webview freezing or app not progressing past the loading animation without a close swipe / reopen.
You can definitely make a webview app that starts as quickly as most native thing (sub-1s start). We used Tauri and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
That's a pretty simple view of native app vs web. Web will always have a lot of baggage that native apps simply won't have, layers and layers of abstractions that still needs to load.
It's true that a blank canvas loaded as a web view will start fast, though. But in practice, when web applications grow - performance tends to take a hit, and the developers also tend to be careless with resources.
Web developers are not magically worse at this than native devs. See: much of the windows OS lately. The performance of a web view app is more to do with the quality of the devs than the platform it's built on.
Generally though, web developers are of lower quality than native app devs. Often little or no consideration to the layers below, and their focus is more on security rather than speed.
Funnily, I'd say the reason web apps tend to be worse than native apps is because the web is so much more powerful and flexible.
For a native app, I'm often limited to just a small set of components and maybe images I can put on those components. Animations are out of the picture. Configuring colors is sometimes not available but always painful (every component needs it tweaked, there's no universal way to change it). I can't really change things like border margins, rounding, or adding crazy stuff like wobbles or splash effects on click. And really, the more I try to add those things, the worse experience it ultimately ends up being as the OS style and theming moves on. My best bet is keeping everything as close to native styling as possible because that has the best shot of still being usable in windows 20.
Because web apps allow configuration of everything, everything is configured. There are libraries and frameworks that do mass configuration. You can always add 1, 2, or 20 new layers and webdev has abstracted that away into a simple <MyButton /> component. And because of all these capabilities, you need a pretty beefy runtime to be assured you can do them all. Coupled with the fact that this is all also powered by a javascript engine.
Although technically speaking, native is much more flexible as you can literally do anything. But yes, most devs will just use standard UI components and that's it. So your point holds.
Well, to do literally anything outside of standard components, you effectively end up in a realm of programmatically drawing your own "anythings". Certainly possible because obviously browsers are examples of this. But a lot harder.
Yet I never had issues doing any design thrown at me using AppKit, UIKit or SwiftUI.
Only storyboards and XIBs were hard to style globally.
All of the flexibility, but a lot faster than web
The downside of the native app is the open abuse of surveillance. Why does Teams _need_ local network access to function on my ipad? Why does outlook want access to bluetooth from my phone?
Users don’t want to have to configure every app to fuck off, and native web apps (the world we _all_ live in) work way better than some hodgepodge of shit baked together by copilot that’s using unsafe calls and/or libraries.
The Teams conferencing solution probably needs it.
It’s pretty spiffy when it works - it detects whether you’re in the same room as the conferencing device and suggests pre-muting your audio.
The teams conferencing solution probably needs it. It’s pretty spiffy when it works - it detects whether you’re in the same room as the conferencing device and potentially suggests muting
Or just… mute the audio
> That's a pretty simple view of native app vs web. Web will always have a lot of baggage that native apps simply won't have, layers and layers of abstractions that still needs to load.
Well, as I say, you can definitely have webview apps that start fast and aren't taking ten seconds to do things. Not just blank canvasses.
Yes, I’ve made multiple Jumpstart iOS & Android apps that work with Jumpstart Rails and the speed is awesome.
My main gripe with the Fastmail client is that it doesn't work offline. This is of course absolutely possible to do with a webapp, and IMO ought to be a priority for an email client.
Offline support was added in August last year: https://www.fastmail.com/blog/fastmail-works-offline/
I literally switched on "Enable offline support", caching "All mail" offline on my iPhone a few months ago. Tons of free space, only using 4GB for offline.
But when my phone is actually offline (on a plane or elevator) it beachballs when trying to find something.
(I work for Fastmail). That sounds odd – have you contacted our support team so we can look into it? https://www.fastmail.com/support/
I didn't, but I'll do so now. I usually don't bother with support, because I forget that good companies like Fastmail actually have a competent support team.
Not OP, but I had to change the mail cache from all mail to recent, I think because it couldn't handle how much mail I had? It would often get stuck not syncing, and offline would be unreliable and showing a blank screen. Recent works fine, but it would be worthwhile folks testing more with all mail enabled, especially if they have larger inboxes.
The mobile client now supports viewing emails offline.
Even desktop app on Linux and a web app.
Got an example of a well-implemented natice app for email? I'm bugged by some bugs with the Fastmail app, but have generally had a better experience with it than any other client I've tried. Search in particular is far better on the Fastmail app.
I really like Mimestream, which is a native client for Gmail.
Very fast and supports all the usual native macOS keyboard navigation, e.g. shift or command to amend selection in a list.
It’s really tempting - uses their API for that speed.
I’m worried Google won’t like it someday. It’s such a hassle if they shut you off that I want to seem like the most normal user to them. Pay Mimestream, skip ads, avoid Gmail app telemetry… any incentive for Google to permit it longterm? (Like maybe you’d switch to Fastmail if they killed Mimestream… or maybe not!)
I've heard good things about it, for sure, but I'd argue that it isn't really an Email client. It is a Gmail client as it doesn't work with anything else. Fastmail is in the same bucket, but it is part of my contention about there not being good Email apps generally.
> Got an example of a well-implemented natice app for email?
Mail.app isn't total shit. It's not great. But it doesn't fumble the basics, like Outlook for Mac, which thinks it's fine to take like 10s to show me my inbox.
Why does it seem to take so long to get & read one new email?
I can use get new mail or synchronize in Mail.app, but always spoiled by the instantaneous Gmail app notification. Often don’t have patience to wait for Mail.app for 2FA codes (just OCR or manually type from the Gmail notification mirrored on Mac).
Also should back up a bulk of ancient emails clogging the app, might be partially my fault.
Mail.app's search is completely and utterly broken in my experience on Macs and on iPhones.
Oh yeah. For search I open the browser, usually. But 99% of the time it works without taking a European Commission session to load.
It looks like Apple is addressing this with the next release of macOS/iOS
iOS Mail app still undefeated 19 years later
It has its quirks. For example it can’t attach an image without inlining it. Or if the sender has several email addresses saved it can’t show which one sent you a particular email. And it can’t show you which of your email addresses received a given email.
it really feels like that not progressing past the loading animation all of a sudden has gotten worse. like yea, used to happen like once a week for me, but now it's probably once a day
Gmail used to offer a low bandwidth / performance webmail interface, that was essentially their original UI. Ran like greased lightning, used barely any memory. Emails loaded almost instantly.
It was nice while it lasted.
Isn't it still the case then? I used the basic HTML version when I was working at Google to try to understand whether or not it was slow because of the (unoptimal) frontend or not (it was the backend that sometimes took >=600ms to load messages unfortunately, not the frontend).
Google killed basic HTML in Gmail a few years ago
It's crystal clear Microsoft simply can't make good software at all anymore. Vendor lock and inertia are their biggest selling points.
When was the last time they did? Buying existing companies does not count
Active Directory and MS SQL Server are both solid products, as is .NET. The windows NT kernel is very well thought out, too. The last iteration of windows phone was quite good, if too little too late.
Don't get me wrong, MS will enshitify anything it can to make a quick buck. They're much like Disney in that regard.
SQL Server is a fork of Sybase. Not a MS invention.
Active Directory is probably based on someone's LDAP server, though I don't know for sure.
.NET is a copy of Java
NT kernel is good, thank Digital/Dave Cutler for that.
> SQL Server is a fork of Sybase. Not a MS invention.
It's long-since been rewritten. Pre-SQL Server 2000 it was garbage, but it's been improved significantly since then. I'd still use alternatives given the choice, but it's a solid DB.
>Active Directory is probably based on someone's LDAP server, though I don't know for sure.
So you don't know. It was written in house, using a bunch of standardized protocols (LDAP, X.500, kerberos), though with proprietary extensions (GPOs, etc).
> .NET is a copy of Java
That's a gross oversimplification. It's arguably a rip-off after MS tried to sabotage java, but it's their own implementation.
> NT kernel is good, thank Digital/Dave Cutler for that.
Yes, MS hired an experienced OS person for it. Probably one of the best things they ever did.
---
I'm not saying MS deserves kudos or the benefit of the doubt, but they can put out good software, and these are all mission-critical examples of what they have to (having AD go down would bring a whole corporation to a halt). The problem is that with almost everything else, MS has the incentive and capability to ruin. And ruin they do...
For early history about Active Directory, you can't get much better than straight from the horse's mouth ( manager of the Exchange / Active Directory group ).
see https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/021-expand...
and
https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/bonus-the-...
I will say that in the era when they came out with AD they really took "enterprise configuration management" seriously and made Windows by far the best mainstream ecosystem to manage hundreds or thousands of corporate desktops.
> .NET is a copy of Java
A copy which has had value types (Java's ongoing Project Valhalla) from the start, and reified generics for as long as it had generics. They're quite different once you take a deeper look.
NT, SQL, AD is good. It's the schizophrenic management in the last 20 years that has messed it up.
Microsoft shows how long you can coast on some good decisions.
Exactly that. Haven’t heard it said like that before. Same with my company.
Windows NT/2k?
Yeah, somehow we've lost lessons learned. Used to be, you knew it would take forever to display all of something, so you displayed what you could as you had time to render it. For instance a long report. As you render each page you would make that available to display instead of waiting for the entire 200 page report to render first. "Feeling" fast was often as good as "being" fast.
No we still do that in web dev. This one was just a classic example of design by committee. Classic microslop
The decision to use web technology and the decision to not give a shit about performance (or usability for that matter, unstyled text as buttons anyone?) are often made together, even though they are theoretically independent.
My company recently switched from Google Suite to Office 365.
Both are web apps.
It’s NIGHT AND DAY. Google did everything instantly. Outlook doesn’t.
This morning Outlook decided to spin for 30+ seconds (at which point I gave up) showing a folder. I get a modal pop-up telling me I have to “refresh” teams multiple times a day. Search always fails the first time. Always. Then it works. Some.
I agree. It’s not web tech. It’s MS not caring.
Just last week I vibed an .eml viewer that uses WebView2 and can confirm that it's very quick when not encrusted with garbage.
https://github.com/efsavage/WinEML
Also a daily Fastmail user and it's as fast as any local mail client I've ever used.
Sure seems like all this fancy Copilot coding help they have would've helped develop a better email client.
I think it really could. You can vibe-code efficient software, if you care.
Microsoft's problems are organizational. A developer can't actually do shit correctly when constantly being pushed to deliver more.
It is. Classic outlook didn't intermingle ads into your inbox. That feature alone makes new outlook much better.
Written on my windows phone 7 series 7
- Satya Nadella
Depending on if you have Microsoft365, you don't get ads either. It's not ads, it's fact that browsers are still not native performance to Win32 application. However, companies hate maintaining multiple applications (Win32/MacOS) and Sysadmin at companies hate maintaining Win32 Applications as well so everyone starts building WebView2.
I do get ads. I constantly get notified about copilot features and whether I've used them 'enough'.
This is done by my employer but the "adoption" team at Microsoft provide the tools to do this monitoring and advertising, and they even provide the emails they send me verbatim. I have some stuff to do with the organisation around that. God I hate those guys, they are trained to be literal shills, corporate puppies. Completely brainwashed.
The "new" Outlook is older than Copilot, so we can't blame the AI here. Don't take this as defense of the new Outlook - I hate it with the same passion.
I maintain a program using WebView2, it runs quite nicely.
It needs to render custom content, and the HTML renderer is much faster than I'm able to make it myself using the native API.
It would be hilarious if it, like Teams, was backed by Sharepoint. It would also explain a lot about how terrible it is.
The problem with web apps isn't that they're slow but that they enable the Room 641As of the world to spy on you, just by virtue of making network connections. Encryption doesn't even matter. Just behavior patterns are enough.
Wondering to what extent the new code has been AI-assisted.
I think that the usage of WebView2 is a moot point. It effectively is an Edge browser just the same as Edge itself. There may be other underlying issues, but I'd be shocked if WebView2 was to blame.
Not to mention they puts ads in your email client regardless of whether you use office or not
WebView2 can be a fantastic experience when the application is designed around it with intent. It can't be a technological afterthought. Taking an application that was designed for web and throwing it in a desktop shell is how you wind up with bad experiences. A hybrid of WebView2 and native elements seems to be the best approach. You can completely hide the browser startup delay with these techniques. The Discord engineers decided to just throw a splash screen in front and call it a day. You could do that too. It seems to fly.
Until you look at memory consumption in Task Manager or Process Explorer. WebView2 spawns ~400Mb worth of various browser processes. Your main app process by itself might look nice and slim, but all that (somewhat hidden) cost is atrocious.
Microsoft Schedule+ was Microsoft's workgroup calendaring app before the Office division merged email and calendar into one app.
Outlook was late so Schedule+ was included in Office 95 for the Win95 release and so Schedule+ got a wider retail consumer release than if it had been just included with the Microsoft Exchange Server 4.0 release.
from https://www.reddit.com/r/software/comments/v73bk7/microsoft_...
7MB RAM is a lot when Win95 was designed for a 80386 with 4MB RAM. But a modern day x86 (okay, x64) with 8GB, that's about 0.1% of total RAM.I have 16 GB of RAM on my laptop, and I'm told that's relatively little nowadays. Even after the OS's 2 GB cut, I can run 35 applications that use 400 MB each. I don't even have 35 applications that I care about. (and I'm certainly not going to want to run more than, say, three email clients)
RAM usage at that scale might not be desirable, but any engineer knows that it's the result of a tradeoff where the other options take longer to develop. I would rather have an application that uses 400 MB now than a slimmer one in several years, or one that uses less memory but is extremely slow in some corporate environments (like older Outlook).
(please don't respond to quibble about the napkin math)
No quibble, but you'll have to pry classic Outlook from my cold, dead hands... :)
Functionality and design are massively better than the new webapp - I just wish it responded with less than a 10s latency on my work machine...
Which doesn't make a whole lot of sense because you can run all the Chrome components in-process, and in this case WebView2 is rendering trusted code written by Microsoft that isn't going to try and exploit the renderer (HTML email is very limited, doesn't support JS at all).
Processes in Windows are very expensive objects. They could probably reduce the overhead by allowing more customization of the Chrome codebase for this. Mojo abstractions service location.
And to think that the "old" Outlook's splash screen is there for a reason: it used to take a while to open before SSDs became commonplace! Windows in general used to be usable on HDDs; SSDs would blow everyone's pants off making everything open instantly. These days we have 20+ Gbps SSDs without the AHCI latency tax and they're no longer enough to open an e-mail.
THAT'S how low the ball has been dropped.
It's not just Windows. It's everything Microsoft.
What steams my clams is that I can press Reply in Outlook and be halfway through the first sentence of my message before the reply window even opens. (M4 Pro)
Almost every time I use Outlook, I have to rewrite my first sentence because half of it was typed before Outlook was finished doing whatever it does in the background. This doesn't happen with other mail clients on the same machine.
It's not 1982 with 8 character keyboard buffers. I shouldn't be able to type faster than a computer can handle the input.
You're right, but it's not just Microsoft.
I've been doing software engineering for 20+ years. I've been at a lot of different companies and at almost every single one I'm always kind of flabbergasted at how shabby the engineering is. I think maybe ONCE in my career did I work somewhere that I was proud of the engineering we were doing and it was a 18 month consulting gig at a startup with 3 engineers.
This isn't hubris, I am part of the problem. Too few engineers working with overly vague requirements with not enough time always results in the same thing. We are all churning out products we should be embarrassed about.
Microsoft might be the largest, most flagrant example, but code base entropy is a rampant force of nature. It is everywhere. Google Home gets steadily worse every week. How? They have like 100,000 engineers. Can they not spare a dozen of them to keep that product from being abject shit?
Is there a solution? I don't know, but maybe LLMs replacing 80% of us is exactly what we deserve.
> I don't know, but maybe LLMs replacing 80% of us is exactly what we deserve.
Been there, done that, but I wouldn't put the blame on engineers. You said there it yourself:
> Too few engineers working with overly vague requirements with not enough time always results in the same thing. We are all churning out products we should be embarrassed about. [...] They have like 100,000 engineers. Can they not spare a dozen of them to keep that product from being abject shit?
You know the big O thing. If your algorithm is inefficient, it will ultimately slow down to a crawl at one point, no matter how many cores you throw at it. Now replace 'algorithm' and 'cores' with 'corporate processes' and 'employees' and you get a picture of what is exactly happening at large bureaucracies. Even worse so now that they can no longer afford to infinitely expand and have to cut costs (through LLMs and offshoring) while maintaining an illusion of growth for stakeholders.
The funny thing is that, despite all of this, the core problem (IMO) of managers playing political games and reaching for short-sighted quick fixes like "new agile methodologies" [0] instead of doing their jobs well remains unaddressed. Meta has been recently letting go of middle managers in a (frantic?) attempt to tame the explosion of bureaucracy and the associated loss of efficiency, but the rest of the industry just appears to be repeating "AI" like a mantra. Even though coding itself has already been the most "over-optimized" part of the whole software development process and optimizing (the costs of) it further only results in further "Outlookization" of software.
[0] https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/project-managemen...
The solution is competition in software. But it's a really, really dysfunctional market. Outlook persists because it can speak to Exchange. Too many bad software products persist because they're part of a lock-in with something that's difficult or expensive to swap out. Ultimately, Windows itself.
The problem is more to do with people don't want to pay for software anymore. How would a new email entrant make money when no one will pay for it?
The same question can be asked in this case: if there's no money in it, why did Microsoft pay for the creation of a new Outlook that's apparently worse than the old Outlook?
I think it might be less about making money and more about burning less. From what I understand, the new Outlook is a wrapper around the code that already powers Outlook.com. Since they're already maintaining Outlook.com, they might as well integrate the functionality of the Office Outlook into it and only maintain one of the two moving forward.
Actually the answer is quite simple, their servers are the ones retrieving emails so they have access to the email contents (perhaps for training data?)
That isn't really an answer at all, as you can do what you like with data on your servers without making a new client.
Even client side, that doesn't explain (as per article) a complete do-over as a web app wrapped in a browser.
Prior to this new version, Outlook did not pull emails through Microsoft servers but pulled them directly from the mail server configured. Now, when you retrieve email from Outlook New, Microsoft servers are "proxying" the emails through their systems.
I get a weird feeling when I watch vga/dos programs like Quattro Pro 5. These were large programs quite well done, on very very limited machines. Today apps may not even provide that much (but they are fully networked, maybe more extensible).
Since Classic Outlook was developed in the glory days of OLE2.0, it's got OLE Automation baked in. VB and JScript code can access emails and appointments and perform relevant operations on those objects.
Yep, let the AI write efficient code in a compiled language. Switch everything to C++/Dlang/Rust. You are not writing the code anyway, so all arguments against those languages are moot now. Replace Node.js, Electron, and even Java/C#.
In web Outlook I *very" often begin typing as some element is loading a popover and end up hitting some key that archives the message and leaves me scrambling to click Undo. I guess it's usually some contact comes into focus of my mouse and starts trying to load the org chart or whatever. Ughhhhhh.
I remember the late nineties and early naughties, when I used to type faster than Windows could cope with, and it still never lost a keystroke.
I hear the CPU fan spins up when you hit the Start menu now.
It needs to load in all those recommendations for you to ignore.
Not everything. VS code is still good. Odd, but true. Runs like a dream. I do use an old version though from a couple years ago, never bothered to update.
If I were a trillionaire I'd buy Apple and Microsoft and force all their engineers to use spinning rust on everything.
No SSDs would be allowed anywhere except in the "does going fast break it" test room.
Anyone above VP would be required to have 5400 RPM rust.
Imagine that. There would be a company wide "max one reboot per year", planned well ahead (during vacation periods) since it would mean people can't work for days on end. Haha.
Easier and faster software development frameworks have made it cheaper to ship garbage software. Nobody really knows how to measure software quality, but agile development makes it very easy to measure software quantity, so that is what companies prioritize.
It's why AI-driven development isn't actually yielding better products even though it makes developers more efficient. It's just being used to pump out garbage faster.
Why this enshittification…
I also see this bad design pattern - tried to clone an outlook calendar event, a meeting with a teams link it that I need repeatedly at sporadic new times (thus can not set it up as repeating).
Outlook native is unable to do that - I am then forced to use Teams to clone the event, likely because Teams need a new meeting id - but why the f••• is Outlook native not able to do that (oh - it’s a webthing).
Too bad they are making changes for the sake of changes (and $$$) in stead of user needs …
Schedule+ had the concept of exceptions to a recurring appointment (RA) - meetings that didn't follow the recurring pattern (e.g. every week on thursday at 4pm).
This was exposed through the UI by letting the user adjust the date & time for the RA instance (e.g. move this week's thursday 4pm meeting to 2pm) via drag-drop or editing the RM instance and change the time in the appt dialog.
So I assume with Outlook you could schedule a recurring appt for the common case - weekly appt on wednesday at 1PM. Adjust as your needs require - no meeting needed? Delete this week's instance. Need to move the meeting earlier or later? Go and reschedule this week's instance.
Obviously wouldn't work if you needed two meetings in a week.
The recurring events calendar spec is crazy powerful, but also crazy bc its just a flat text file. For a bit i was attempting to stream-parse a huge calendar on my esp32 lcd display board and went down the rabbit hole.
The spec, i assume you mean iCalendar, came later.
Personally that's why I think 'async' in most languages is a farce - it could've never occured to 90s programmers, as back then applications frequently swapped out parts of their program code and state onto the disk - and there's no 'async' to save you from that.
Nowadays disks are fast, but a lot of apps are heavy - your Electron-based webapp is hundreds of megs of binary - there's no saving you from having to load that the same way. In fact most likely your app will have less assets to load than the sum of binaries.
Started a new job, with Windows 11. notepad.exe now takes 3 to 4 seconds to load on my work system... (even after closing the last tab and reopening the program).
Hah, it even has in-app purchases, for AI writing...
As slow as Windows is (very), once you start adding the corporate security tools on top of it (Crowdstrike) and have to deal with a slow and buggy corporate DNS system, it just becomes unusable.
The only way I can do anything timely now is through WSL.
Yeah, I'm worried about the day when infosec turns it's eye toward WSL. So far they have turned a blind eye, but just wait until someone cooks up an exploit targeting WSL...
In my experience they just block it in corporate environments.
They don't explicitly block it in my org, but connecting to VPN while it's running breaks the networking inside WSL.
Sometimes it is routed from the VPN, sometimes it is DNS, sometimes it just needs a restart. I'm not sure if that situation has improved. There were some workarounds at one point.
It's "just" a Hyper-V VM with some extra drivers to talk to the sibling VM. There isn't much special about it that should worry you too much.
Well, I'd like to tell security that
> The only way I can do anything timely now is through WSL.
There's your mistake, if do it faster, you're going to get more work assigned. If you do it as Windows speed you get to do less work. Same money.
I’ve been experimenting with windows 11 IoT enterprise this week. You can disable and uninstall a fair amount of cruft
True, those things make Windows unusable. They also make the Mac worse, but not so much worse that it isn’t an absolute breath of fresh air compared to any corporate provided Windows device.
Yeh. The unix VNC session I connect to is snappier than the client host it is running on.
[dead]
That's nothing. He have Surface Pro laptops, and of course it has Copilot built in. I tried to open an app by typing in a search. On versions without Copilot turned on, instantly finds the app. On a Surface Pro, takes a good 20-30 seconds for it even start the search.
Complete rubbish. Not a single person in the organisation likes the new Outlook.
The amount of applications on the average consumer's laptop is such a tiny space to search over that there really is no excuse for this being anything other than instant.
iOS and macOS suffer this too, it's like I open search and the operating system awakes from a hangover and makes sure it's wearing pants first
Tip: Spotlight searches through all data and can be slow, but there's a separate App Library search that only searches the app names and it's instant.
One of the first things I do on any Mac device is to disable Spotlight, install and bind Alfred to Cmd-Space, and then change Finder's preferences so that Cmd-F searches the current directory.
iOS and macOS aren't even close to the awfulness of search on Windows.
Although they have just rewritten it so there must have been some problems with it.
Load Everything and it'll instantly show you every file on your computer. Finding a file is instantaneous.
There's no reason finding an installed app should be anything slower than that
Microslop at its best.
I’m struggling to understand what their end goal is. How much can you half ass everything until your entire company becomes just a nuisance.
I have had the same thought for years. I guess their monopoly makes them able not to care about quality (and does not depend on it).
A big decision maker, before signing a big contract, will look at the budget and won't care about how good is the UX.
At some point I assume somebody had to explain why the start menu is 40-50 times slower than previous releases. Or they simply vibe-code something and ship it not caring what they created.
Big assumption there that they even have an end goal.
Given that making Windows' market share is more or less impossible to make any bigger at this point (every human on earth has used Windows in some capacity by this point; there are no new markets to expand to, the only option left is to not bleed old users, but that requires significant effort and a good strategy), they've opted to not really bother with Windows and shifted focus completely, leaving Windows out to dry, resulting in this and gestures vaguely at Windows 11 and everything else Windows.
Remember that all of microsoft's divisions are competing against each other and they all have to turn a profit. So windows has to include AI, xbox, both onedrive and sharepoint, teams, etc. and so you end up with the worst of all worlds
At thsi point i think the current goal is the annoy the tiny ants in the consumer market who complain and are a nuisance , but don’t make them much money compared is the big boys in the enterprise world.
It's sad. Further compounding the problem like siblings have said is enterprise security stack stuff - EDRs/XDRs, app control, firewalls, productivity police nonsense.
The second thing is that enterprises typically don't have someone fighting for the desktop UX to remain usable when PC fleets go up for purchase - pick the cheapest toilet paper is often the strategy of the day. Now you have a PC that hits a bargain price point that seemed attractive on some analysis to the CFO, it's been saddled with security software that saps 50% of the limited performance to begin with.
Lot's of enterprises are enabling whitelisting of apps launching using some sort of tooling - I think Microsoft provides one, and CrowdStrike etc. It's likely the delay involves a call to a backend application or even sometimes a web server. This would be on top of real-time scanning of every file before it's opened.
True ... my company recently started deploying endpoint protection like crowdstrike, beyondtrust, zscalet onto our macs and these have slowed my machine considerably. They somehow spike the CPU just when I am doing something important.
I cannot believe how ridiculously heavy this stuff is. On my corporate laptop with a modern i7 and 32GB RAM (running Windows plus Crowdstrike, Zscaler, and probably some other junk), it feels like I’m on a netbook. It’s awful.
Those are basically spyware hooked to every system call.
Microsoft has AppLocker (since Win7, I think). If you give it a curated whitelist it's actually quite alright and manages well via GPO. (until you manage to lock yourself out ;) Much less overhead than any 3rd party tool that hooks the kernel.
Yes, it's usually a filter driver that delays execution until something like a hash is checked or other rules evaluate. Some products hash every interesting/executable file on the PC. They're powerful tools but can be extremely performance-sapping.
I've read some people replace notepad with Notepad2e [1]. I personally use vim as my text editor.
[1] https://github.com/ProgerXP/Notepad2e
I can't even start notepad.exe since upgrading to 11. It complains about a missing DLL. I'm only down to a few pieces of daily-driver software that I absolutely need a non-VM Windows installation for. Once I migrate from those, it'll be a full switch to Linux for me. I've hated Microsoft with a passion for far too long
To everyone reading this, Win 11 Notepad CAN BE UNINSTALLED.
Old one lives in c:/windows/notepad.exe which you can open with Win+R, type notepad to open good old non-slop non-ai notpead. Or do some registry shenanigans (you can find them online) to bring that one in start menu or make it a default editor.
The calculator takes 17 seconds to launch and be usable on the Windows computer I'm forced to use at work.
17 seconds. I timed it.
The old Win32 applications still launch instantly on the same computer.
> Hah, it even has in-app purchases, for AI writing...
That's disgusting, even by Microslop standards.
Sounds like something is wrong with your system.
My work machine runs Windows 11 and it's fully up to date. Notepad starts pretty much instantly.
At my last job I was responsible for 70 windows 11 machines. At my current job it’s 20. These are i7/i9 spec with 64+GB memory and NVMe drives. No endpoint management software, just Intune for device registration.
They all have _very significant _ performance issues out of the box, with very long app startups, and very confusing slowdowns. I am 99% sure it’s windows defender doing an absolute crap ton of work on every single file open, and ignoring file and folder exclusions.
I know IT people often aren't given the time to dig into this stuff, but xperf and event tracing should reveal the culprit fairly quickly.
The best resource for this kind of stuff is Bruce Dawson's blog:
https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2015/09/24/etw-central/
I'm not IT, I'm' just the senior most engineer in a game studio. Ive got WPA captures that point to windows defender, even with processes and folders excluded. But I have literally no idea what to do with those traces, hence my 99% conviction.
If it is mostly your own tooling you may want to look at setting up a dev drive. It is supposed to be more optimized around workloads that would normally spin stuff like defender off the rails.
I need to write the blog post. I keep being told this, and it’s not the solution.
After a reboot, on an NVMe dev drive with no disk encryption, first launch of our internal application (unreal editor) takes 9 minutes on my workstation. If I disable windows defender before launching it, it takes 30 seconds. If I add all the processes as exclusions, and add the workspace folder as an exclusion to defender… 9 minutes.
edit:
I didn't mean to direct this at you. I mean that it's somehow gained traction as being the solution to slow filesystem access, but the reality is it's just broken.
I'd much rather know that something I think should work won't and where it happens. Bad advice can't become good advice in a vacuum.
I ran a quick test this morning - it took 7 minutes to load the app after a reboot, 90 seconds to load the second time, and 50 seconds after a reboot with windows defender disabled. All on an NVMe drive with basically nothing else running (no browsers or anything). The WPA capture showed msmpeng. That’s with the folder, and UnrealEditor.exe excluded from defender.
If it's that bad, why not just disable it?
Enterprise versions are tamper-protected.
I am the enterprise here. We enforce it on because the alternative is worse.
Can you not dual boot into something else and delete the executable?
Disk encryption is also mandated in most enterprises.
I do not mean to patronize, it's just the enterprise-y stuff has tried locking down the PCs for exactly this reason - deleting the security tools when they're not loaded would be of course very effective.
On top of that, showing such motivation can expose people to violating the 782 commandments of whatever corporate IT policy someone had to sign to get a paycheck.
Rare is the security vs usability compromise in these companies that accounts for the need for high performance desktops, sadly.
I replied above but basically we still need something; some people are just incapable of not making a total mess and they will literally go to Trojan.com and install dangerous.msi, ignore all the optional dismissible pop ups that say this is bad, and then still drop me a DM that the cracked plugin they got for maya to try out before asking to spend $8 isn’t working…
If there’s a middle ground I’d love to hear it!
Couldn't you disable on a per-user basis? Everyone shouldn't be punished just because a few people can't be careful with their stuff.
The person mentioned is a special case but the reality is that most people do need _something_. What happens if one trusted person makes a mistake and submits an exe to perforce? Now absolutely everyone is hosed.
Why would everyone be hosed just because a binary got committed to version control? Either way, surely you can set up some policies or monitoring for that sort of thing.
I don't know, I've been developing on Windows for decades without an antivirus and I've never had these issues. Are your people downloading and installing random software all the time? In my experience, once I'm set up with my usual tools I rarely need to install anything else.
>Are your people downloading and installing random software all the time?
Yeah, just looking at the app control logs, they evidently wanted a weird notepad app, someone else tried a bespoke browser, random browser extensions, some audio tool instead of using the licensed Adobe products, whatever. That's before we get into the people who try to install games or cursors or custom wallpaper and amusement widgets. There always seems to be someone who uses the work tools for porn and clicks on things. These things show up in 5-person and 5000-person offices alike.
Good judgment gets individuals pretty far but it's not workable with a critical mass of people. Many orgs are under attack from convincing and intentional spearphishing, and the common denominator in how most attacks start is people. Not all attacks, but lots.
On top of that, I think we'd fall behind on some of these attacks without stuff like 3rd party 24/7 SOCs - the last few incidents I read, cookies were re-used in seconds after being phished, and command and control sessions were detected almost immediately in a different attack.
I find all of this exhausting stuff as the norm when I talk to people across the industry, and yet I don't bother at all at home - I'm living both realities.
> Why would everyone be hosed just because a binary got committed to version control?
We’re hosed if someone submits malware to source control and other people run it?
> Either way, surely you can set up some policies or monitoring for that sort of thing.
Like a tool that comes with windows that checks that nobody has done that, called windows defender? The tool I have a problem with?
> I've been developing on Windows for decades without an antivirus and I've never had these issues
This is a 100 person company with maybe 30 programmers, 30 artists and 30 designers. I don’t know which of those people are “capable” - and the people who say they are are the people I probably trust least. In a perfect world we’d tell everyone to be careful, and not click on random phishing links, and they’d listen. But they don’t, and we have to take some basic precautions. Using the OS provided, historically good, tools is a good starting point.
> Are your people downloading and installing random software all the time?
Dunno, we don’t monitor what people do. We just get an email if defender quarantines something. But we’re dealing with people working from home, and being given gaming spec machines. I would put money in the fact that people are using these for personal use.
>Like a tool that comes with windows that checks that nobody has done that, called windows defender? The tool I have a problem with?
No, like a tool that's running on a machine of its own, monitoring what gets pushed to version control, or a policy on the version control server that rejects attempts to push files of the wrong type.
Set up server-side commit hooks in git to run your checks. Don't allow binaries to be run from user-writable locations.
In an ideal world sure. But we have versioned closed source third party tools that need to be shared with the team. The industry standard in games is to dump that stuff in perforce. I’ve only got so many battles in me.
"It's what everyone does" is not per se a good reason to do something. A version control system is not for file sharing, it's to collaborate and track changes over time.
Eugh. Well, whatever. Not like it makes any difference to the employee. They get paid whether they're waiting for the computer to finish spinning or doing useful work.
We’re spending $4-8000 on these machines to try and offset these problems.
The problem is that there’s 100 of these “little” issues - and I have a full time job that _isnt_ doing IT support. If someone can help me find an IT support contractor that I can hire that will fix it I’d love to chat to them, but it goes in the pile alongside “why on earth does teams take longer to boot than my entire machine” and “why are we using zoom (because the person who makes the decision there prefers zoom to teams”)
Because the alternative is worse - no protection. Because we have everything in Intune we get the per device scan reports (I lied - we do enforce _some_ stuff as a group policy. We disable turning off certain features and we manage the windows update cadence) and thrrr have been multiple people who still need it… it’s generally non tech people who just download the absolute worst crap imaginable and ignore all the bypassable warnings too.
Windows defender has the uncanny ability of spiking up its resource usage at just the wrong time. Add in MS teams into the mix and the system just starts screaming.
I know nothing about how defender works internally but it seems to do a synchronous scan on every single file access and an extra long one on a DLL or exe. It seems to cache them but throws the entire cache away on restart. The behaviour is worse on C than another partition even if the partition is on the same drive. Anything that accessed a hunch of files on startup will bring your computer to its knees on first launch.
The best demonstration of the delay is typing Calc in the Win+R Run dialog. There's a difference between instant and "way faster than Word".
On Windows 7, you could hit enter and immediately start typing numbers and it would work. I have never worked on a Windows 10 or 11 machine where it launches instantly.
I get a similar lag when launching Notepad. Not a huge disruption to the day, but annoying to see on a simple utility that used to be better.
That one is a little slower for me too - about 700 ms (it's a difficult thing to time with a stopwatch).
The iOS app "Is it snappy?" Is great for things like this.
That's really cool and what a great idea. Thanks for the recommendation.
in windows 11 i launch calc from win+r and it opens right when i hit enter. the delay is not from the launch dialog/OS but from the app (i use windows 7 calculator, i've replaced it because i don't like win 10+ calc design)
Just give her a little of the ole "works on my machine."
No it is a bug Windows in Windows 11 with the new Notepad. Maybe someday they will fix it.
So you have to tinker with Microslop systems in order to make them usable?
If users have to debug performance problems, they'd be better off just installing Linux instead.
Genuinely curious how quality is so poor at MS. Tech debt and deadlines and red tape?
This is the company that invented the term dogfooding and forced everyone to use Exchange until all the bugs were worked out.
I’m building a next gen web mail app at work and there are a ton of UX edge cases but the performance of the core UI is not rocket science.
I’m looking for help play testing to squash bugs, improve the last mile of performance, and to add Outlook support.
https://housecat.com/
The incentive is the mail app is “malleable” so you can craft custom workflows and UI widgets to help you get to inbox zero.
I work in what used to be Exchange. (my opinions are my own).
There is no one reason for the quality issues. It's a thousand small decisions and problems that have compound against each other over decades, coupled with the sheer feature complexity+scope+impact and multiplied by the titanic scale and volume the platform handles.
Additionally, the engineering culture really prioritizes backwards compatibility for customers (for good reasons) which bleeds into all aspects of the platform/decisions in both good and bad ways - and means that the big and obvious step-change platform improvements that could be made internally to make things better are not really invested in, or are deemed to expensive.
It's still a great place to work, and I'm proud that my work is in some small way directly contributing to and helping billions of people's work lives but there's still a long road ahead to improving the customer experience of using the platform for both internal and external customers.
Hard to blame (new) Outlook issues on backward compatibility... seems like it's a ground-up electron app that supports basically nothing from the classic version.
I clicked, saw this "The email app with its own AI agent" and closed. Another "Let's shove AI into something".
Outlook already provides me this, it's terrible at it since context is key and context is probably buried in several places it has access to and despite that access, it still falls flat.
Fair feedback and sentiment.
As I build this out there's actually less and less AI in the product and more good old-fashioned UX, writing and data entry tools, and automations.
Some examples...
We're simply bringing a CRM CRUD form into an email thread, populated from email sender / domain, for the end user to review and submit.
You can add your own notes into a thread, and copy / paste from
Similarly good pre-defined templates with variables perform way better than AI generated drafts.
Context is indeed key. The person at their email inbox has most of the context in their head, they need good tools to organize that context down for their future self and their team. AI can help but its really about just building a great tool for the operator.
I second this feedback. The demo video was also clicking on emails and having Claude research and answer them automatically? Is this really the inhumane kind of communication we want to be pushing and normalizing? The UI looks nice, and I would love a better e-mail client, but the egregious pushing of AI convinces me not to try it.
If the developer is suggesting answering emails with agents without reading it, how do I know this project is shoved full of unchecked vibe-coding? Don't want to be so harsh, but I wanted to second this feedback since you seem serious about hearing it. All the best with the project, aside from the immediate AI turnoff it looks great.
I hate this type of disguised ad paired with a running commentary on important issues.
It’s funny because your demo is full of spinners.
At some point they gave up on quality control. Not sure why but things went downhill at Microsoft years ago already. With the rise of AI slop and Microsoft turning into microslop, this trend just became amplified.
Yes. That point in time was long before AI. Remember Longhorn/Vista? Windows ME? Etc, etc…
They fired all of their SDET, eliminated the SDET role/discipline, and made SDEs responsible for quality and shipping their features, a major conflict of interest.
This happened ~2014/2015.
https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-microsoft-doe...
Microsoft has always been careless about performance. Two anecdotes:
A friend of mine used to work for Microsoft (long ago). One day I was complaining to him about some package that Microsoft had put out. "It's so slow!" I said. He replied, nonchalantly: "buy Intel stock. People will have to upgrade their PCs!"
Second one is from about 15 years ago. At one of the local meetups, I was chatting with a long-lost friend who worked for Yahoo. He was describing their recently-concluded Search deal with Microsoft, and how it worked in practice. This was an issue he had raised with Microsoft engineers and gotten no traction on their side. (This is all from memory). Basically, he described how a search request from an European user was handled by Yahoo Search. So, say someone goes to "search.yahoo.de" and enters a search term and it triggers a request at some Yahoo server in an EU datacenter. According to the deal, that would be forwarded to a Microsoft server, based in Virginia. Now, since the request was from EU, the Microsoft server would turn around and make a request to a MS server based in EU. Which would then respond with the search results to the MS server in VA. Which would then send the response back to the Yahoo server in EU. So, basically, 4 cross-Atlantic hops for one search request. He claimed latency figures of around 1500ms, when their internal goal was to keep latency below 300ms (after which it becomes noticeable and hurts metrics?). But when he brought up this massive latency spike to his counterparts in MS, they just shrugged it off.
They routed the search to Virginia for surveillance, I hope that is clear to you.
Calculator taking measurable seconds to load was the last straw for me for Windows 10. Exclusively Linux at home for a couple of years now, and there's a relatively steady stream of headlines to remind me of how good a decision it was to switch away.
Luckily, one can still revert to the classic calculator: https://win7games.com/#calc
I use Windows exclusively for games, but I don't like playing the game of disabling upsells, dodging unkillable Edge, and restoring secret pre-AI versions of Windows components.
Anecdotal, but I've never had issues with any game outside of competitive shooters that require kernel-level anticheats. If you're not playing those, it could be worth a try.
I don’t like it either, but as an easy solution it’s still the lesser evil for me. At least they do allow running 20-year old binaries.
Lots of games run just fine on Wine. Those that don't, usually work on Steam/Proton.
Yeah, I've been exclusively on Linux at home since 2019. I have to do work on Windows though and it's a daily reminder that Windows is a piece of shit and gets worse with every update. WSL is the only thing that makes it bearable. It's like releasing a long relaxing breath when I can finally get on my home computer.
I switched in 2023 or so, I have not seen one headline per your example or anecdote or comment or tea leaves that have made me question moving away from windows.
Not one, not once. Even my worst day on Linux where something does work for seemingly no reason, still better than Windows.
Thankfully, that has improved, but there's still a weird bug where multiple instances of the calculator will spawn for no reason at all.
The calculator in Windows 11 still takes several seconds to load for me.
It seems that some Windows computers are generally laggy with no good reason. I could recommend installing Old Calculator.
https://winaero.com/get-calculator-from-windows-8-and-window...
It was a little difficult setting it up so that the calculator key on the keyboard pulls it up but aside from that it works well.
Probably a cache thing. Win11 precaches a lot of stuff if you hover over it or have excess RAM. It's not as smart as SuperFetch and ReadyBoost (with an HDD) was but it's still doing similar things.
How big is the calculator app on Windows 11 that you need to cache it in RAM? On macOS, the calculator app is 6 MB. And that's containing both x64 and ARM code. How long does it take a modern SSD (6 GB/s?) to read that?
If it's the same as on Win10 it's a UWP App that needs a ton of dependencies like .net, WinUI2/XAML.
The appx is: Approximate size 21.8 MB according to https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9wzdncrfhvn5
Win7 calc.exe had 758KB for i686 and 897KB for amd64.
Reminds me of the early days of MacOS X when the Calculator app was written in Java as a demo of how fantastic and native their Java integration with Cocoa bindings was. This of course made it horribly slow to launch since initializing the JVM back then was a massive chore.
You shouldn't need to cache a calculator app to make it load quickly - it opened instantly on a machine running Windows 3.0 with 2MB RAM.
Instant for me but I have a beefy CPU Ryzen 9800X3D and some crazy nvme.
And most important: no corporate spyware disguised as anti-virus, in this machine.
Isn't it way easier to just find a better calculator app (same for most other straws)?
But isn’t the point that Microsoft aggregate thinks it is acceptable to ship such a poorly performing product?
That's a different point? This one is about what you do about it
I had already done lots of things to make Windows less in the way of what I wanted to do. It was this Calculator app thing, plus the constant reconfiguring of settings (at install time and sometimes after updates) to turn off a whole swathe of Windows services that serve Microsoft, not the user.
Calculator was the final straw.
I actually use the old calculator on my work computer, and it's still not as fast to load as it was 20 years ago (but my work computer is also chock full of 'security' software, so runs like a pig).
The calculator app, whilst the straw that broke the candle back, wasn't the point for me, it was the pattern.
Which has continued apace.
They have enough employees to build native apps that run super quick but are still seduced by the web portability argument which, as we all know, is mostly untrue even now and which introduces all kinds of non-deterministic latencies/errors, which cannot all be handled neatly.
To be honest, this is the same in almost all apps that have any more than 10 developers working on them (my estimate!). Death by dependencies and a lack of coherent design.
As someone else said, though, some things like fastmail work OK in the browser so it is possible.
Native software is incredibly difficult to build well.
There are at least 4 platforms they would need to support: Win, Mac, iPhone, and Android.
That's 4 different software engineers at least, just for the frontend.
Then, there's various backend engineers, who could be shared, yes, but not always. Android's weird runtime requirements are bespoke enough that just because the database is written in C++, doesn't mean it's the same C++ database as what the Windows backend would use.
Finally, there's the designers, who end up consolidating all the unique things about each native platform into a common design language so they can have a shared vision on all of the platforms. So engineers end up building UI that works identically on all 4 platforms, and you're basically building a bespoke "browser" at that point.
> Native software is incredibly difficult to build well.
Sure. But if Zetetic, the SQLCipher[0] guys, can maintain native independent releases of Codebook [1] on all platforms there’s no excuse.
Big tech serves the shareholders. Building native applications across platforms is hard, but not “put man on the moon” hard.
—-
[0] https://www.zetetic.net/sqlcipher/
[1] https://www.zetetic.net/codebook/
The platform is not the issue. Competent engineering teams could blow this out of the water with a single threaded jquery web app.
I have to agree here but I would like to add: every single web app I have ever had to build or was part of building was heavily biased and towards adding more features and exorbitant amounts of tracking that me or the other engineers had to practically beg the product owners to do do perf optimisations or reduce technical debt that accumulates after a couple of years, even with lots of low hanging fruits to pick from.
Idk, Gmail got really slow too. Also how do they not have infinite scroll in 2026?
Why a team... give me a few days ;-)
> They have enough employees to build native apps
They'd screw those up as well.
But they didn't, Office was native for Mac and Windows and was done pretty well
The latest version of "Legacy Outlook" on Mac has a huge bug now: "Replying to or forwarding an email does not include the original message in the email body in legacy Outlook for Mac" [1]
So now i am forced to use this New Outlook crapware at last. And it is crap. Its slow as a dog, every action takes 1s. Why do they rearrange all the buttons, change all the fonts... why don't they just copy the old interface 1:1 ? Who knows...
If I have to use this new version for longer than 2 weeks I am switching to some other client.
And also, who knows, maybe they are purposefully inserting these show-stopping bugs to get people to switch.
[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/replying-to-or-for...
I second the sentiment, it’s unbelievably annoying. Even more so when the suggested solution from the “support” appears to be “You can downgrade to a version before we introduced this bug”. I’m not even gonna try switching to that new crapware, I’m just going to change client altogether.
Thanks for the tip, instead of enduring any longer, i decided to downgrade, which was easier than I expected, and this old version works, doesn't have this bug.
Just delete the Outlook app from the Applications folder, and run the Outlook installer from version 16.109.3 (June 02, 2026) [1]. All data is there, no need for any backups or anything.
Then, delete (or rename) the Microsoft AutoUpdate App, which lives in: /Library/Application Support/Microsoft/MAU2.0
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/officeupdates/update-histo...
As Casey Muratori likes to say, “My superpower is that I’m old, so I remember when computers used to be fast.”
I wish we had more Casey Muratoris and less Sam Altmans.
I remember them being dog slow. People used to joke about loading bars going backwards. But Windows did peak with 7.
Man, I've really been falling into his stuff. So refreshing to hear someone speak from a perspective of care. It's good for my soul in this world of slop.
I highly recommend consuming Casey Muratori content, particularly if it’s blue shirt Casey standing in a black void with yellow handwriting. Those are his high-production serious lectures, and they’re worth every minute. (It took me a while to find his YouTube channel because it’s called “MollyRocket”.)
Wait, which Outlook is this? Is it "new Outlook" or "Outlook (new)"?
Copy (5) of Outlook (2).final.revised.4.exe
.vbs
It's the one that nags you to upload all your IMAP passwords and email to Microsoft's cloud.
Or Outlook.com, their free webmail alternative to Gmail?
Apparently, not the one that comes inside Copilot :)
Wait, which Copilot is this? :-P
It's Copilot all the way down.
There are 2 that are a bunch of software. But AFAIK, they have the same Outlook inside.
Outlook CoPilot Legacy But Also Preview
It's really hard to understand how these trillion dollar companies somehow can't afford to maintain quality apps. Seems every new Office release makes things worse. I assume the WebView2 makes things a little easier for devs but how much are they really saving at the expense of quality? And I have no idea what the product managers are doing. They are certainly not thinking about improving the product. The new Outlook and Teams feel like they are being hacked together by a bunch of interns that are trying out Scrum.
I'm reminded of the Teams team making a comparison video between their old and new versions, which only went to show that the new version was also really slow (9 seconds).
https://youtu.be/CT7nnXej2K4
“Incredible, a mere 35 billion cycles to start up!”
The comments on that video are perfect.
> Windows 11 ships with two versions of Outlook. There is Outlook Classic, the long-running Win32 desktop app built for power users, and there is the new Outlook, which Microsoft is pushing as the future of email on Windows. The newer one is built on WebView2 and is, in essence, a browser window that loads Outlook.com. If you have ever used both side by side, you already know which one feels faster and which one does not.
This is bizarre. Kyle Rubenok, according to his LinkedIn and GitHub @krubenok, is the senior manager for the outlook product. Isn't he taking any responsibility for how poorly his product performs? In many regular companies, such a manager would be fired for managing a product into decline. I guess I don't understand how big US corporations work.
This year, for the first time since 2006 I've have Outlook and friends in my life. I run Linux, so naturally I turned to firefox.. Not a win. Fair, I use Chrome only for these products.
Dear Lord, how has the software gotten this much worse in 19 years? I thought that Thunderbird was bloated and awful... until I tried Outlook, in a browser, on Linux. Now, the Thunderbird experience is shockingly pleasurable, compared.
Don't even get me started on the horror that is trying to mix left-to-right and right-to-left languages within the same document. OpenOffice figured this out a decade ago. Google Docs has done this perfectly since the beginning. When I learned that it was genuinely this bad on Windows too, my mind was blown.
I don't understand how this is possible.
Thunderbird was not _that_ bad, tbh. But none could compete with theBat!
Just a classic example of bloating degradation that happens to any software which has saturated all basic needs decades ago.
The issue is, as the product continues to generate revenue, the product team continues to get funding and they are forced to add bloat as new features.
Same with security and compliance standards at companies. You keep pouring more money, and you keep getting more fort walls and dungeons, without any regard to productivity and performance impact.
You forgot to mention that all the people who made the original product great left and all the ones which could make the successor great did not join.
and now you can use AI to create even more unnecessary features even quicker.
i think that having teams for each product is an antipattern. if the team was purely a "mail task force", the workers could be placed to work on Exchange or the Azure related bullshit. But now, the Outlook team has to constantly create unnecessary work for itself.
From my experience using Outlook, they could keep the Outlook team for bugfixes only and still have enough work for the next 5 years just improving/fixing the classic version.
The will save bug-fixing as a work-reserve or future job security, and keep adding more visible/flashy new buggy/bloated features.
This matches my experience as well. I see no lack of work to be done without necessitating additional features.
Hardware has become insanely fast, while software has become absurdly inefficient. During the Windows XP era, I use to browse the internet even on dial-up connections, use Yahoo Messenger, and run everything on a desktop with just 512 MB of RAM and a 40 GB hard disk, everything worked, but today basic use on Windows often need a minimum 8gb ram. I wish I could go back.
I will say, a positive thing that has come out of msft's 20ish year run of consistent incompetence and piss poor leadership, is that there are quite a few former msft engineers (now retired) that are posting great lectures and educational content on youtube.
also, idk when, but the talent level of a "msft engineer" from 90s to early 2000s feels like they runs laps around the msft engineers of today. it's hard to not feel that the suits cannibalized what was at one point an extremely profitable company with great engineering culture for nothing but shortsighted gains
That is why I said the 2x improvement about Webview they said earlier doesn't matter. And I believe the 10sec already accounted for the 2x improvements.
>the new Outlook uses between 490 MB and 636 MB of RAM while idle, with individual sessions varying based on mailbox size. Outlook Classic, doing the same job, uses around 117 MB to 148 MB at idle. A roughly fourfold difference.
In the old days, we would have cried about 150MB memory usage idle as being bloat. Why isn't it 30 to 60MB. Now 150MB is still so much better than 600MB.
I am not sure if Native will ever win. I do wonder if we could somehow make webview, or may be a subset of webview that is as fast as native.
> In the old days, we would have cried about 150MB memory usage idle as being bloat.
I'm curious how much of those 150 are things that can't be boiled down to 'text', since that should be roughly the same size as on completely un-bloated software. The database of emails, the plain text of said emails, and all the basic UI should all be nothing but text and take up next to nothing.
Images on the other hand. I'd imagine Outlook Classic hasn't been made with 1 MB PNGs for all their icons, so it's probably not that that's pulling the memory usage, although it's probably contributing. Meanwhile, New Outlook (New) probably didn't optimise a single thing, so it probably is using 1 MB icons, which then quickly piles up. Not to mention the whole webview rendering backend, since we apparently can't make anything without going through a few layers of abstraction first.
The "free" version of outlook that replaced Mail is so bad that it made me finally switch to Thunderbird and I don't see myself going back anytime soon.
The only thing I'm missing sometimes is the Copilot integration, but copy and paste with Thunderbird is still faster than using Copilot in Outlook...
When I was using Thunderbird on Windows back years ago, i abandoned it in a week because it was absolutely slow when fed with years of archives as compared to Outlook 2010. Seeing recs for Thunderbird recently says something for sure.
Apparently, they did a rework of the interface a few years ago.
https://github.com/thunderbird/developer-docs/blob/master/th... and https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/02/the-future-of-thunderbi...
I don't even think Thunderbird has gotten any significant speed improvements over the years (unlike Firefox). The only real reason it's gotten better on that front is that processors and I/O have gotten faster. Meanwhile, Outlook as managed to take every morsel of improved hardware, and squandered it.
I've never had problems with Thunderbird on that front, but then again, I've never had email accounts with 100k emails archived.
I really like Betterbird. It's basically ESR Thunderbird + a few fixes.
If you want mail to just work and updates going smoothly it's the solution.
What was really behind the push to get everything browser based in the first place? Is this all to make everything cloud based, software as a service, or did some exec see a demo of Windows 8 and think "web is the future" and over-rotate?
Turns out the browser is an incredibly sophisticated and highly performant layout engine that works on almost every platform out there. Native UI frameworks are always going to be more efficient and let you access more of the hardware, but it's more expensive to maintain 2 or 3 separate codebases.
The push is that web developers are easy to find, and native software developers barely event exist anymore (and if they do can get paid to work on things like trading software, though web is even picking up there!).
Microsoft don't even _have_ a reasonable desktop UI stack, having been through at least 4-5 which gained minimal traction before being abandoned. The last successful one was Windows Forms, which is what I'd pick up today if I ever had to touch Windows again.
The least cynical argument is internationalization. Rendering engines already implement robust text layout when multiple languages are involved, so it makes sense to leverage it. The more cynical argument is that it's easier to find web designers than desktop UI designers. The more-cynical-still argument is the one you said.
Some of it is anti-piracy, and it's also cheaper to support
> Speaking of memory, the new Outlook uses between 490 MB and 636 MB of RAM while idle, with individual sessions varying based on mailbox size. Outlook Classic, doing the same job, uses around 117 MB to 148 MB at idle. A roughly fourfold difference.
They really picked the wrong timeline in which to 4x RAM usage for no benefit.
hey, I have a question for any product managers who are in charge of making decisions re: rebuilding app UI in Electron, like 1Password with their entire app, Adobe with their dialog boxes, Windows with their Start Bar (!#@!$!)
My understanding was that the proposition of Electron is that it’s there's some cross-platform advantages, also it’s basically easier and you can hire a junior dev to wing it.
My understanding of AI is that you can just tell a junior dev to vibe it.
So can't you turn your AI’s on making native UI via vibe apps? Shouldn't that be really easy for any idiot, and also performant?
Not a product manager but I habitually try to play devil's advocate as one. I think it's popularity, full stop. You _could_ vibe code a native app no problem - but then you're targeting one set of hardware. If you're already just vibing it, why not make something that will work cross-platform while you're at it? And if an LLM is prompted with that, they'll usually go with the popular choice: web app on Electron.
Okay, but Windows isn't cross-platform.
Adobe is but they have a ginormous multi-decade codebase that mastered cross-platform UI ages, an LLM coding assistant ought to be able to "add a range input here using our standard UI library" much more easily than "rebuild this with Electron."
1Password at least has a decent excuse for a rotten decision.
There are plenty of cross platform options. I write with Qt for example.
Yes but Qt comes with the drawbacks of being tied to Qt.
With Electron + React, you'd be able to rip out any components you need and place them in other web apps. The browser is (psychologically) avoiding vendor dependencies to a greater degree than other options.
You are tied to web and react. You can substitute react for something else (I suppose) but still tied to that.
I know of a few other cross platform toolkits if you don't like Qt, but in all cases you quickly become tied to it.
New outlook is quite honestly a joke. I tried to like it but went back to the old outlook as crucial features were missing. Simple things such as shift+f3 to change case to upper/lower/sentence case. This I believe stems from spell check being missing, another big issue for those with custom dictionaries. Poorly implemented template and template file management, I could go on...
If I intended on using a basic email editor, I would not have installed Outlook on my PC, I think the product manager or whoever is in charge of it's direction completely misunderstands the purpose/use-case of their programs.
I had no idea shift+F3 was there. If I even thought to look for such a feature I would assume it is in the right-click context menu and wouldn’t need a shortcut for it since I would use it once a decade. Now I wonder what kind of environment you work in where that is needed (and I work in an environment where a critical application requires Caps-Lock on for any extended usage).
This shows the problem with people who think the features in Office apps that they don’t use are bloat. If you made a new app using the 80% of features all the users regularly used, you’d discover you need 100% of those features because 20% of the users use a different set of obscure features.
I have always been amazed at how outlook just seems to always get worse. When I first used it decades ago I found it awful but it had a logic to it, now it is worse and makes no sense in the current world of options.
JavaScript needs to do whatever JavaScript needs to do.
It's incredible when we have AI assistants that slow shit like that still ships in products affecting millions of users. Imagine how much totally wasted energy that costs just because the companies are cheap. Just port it to Rust and run it as webassembly at least.
On the subject of Microsoft gripes, MS Purview removing focus from a text box for several seconds every time I paste something is driving me insane. Was just enabled recently at my org, but apparently has been a problem since 2024 at the earliest: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/answers/questions/1791527/...
Even the damn Artemis astronauts on the way to the moon had to call home to troubleshoot Outlook
At this point I’m convinced that the only people working at Microsoft are those who nobody else would hire. There is no way a self-respecting person would be ok creating garbage like this, day in and day out.
Maybe they do respect themselves and have decided the money in the job is just a means to other ways of respecting themselves that don't involve benefiting MS or customers or users.
Both can be true at the same time. You don’t have to be extremely passionate about your job and go above and beyond, you just have to be competent.
I start Outlook every morning to check work emails. Sometimes it opens, sometimes it doesn’t, nothing shown on the screen, no loading dialogs, it’s as if you never opened it. Then five minutes later it opens.
Happens on Windows/Mac
It seems to do an update check before rendering any UI, if there’s an update it must download and apply it before showing the UI. To a user trying to open the app, it’s as if it’s broken not loading.
It’s a massive pain, trying to access email but need to wait five minutes as the app decides it’s not going to open and update instead of giving the option not to, or doing it transparently in the background so app useable and prompting to restart when ready
Trying to save files in office is just as frustrating. Some dark UX going on making it difficult to save locally instead of in one drive.
2026 Microsoft software in a nutshell. More clutter, less performance.
I use Office 97 for this reason, it's like 400mb installed and everything happens instantly. Grab a copy off archive.org!
I'm more of a Lotus guy.
Anytime a relative installs a new machine I get the call "What is wrong with outlook?". It's always "new".
New Outlook doesn't even have feature parity with Outlook Classic.
Peak Outlook was 2016, right before the 365 mess.
I heard excel guys say peak Excel was 2010.
Where there any genuinely useful features Outlook 2016 had over 2010?
Mostly memory management and 64-bit support finally being on-par with the 32-bit versions, but it's hard to argue the nuance overall.
The switch to hardware-accelerated rendering was poor. It's still causing issues today. Is it the graphic drivers' fault or their poor implementation? Who knows, but they also disabled the switch that allowed to turn it off, which is just classic Microsoft being annoying.
I wouldn't trust an "Excel guy" who said that, they aren't staying current/using new functionality.
Just off the top of my head:
IFNA, FORMULATEXT, DAYS, CONCAT, IFS, SWITCH, XLOOKUP/XMATCH, FILTER, UNIQUE, LET, TEXTBEFORE/TEXTAFTER, LAMBDA, et al.
But my favorite improvement is the "don't intentionally corrupt CSVs" options found in Settings -> Data -> Automatic Data Conversion (hint: Disable everything). Only took them 30-years to add that. Absolutely absurd these are enabled by default still.
Excel is one of Microsoft's best pieces of software and one of the very few they haven't turned into slop YET. Still don't understand why we don't have local-only Python to replace VBA at all license levels (i.e. non-cloud).
> Automatic Data Conversion (hint: Disable everything).
It still butchers long strings of digits if they are more than around 12 and less than around 15 digits long, its very annoying still.
Also textjoin and textsplit and the whole spill functionality.
I gave up on Excel for working with CSV years ago, but it sounds like I need to go back and try again. It used to drive me crazy how the import function was all "just fuck my shit up, Fam" every time.
Reminds me of the old joke about it: How is Microsoft Excel like an Incel? Both think everything is a date.
Not to mention native array formula handling.
XLOOKUP was introduced in 2019. I thought it was a great update
I'm an Excel guy and 2013 was an improvement over 2010 with very little to dislike.
You can take LET and LAMBDA from my cold dead hands
Those guys aren’t using Excel very much.
Back when you could just buy the software and have it.
microsoft is an amazing study in managed decline
that people still buy this, businesses still rely on their infrastructure, and their stock is somehow world-class is outstanding for the fact that its operating system can't do what middle school level coders can accomplish
Why can't we see the taskbar in the classic notification video? In the new version it's launching the app cold. We can't see if that's happening in the classic video or not. It seems like it's just opening a document window instead of the whole app.
I don't doubt the new one is slower, but it seems odd that that's the only video that doesn't show the taskbar.
Up to middle 2000s, softwares were required to be installed either via downloading an EXE or CDROM.
Nowadays everything is cloude based including e-mails, you have zero reasons to use Windows as an end user.
Adobe is RIP and the alternative supports Linux, gaming is no longer excuse and in fact, games anti-cheat require kernel level access on Windows, that will never happen on Linux.
Companies still use Windows because they can track everything, Microsoft Teams is more than just a chat, it tracks your status, keyboard usage, interaction with teams, camera on/off during meeting, mic, etc.
Companies can build a whole profile from your Teams data.
Windows is the most unsecure OS, it has always been, so companies can spend millions or billions of dollars on tools and services to make Windows somewhat usable.
Also, forcing engineers to use Windows to manage Linux servers has to be the most nonsense thing ever.
Make that makes sense.
I have 5 computers at home, running Mac, Windows, and Ubuntu Linux. I've been using PC's regularly since the 286 age, and Windows 11 is terrible, I don't want to logon to your online services in any shape or form.
The windows operating system does more to disrupt my work flow than it does to assist it, the WSL layer so you can do any development helps, but I'm only using Windows at this point for games, and even then I barely play them so I'm mostly running Windows on one of my systems because it is already installed.
If apple / linux up the game support I would most likely never use Windows again.
Congrats to the new outlook team on the performance improvements, I certain it used to take 30 seconds to do it, and they've cut it to 10s !!
But seriously, can we please make desktop productivity apps not suck on windows? I started programming on windows, old school Win32 with a little MFC. Still have the super thick MFC book from MikeB somewhere in the closet. It was better than the alternatives at the time.
Now I look at the windows developer site and I can't even figure out what happened since I stopped Win32 programming at around 2004. It's a total train wreck of abandoned technology, each worse than the previous ones.
Office (and to some degree visual studio), used to be the lighthouse, best in breed application, often using api's that were not yet public and styles that were not yet adopted. I remember buying component libraries that emulated these to make better looking and performing apps.
I'd look at windows again if they would make apps not suck and be ones that the industry strives to emulate. Without that, Linux or Mac is just as good (actually better since they have decent userlands).
If i was in charge at MS, I'd go full return to monke and put a lot of devs into making winforms work great with 4k and high DPI. Then rebuild the most critical apps with winforms using a new layouting engine and some wpf concepts carried over. Nothing new or fancy, just old but gold.
History shows that there have been many Microsoft executives with a vision of building a new, perfect GUI toolkit. They all were released half done and quasi supported to this day.
I mean like you take the old thing and enhance it a bit but dont make a new thing from scratch because the idea and architecture has always been perfect. Most GUI toolkits from microsoft are drilled for ease of use so you dont have to have many devs to get something running (looking at dual way data binding and xaml). Imho thats the wrong approach, make it perfect for experts and approachable for juniors, winforms was very easy to click together, WPF not so much, too much framework magic.
That one feature may be fast but anyone who ever used Outlook with multiple shared mailboxes, mailboxes over a few years old, archiving to PST files, etc. will know that Outlook Classic could hardly have ever been considered fast.
Although I don't love it and avoided it for many years I've noticed a lot of these issues went away with the new Outlook. I can load and unload shared mailboxes on demand and I stopped worrying about cache mode settings about five minutes after I switched to it.
It's not great, it's not terrible, like most software I use. But I would have always said the same about Outlook Classic.
Bottom line for me is that MS has Classic on maintenance mode and it's only a matter of time before it's gone.
The biggest issue I have with new outlook is meeting notifications (reminders) on Windows.
I see a freaking loading screen with the Outlook logo for 5 seconds before the window is updated with the meeting name along with a button to dismiss it. Yes that's everything in there.
How does Microsoft think this is ok?
Clicking a Teams meeting link from Outlook Calendar opens the pre-meeting screen to allow enable/disable of camera/microphone, plus it also loads up a little reminder window with Join and Dismiss buttons _over the top_ of the Join button of the pre-meeting screen.
Every time.
And then there's the fact that, if Teams wasn't already loaded, you can be up five minutes late for a meeting waiting for Teams to roll out of bed despite having clicked Join bang on meeting time.
I don't have the most up to date system at work, but it feels like 90s wait-computing.
Quite often when I use a 1990s system, I encounter several things that are instantaneous, while modern machines take several seconds.
Like, sending an empty folder to the bin:
Win 10 this afternoon took seconds to display a dialog box with no content, the a couple seconds to add a progressbar, then a second to add the cancel button, then multiple seconds to finish showing progress.
But at home a 1991s system with System 7 completes the same task instantly without needing a progressbar.
Why are you not on thunderbird yet? Why do you get Windows notifications? Are you using Windows? I don't understand how there are people who can notice such things but still use windows in 2026. Also, please don't write with AI. This post was written with AI.
Often people have no say in the matter. Major of forced Microsoft usage comes from corporate IT. Corporate IT likes Microsoft because the amount of tooling available to manage it. Often these same people run Linux or Mac at home.
Rest of the people do not know the difference or know how to change out the software with better alternatives. Example, Firefox keeps loosing customers to Chrome and yet Firefox fully supports Manifest V2 with proper Ad-Block support, which increases computer security. Show these people an Ad heavy website with Chrome vs Firefox & U-Block Origin, this looks like magic to them.
Personally, you have to pay me to use Microsoft products. I have been game exclusively on Linux for nearly 10 years now. Before that, 5 years of dual booting just to game.
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I might be an email simpleton, but I don't think I've ever used a native email application on a desktop/laptop machine ever in my 20+ years on the web. I always just used the website, starting with EarthLink, then Hotmail, then Gmail, and now Proton.
What email power feature are folks using that necessitates using Outlook natively?
I couldn't even get new Outlook to sync with some email accounts. And my Office 2019 licenses will stop working next month due to a cert expiry Trojan horse baked in by Microsoft. Why does MS think I will ever want to pay them for anything ever again?
Some years ago, Microsoft got the security religion internally. While it doesn't mean that they've been issue-free since then, it largely worked. They were dangerously close to acquiring a reputation as being too insecure to do real work on, and they resolved that enough for the market.
I wish someone would give them the performance religion. The saying that what Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away is pretty old, but I will defend Microsoft in the past with the observation that, you know, 32MB of RAM to 64MB is a pretty small change in the modern sense. It doesn't take very many bitmaps or fonts or colors to burn through that sort of increase in power, even at the older resolutions of the past. There's a reason we don't all build our UIs to run on 386-class machines.
But it's gotten freaking absurd. I've got a 8-core monster that cranks up to near 5GHz at the drop of a hat, more RAM than I could have dreamed of in the 1990s, and a disk with numbers that I would have asked if you were accidentally talking about RAM back then (NVME SSDs still have ~500-1000x the latency, but the modern SSD wins handily on bandwidth). Modern code has more to do, more fonts, more graphics, more Unicode, but still it has gotten really absurd. 10 seconds on a modern computer is a lot of time. 12,000 frames of a AAA game ought to be enough computational power to check my email, not to have my email checker still choking and stuttering as it barely manages to start up.
Outlook has been an embarrassment for years. Poor defaults, bugs that have existed for years, and sub-par performance.
Search for a meeting: it shows you the oldest first.
Busy search calendars? It may or may not show working hours. It’s incapable of helpfully locating a mutually agreeable time in the way more modern agents can.
Search for mail? It’s an abomination trying to prioritize what you actually want.
The settings aren’t intuitively organized and a hodgepodge of UI standards.
We’re still on old Outlook and I’m not sure what we are going to do when Microsoft cancels it. The New Outlook preview release came out 4 years ago. If it was ever going to not be a piece of crap it would’ve happened by now.
Outlook is probably the worst software I encountered. I have seen relative being reduced to tears because she was not able to find her important emails and genuinely thought they were gone only to find out Outlook search is so crap it wouldn't find them despite getting literal sentences that were in those emails. I also particularly like merging unrelated email threads into one so you end up not following what the threads are about. The focused view is the best. It hides the emails you actually care about from you. Software like this should be illegal to distribute.
This is our fault, folks.
We technologists lobby ineffectively. We don't unionize. We are never not distracted.
There's also an unresolved bug when a certain email is both coming from an on-prem exchange and at the same time is used as a registered account at Microsoft, outlook seems to have continuous disconnections and prompts to login into the Microsoft account in outlook rather than sticking to the already logged in exchange email. Frustrating to say the least.
https://archive.is/pcRNR for those who prefer minimal stalking as they travel the web.
[even when the top-level tracking preferences look full off, if you dig down you'll find some “part” on, and you can't set them full-off (you are blocked from disabling tracking by Amazon at least)]
[Mental note to self: add “windowslatest.com” to “are you really sure you want to go there?” DNS greylist]
If you're this far in and still using Windows and Outlook, there's no saving you. You've been in an abusive relationship for _decades_ now. Get help.
Win11 may be the best thing for Linux. After all, people who are pissed by Win11 may eventually change operating systems.
Now if only Linux were to offer a useful GUI ...
Linux doesn’t define a GUI. I think you mean ”Now if only there were a distribution of Linux that implemented my personal idea of what a GUI should be.”
To which, I bet someone does. If you think Windows nails all the right ideas, there is Mint.
Yes, however KDE plasma is much closer to modern windows and makes it look like a toy.
>Now if only Linux were to offer a useful GUI ...
Tell me you have only used gnome without telling me
I wonder how many MS engineers are lamenting how superior Classic Outlook is for AI integration. COM and VBA let cc do pretty much everything.
New Outlook also does not do IMAP for me at all. Even though it says it does, sending you on a nice time wasting goose hunt. Thank you MS.
New Outlook doesn't actually do IMAP at all. What it does is sending your IMAP credentials in clear text to a remote Microsoft server, which will then fetch email for you.
> “Microsoft listed 15 productivity features [including] richer Copilot integration…”
Dumb-@$$ Copilot in Outlook. The other day I needed to list all of the file attachments for a particular email. Copilot couldn’t do it. But it could suss my impatience.
Decisions of a company with no competition.
I like that many of the people the agree with this live in California and are or assume to be happy with complete one-party rule.
It's not so bad here in Orange County. City/county politics are more balanced and provide pretty good counterweights to the state party. It's much better than the Seattle area, which truly has uniparty rule and it shows. People are less civil and tolerant there, crime and schools are worse, quality of life is lower.
I agree with the parent comment though. MS just doesn't have meaningful competition for Windows and Office, and the terrible software quality/experience is what we get.
Is this why Outlook for Mac is such crap?
Yes, that’s effectively new outlook in an electron(-like?) container.
At this point I would pay up front (one-time fee) for a Windows email client that rendered fast, worked with multiple account types including Outlook, had a nice simple interface so I can focus on the messages, and didn't have AI stuffed into it. Seems like we just don't have that.
Build one? sounds like there is demand!
"Old" Outlook is slow enough as well. Especially with Corporate "security" software.
You will then see the new one in the same situation...
New outlook also pre loads ads and it takes a few seconds for the paid verification to go through before the ads go away. Very frustrating clicking on the first email at load time only to realize it is an ad. Just the icing on the sh*t cake.
I have ~3 lower/mid range Linux laptops and 1x mid/high range windows gaming laptop. It's amazing how slow the windows machine is despite being an absolute beast compared to the linux machines, which have way worse specs.
The mobile app does this too. When you open a notification it first brings you to an old email you already had open and it takes a number of seconds before that's replaced by the one you were notified for.
My first week at a new job that forces me back into Windows (with WSL). I'm about ready to throw my machine out the window and follow after it. I understand that a lot of the performance issues are things like crowdstrike and Defender and maybe some poorly configured network proxy stuff but Jesus, this sucks. I write embedded software for machines with 1 ten thousandth the compute of my dev machine, I should not be encumbered by issues like this.
Me: I'm tired of this, grandpa... Microsoft: Well that's too damn bad!
A pool of notifaction-agents trying to upsale copilot or staying quiet, is stateful aka a turing machine. If you use enough of these agents they can draw and behave like any software e.g. outlook
The Outlook web app breaks browser navigation, I thought we had that figured out in SPAs like, more than a decade ago. But it does load almost-instantly (less than a second) so that's nice at least.
Where does it break nav? Honest question, because I have been living inside it for almost 7 years now and actually prefer it to any of the desktop clients (except on the Mac).
On desktop (Firefox) at least if I navigate to another folder, the URL changes but the browser back button doesn't change the view back to inbox. On mobile (iOS Safari), if I open an email, then try to navigate back, it takes me all the way back to the login page. The app also seems to use old-fashioned #anchor-based URLs rather than the navigation API.
(Hilariously, I found a feedback link but it points to a 404.)
How else would we know Microsoft is still Microsoft?
It's the "blink twice if you're okay" test for them.
On a side note, how long did it take for IBM to go from being everywhere to becoming irrelevant?
What is outlook doing that it didn't already do under windows xp? Surely it should be blazing fast by now
Literally was just googling yesterday about why Windows File Explorer genuinely takes longer to boot up than microsoft edge. Insane how fast they are enshittifying.
I think that's caused by OneDrive. Which was the "shove down your throat" flavour of a couple of generations ago.
F OneDrive.
yea I do think you're right. Really dislike that they've truly stuffed it down as everything getting auto-uploaded to OneDrive. Would be happy to use it to store certain docs but can't control how work sets it up ya know? stuck suffering instead lmao
This is so incredibly sad.
One of these years, Windows might become production-ready again.
They may consider rewriting their web-based apps into native apps using IA.
Oh man! How do we ever get enough compute to run AI if AI-written apps end up eating it all?
Teams, the new outlook are both piles of garbage. They've been garbage for years, and will probably still be garbage in a decade from now.
Teams takes 2gig of memory on launch, and still misses keystrokes because it is so unresponsive. Click on someone and start typing and half your chat isn't recorded. Absolute hot garbage.
Outlook isn't much better.
People who worked on them should be ashamed to consider these products shippable.
its faster to use an LLM + MCP (chatgpt or claude integration cloud integration) to search your email than to use the search field in the web browser now
its also possibly cheaper than the monthly licence fee for the desktop app suite
new Google homepage takes [many] seconds to do what classic Google did instantly
Just tried it. It loads instantly and then loads some other stuff I never seen before. However for me the main thing still loads instantly.
Same with Gmail. On decent desktop with multi-hundred megabit connection. Frankly just amazing how poor things have gotten.
Yea, everyone is trashing on Outlook web while Gmail is over there doing same exact shit. Even worse, Gmail has never well integrated all its features. Apparently having easy access to my full calendar requires a new tab.
They so screwed Outlook. The stupid thing refuses to respond after switching to a diff network or SSID till it’s completed some synchronization of some kind. The stupid app refuses to come into focus.
I really don’t need the freshest view at once. Maybe I just need to look at an open email you dog of an app!
Why did they castrate Outlook? Does MS hate itself? What in the name of shit are they thinking? Who does this make happy?
What I don't understand is why search is so broken.
If I do a search of my inbox with a lot of results, it gets lazy-loaded. Fair enough. But why, when I scroll to the bottom and it loads the new batch of email, does the view need to jump back to the top of the list?
Why has Gmail been able to recognize and properly group/deduplicate prior conversations in top-posted email threads for 20 years, but Outlook can't bother? That also breaks search, since every email with the result somewhere in its body (even prior emails) will appear.
Web apps are a scourge.
Honestly, for most intents and purposes, we could have just stopped with Outlook 2010. I'd have paid $5/mo for security patches.
It should be based on Team's code base :-)
While I don't like the new Outlook much, half the time I use it is through a browser on my Linux box anyway, when I check work email from my own hardware...
I'm also don't agree with the assertions that you cannot address performance issues in a web based application. The actual email rendering in Outlook classic is still an embedded browser engine. Now it's just doing more of the application. If anything VS Code and the underlying editor system should show that you really can create pretty responsive applications on a browser surface... no, it's not the fastest, but if you're comparing to a lot of "full" IDE applications, it's a massive improvement... Visual Studio around 2010 was absolutely horrible for building web based applicatons, with common freezes and input lags.
There's plenty of room for improvement in these applications... I think the web shift is more to support cross platform better than it is to avoid optimization. At this point, they really want to be able to support Android, iOS, Windows, Mac and maybe unofficially Linux. The browser is the best bet to make that happen. I think that wasm can bridge a lot of the performance issues where service interactions go beyond the immediate state. With the rust ecosystem as good as it is for wasm target usage, I'm frankly surprised more of the logic isn't already there instead of JS. That said, I don't know how much is effectively asm.js or electronic translations to JS, or relying on server functionality. I haven't dug that deep.
That said, there's plenty of room to optimize web based applications. Even if it comes down to single-channel RDP application shells to a server-running application remotely. I think the point is to share as much as possible and support as broad an audience as they can. I think this is still happening in a context where three are still those that are trying to keep Windows on top and ignore Linux, while others in the org want to fully embrace it.
Outlook for Mac is surprisingly good, though. Every interaction feels (and is) native.
Kudos to the team. I think this is same team that maintains Office Suite for Mac.
I hope to see Teams for Mac in the future. Current Teams app is dogshit.
Surprisingly good is a stretch. Barley adequate more like it.
Now that they've hidden mail access behind oauth (imap and SMTP, additionally SMTP behind global default off policy) and graph api behind oauth2 - it looks like they don't have to worry about real mail clients competing.
Actually fighting [f] to get mail in/out working with freescout right now - and having had learn more than I care to about o365 and PowerShell etc - I wonder how hard it would be to write a couple of stand alone tools to get fetch/send/sync mail working with o365 and local maildir - to get my/sup/any sane Mua to really work with o365/exchange/outlook.
Then there's calendar and teams to deal with..
[f] Thankfully our o365 reseller does most of the fighting - I'm happy to not have tenant-wide admin in AD/entra/whatever kerberized LDAP is called today.
Correction - not "my" but "mu" (mail utils):
https://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/
Btw, anyone still reading/participating mailing lists? From MacOS? Have you found a reasonable client?
I'm not even going to try with Outlook.
Are we talking about the same Outlook here? And I mean that sincerely. I just joined a new company and now have to use MS software for the first time since Windows 7. Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, you name it, are all a clunky mess (at least on MacOs).
Good question. There are two versions of Outlook on macOS.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-US/Outlook/outlook-for-mac
Which one did you use?
> like all web apps, it’s slow
No, that's a very uninformed take, and contradicted on two fronts:
1. Microsoft's other native apps have gotten unusably slow lately, too.
2. There's definitely plenty of fast web apps.
I don't mind snark, but make it factually accurate.
This is just Microsoft's poor strategic decision to try to drive as many as possible to Linux. Hell, weren't they bragging recently about managing to make opening the start menu take only a tenth of a second? It should be instant.
Maybe they think we'll replace users with AI, too. AI is the only thing slower than Microsoft's UIs lately.
Web apps tend to be a mixed bag. After a while they become slow because of dozens of async operations relying on network.
That can be an issue for native apps too, but they tend to be designed in a local-first manner, which means that they'll always have a speed advantage, assuming your typical dev team.
> Web apps tend to be a mixed bag. After a while they become slow because of dozens of async operations relying on network.
That's not an inherent web-vs-native difference, though.
> That can be an issue for native apps too, but they tend to be designed in a local-first manner
That's a choice.
> which means that they'll always have a speed advantage
woah there. No.
> assuming your typical dev team
So it comes down to the developers (and project management, etc). Yup, I 100% agree with that.
So we agree that it's not a technical difference?
Another way to say tenth of a second is 100,000,000 nanoseconds.
We have 4GHz computers with 8-16 cores, and it takes 100,000,000 cycles to show the start menu?
Edit: Corrected the scale factor.
Another way (which happens to be correct) to say tenth of a second is 100 000 000 (one hundred million) nanoseconds. You were off by a factor of 1000!
Yeah, I skipped microseconds entirely.
Also, at a typical turbo speed of 5 GHz you get half a billion clock cycles and multiple instructions can be retired per clock for about one or two billion total in those 100ms.
That’s about 1,000 instructions per pixel of the Start Menu!
All web apps are in fact slow compared to native apps. They are also clunky (though that's my opinion, not a fact). There are better and worse web apps, yes. And it's possible to make native apps which are even worse than a web app. But "like all web apps, it's slow" is a perfectly fair statement.
That's not even remotely true.
What native apps is Microsoft developing as of lately?
Most top of mind was this tragedy that Microsoft somehow thinks is "good" and not something to be ashamed of at all: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/the-new-run-dialo...
Teams Classic is better too.
The funny thing is that the Outlook client for Mac is a native app and it's way better than the Windows client.
I don't get Microsoft (and in some ways Apple and Google). Huge companies with humongous amount of engineers. Many very capable people.
They can't find 5 to build a native app for a platform used by a billion people?
Like really now? Why the f is this a web app? What's the point of an OS then?
That 10 seconds of enfourced mindfullness will save your bacon when you no longer have to deal with ransomware
Is anybody still using email in 2026?
Everybody I know uses IM systems like Wechat, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal.
Email is still (and IMO always will be) the defacto method of communication for anything professional, regardless of whether it's 1994, 2026 or 2095. I'm not even totally convinced that something else could come along and usurp it; it would have to be something so easy, so ubiquitous, fully-supported across every piece of software and internet that you encounter, while serving as a form of identity and "fixed geography" (think about how email addresses serve similar purposes as postal addresses), trustable, comprehensive, and completely open and free (not as in beer, but as in protocol-level free) ... and even then, the value prop would have to be cheaper, seamless to migrate all existing email-related stuff to, and backwards compatible with / significantly more compelling than email itself, to convince the world to adopt it.
I'd love to see it though, because email really is long in the tooth at this point.
> Everybody I know uses IM systems like Wechat, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal.
Great, instead of having a single, standard and interoperable way to communicate (albeit with its defaults), now we need to have 5, 6, 7 different closed systems that can't speak with each other, most of which require a working smartphone in order to even have an "address". What a wonderful evolution...
IM is fine for quick, ephemeral communications ("I just arrived at the restaurant") or automated processes ("Your authentication code for $BANK is 9975"), but for meaningful, thoughtful communication between human beings, email works better for me. The main advantages:
- I use my own domain, so I'm not tied to any single provider
- I can keep a copy of everything (I still have some emails from 30 years ago)
Do you have a job?
Yes. I don't live in the US though.
Everything this company touches is shit. Unbearable.
I honestly don't even care so much because I do everything on my phone these days but yes it has become apparent that Microsoft hates Office.
Similar one about WhatsApp on Windows. What a shitshow.
https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/06/13/whatsapp-is-eating-...
Why is anyone still using Windows in a year greater than 2010?
Some of us use software that is windows only eg any non-software engineering discipline.
Because the purpose of an OS is to to be an application, but to run other applications- most of which are not on Linux.
Gave up on the fluffy article 8 paragraphs in, is the tldr the new one is web and slow? Cause that doesn't explain 10 seconds.
powered by AI
The only thing not slowing down is the speed of enshittification at Microslop.
Copilot is now helping you out :)
enshitification
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They should just ask Copilot to convert it into a native app /s
But in all seriousness, if MS really did believe in copilot, there would be no need to write webapp slop. They could just write native app slop.
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Thank JS and Electron supporters for that.
Is the new Outlook client a JS/Electron app?
The article mentions that new Outlook uses a Webview2 control as the UI. You can call it JS/Webview.
Similar to Electron, but using an MS Edge browser window control as the webview control instead of Google Chrome.
It's lighter weight than Electron, if you consider that Webview2 ships with Windows and is shared with other Webview2 consumers as opposed to Electron apps which each ship with their own self-contained web browser.
npm love this comment
Microsoft Classic has COM+. It can be automated. U can automate it via POSH or whatever u like. It is super solid piece of software. Bloated or not is a very wrong move to take automation away from ppl.