Also they already start shortening the live cycle of the non subscription office licenses, calling it „Modern-Lifecycle-Policy“. Up to now you hat 7-10 years of update support. But this year Office 2016 and 2019 phase out, next year already Office 2021! And Office 2024 only has support til 2029. Thats from today only 4 years (at the same price!)

If the XML standard is overly complex, does that mean it’ll be a bigger pain for MS employees to maintain? Sounds like cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face.

Anyone who thinks this is new, please read this, this and this.

And there’s also this. It’s a topic since shortly after the standardization of the Open Document Format 2006. MS then feared to lose whole governments as customers, so they (pseudo)standardized their own format, with a whole bunch of traps (in the format) and abuses of market power.

Moved to LibreOffice. No regrets. Thank you, Microsoft!

Disappointing Fox news version of Windows’ take of something somebody at Libre once said about Windows’ domination of markets.

This read like basics. Was hoping for more info on how unusable XML was fot LibreOffice or if it wasn’t (unusable to OSS versions). Obviously, OSS is better for enough reasons that a few in the EU are switching government computers from Windows to Linux.

Yes, corporate & proprietary schtick is lame & crippling. Old news. Guess it needs to be yelled until we research start taking about (marketing) FOSS Solutions.

I mean, they could just really suck at writing good software. Isn’t some sort of rule of thumb law to never attribute to malicious intent what can just as easily be explained by stupidity?

I don’t buy the argument that windows just works or that it’s somehow better or more stable. The reality is we all have grown to learn about computers specifically using windows and it’s been a steep learning curve. We have gotten familiar with its specificities and its sporadic misbehavior and accepted that as the norm. And people prefer what they are used to even if it’s suboptimal because they would rather not learn something else from scratch, even if in the long run it could be better.

Put any person who has zero computer experience in front of a windows computer or Linux computer and I doubt they would say the windows computer just works and the Linux one doesn’t.

microsoft is a dirty bastard

The problem: our desire for convenience

Bring on the downvotes, but: When it comes to tools like computers, convenience is synonymous with productivity. People aren’t unreasonably demanding to have their hands held, they want to get stuff done. We need to stop acting like convenience productivity is just one of many concerns. It is the primary concern.

Freedom is nice but to most people it’s only important if it helps us do the things we want to do.

Not sure why this author is spreading “paid software is convenient and just works” rhetoric. Simply isn’t the case. You just get addicted to trying to solve your problems with money.

My only issue with Libre Office is that they are not available on mobile phones. I want to use spread sheets to make calculate and make projections on my finances if I can’t use my computer at a given moment.

There are people for whom this is news? Cheesus chroist

There’s a phrase that gets passed around the tech scene: “Linux is only free if your time has no value.” Because, yes, Linux and other open-source apps are free to download and use. In a world driven by money, you’d expect the free version to overtake the paid one. The problem is, the paid option…just works.

Sure, until the paid option does something anti-competitive or gets too expensive or shuts down entirely, and you have to switch to a different paid option, sometimes burning dozens of hours in switching time (and/or hundreds of hours of work through lost or corrupted data) in the process. Not to mention the transition costs of just figuring out the new thing. Why not just switch to something that won’t go away, or be changed under your feet?

The problem is that it needs that initial time investment to get it working the way you want it.

Maybe I’m just enough of a tinkerer in any situation that I’ve put pretty much the same amount of time into fiddling with my Linux settings as I did with my last Windows computer.

If your hardware isn’t working properly, you have to find drivers that run on Linux; if the developer never made Linux-compatible drivers, you have to figure something else out.

People have been talking about this for my entire life, but in the past year of my switch to Linux, it has literally never happened once. I downloaded a new, open-source driver for my drawing tablet because it had some extra features that I wanted, but even it worked out of the box. I’ve never experienced this incompatibility. Honestly I’ve never even had trouble with software I wanted not being available for my distro.

Am I doing Linux wrong?

Windows doesn’t have this problem.

LOL.

Installers made for Windows don’t need any special TLC;

ROFL!

you double-click them and they work.

OH wait they’re serious?!

Once they’re installed, they work. If you need to install a driver, it works. You open a document in Office, it works.

Sure, if you don’t run into a permissions issue. And if the system registry doesn’t get corrupted. And if you’re not on an ARM machine. And if your TPM is the right version. And if you’re on the right subversion of Windows. And if a previous install didn’t leave some remnant of itself behind. And if you don’t want to do anything with an Apple device at all. And if sometimes you have the right fonts installed?

Honestly, I think I’ve had fewer problems installing Linux applications than Windows applications, but I can’t attest to that. I think I can be pretty confident in saying that they’re mostly equivalent. Both of them are pretty mature platforms with fairly minimal hiccups, in my experience.

And if something doesn’t work, we can yell at Microsoft until they publish a fix that makes it work again.

That’s a weird way of spelling “until they ignore it for six months and then lock the support thread for inactivity.”

Microsoft has gotten us into a state where we don’t need to think, tinker, or troubleshoot our software. We just double-click the icon and wait for it to “just work.” If it doesn’t, it’s someone else’s issue to solve, and we flood social media and support emails until the issue is resolved.

Here I have to agree with the article, because whatever the reality of installing applications on Windows, this is the fiction they’ve sold us. Apple, too. All operating systems have troubles, and all vendors try to downplay them and fix the stuff that causes problems for most of their users. Linux is just honest about the fact that they can’t make everything a perfectly smooth experience for everyone.

The problem: our desire for convenience

This hits it right on the money. As nice as open source and open standards are, at the end of the day none of that matters to the 99% that want/need to do X as fast and painlessly as possible.

To people like my wife MS Office/LibreOffice/Google Docs are all the same thing in the category of productivity suite. And one of those does not meet her where she lives in day to day life. And it doesn’t because there is no money in doing so for LibreOffice. And there is no benefit to her to seek out LibreOffice for her uses.

Hell, just take a look around at the number of people that preach about the evils of Microsoft, Google, or whoever but love them an iPhone and Macbook. As bad as Microsoft and Google can be for screwing over the user with vendor lock-in they don’t hold a candle to Apple. But they get the money despite there being “better” options technically and philosophically for nearly everything they make, but Apple knows all of that pales in importance to 99% of potential customers compared to being convenient.

I’mma just going to sit over here in the corner with my AbbiWord and Gnumeric…