I think most of the complaints are that Microsoft Office doesn’t work. Which is true. The web version of Microsoft Office is honestly kinda terrible.
And no, people don’t want to use a product that does the same thing as Microsoft Office, they want to use a product called “Microsoft Office”. No, it’s not logical, and doesn’t make any sense at all but it’s how people are.
The only sense it makes is that M$ hasn’t followed the spec, and so things done in office display fine in say libreOffice, but not the other way around. So if your company is willing to transition, but everyone you deal with outside the company is still on Office, there’s a bit of a communication issue. That’s M$'s biggest strength, homogenous work environments.
That’s why my business only uses pure, crisp .txt files. If I can’t open it in notepad, I don’t want it!
I have unironically been preaching the powers of text and JSON, and have some converts. Universal compatibility is great.
Json is a garbage format for anything that’s meant to ever be touched by a human. At least use yaml or json5.
In the first paragraph of JSON5’s site:
It is not intended to be used for machine-to-machine communication.
YAML is not supported by a lot of enterprise software (example: Azure pipelines supports it but Power Automate does not). JSON, XML, CSV, or failing that Text are the safe bets. We use a few options for reading or building presentation layers quickly. Ultimately the idea is to move data around in a way that is friendly to our current and future applications.
It’s absolutely trivial to convert either format to json if necessary. The real killer for me with json is the lack of comments. Human-maintained files absolutely need comments.
Fuck it! I’m in!
You spelt monopoly wrong.
This needs to become illegal and bear a bankruptcy inducing fine if repeatedly done.
We need to get rid of these monopolists
Pretty sure it is “illegal” I mean didn’t they get dragged through court in what the 90s 00s? Specifically for anti-competative monopolistic actions. Illegal was in quotes there because nothing really changed.
So use OnlyOffice instead of LibreOffice
Microsoft’s biggest strength is the Active Directory. Linux user and computer management is a huge PITA.
For Linux user management you can just use an LDAP solution like FreeIPA. You can even tailor sudoer rules based on security groups, so like you can allow someone to reboot the server but not actually make configuration changes to system config files and what-not. It’ll also handle CA and PKI with smart card support and of course DNS. It has a web interface as well.
I’ve done workstation maintenance in a previous job. Every part of the Linux centralized management was worse than Windows. We did it to support our coworker’s wishes, but SSSD constantly shits the bed, and having to code (config management) to write some pretty simple rules like default printers is super annoying compared to the Active Directory built ins.
I don’t know, I like using Fleet Commander with FreeIPA (where it stores the profile). You just spin up the template VM for whatever like-clients on the network you want to make default profiles for and make the changes, shut it down, checkbox the changes (the configurations and stuff) that you approve and let it apply the profiles across the network. Easier than depending on Puppet or Ansible playbooks IMO.
I have had issues with SSSD as well though and it had to do with Kerberos tickets but I can’t remember what I did to fix it. We’d have to manually use kinit on each machine when it’d basically fall off the realm. I want to say it was a DNS issue but it was so long ago, I just don’t remember.
We used to use Centrify for Linux and Solaris and it was easy using Access Manager to basically handle AD users and computers with Active Directory and had some GPO support (you could push config writes with GPOs for example and organize it all via OUs for example) but it would get a little wonky between trusts in the forest sometimes (in regards to zone management in Centrify) and they kept getting more expensive. Maybe they’ve fixed that stuff now but it was really simple to use and you could basically manage a lot through the AD and create group profiles in the Access Manager. I think the last straw was wanting to force us to license the entire suite regardless of whether we were using it or not. Personally, I never liked it because it wouldn’t use SSSD or kclient/nsswitch and if some service tried to join the realm/domain, it’d join using the same computer accounts and basically break the account since Centrify used its own client, so you’d specifically need to join the computer accounts via Centrify as a different name. It wasn’t detrimental or anything – just annoying that it was a problem at all. Also, sometimes the user cache database saved in specific users’ appdata that use Access Manager would corrupt from time to time and you’d need to manually delete it to use Access Manager. I’d hope they fixed that by now too though.
All and all, I’m not saying Active Directory isn’t an excellent product because it is and I’m not saying that there is a 1:1 solution for Linux but I’m saying it that in my experience it isn’t terrible either with FreeIPA and products you can use with it. I definitely hated other 389 solutions prior to FreeIPA though.
AD is easy top set up in Linux with a samba4 docker container. For instance: https://github.com/Fmstrat/samba-domain. Even HSS a script to easily join debian based machines.
There shouldn’t even be word processor documents between companies. PDF is the file type for maintaining consistency of page formatting!
Should be and is in fact? Two veeeerrrry different things
Micro$oft office is being teached in college for my friend and I, having libreoffice, tried doing the exact same thing in it. Not only everything was possible, but also its more convenient in LibreOffice. There are many annoyances in m$ office like auto formatting which cannot be disabled and auto prediction which fills in the details of next cited person from previous (like hell what, how should two people must have same bio?) and now you have to edit all that out by replacing the autofilled ones. LibreOffice on the other hand has much better UX
(Talking about Excel vs Calc and also Word vs Writer)
I mean maybe that specific advanced feature is not in libreoffice, but there are much more good things in it that is worth considering using it.
I use libreoffice and onlyoffice daily for academic works, with a few works published out there. I even use more features than the average office user, and I have to listen to people claiming that they can’t use any of those, because they’re inferior. I even have to listen to people saying that libreoffice isn’t suited for doing any SERIOUS WORK, and I’m like “What? My work isn’t serious?”.
But tne other user got a point. People want to see the name and the ms office logo. They will reject any alternative just because is isn’t ms office, no matter how good and sufficient they are.
If only libreoffice had an app for mobile platforms…
Being unable to open the documents I wrote on my computer without using some kind of crappy ad filled third-party app is annoying.
Libre Office has a mobile app. The one called LibreOffice viewer is only a file viewer but works perfectly if you only look at documents, it is developed by the same foundation that develops LibreOffice. If you want to edit, Collabora is the name of the app, it is based on LibreOffice and is officially approved by The Document Foundation. It is developed by one of their certified collaborators. Both are available on Android and iOS.
Thank you!
Try Collabora Office!
Thanks!
At least one good thing that Google has done is that Docs/Slides work on browsers and (where I live) most people use that now.
Not great if you are also trying to de-Google, though.
If the alternative is Microsoft, you’re between a rock and another rock that used to claim not being evil.
Libreoffice all the way. Most users don’t need more than that.
Google is not really much better than MS. It still leaves you under the yoke of big tech. “Meet the new boss, the same as the old boss”.
Our company has bought into the whole onedrive/teams/ Microsoft family.
They’ll do what the IT guy says but that first time copilot popped up grrr
Ironically, Microsoft has retired the “Microsoft Office” name.
I have seriously considered trying to install Microsoft Office 2024 (aka OnlyOffice) for a family member to see if they even notice.
OnlyOffice is pretty nice for homegamers I think. I just don’t need or want a full up heavyweight office suite anymore. And I’ve gotten to the point where I remove LibreOffice and replace it with OnlyOffice every time.
So do it, just do it. You know you want to…
Oh I run OnlyOffice locally and in NextCloud already ;) So it would only be for someone who lives in another state, simply to see the reaction.
I would do it for the reaction. I doubt they would complain very much at all.
You know, i made my dad try OnlyOffice and he loved it except for the fact that not all shortcuts worked. Years of experience with excel shortcuts didn’t translate in exactly the way he wanted. Which makes sense ig but i think that would give it away
I installed a Windows 11 update. Office no longer worked. Office refused to re-install despite trying a huge number of things. It literally refuses to install. Tried their help tool which even does removal of old references in the system. Failed 5 times.
Tried using the web version for a simple thing. First localization struggle which doesn’t carry across sessions. Excel column formatted to number. Then to currency. Then to general. Autosum shows #Div!0 still. Tried seeing if the AI could help. Have to re-login. (Using Mozilla this whole time btw). After re-login, ai tool says stop using private mode. I’m not…
Literally trying to do the simplest autosum on about 25 lines and it can’t function.
Installed LibreOffice. No problem with ‘Excel’.
I’m really not exaggerating. I saw online a similar issue and the guy had to reinstall the entire OS to get office to work again 🤨
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Have you tried excel ? Its WAY AHEAD of any excel like thing available as office in wild. Just example vlookup , Power tables , vba are no whwre near in any of the products.
You’re giving me VBA flashbacks. The worst language I’ve ever programmed in.
The funniest thing is, people say Linux is not ready, cause [insert feature] doesn’t work. The problem is said feature doesn’t work on Windows either.
For example pausing/resuming playback across multiple appliacations using media keys. It’s not perfect on Linux (not every app uses MPRIS), but it’s not great on Winodws either
Hell tbh I never use my pause/resume button, I just hit “p.” I <3 VLC
HDR works. On KDE Wayland and in games only with Gamescope, but we are getting there. And there is the Steam Deck of course.
I never managed to get gamescope working on my Nobara. Any docs I should look into?
Depends on what you mean with not working. Get any errors? e.g. i like to test with vkcube (vulkan-tools need to be installed. don’t know the package name on Nobara / Fedora). if
gamescope vkcuberuns, then its likely not a gamescope problem but one with the e.g. game you try to run or wine / proton.But the latest versions seem to be indeed a bit problematic. The last that works (mostly) flawless on my Arch is 3.14.2. So maybe worth a shot to downgrade to that if your current one fails with vkcube.
Otherwise, it is probably a good idea to get in contact with the Nobara community or the developer. I hate to recommend Discord, but as far i know that is unfortunately the only place where they are active.
And there is of course always the excellent Arch Wiki which is usuable for other distros as well: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Gamescope
HDR is awesome if you have the right hardware. I’ve never seen a movie look so good. Someone needs to get HDR working.
It does work for most games. MPV player supports it as well. It’s still rough around the edges, but it’s definitely there.
It works in KDE + Wayland… mostly… for applications that support it… and there was this update that ruined my color profile for a while but they fixed that now!
first game I played in HDR was mass effect legendary. I don’t care that the game itself is close to 15 years old, the 4k remaster + HDR blew my mind and set a new standard for how good games could look.
It’ll be finished on Wayland before the end of this year
We recently got hdr support tho
And lack of Adobe is a feature, not an issue.
Linux wins again.
To access a lot of pdfs used in the military you need adobe or it won’t open, you get this stupid screen telling you to download the latest version. So it’s required for some jobs :(
You can get both on Linux. KDE Plasma 6 with Wayland supports HDR, and you can even run some Adobe apps through Wine (Photoshop on Linux, Illustrator on Linux).
Using Adobe on Linux is a sacrilege. Screw that company.
photoshop, illustrator, etc are genuinely good programs though. the ‘linux alternatives’ just arent usually as powerful or easy to use.
this is coming from a linux and foss fanatic, btw. i dont use adobe, but i probably would if i was in a creative industry
I agree that they are effective programs for getting work done. There are some drawbacks in a professional setting though, the biggest being the data scraping that has been introduced. It’s hard to explain to clients that any licensing of their images has been violated before it has even been applied. Either Adobe are going to get away with exactly the kind of IP infringements that they are so against when it comes to their own work, or they’re lining up a buggerload of legal problems for themselves further down the line.
Then there’s the price-gouging that they’ve gotten into with their online subscription model and instability on some hardware.
How to trust them?
For people starting a new business in a creative industry I don’t think Adobe is the obvious choice that it once was.
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Last time I tried HDR on Windows, that sucked too.
My Android TV and consoles are about the only devices where it works properly.
HDR games is fucking baller on the steam deck. I’m legitimately thinking of switching to kde from sway so I can take advantage of it on my new OLED monitor.
I actually do use acrobat for legal document work
It good for adding signatures and making changes to pdf format schtuff
If that’s your only use case you can also use Xournal++ on Linux which does the job.
Of course your choice of OS is totally up to you and you don’t have to justify it to anyone, just letting you know the tool exists.
what do you use for illegal documents?
A pirated copy of acrobat
Like this?
Pirate acrobatWe got pirate acrobat at home.
Pirate acrobat at home:
Adobe Acrobat works for me using Bottles/Wine. Pirated and old version of course
I am wondering how many people give up because their exact program isn’t on there.
I get having to use Adobe software if you are an industry professional, but I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about people who don’t want to change because qbittorrent is not the same as utorrent. Or peazip is different than 7zip.
Both qbittorrent and 7zip are FOSS projects that are perfectly available on Linux. There’s actually very few software packages that aren’t also on Linux, but they have a strong pull. Like AutoCad, Photoshop, video editors, DAWs, etc. Is specialized niche software, not everyday software that usually stop people. Also, they are unfamiliar with a workflow to do certain things on Linux’s DEs.
I’m still waiting for gimp to actually be a viable alternative program to photoshop before installing dual boot linux
Gimp lacks photoshop features and still isn’t catered towards creatives which is the main demographic of people using the software
I’m aware of krita but it’s suited as a drawing program and also lacks many of the photo editing features I would use in photoshop
I’m still waiting for DOS to reach feature parity with MacOS
The biggest problem with Linux (other than the whole “most people give up the second they see a terminal” thing) is software availability, which will hopefully improve as Linux gains market share.
2024 is indeed the year of the linux desktop
use winapps on linux, adobe isn’t problem anymore, nor office
Here is to barge of negative votes but why linux sucks
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A user has to use terminals for lot of cases when they have to install softwares
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There is no single way to add program to startup on different distors, even in some distros you have to go terminal route
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Its 2024 nobody wants to use terminals like Olsen days , while using os at fullest not possible in Linux
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A user who wants to do something can/will cone across rabbit hole. You want to install xyz , then can’t run cause it has depend view, you installed those but there are this thing missing , that thing missing…
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I only care about Minecraft, if you search if moneycraft runs on Linux , third results shows you rabbit hole , second is question which distro can’t run Minecraft… REPEAT I AND DOZENS OF US , DONT CARE ABOUT STEAM AT ALL.
6.i plug in HDD it’s availablity to me throught apps across anything , I don’t have to MOUNT -A-B-C xyz anywhere at all
I will paste a full reply from another thread Till then linux dudebros linux does not work for ordinary users no matter what market share it has .
Courtesy user :bearoftime Lol, right. Linux ain’t even close to replacing windows - just look at the gaming issues that persist, or other compatibility issues.
It’s great for specific use-case scenarios, but I’m not dealing with supporting friends and family when stuff doesn’t work because I told them to install a Linux distro.
Besides, business doesn’t have this issue - it’s only on home (not Pro) installs, because for business we do all sorts of system management that would preclude this, even is MS tried to push it.
This just reflects how MS sees home users - there’s no profit there (never has been, it’s always been about getting people used to Windows at home, to capture the audience).
No one in my family is allowed to use Windows Home versions. They either buy pro when they get a new computer, or I get it for them.
My standard response to “just go Linux” :
I keep having to say this, as much as I like Linux for certain things, as a desktop it’s still no competition to Windows, even with this awful shit going on.
As some background - I had my first UNIX class in about 1990. I wrote my first Fortran program on a Sperry Rand Univac (punched cards) in about 1985. Cobol was immediately after Fortran (wish I’d stuck with Cobol).
I run a Mint laptop. Power management is a joke. Configured as best as possible, walked in the other day and it was dead - as in battery at zero, won’t even boot. Windows would never do this, unless you went out of your way to config power management to kill the battery (even then, to really kill it you have to boot to BIOS and let it sit, Windows will not let a battery get to zero).
There no way even possible via the GUI to config power management for things like low/critical battery conditions /actions.
There are many reasons why Linux doesn’t compete with Windows on the desktop - this is just one glaring one.
Now let’s look at Office. Open an Excel spreadsheet with tables in any app other than excel. Tables are something that’s just a given in excel, takes 10 seconds to setup, and you get automatic sorting and filtering, with near-zero effort. The devs of open office refuse to support tables, saying “you should manage data in a proper database app”. No, I’m not setting up a DB in an open-source competitor to Access. That’s just too much effort for simple sorting and filtering tasks, and isn’t realistically shareable with other people. I do this several times a day in excel.
Now there’s that print monitor that’s on by default, and can only be shut up by using a command line. Wtf? In the 21st century?
Networking… Yea, samba works, but how do you clear creds you used one time to connect to a share, even though you didn’t say “save creds”? Oh, yea, command line again or go download an app to clear them for for you. Smh.
Oh, you have a wireless Logitech mouse? Linux won’t even recognize it. You have to search for a solution and go find a download that makes it work. My brand new wireless mouse works on any version of windows since 2000, at the least, and would probably work on Win95.
Someone else said it better than me:
Every time I’ve installed Linux as my main OS (many, many times since I was younger), it gets to an eventual point where every single thing I want to do requires googling around to figure out problems. While it’s gotten much better, I always ended up reinstalling Windows or using my work Mac. Like one day I turn it on and the monitor doesn’t look right. So I installed twenty things, run some arbitrary collection of commands, and it works… only it doesn’t save my preferences.
So then I need to dig into .bashrc or .bash_profile (is bashrc even running? Hey let me investigate that first for 45 minutes) and get the command to run automatically… but that doesn’t work, so now I can’t boot… so I have to research (on my phone now, since the machine deathscreens me once the OS tries to load) how to fix that… then I am writing config lines for my specific monitor so it can access the native resolution… wait, does the config delimit by spaces, or by tabs?? anyway, it’s been four hours, it’s 3:00am and I’m like Bryan Cranston in that clip from Malcolm in the Middle where he has a car engine up in the air all because he tried to change a lightbulb.
And then I get a new monitor, and it happens all damn over again. Oh shit, I got a new mouse too, and the drivers aren’t supported - great! I finally made it to Friday night and now that I have 12 minutes away from my insane 16 month old, I can’t wait to search for some drivers so I can get the cursor acceleration disabled. Or enabled. Or configured? What was I even trying to do again? What led me to this?
I just can’t do it anymore. People who understand it more than I will downvote and call me an idiot, but you can all kiss my ass because I refuse to do the computing equivalent of building a radio out of coconuts on a deserted island of ancient Linux forum posts because I want to have Spotify open on startup EVERY time and not just one time. I have tried to get into Linux as a main dev environment since 1997 and I’ve loved/liked/loathed it, in that order, every single time.
I respect the shit out of the many people who are far, far smarter than me who a) built this stuff, and 2) spend their free time making Windows/Mac stuff work on a Linux environment, but the part of me who liked to experiment with Linux has been shot and killed and left to rot in a ditch along the interstate.
Now I love Linux for my services: Proxmox, UnRAID, TrueNAS, containers for Syncthing, PiHole, Owncloud/NextCloud, CasaOS/Yuno, etc, etc. I even run a few Windows VM’s on Linux (Proxmox) because that’s better than running Linux VM’s of a Windows server.
Linux is brilliant for this stuff. Just not brilliant for a desktop, let alone in a business environment.
Linux doesn’t even use a common shell (which is a good thing in it’s own way), and that’s a massive barrier for users.
If it were 40 years ago, maybe Linux would’ve had a chance to beat MS, even then it would’ve required settling on a single GUI (which is arguably half of why Windows became a standard, the other half being a common API), a common build (so the same tools/utilities are always available), and a commitment to put usability for the inexperienced user first.
These are what MS did in the 1980’s to make Windows attractive to the 3 groups who contend with desktops: developers, business management, end users.
All this without considering the systems management requirements of even an SMB with perhaps a dozen users (let alone an enterprise with tens of thousands).
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A friend came to my place with his Linux laptop, to grab some privateered games off of my Nas.
Couldn’t connect to anything on the network.
He was like ‘yo let me try these command lines’
When he was done fiddling around his computer wouldn’t boot.
That friend sounds like they were pretty stupid or they just had an unrelated issue at the same time.
Sounds like a typical Linux user ;)
Yeah maybe like in 1995… If you’re having this kind of issue in the present day, you’d have to be shooting yourself in the foot very very intentionally. (An example is a broken custom Arch or Gentoo setup, which you shouldn’t be using anyway unless you know exactly what you’re doing.)
I’ve been regularly trying whatever Linux distro is supposed to be good on and off every other year, and there was always something that made me go ‘that should be working right out the box’ and then spend too much time fixing it.
So not just from 1995.
If you’re not able to connect to a NAS for some reason, that’s almost definitely on you or your friend in this case. But even that aside, expecting a one to one transition has always felt odd to me… You don’t switch from an Android device to an iOS device or vice versa with the expectation of everything working one to one. You usually understand that there’s a lot of differences involved.
There’s ofc things like VR that I will admit Linux is quite far behind in, but for general use, Linux is problem-free for the most part these days. And you definitely don’t end up having an unbootable system pretty much ever unless you intentionally fuck it up. Like yeah, Linux lets me uninstall the kernel or bootloader if i choose to do that (it will try to warn me ofc) and that would render the system unbootable. But that would be me being irredeemably stupid, not the operating system’s fault. Hell, some distros like Tumbleweed even come with a better snapshotting setup than both Windows and macOS, making it pretty much impossible to fuck it up that badly.
this is the other thing linux communities are well-known for: blaming the user for not being good enough.
i think the last time my linux failed to boot there was a power outage…but the machine was a laptop. before that it was running an update (fedora/nobara). before that it was installing void (“installation complete” -> reboot ->grub recovery). before that it was running an update (pop_os). Before that it was running an update (manjaro, this was during a brief moment when it was very popular and linux folks claimed it was user friendly and suitable for moderate users). I’ve managed to recover from most of those cases listed above, but with the exception of manjaro that was 2023+2024 right there.
My Nas is a standard truenas scale installation with standard SMB shares that all my windows computers pick up instantly without any or extremely limited fiddling.
I’m not some nooblet that doesn’t know shit, tyvm. I’ve been using computers for decades.
I don’t expect a one to one translation between using windows and Linux, but I do expect basic functionalities to be, well, functional out if the box.
SMB works out of the box on every major distro, so yes, you’re bullshitting or your friend is genuinely an idiot
