Comment by linguae
3 days ago
I miss the days when personal computers were simply tools, akin to pencils and handheld calculators. I remember the days of Macintosh System 7 and Windows 95. No upselling services. No automatic updates. No nagging. You turned your computer on, executed programs, and that was it.
On the Windows side, things started going downhill starting with the Windows XP era, and on the Mac the annoyances began sometime in the mid-2010s.
It seems Microsoft, Apple, and other companies realized that they’re leaving money on the table by not exploiting their platforms. Thus, they’re no longer selling simple tools, but rather they are selling us services.
Yes, there are good Linux distributions that don’t annoy me, and the BSDs never nag me, but the problem with switching to these platforms is that I still need Microsoft Office and other proprietary software tools that are not available outside “Big Tech.” There are other matters that make switching away from Windows and macOS challenging, such as hardware support and laptop battery life.
Easy answer to your last point: Work machine and Non-work machine. If I'm working for a company and the company needs MS Office, they will give me a machine with MS Office. I will treat that machine like a radioactive zone. Full Hazmat suit. Not a shred of personal interaction with that machine. It exists only to do work on and that's that. The company can take care of keeping it up to date, and the company's IT department can do the bending over the table on my behest as MS approaches with dildos marked "Copilot" or "Recall" or "Cortana" or "React Native Start Menu" or "OneDrive" or whatever.
Meanwhile, my personal machine continues to be Linux.
This is what I'm doing at my work now. I'm lucky enough to have two computers, a desktop PC that runs Linux, and a laptop with Windows 11. I do not use that laptop unless I have to deal with xlsx, pptx or docx files. Life is so much better.
Apt username, for a pragmatic strategy.
A variation I've done occasionally is to run the Microsoft Windows software in a VM on my Linux laptop.
When I last had the MS office suite inflicted upon me, a couple years ago, I was able to run it in a Web browser on Linux.
It's important to remember, though, that these measures probably won't work long-term.
Historically, MS will tend to shamelessly do whatever underhanded things they can get away with at that point in time. The only exception being when they are playing a long con, in which case they will pretend to play nice, until some threshold of lock-in (or re-lock-in) is achieved, and only then mask-off, with no sense of shame. (It's usually not originating bottom-up from the ICs, and I know some nice people from there, but upper corporate is totally like that, demonstrating it again and again, for decades.)
Also, a company requiring to run Microsoft software is probably also a bad place to work in other regards.
> Also, a company requiring to run Microsoft software is probably also a bad place to work in other regards.
My current employer is so great that I have casually mentioned that I might stay until I retire a bunch of times since joining. I've never said that about any other job. We have Word because there are industry requirements that it meets in terms of formatting legal documents. Can other apps supplant it? Possibly, but no one is spending the time and money to find out and it's not my decision to make.
I understand the motivation of the statement, but it's a fallacy.
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> Historically, MS will tend to shamelessly do whatever underhanded things they can get away with at that point in time. The only exception being when they are playing a long con, in which case they will pretend to play nice, until some threshold of lock-in (or re-lock-in) is achieved, and only then mask-off, with no sense of shame.
The Windows 10 bait n switch to Windows 11.
Hundreds of millions of PC users worldwide on old hardware using old Windows OSes were offered Win10 as free upgrade, with the promise that Win10 is the final Windows edition.
Later though, M$ announced Win11 and it would work only on new hardware (BIOS TPM 2.0 constraint), and Win10 is no longer being supported for personal use (except via some complicated ways to get an extension for the Win10 updates). And not only is Win11 buggy and full of ads, its performance is also bad.
Well, the good thing is that such shenanigans are pushing PC users to migrate to Linux.
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> Also, a company requiring to run Microsoft software is probably also a bad place to work in other regards.
Microsoft being shitty notwithstanding…I think you don’t really grasp just how prevalent Microsoft is in the business world - it is not the indicator you think it is.
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Have a new laptop arriving shortly with enough RAM and storage, that - me being a historically "Windows as primary OS" kind-of-person, with the enshitification of their adding CoPilot to everything and turning Windows 11 into an "agentic" OS, my installation will be Linux-first, and then run Windows via LKVM (hopefully with proper pass-through for TPM + GPU).
Yes - I have "noodled" with Linux in VM's and Raspberry Pi's - but it has never been my primary OS.
Thanks to Microsoft, that is about to change...
> Also, a company requiring to run Microsoft software is probably also a bad place to work in other regards.
This seems like an over generalization, though I agree with your other points. Microsoft is not a good company, but are any of the big tech behemoths?
I could buy an argument that requiring Windows for devs might be a red flag, unless said company is making Windows software or games, but there are plenty of valid reasons to standardize on Windows & Microsoft 365 across the office, especially in very large companies. Even if a company issues macs, they are still probably on M365 unless they are in silicon valley or a startup using Google Workspace.
Consumers aren't Microsoft's customer, and to be honest, I get the vibe that Microsoft would just prefer to stop selling to and catering to consumers/personal users entirely for Windows. Windows in an enterprise, properly reined in by a competent IT department, isn't too bad. Windows gives a lot of tools to IT and the business that you would otherwise have to build yourself, which for non-tech company or a company where software isn't their revenue generating product, has a lot of appeal.
The distaste everyone feels for it is because Windows isn't built for the end user anymore, it's built for the person signing the checks at the company, who usually has different needs. Doesn't mean it's a bad product (although, it's not great), just that you, the user, isn't who its designed for.
some companies don't have a choice; in a previous AEC job (architecture/engineering/construction), we had to deploy windows to use Autodeck Revit.
Now servers and other backend stuff, on the other hand, linux and illumos.
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I like this in theory but as someone who travels often with my work laptop, it's nice to be able to use the same hardware for personal use as carrying a second computer is impractical regarding carry weight and packing.
Apple used to allow installing a second copy of MacOS without it being subject to the work profile - completely isolated from the work partition (because you could ignore the "set up work profile" prompts after installation).
I would simply restart my MacBook into the personal install after work & on weekends.
Apple have recently updated the MacOS installer to be always online so I can no longer install a seperate MacOS partition without a work profile.
I ended up buying an ROG Ally but it's honestly not that portable. The power brick is almost the same size as the handheld and it occupies about as much space as a laptop in my carry on.
When I travel for work, I take my work laptop and an iPad in a keyboard case. It’s under 2lbs (0.9kg), it can charge off the same brick as my phone or even pass through charge off my work laptop itself, and keeps me connected to my personal digital life without having to put anything personal on the work machine. It also never raises an eye with security if you have a laptop + iPad.
Usually, the iPad apps are "good enough" (in some ways, they are actually better for travel, as they are designed with features like offline downloads), but if they are not a "real" computer is only a tailscale connection to my home network away over VNC.
Edit: specifically, the iPad + Laptop combo never raises an eye at customs houses. Inside the USA, I've taken as many as 3 laptops for a work trip before, and I can not express how much the TSA does not care. On the other hand, when you go through customs in another country, they can be bit ornery (i.e. suspect you of trying to avoid import tax), so I never want to take more than one laptop through a customs barrier.
p.s. if you want to game in your downtime, such trips are an awesome time to break out the emulator and retro game, an iPad has more than enough power for this, and SNES / d-pad type games work great with a keyboard case as a controller (or, you can just bring a real controller).
All of these gaming laptops really do suck. I feel like these days your better off having a small form factor pc or just remote into your machine from far away.
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If you aren't into gaming at all, you might consider a smaller Macbook Air for personal use... mine is mostly relegated to occasional use unless I'm traveling, where it's mostly email/web use. Small, light, fits my needs and can charge via the same USB adapter I carry for my phone anyway. I have a rather heavy laptop bag so the difference between 1 or two laptops and the portable display isn't that big a difference.
Two laptops is easier than you’d think if you have the right bag.
My work lap is so locked down I cannot do anything personal on it, so when I go into the office I always carry two laptops, and the personal one is an old thick heavy dinosaur; it’s got to be at least five pounds. However, with a good bag that has a (non-padded) belt and sternum strap, it is not difficult. The belt carries most of the load and my shoulders don’t hurt; they hardly feel anything.
I deliberately park in the farthest spot at the other side of campus (about a half mile, and up four flights in the garage) to get in exercise steps with the heavy pack.
It’s good exercise but I absolutely need a belt and sternum pack to do it. Wouldn’t dream of trying that with only shoulder straps.
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Been using this strategy since Windows XP
I can do work on the computer running BSD/Linux, save it in a text-only format, transfer it to the work computer then import into Excel, PowerPoint or Word
It's been over 20 years since I had a home computer running Windows (and well over 30 since I've used a mouse)
I think the GP comment is evidence that Microsoft can get away with what it is doing. Even people who can use Linux or BSD will not stop using Windows at home no matter how obnoxious it becomes
There is a substantial difference between complaining and actually taking action and the company seems to recognise that
Same. Work provides the idiot box. I give it its own segmented network too, cause work spyware and all... then run a personal workstation with linux next door to it.
The problem with Linux is that there is no legitimate place to direct your rage at. It is free, nobody owes you anything and every installation is different. When Windows is awful, virtually everyone is being sympathetic. When Linux is awful, there is a genre of people that made using Linux an integral part of their identity, that will explain to you how your frustrations are really your own personal failures.
I'm slowly moving away from the Apple ecosystem, and this is what I rather like about Linux. I find it obviates the anger — there's no specific entity making decisions that make my user experience worse. If something's annoying me, it's quite likely to be my own fault.
You could argue that, with Windows there is a legitimate place to direct your rage at, but the action of directing your rage does not actually have any effect on improving your experience. With Win and Mac, no one cares, because they already have their customers locked in and tight, they will accept any experience degradation. With Linux, you are not a customer so no customer complaints, but still arguably much better support.
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> When Linux is awful, there is a genre of people that made using Linux an integral part of their identity, that will explain to you how your frustrations are really your own personal failures.
There are also people who often claim that their installation of Linux always crashes after every single update, their favourite commodity hardware that's a decade old still doesnt work out of the box on Linux etc etc.
The truth is somewhere in between and its a lot closer to the positive experience these days compared to the old days.
When Windows is awful, everyone is sympathetic except for their support. They are beyond useless.
Ubuntu with support is totally a thing, not sure if it is good or not.
Windows 11 Home: $139/license Ubuntu with support: $150/yr
> When Linux is awful, there is a genre of people that made using Linux an integral part of their identity, that will explain to you how your frustrations are really your own personal failures.
On the one hand, yes, this is not a nice thing to have happen. The frustrations shouldn't happen to begin with, and then people shouldn't be using the reverse Uno card on you just for that.
On the other hand, Linux has a lot fewer of these frustrations (in my experience), and a lot of frustrations are being fixed with time, since you're likely not the only one who is frustrated by it.
On the third hand, the situation being shit for obvious human reasons, not enough dev time, disagreements about the way forward, as is the case with Linux development, is a much, much nicer thing to have your problems caused by, rather than the source of Windows being shit, that is, someone wasn't happy with their dashboard this morning and decided to make that your problem today.
You can always buy someone to direct your rage at if you are a business and wanting to deploy Linux though. Red Hat, Suse, Canonical will all happily sell you support contracts and guarantees.
Idk. My main frustration with Linux has nothing to do with the OS itself. Linux is pretty good actually. My main frustration has to do with software that doesn't run on Linux that I have to use occasionally. So things that force me not to use Linux. But that has gotten much better over the years.
And meanwhile my Windows and MacOS experience has gotten much worse. So I feel pretty good with using Linux as my daily driver for the past 6 years.
I installed Linux Mint Mate on my parents home computer and they have less issues than they ever had with windows 10-11
Whats to rage about w/ Linux?
Like Apple used to warrant, it just works.
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No full time job, so as a freelancer those machines need to combine. And my work uses similar software that simply doesn't work well on Linux.
But yes, ideally I'd have two machines to separate my career from my personal life.
I'm using Debian an when working for a client that requires Windows, I'm working in a VirtualBox with Windows Server 2022 as my desktop OS. It works really well (running mainly Visual Studio) and licenses are pretty cheap. But the best part is, that there are no ads and other Windows 11 Copilot nonsense.
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If you’re implying separating work work on two machines; beware the corporate spyware on the windows machine will show a lot of idle time!
> Windows 95. No upselling services. No automatic updates
Even Windows 95 came bundled with MSN on the desktop which had a paid monthly fee to access. And its lack of automatic updates was a real problem, as you had to manually find the service packs and security patches. The automatic updates in Windows XP were vastly more convenient.
Automatic updates are needed for security. The only era when you didn't need them was pre-Internet. They're not something we want to get rid of.
> Automatic updates are needed for security. The only era when you didn't need them was pre-Internet. They're not something we want to get rid of.
That was true right up until companies started routinely pushing updates that broke things, removed useful features, added user hostile features, or even outright ads. If I have to give up automatic security updates to not have my software get worse on me over time, I will gladly do so. I would rather have security updates and not have the user-hostile stuff, but we seem to be unable to get that, so the next best thing would be no automatic updates at all.
Installing Internet Explorer 4 on Windows 95 opened up the first version of Windows Update, when it started as a web app with some custom ActiveX plugins. Windows 98 was the first time Windows Update had a bundled link in the OS, and shortly after Windows 98 introduced a "Critical Update" notification that would prompt users to open Windows Update.
Automatic updates arrived in Windows ME.
It's interesting the timeframes on Windows are often earlier than you think they are. Admittedly, a lot of users skipped Windows ME and its strange reputation, so Windows XP may have been their first time seeing automatic updates.
I know you won't believe me, and my precious karma score may suffer by stating reality: you don't NEED security updates. A properly hardened server with no patches will outlive cobbled together trash library patch over garbage code pasted from ai vibing script kiddies. Would you shake your head in disbelief if I told you 'security patches' are the fix delivered by a dealer to quell your shivers?
Give me functionality updates, cumulative service packs, and the just after BBS days when an exploit discovered in your software meant it was used by no one, anywhere, because we no longer trust your coding or your 'fix'
Nobody's talking about "properly hardened servers" here. We're talking about the OS used on desktops and laptops by everyday consumers, connecting to the Internet across a wide variety of Wi-Fi access points.
Do you not see the constant stream of zero-day exploits coming out for consumer operating systems? Do you think those don't need to be fixed?
I'm genuinely curious -- I've never come across anyone with your perspective before, so I'm struggling to understand where it's coming from.
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The internet was a big part of it. Most home users did not have internet access in the System 7 days. When it came out in 1991 no country had more than 1% of its population with internet access. By the time Windows 95 came out around 10% of US users had internet access.
It wasn't until 2001 that the US reached 50% of users having internet access.
Without internet there wasn't really a good way to distribute updates to most users.
As a developer in that era working at a company that made software for PCs and Macs it was great. It meant that the way most users would get our software was buying it on floppy disk (or later CD) from a retail software store like CompUSA or Egghead.
We'd only make more money from someone who bought our software if that software made a good enough impression that they bought more of our software. We'd lose money if any software went out with enough bugs or a confusing enough interface or a poorly enough written manual that a lot of people made a lot of calls to our toll free tech support.
This was great because it largely aligned what developers wanted to do (write a feature complete program with a great UI and no bugs) and what management wanted (happy users who do not call tech support).
With internet giving us the ability to push updates at almost zero cost and as often as we want people who release incomplete programs early and add the missing parts in updates are going to outcompete people who don't release until the program is complete and nearly bug free.
Once you get there it is not much of a leap to decide that what you are really selling is not software to do X but rather the service of providing software to do X. Customers subscribe to that service and you continuously improve its ability to do X.
> It meant that the way most users would get our software was buying it on floppy disk (or later CD) from a retail software store like CompUSA or Egghead.
On the topic of Windows, this is why Microsoft's commitment to backwards compatibility was and is such a huge deal.
It wasn't so easy to just update your software if Windows ever made breaking changes, and your users would, rightly, be pretty ticked off if suddenly what they bought no longer works because they upgraded from Win 95 to 98, or 98 to XP.
You had confidence that you could buy a program once, and it'll just happily continue to run for the foreseeable future.
This also made businesses happy. If you liked a particular version of a software product, you bought it, ran it on Windows, and could rest easy knowing it'll just continue to work through version upgrades of the OS.
I stopped using Windows over 15 years ago and moved to Ubuntu that was running all the servers. Unfortunately Ubuntu decided to do the same garbage trying to shove their pro crap down my throat, made it impossible to remove (by making a desktop requirement) and resorted to the game of trying to re-enable it during updates
I finally moved everything to just Debian itself that never nags me and just works with everything I need, including games (thanks to steam)
Only time I boot a Win10 VM is to compile apps for for windows, otherwise it has zero use or need anymore
I supported Ubuntu when they started but gave up on them after they sent people's local file searches to third parties so they could push amazon ads. They're totally corrupted as far as I can tell.
I too remember the days when every unpatched Windows PC was a member of a botnet. Perhaps less fondly than you.
And thankfully this was before a time when everyone’s computers and phones had access to their bank accounts, credit cards, and before email was the gateway to virtually your entire life.
[flagged]
Most of your account's comments in the 13 days since it was registered have been flamebait, fulminating or trolllish, and are being flagged by other community members. Please stop this style of commenting or we'll have to ban the account. HN is only a place where people want to participate because others make the effort to raise the standards. For accounts that are dragging the standards down, sooner or later we have to do what most of the community expects of us, which is to uphold the guidelines and ban accounts that continue to post in this style.
If you would review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and start taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
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I remember installing plain Windows XP at a time when Service Pack 3 had already been released. Since I had only recently gotten cable internet, it didn’t cross my mind to disconnect the network cable, and my PC got owned almost immediately. IIRC, some dialog just popped up as an artifact of a successful penetration, right after the network connection was established - before I even managed to insert the SP3 CD. So it was pretty bad for a while.
> According to the researchers, an unpatched Windows PC connected to the Internet will last for only about 20 minutes before it's compromised by malware, on average. That figure is down from around 40 minutes, the group's estimate in 2003.
This was from two decades ago, and cursory searching suggests the average lifetime of an unpatched system is even lower now.
https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/study-unpatched-pcs-compro...
I do also recall having a fresh XP install and getting owned in a few minutes because I connected to the internet.
Not sure what you guys were trying exactly and what tools you had at your disposal.
The real problem was pre-Windows XP. Anyway, just because you failed your assignment doesn’t mean it wasn’t a real problem. You should probably trust actual IT administrators over your experience as a college student.
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FYI, malware researchers deliberately infect a VM and then analyze the malware. Here are some present-day examples of such investigations using the open source Garuda framework: https://cysinfo.com/introduction-to-threat-hunting-using-gar...
You just had the wrong classmates
FUD? Blaster said otherwise.
I miss when I felt that personal computers were a new wave of democratized capital, a kind of affordable factory for individual owners to use pursuing their own autonomy and power... and not just for programmers.
I underestimated the economic forces trying to turn them into devices for enforcing the interests of a large company onto the owner and turning the owner into a renter.
Windows XP sold for $200 in 2001. In 2025, that's $364[1]. If we can find enough people willing to pay $364 for an OS that values privacy and doesn't push needless upgrades, that'll be a start. But XP itself was probably priced based on the belief that people would be upgrading in a few years to Windows Vista. So we might need more than that.
[1] - According to minneapolisfed.org, which uses the official economist-approved inflation rates. Not that I'm implying that there's anything wrong with that. I have all of the orthodox beliefs about inflation that a good citizen should have.
Windows 11 Pro is still $200 [1]. Of course most people don't pay anything directly as it's bundled with their PC and they won't think to question why that is.
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/windows-11-pro/dg7gmgf0d8h...
The cost of Windows 11 Pro is $200, plus your privacy, ownership of your computer, and your dignity. It's way too expensive.
> Windows XP sold for $200 in 2001. In 2025, that's $364
I assume you used the overall CPI rate rather than the software rate. but using the Software CPI its more like $58. and that seems like an easier sell (for the user, maybe not the developer).
http://data.bls.gov/dataViewer/view/timeseries/CUUR0000SEEE0...
Software CPI-U
2001 Oct 77.0
2025 Nov 22.182
$364 when?
I am old enough to remember that when Windows 95 was released Microsoft tried to take over the Internet with Microsoft Network (MSN, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN_Dial-Up_Internet_Access).
They never changed.
Hardware support isn't all that bad anymore. Certainly better than it was when I started using Linux.
It isn't perfect. You'll probably have a better experience with AMD than Nvidia GPUs, most fingerprint readers probably won't work, and newly released hardware might not have drivers for a few months, but most stuff just works.
> I remember the days of Macintosh System 7 and Windows 95. No upselling services. No automatic updates. No nagging. You turned your computer on, executed programs, and that was it.
I 'member the days of Win 98, Win ME and Win XP... made good money cleaning up malware - browser toolbars, dialers, god knows what - from computers. Some came from the hellholes that were Java, ActiveX or Flash, some came from browser drive-by exploits served from advertising networks, but others just came from computers that were attached directly to the Internet from their modems.
And I also 'member Windows being prone to crashes, particularly graphics drivers, until Windows 7 revamped the entire driver model.
Oh, and (unrelated) I also 'member websites you could use to root a fair amount of Android and Apple phones.
All of that is gone now, it has gotten so, so much better thanks to a variety of protection mechanisms.
Security and upselling are orthogonal; I can make a secure operating system that doesn’t notify the user of OneDrive, iCloud, and other services.
Things get more nuanced when we talk about other types of notifications and about whether updates should be automatic or always require a user’s explicit consent. I personally believe that a key tenet of personal computing is that the owner of the computer, not the hardware or software vendor, should have full control over the hardware and software on the computer. This control is undermined when systems are designed in ways to give users less control. There may be legitimate security benefits to mandatory automatic updates, for example, but there are risks, such as buggy updates leading to broken installations or even lost data, and there’s also having to deal with unwanted UI/UX changes.
As a power user, developer, and researcher, I want control over my computing environment. Unfortunately Windows and macOS have been trending toward more paternalism, more nagging, and more upselling. Thankfully Linux exists, but at the cost of needing to switch away from convenient proprietary software tools like Microsoft Office. I can do without Word or Excel, but PowerPoint is what keeps me on Office (I’ve tried LibreOffice and the Beamer LaTeX template). I’m also concerned about hardware getting increasingly locked down, which will hurt Linux.
I had the same reading, it sounded like Windows is worse now than Windows 95, which would be a hot take indeed. But it seems the intent was purely on these nagging aspects which have definitely gotten worse.
It might be easier to swallow the message focusing on Windows 8+ when it really jumped the shark. Windows 7 was a pretty good OS holistically I think even if there are aspects lost compared to the pure simplicity of those really old ones.
You haven't addressed OP argument.
The fact there were security concerns is unrelated with the MAIN points discussed not only in the post, but in OP's reply:
> No upselling services
> No automatic updates
> No nagging.
> No automatic updates
Without auto-updates you could take a guess how many systems wouldn't get patched in months.
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It is not really gone - at all.
The size of the botnets and raw bandwidth they have access to now is staggering. (DDoS, "Residential Proxies", ”Anti-Censorship VPNs”, etc. All just compromised residential devices.
Can you provide some details on the reasons for needing MS Offfice? I'm genuinely curious. What does LibreOffice do differently that makes it a problem for you to use? Personally my only complaint is the performance of LO, which could be better.
I'm not GP but I do know it's rare to open an existing .docx in LibreOffice and have it look right; who knows what it looks like in Word after I've edited and saved it. It's fine creating new documents, and Excel/Calc is better than Word (inherent in being more structured I suppose), but it's not a drop-in replacement. I've used web Office365 when necessary though, not Windows.
> I do know it's rare to open an existing .docx in LibreOffice and have it look right; who knows what it looks like in Word after I've edited and saved it.
This is not true except as hyperbole. Most docx open and let themselves edit quite well in LibreOffice Writer, and they look right.
However, you still have a point. There are always some cases when the compatibility is not good, and the only way to use said docx files would be in MS Word.
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For me, some complex Excel usage was not replicable in either Sheets or LibreOffice.
Excel I'd argue is the primary reason for most in the business world.
What LibreOffice misses, and sheets to a lesser extent, is that Excel isn't just a spreadsheet app. It's a general-purpose programming environment for non-devs (although, at a certain point, you could argue they are effectively programming even if they don't see it that way).
Yeah, there are better solutions. At a certain level of complexity, you probably shouldn't be using Excel and should switch to Python+some SQL database, but there's something to be said about the visual environment Excel provides.
Excel is Microsoft's killer app
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Do not connect it to the internet. Problem solved.
Basically anything in a social network needs to learn to defend itself against threats. Make computer a hermit, and it can go without updates for a long time.
(Oh, but you don't like that? Well, Microsoft doesn't like getting in the news for some worldwide botnet of all Windows 10 machines. I bet they'll figure this out sooner or later.)
Microsoft Office somewhat works in the browser. Certainly good enough for me, although 99% of my actions is upload document to onedirve, open it in web MS Office version, export to pdf and then read with standard tools.
> but the problem with switching to these platforms is that I still need Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office Online works fine on Linux. In fact, it’s superior to native MS Office in terms of stability.
> Microsoft Office Online works fine on Linux. In fact, it’s superior to native MS Office in terms of stability.
It may work for your case - good. Many companies have custom VBA macros that runs on their Excel sheets to get data or validate it. Try to use a document like this on your online Office and you will understand why most Office users can't easily migrate.
What kills me is there seems to be no option for accounting that is acceptable to CPAs besides being held captive paying whatever QuickBooks cloud demands. It's not like dual entry accounting has changed much in 500 years. There are bank integrations and service contracts (notably Apple Card wasn't willing to pay licensing fees for the quickbooks file format, so you simply couldn't syncronize your accounts with your spending, instead falling back to manual import), but they would not make investors happy by merely offering bank connection services
(God forbid banks be required by law to offer a web connector that allows you to request your own data. A workaround I've tried is to have my bank send me an email alert on every transaction over a penny, so at least I have a record, but never got around to setting up an auto import from my inbox)
I've heard that many times, but the 3 accounting firms I've worked with for my business didn't care what accounting software I used. They were all happy to work with Gnucash so long as I could provide the needed reports, all of which were pre-configured in Gnucash. Two were small firms, but one was part of a major national accounting firm/franchise.
If you a small business with retail and payroll, tax tables being up to date are worth the price.
> I miss the days when personal computers were simply tools, akin to pencils and handheld calculators.
> System 7 and Windows 95
If Windows 95 was the complexity level of a pencil to you, Win 10/11 is merely a color pencil. You should be fine getting rid of the nagging and adapting it to your needs, it hasn't become 10x or 100x more complex, merely incrementally more.
> Microsoft [...] not exploiting their platforms.
That's a phrase I didn't expect. What part of Microsoft do you feel was leaving money on the table, as they were sued by basically the whole globefor their business practices ?
Every decade MS never finds a shortage of acolytes.