I’ve been dual-booting Linux and Windows for a while, with Windows as the fall-back option in case I wanted to use Office for something. Now that they tried to trick me into paying a subscription for their AI slop machine, I’m finally, fully out. It was a pain to actually track down and back-up the stuff that was held for ransom in OneDrive, but now it is done.
I feel like Windows tries with every change to push it’s users to Linux.
Secret good guy MS - get everyone onto Linux and tank their stock price 😂
I get how people need to use micro-shit for work but I don’t get how a any freedom enjoyer is willing to use spyware on their own hardware
Just make the adjustment, deny the parasite engagement and profit.
Paying micro-shit anything is funding your oppressor. This is a class war, act like it folks
I feel like Windows tries with every change to push it’s users to Linux.
Even their core applications move to being web based.
We’re already past that point, we’re now at “cram copilot into everything, even if it makes no sense.”
Just going to mention that if you’re okay with non-FOSS office software, I really like Softmaker’s suite (their buy-once non-subscription version).
Just cancelled my 365 the other day too. Been on Linux for half a year now and forgot I had it until the news of the copilot price increase came out and reminded me. I was happy I could cancel and be refunded the remainder of the term and get some money back in my pocket!
I have to wonder if anyone at Microsoft is paying attention. It’s like New Coke in the 80s. They quickly realized they fucked up and rebranded the original as Classic Coke. I’m wondering if there will be a Windows Classic coming out soon with no AI, no subscription, no forced cloud dependency bullshit. lol probably not but whatever.
Keeping with the soft drink analogy, I think Pepsi tried something similar in the 90s with Crystal Pepsi, which also failed miserably.
If “lime must go up” always, then they need to come up with a better way than product enshitification.
New Coke was different in 2 important ways.
-
It was actually a way to hide the flavor change in the switch to Corn Syrup instead of Sugar, and never intended to be permanent.
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Pepsi existed
There’s no real commercial competition for Microsoft. Linux is great, but there’s nobody for a business to call when shit fucks up. And Apple’s walled garden and high prices make it terrible for enterprise.
- People stopped consuming New Coke
As long as people do nothing other than complain and continue to use the product they have no reason to change.
There’s enterprise support for several Linux distributions like
https://www.suse.com/services/premium/ (and SEL is a thing) or
https://ubuntu.com/support
Whether those distros meet the demands is a different animal.
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I can finally say that I’m making the move to Linux now, as I’m dual booting Fedora. I plan to try to do my regular browsing and activity on Fedora, while keeping my school work and what little gaming I do (laptop user) on Windows. Hell, once I get confident enough in my Linux skills, I’ll probably move the school stuff over to Fedora too.
I’m doing it mostly cause I’ve read the privacy horror stories, but also because I just hated Windows 11. Like there’s nothing about it that is worth staying for… The excessive resource use, random settings being changed that you have to dig to find, the shitty Co-Pilot ads, and the fact I won’t be able to use office once I graduate… Yeah no.
Good thing is I’m a cyber student, so guess I’m just getting a head start for a easier grade in my future Linux class lol.
Same, Microsoft is about to force my laptop to update and I am about to own zero devices that run Windows.
There is no coming back either, which is what makes the schadenfeude of Microsoft (the dog) really actually catching the car this time so funny and satisfying.
I think it is going to make heads spin how fast the idea that Windows has unassailable hegemony in the desktop space becomes an antiquated idea. There is an asteroid in the sky, and the time of dinosaurs is over.
All the alarm bells should be going off at Microsoft hq and I know they probably feel like they are sitting pretty and feel nice and future proofed in their business plan, it is amazing and makes my heart sing.
Sorry not sorry you law breaking, monopoly chasing, morally bankrupt losers. You might be richer than I ever will be, but lets be honest, that is because I have standards about what I am willing to do for money.
They dgaf about us. Their Enterprise clients are their cash cows. But we are rid of their fleas nonetheless
Yeah I know that is how they see it but the generational wave they have been coasting on was the fact that computer nerdy kids would learn the ins and outs of Windows software long before even entering the workplace.
Microsoft has been taking advantage of the fact that kids like me would be so excited to learn computers that they would learn the basics of just poking around the desktop before they could read.
Nowadays that is gone, there is no playful connection and the sea of change will butterfly-effect into the future and cause a million symptoms of an issue we all know Microsoft will never actually value or address.
Microsoft has been functioning this entire time with a special unspoken in with nerdy kids who grow up to build important and valuable computer tools. Microsoft has steamrolled that, and on the scale of 10+ years I am not sure there will be anything Microsoft can actually do to mitigate the strategic defeat that is going to cause even if they are able to be honest and lucid about it at that late date.
More and more computer nerdy kids are going to learn the shit out of Linux because it is where they game and it feels welcoming to them (i.e. it doesn’t feel like sneaking into a suffocatingly boring office full of identical cubicles that gives periodic blaring notifications on a gambling casino nobody your parents know can afford called the Stock Market).
I can’t understate how much this will lead to Microsoft completely losing the plot because no one could ever suggest this as a danger in a Microsoft boardroom and be taken as seriously as they should.
gets popcorn I for one am going to enjoy the show
Really looking forward to see steamos on a workstation 😁❤️
At least they don’t make you pay for cancelling like Adobe does
What stopped me initially from paying Adobe was the fact that they force you to use their Cloud app which served no purpose to me. A crack doesn’t come with Cloud or at least a disabled one… Now that I know you have to pay to cancel, I’m pretty happy that Adobe stuff is easy to crack.
Cracked software still enables their dominance over the market.
What? How much is it? Surely that can’t be illegal?
You have to pay if you want to stop a year’s commitment early. Iirc you have to pay half of what you promised you would pay them over the year. So if you changed your mind it’s cheaper to cancel than to continue paying for the months you have left.
If you sign a contract agreeing to their terms (and receive a discount in exchange) you have to follow them. The same goes for any other contract where you have a year’s commitment like for an ISP. It’s all pretty standard.
Is it annoying? Yeah obviously but they make it pretty damn clear when ordering that it’s a year’s commitment and that you receive a discount. Any reasonable individual should be able to figure out why you get a discount.
Adobe signed me up for a “trial” over the phone, which they then ended up trying to charge me to get out of.
I ended up just blocking their payment and never heard anything else about it. Fuck Adobe, they are in contention for shittiest company in my eyes.
Ooh it’s an early termination fee. OP made it sound like there was a fee on top of the subscription cost. Which I guess still fits the definition.
Still scummy.
Welcome! Been like a year and a half for me, and I can’t even imagine ever going back to Windows. Just using it for work is already too much.
I can feel the bloat when I use it now. Like you need to get from point a to b in a hallway. It’s just you…and windows inflatable boat they fully inflated in the hallway between a and b. And you have to squeeze through to go to point b.
Yeah, Linux feels like what using a personal computer was always supposed to be.
You should try OnlyOffice. It is very similar to MS Office and fully compatible with Microsoft formats. It has fully replaced MS Office for me for all office work. Also it can be easely integrated with your private NextCloud. You can install it from Flathub.
Edit: it also lets you edit and convert pdfs like Adobe Acrobat Pro
Is this better than LibreOffice?
Why not both? It’s simple to install both and decide for yourself. I use both for different tasks.
People usually refer to LibreOffice, so it is interesting that this alternative I never heard of before is allegedly better (it looks better that is for sure)
LibreOffice has more features and is overall better. OnlyOffice is more compatible with MS Office. So if you need to use docx etc. for work, you use OnlyOffice as a workaround.
But LibreOffice has supported docx for years now, right?
It messes up object arrangement. This is technically Microsoft’s fault, but that doesn’t help when you want to communicate clearly with a MS Office user.
Isnt libreoffice for the .odt format? I read that .odt and docx arent compatible and I really dont want to convert my whole documents collection nor deal with broken/rearranged content when editing documents. I went with Onlyoffice but am only 80% satisfied with it
LibreOffice supports .odt and .doc and .docx and a ton of other formats though.
LibreOffice (and its predecessor OpenOffice) have been a solid FOSS and *nix alternative for like over two decades. So I’m a bit confused about what these other alternatives provide that LibreOffice lacks.
What was it you would fallback to use Office for that you couldn’t do on Linux?
I suspect that you could use Linux, but people have muscle memory for certain things ig
It mostly has to do with formatting things: sometimes I’ll go to a conference, and they want the slides put on their computer, and powerpoint might display differently than on my Linux laptop, or collaborating on Word documents, where formatting can be somewhat fragile. In the past few conferences though, I got by fine with my laptop, making a PDF of the slides as a backup… So I was confident that things will turn out okay before I pulled the plug.
Are the webapps free or do you have to pay for them too? Could be a good option if collaborating with other people is important.
What distro are you using, and how difficult was it for you to get started with it?
I’m currently making a list of distros and looking at each’s pros and cons, including:
- what did work out of the box?
- what required more work to fix / workaround?
The way to go about this is to just download Linux Mint and begin using it. No additional overthinking is necessary. You’ll be able to get Steam working pretty easy, if that’s your thing. Internet bowsers and a word processor are already installed and working out of the box.
I started trying out Linux a few years ago, on a few different computers. Well first, a really long time ago, but I was a Mac user for a long time, and then switched to Windows in 2018, so my modern Linux experience started in 2021 or so.
On my home PC I started with Mint, but because I was doing some programming, ran into problems because the compilers and CMake there were too old to compile a few things I needed to work on (CUDA was the problem for CMake, C++20 was the problem for the compilers). Switched to Tumbleweed, was happy with that for a while.
Meanwhile, on my laptop, I switched from Manjaro to Fedora KDE spin after some stability problems, and was so pleasantly surprised by how it was both solid and up-to-date, that I ended up moving everything to that.
Edit: biggest problem I had was when I tried to install Mint on an office PC that I built for myself. Mint didn’t support the on-board ethernet so I had no way of getting it online, and after getting lost in forum posts, gave up.
I used to recommend Mint a lot, but it’s falling too far behind hardware wise and in the front end. Lack of default Wayland support and so many unsupported hardware is not where you want to be sending new users today.
+1 for Fedora based distros at this point. I tend to push Nobara because it has a lot of hardware tweaks built in to give a better out of the box experience, but I can’t really say vanilla Fedora has had issues as long as I was on an AMD platform.
Mint is cool. But, that mint in other menu. LMDE bookworm based. Rock solid and no slugish
What was painful about getting the stuff out of OneDrive?
When I did this it was straight forward.
- Sync to local
- Move all to new directory (his triggers a mass deletion on OneDrive)
- Sync to seafile (in my case)
mainly it was because I was trying it from my linux desktop, and if you try to download a large collection of files from the onedrive web interface it’s 50/50 if it fails half-way through
Ah yes. I’ve had the same issue. The web download is hit and miss. Totally understand, and a warranted description of that experience.
