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Ask HN: what does Microsoft sell that you can't get for free?

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Re: Ask HN: what does Microsoft sell that you can't get for free?

#61

Post by usaar333 »

pacak wrote: post #60
usaar333 wrote: post #59

Things that force me to keep windows installed (not all MS products, but in a sense require you to have windows): 1) Powerpoint - Impress can't even import many powerpoint presentations correctly, and offers far less pre-made themes,. and is overall very weak competitively. (In general, the entire Office suite wins over the alternatives; the powerpoint/impress difference though really stands out). 2) Games. - You can…

1) Never used both of them, can't say here 2) Actually you can play most of them, at least those without copy protection. http://winehq.com 3) That's because Dell made drivers for win and didn't for linux. They can't hire one full day linux programmer? Maybe they do not want my money? 4) Works for me.

2) Wow, I had no idea so many were gold rated. Now if only they could get office working, I'd never have to use windows again on my desktop. :)

3) Are there any laptops with such features that work very well with Linux?

4) What distro to you use? Both of my computers have issues where the full screen window appears behind the browser (and switching back to windowed mode fails) - I'm on kubuntu 10.04.

Re: Ask HN: what does Microsoft sell that you can't get for free?

#62

Post by konad »

AlexMuir wrote: post #16
patio11 wrote: post #12

A desktop OS my mother can use. Sorry Ubuntu. You've sudo apt-got my-heart but, well, reality isn't coextensive with our aspirations.

This was what I thought until I installed ubuntu. Maybe it's the honeymoon period, but it just works. I doubt your mum is doing heavy graphics work or playing games and those are the only two things that are keeping me on win 7. The interface ubuntu is nice, it's stable and programs can be installed in one click. I'm not saying its perfect, just that it's much, much better than I thought.

wait until she buys "garden designer 5" from Wal-Mart

Re: Ask HN: what does Microsoft sell that you can't get for free?

#64

Post by patio11 »

konad wrote: post #62
AlexMuir wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was what I thought until I installed ubuntu. Maybe it's the honeymoon period, but it just works. I doubt your mum is doing heavy graphics work or playing games and those are the only two things that are keeping me on win 7. The interface ubuntu is nice, it's stable and programs can be installed in one click. I'm not saying its perfect, just that it's much, much better than I thought.

wait until she buys "garden designer 5" from Wal-Mart

The exotic technology need which required an engineer to cast magic spells last time was, ahem, wireless. I know, not Ubuntu's fault, but Mom doesn't care why it is a paperweight. She doesn't know what a driver is.

Re: Ask HN: what does Microsoft sell that you can't get for free?

#65

Post by dagw »

SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #35

Primarily, I'd say it's application software support on Windows. Games? You get a few working under Wine, sometimes, partly, but they're far more likely to work well under the version of Windows they were tested with. Photo editing? Photoshop, or even Corel PhotoPaint, leave Linux in the dust. Video editing software? Nothing on Linux comes close to Vegas Video in features and usability. 3d Graphics? A slew of high-en…

I'm sorry, but saying that Blender is the only 3D app for Linux is simply incorrect. Maya, XSI and Houdini plus several other professional 3D apps all run on Linux.

Re: Ask HN: what does Microsoft sell that you can't get for free?

#66

Post by yekmer »

Open Office sucks compared to Microsoft office, I switch to Microsoft when I want to prepare a fancy office document, or open and edit docx files correctly. And secondly, to try if my application works correctly on sucking ie. That is all, I am so happy with Ubuntu

Re: Ask HN: what does Microsoft sell that you can't get for free?

#67

Post by SecurityMatters »

kenjackson wrote: post #36

Can Open Office and/or Google Apps access OLAP datastores as well as Excel can SSAS? Do either versions of their word processor have programmability layers so we can develop workflows directly in our office documents? Across all departments we have probably close to a million lines of VBA, COM, and VSTO code that we use most in Word and Excel. And a little for Outlook. And I just recently, like last week, seen some i…

I don't know about accessing OLAP databases, but it seems like a bad idea, anyway. The programmability of OpenOffice is quite powerful and workflows can and are automated with it.

Visual Studio is not bad for people with little understanding of development. Unfortunately, CS schools turn out many people like that these days. I don't know why people want tools that get in the way and slow you down as much as Visual Studio, but it is popular.

To me, the built in unreliability of Windows is something I wonder why more people don't focus on. Building your business processes around something that needs proprietary tools that can disappear with little notice just seems crazy.

Re: Ask HN: what does Microsoft sell that you can't get for free?

#68

Post by rohitarondekar »

kenjackson wrote: post #36

Can Open Office and/or Google Apps access OLAP datastores as well as Excel can SSAS? Do either versions of their word processor have programmability layers so we can develop workflows directly in our office documents? Across all departments we have probably close to a million lines of VBA, COM, and VSTO code that we use most in Word and Excel. And a little for Outlook. And I just recently, like last week, seen some i…

"And the other tool that only MS has is Visual Studio. Still hands down the best dev environment I've used."

http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/

Re: Ask HN: what does Microsoft sell that you can't get for free?

#69

Post by giblet »

kenjackson wrote: post #36

Can Open Office and/or Google Apps access OLAP datastores as well as Excel can SSAS? Do either versions of their word processor have programmability layers so we can develop workflows directly in our office documents? Across all departments we have probably close to a million lines of VBA, COM, and VSTO code that we use most in Word and Excel. And a little for Outlook. And I just recently, like last week, seen some i…

I think the point was that startups, without a million lines of VBA and friends (terrifying), may get hooked on non-MS software because it's free/cheap.

So in X years they'll be rocking their Palo server and a million lines in to OpenOffice Basic (also terrifying), wondering why more people don't use Google Wave v2.

Re: Ask HN: what does Microsoft sell that you can't get for free?

#70

Post by sjtgraham »

ChRoss wrote: post #47
AlexMuir wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don't get this insistance on control over utility servers. If we take sensitive businesses out of the equation there's really no argument for it. How many times has gmail been down for me? Never. What about exchange/lotus notes? At least once a month. And even when they work they're shit.

When you're using gmail, you also dependent on the internet connection. And my opinion, for business email, having abc@yourcompany.com looks better than abc@gmail.com

if you use the internet, you are dependent on the internet connection.
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