61–69 of 69 posts
I am nostalgic for a Windows I can PAY for that minimizes my participation in the "I am the product" monetization world.
That day has come and gone thanks to other companies and closed ecosystems like Apple
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A linux distro with sane defaults, robust wine scripts, and no personal information compromises, that is easy to install, could take over the world. I vote KaOS as the base: http://kaosx.us
In my experience, Debian is easier to install than a recent version of Windows. I think it's an excellent choice for almost everyone.
I've never done a graphical debian install. how does it compare to KaOS?
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I do agree. And I'll be sticking with Windows 7. I am indeed mostly happy with LibreOffice Calc, or even Gnumeric. But I'm aware of no other spreadsheet app that calculates on multiple CPU cores. Or gracefully handles spreadsheets well north of 50MB. Windows overall may be revolting, but Excel is a beautiful thing.
Another area hugely lacking in open source is image manipulation. People who think GIMP is a 1:1 replacement for Photoshop have never used Photoshop.
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Frankly I find the list of reasons to choose Windows is growing ever shorter. I find Windows 10 to be revolting, and the list of reasons to buy it seems to be: * Games * Industry-specific apps like AutoCAD 99% of Excel users would be satisfied by Google Docs or LibreOffice.
I have witnessed two different trials of Google Apps for "regular" office workers. In my experience, the number of Excel users satisfied with Google's offering is a lot closer to 0% than 99%.
Switched from Microsoft products in 1999, back when Palladium started. That was offensive enough. This is downright disgusting. I always ask co-workers how much liberty Windows users are willing to sacrifice to continue using their systems. Seems even I underestimated with Windows 10.
>I always ask co-workers how much liberty Windows users are willing to sacrifice to continue using their systems. You do realize we live in an era of smartphones, facebook and cloud services. Those liberties have been given up already. Window is looking downright open these days.
Seychelles/Iceland-based cloud storage providers, and rk3xxx-based mobile devices (with VoIP) keep us relevant and reasonably modern while preserving our rights.
There are more of us than you think.
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I remember Palladium[1] too. It seems back then people were far more concerned about locked-down devices than they are today, where the majority are willing to accept anything that is advertised as being "more secure" - even secure against them. The media's constant reporting of hacks and leaks certainly doesn't help... I wouldn't consider myself a conspiracy theorist, but this "security culture" today really makes m…
The truth is that for most users, a locked down device is simply more secure. By controlling the environment tightly, the manufacturer can be sure to exclude malicious software. For example, how easy is it to install a keylogger on an iPhone? Allowing users to bypass security mechanisms will ensure they get bypassed. Wasn't it Facebook that was having users compromised by attackers tricking users into running code in…
all it takes is one skilled user to make all the dumb ones their slaves.
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I have witnessed two different trials of Google Apps for "regular" office workers. In my experience, the number of Excel users satisfied with Google's offering is a lot closer to 0% than 99%.
Change aversion.
Excel has developed into a mini-platform of sorts, where users do all kinds of things with it. Time cards, expense reports, order sheets, office floorpans, generic lists, by-hand Gantt charts, etc etc. And other tools -- even similar ones that are supposed to be 'Excel-compatible' like Apple Pages or Google Sheets -- don't really work with many Excel documents 'in the wild'.
The real killer feature of Excel is Excel-compatibility. That's the only reason I personally use Excel -- because, for various reasons mostly outside of my control, I sometimes have to use documents created in Excel. E.g., my employer's vacation day reporting form is created in Excel by HR, and hell no Google Sheets doesn't work with it. (Actually, even the Mac version of Excel also doesn't work with it -- I fire up VMWare whenever I need to fill one out.)
Nothing other than Excel really works perfectly with Excel documents.
I think that was the biggest reason for the failure of the two Google Apps trials I witnessed.
(But there is also the fact that Excel was massively more feature-packed, reliable, and performant than Google Sheets -- which I think is still the case today. I personally use it because I enjoy the ubiquitous access cloudy-cloud-cloud nature of it, but I don't think that wins for many users, especially those who really mainly just use it at their desk at work anyway.)
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I do agree. And I'll be sticking with Windows 7. I am indeed mostly happy with LibreOffice Calc, or even Gnumeric. But I'm aware of no other spreadsheet app that calculates on multiple CPU cores. Or gracefully handles spreadsheets well north of 50MB. Windows overall may be revolting, but Excel is a beautiful thing.
Another area hugely lacking in open source is image manipulation. People who think GIMP is a 1:1 replacement for Photoshop have never used Photoshop.
There are many reasons to choose Windows. For example, Excel is by far the most powerful spreadsheet app. But using Windows where privacy matters is foolish. And trying to lock it down is pointless. If you need Windows for work, or gaming, or whatever, fine. But dedicate a machine to it. And use a different machine for private stuff, running VirtualBox in Debian. Or Qubes, if you're seriously paranoid ;)
Frankly I find the list of reasons to choose Windows is growing ever shorter. I find Windows 10 to be revolting, and the list of reasons to buy it seems to be: * Games * Industry-specific apps like AutoCAD 99% of Excel users would be satisfied by Google Docs or LibreOffice.
[0] http://wps.com/