Earlier quoted context omitted.
LaTeX[0] might work for you. [0]: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX
And if you're willing to consider LaTeX, I'd definitely recommend LyX.
Neither latex nor LyX is a replacement for Office.
Microsoft suspends Windows 10 update, citing data loss reports
371–380 of 391 posts
Re: Microsoft suspends Windows 10 update, citing data loss reports
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
May I suggest org-mode? It can act as a pretty good replacement for Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and even FrontPage. You can even use latex inside org-mode documents and it has an integration with gnuplot.
This comment is a living example of Poe's Law as applied to Linux fans.
A perfect reflection of why Linux is a failure on desktop. If org-mode and latex are sane replacements for office for average users, may the kernel gods save us all.And this is from someone who knows how to use both.
Re: Microsoft suspends Windows 10 update, citing data loss reports
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
I may do that at one point out of frustration, but don’t underestimate the enormous amount of stuff that one has to relearn for a reasonably advanced windows user. Not the least if you live in visual studio. And my job doesn’t involve managing linux servers. All I know about linux, I learned it toying with my synology...
> visual studio Yeah, that's a big one. There is no other C/C++ IDE out there that can measure up to Visual Studio. Either you use vim or emacs with a hundred cobbled together plugins to sort-of approximate a productive development environment (and you still don't have a usable debugger); or install one of KDevelop or Code::Blocks, which are fine for toying around with toy/academic projects of less than 100kloc; or y…
Qt Creator is free software, and I've always liked it better than Visual Studio.
Re: Microsoft suspends Windows 10 update, citing data loss reports
#374Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know everyone is suggesting Libreoffice (and it has honestly gotten a lot better recently) but I remember once when my laptop died and all I had was a shitty old Centrino someone lent me, I ended up using the Microsoft online powerpoint tool to make a presentation that was due. The web versions of MS Office tools are actually pretty well build and feel pretty close to their desktop counterparts.
Libre office is not even 10% MS Office. Don't know why people recommend it. It messes up my word formatting.
Current versions are pretty good - and while MS Office is a veritable power tool (I know no real equivalent to MS Access), most users use ~10% of the functionality; sufficient for many, esp. at the price.
As for the formatting - yeah, MS doesn't seem to follow its own document formatting standards, even for the newer documents. That puts other suites in a hard spot: a) follow standards and present imperfect documents, or b) invest immense resources into bug-for-bug compatibility?
Re: Microsoft suspends Windows 10 update, citing data loss reports
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why don’t they let people set a certain day in the week for major updates (E.g. Sunday), and only the most important micro updates are force-installed immediately?
Some major updates replace other broken major updates.
I guess they could make an exception if booting up failed.
Re: Microsoft suspends Windows 10 update, citing data loss reports
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
Slight downside: apparently Office 365 won't support LTSC soon: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Windows-IT-Pro-Blog/C...
The people who use LTSB also know how to get a volume license copy of Office 2019, which will be supported.
But how long will perpetual Office licenses be sold by Microsoft?
Problem is... 75% of Microsoft’s customers will be satisfied with Office 365 - the other 25% are utterly allergic to the notion of losing sovereignty over their data, but knowing Microsoft they’ll optimise for that 75% and eventually stop servicing the remaining 25% who desire perpetual licenses and on-prem storage, presumably they’ll be happy with OpenOffice thus giving MS’ Office org an excuse to ditch that market segment entirely.
...and that would trigger Microsoft’s aping of Apple’s similar departure from their customer base, which means they lose their halo effect.
Re: Microsoft suspends Windows 10 update, citing data loss reports
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
And if you're willing to consider LaTeX, I'd definitely recommend LyX.
Neither latex nor LyX is a replacement for Office.
That depends on what you use Office for - which is why I qualified my statement. I wouldn't recommend them as general replacements, but they exceed my documentation needs.
Re: Microsoft suspends Windows 10 update, citing data loss reports
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and yet a thousand light years away from Windows Yep, in the front. Stuff works. You don't need 32GB of memory to run anything. The system doesn't get locked down all the time while the OS uses the entire IO capacity. The computer does not misbehave all the time and instead does what you order. You get software for almost everything right from the package manager, and it works for you, instead of shoving ads or lic…
Such rants would actually be believable when instead of cherry-picking the ultimate worst experiences and generalizing them you'd stick to more average statements, more reflective of the truth. I'm not saying this to defend Windows, denying it has problems would be insane, but just to let you know it's prerfectly possible to rant on Windows without going into extremes which sound ridiculous to people who actually kno…
Windows not running on 8GB of memory isn't non-usual. (Yes, 32 was an exaggeration.)
I see Windows using the entire IO capacity of my work computer every working day, 1/3 to 1/2 the time.
Windows update destroying your configuration isn't even news anymore. It restarting when people don't want is a widely known fact, and more than 1/4 of the times I have a half-hour meeting at work the computer stays there updating for 1 hour or more.
Windows software installation is a worst in class experience on nearly any dimension. It's not something that happens once in a while.
I don't know what you call "cherry-picking". Those "ultimate worst experiences" happen every day.
Re: Microsoft suspends Windows 10 update, citing data loss reports
#379I'm a tolerant person, but recently I switched from Windows to Mac because the forced Windows updates kept messing me up. One time I left a long simulation running overnight. In the morning, I was greeted by a computer that had automatically rebooted to install updates, killing my simulation. Another instance was my daughter's birthday party, where she wanted to show a movie. The computer decided to spend an hour doi…
It's annoying but if uptime is critical you really need to change the settings for that. The reason Microsoft forces updates by default is because of all the incompetent computer users out there (especially older folks) who bitch and moan about how insecure and unstable their Windows that they haven't updated in 2 years is.
If uptime is critical, what on Earth are you doing with desktop Windows? There are even server variants now, if you need to have the Windows flavor.
And worse: I'm all for auto updates...unless they break the system! (See article.) No wonder people are holding off upgrades. (Not Windows-specific, for sure - but Win10 seems to be the worst offender)
Re: Microsoft suspends Windows 10 update, citing data loss reports
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are they security patches, though? The difference between a critical safety update and the update that adds new things to Candy Crush is imperceptible to the casual user who just wants to get work done and will foster an unfair distrust of the important need for these updates. Additionally, the implementation is frustrating and buggy. If someone updated OpenSSL from an insecure version on my machine, I'd probably nev…
I hear you, but your claim that Windows Update is "frustrating and buggy" just doesn't mesh with my experience, so it's hard to relate to your concern. I don't think I've ever noticed Windows update running, except for the once-a-month or so times I've come back to my computer and it's been restarted. Hardly "buggy" or "frustrating". Admittedly I don't think all Microsoft updates that get pushed out are security patc…
My frustration with a personal PC is just turning one on the morning after doing updates and having to wait an hour before I could go back to work.
For silly reasons, though, I've had to update a lot of OEM Windows Home installations to new. Something like Ubuntu would have been better if starting from scratch but there was a lot of work to move the codebase to that once Windows stopped being something you could trust to turn on when you wanted it to turn on and turn off when you wanted it to turn off.
Anyway, this led to days of non-deterministic updating where sometimes it would fail to find the new updates until after I left, sometimes it would fail to install an update, and sometimes it would boot-loop. But always it would take longer than installing a new Linux distribution from scratch.
Now this is all anecdotal but even an installation-and-update cycle that goes well takes too long - seemingly because Windows has now mixed the worst DRM implications of SaaS and proprietary SaaP for most of its genuine customers. When I see people talking about how updates can be made to work as one would expect them to work with just a few steps (which seem to change following every major release), I'm reminded of playing with shakier Linux and FreeBSD desktop distributions as a teen. Now Ubuntu is the OS that 'just works'.
My frustration about this largely comes from any complaints about the implementation being lumped in the 'ignore' bin with the Luddites who don't care about the security at all. My very proprietary Chromebook updates painlessly.