The problem: our desire for convenience
Bring on the downvotes, but: When it comes to tools like computers, convenience is synonymous with productivity. People aren’t unreasonably demanding to have their hands held, they want to get stuff done. We need to stop acting like
convenienceproductivity is just one of many concerns. It is the primary concern.Freedom is nice but to most people it’s only important if it helps us do the things we want to do.
I find dealing with Micros~1 a giant pain in the ass. It’s always getting in the way of productivity with pointless rearranging of menus all the time, constantly trying to get me to use One Drive, shoving AI into every corner of everything.
I’m trying to make a spreadsheet to figure out and share budgets, instead I’m spending my time hunting for that menu that disappeared and figuring out how to disable copilot because I’m legally not allowed to share client data with third parties.
This an incredibly tech-brained answer. “Sure, lots of OSS is difficult to install, breaks frequently, and lacks key features, but did you know Microsoft sometimes moves a menu item?”
I love OSS and I want it to succeed but “an item moved” isn’t in the same ballpark as the barriers to OSS adoption.
Lacks key features? Like collecting telemetry data? A subscription model? Not for me.
And talk about shit failing our IT department spends way more time fixing MS bullshit than maintaining Linux machines. We use Fedora at the office and that is extremely stable and very secure.
When IT has to fix a Linux machine it"s because of an actual hardware failure
Over 1 billion people use Microsoft products, but let’s all listen to @[email protected] 's anecdote about his IT dept. I genuinely believe your anecdote, but it’s irrelevant. And until OSS evangelists (of which I am one!) realize that other people exist and have different preferences and experiences, MS will keep winning.
Not relevant? Hah! Found the M$ bot I guess
This is probably the stupidest hill to die in I have ever seen. Of all the things to defend MS for you try to justify their destruction of the pull down menu!?
They broke 30+ years of standard GUI just to keep breaking and changing their stupid ass ribbon bar.
I don’t really care for Macs but god damn does their universal PDM system work great.
The amount of times I have had to click through and memorize their dumb as fuck ribbon bar just to have them change it again the next version is ridiculous.
I started the name calling by saying “tech brained” so I apologize and I’ll ease off on that.
With that said, I have to strongly disagree with you. I use MS Office, LibreOffice, and Google Docs regularly, and IMO the ribbon was a huge improvement for word processors and spreadsheets over traditional drop-down menus. Drop-Down menus have their place but for document editing they are not ideal.
You are going to die on that hill. You sir have some serious screws loose and I will never take anything you say seriously again.
Oh no, some crank who can’t understand that other people have preferences won’t take me seriously. This is a major loss. I am so owned. This definitely isn’t emblematic of the problem with the OSS community.
You also act like an idiot. Now you are a victim as well. The big bad OSS community!? Do you even listen to the shit that is pouring out of your mouth.
Micros~1
I see what you did there. 😆
Yes, exactly that! That convenience == productivity connection is exactly why I am a Linux Mint fan!
Convenience has value, so a lot of people will give their “free” information, attention, and control to commercial entities in exchange for it. Enshittification ensues and many of us are conditioned to beware of things that are simple to use because it REALLY just means you’ve been locked out of 95% of the options.
When a good FOSS project can bring convenience and productivity to more people around the world with NO strings attached, that is an incredibly good thing. It’s like, humanity actually working together just for the sake of the greater good, but doing it on the internet because governments can suck at it.
Damn, I need to find a good open source project to help out this winter when I’m forced to stop my oudoor “engineer turned farmer” hobbies for the season.
Edit: probably something Jellyfin related. Can’t believe I forgot to mention that!
No, what you say makes sense, and I think it’s part of the reason why linux usage (as a daily driver) is starting to increase now versus 20 years ago. It’s just easier to install and use linux distros nowadays.
And most folks who want office for free are going to go with google docs, for the convenience factor.
In addition to that, with great respect to the hard working developers on LibreOffice, at least some of what seems like “unnecessary complexity” in Microsoft’s format is most likely just requirements LibreOffice isn’t solving or haven’t even encountered yet. You don’t get to Office’s size without having to deal with the most insane batshit crazy backcompat or compatibility issues.
They are intentionally obfuscating their file formats. It has nothing to do with complexity or “backwards compatibility” Microsoft has a LONG history of stuff like this.
That may be but without sources that say “let’s make the format more obscure” this is just opinion. Your opinion, OpenOffice opinion, IBM opinion etc.
Look for example at the 1904 dating system that Microsoft still has to support. Real customers still use this shit.
I’m not saying Microsoft has always exhibited good behaviour. But their crappy approach tends to be on the go to market side.
Office still has to support a leap year bug to allow banks to run their crappy Lotus based record keeping. Lotus for Darwin’s sake!! There is so much history in these files and what office has to do with them.
Not sure why this author is spreading “paid software is convenient and just works” rhetoric. Simply isn’t the case. You just get addicted to trying to solve your problems with money.
Right?! That’s how this article ends?! “Sorry, but people are lazy, so, uh…Microsoft just wins I guess.”
I don’t buy the argument that windows just works or that it’s somehow better or more stable. The reality is we all have grown to learn about computers specifically using windows and it’s been a steep learning curve. We have gotten familiar with its specificities and its sporadic misbehavior and accepted that as the norm. And people prefer what they are used to even if it’s suboptimal because they would rather not learn something else from scratch, even if in the long run it could be better.
Put any person who has zero computer experience in front of a windows computer or Linux computer and I doubt they would say the windows computer just works and the Linux one doesn’t.
the windows just works argument actually refers to the fact that it’s consistent.
If you have a problem with the desktop, nobody needs to ask you which de you use, or which parts you have substituted out. You have a graphics problem, nobody asks if wayland or x11. You have a problem with audio, nobody asks you whether you have pipewire-pulse installed and to use pipewire. Shit’s the same everywhere.
I say this as an arch linux user. The choice we all love, is actually a detriment to the average non-power user.
Apple has even fewer choices and therefore greater consistency.
Anecdotally my parents use linux because of me using it on my computers too and one nice thing about it is that they can have a consistent UI. The kind of changes that happen with at least some well established desktop environments and window managers are not nearly as radical as when Windows changes where things are at in their UI. There might be some UI tweaks here and there depending on your choice of desktop environments but I don’t use rapidly changing DEs on their PC. With some of the simpler well established DEs it isn’t typical that there will be a change so dramatic that you have to relearn how to use it like with Windows 8 or something. There are some such as GNOME that have undergone some heavy changes in the past but you can choose to use simpler ones like say LXDE or Cinnamon.
They mostly use the web browser anyway so it isn’t like it was a really steep learning curve. Since they switched to linux the amount of help I have had to give them has decreased. If my parents did more advanced tasks they would need to learn some new ways of managing their computer yeah but for them they just browse the web, use Libreoffice and use the printer mostly. Even before they switched to linux I had them using a bunch of open source cross platform software for years before that which did help the process go smoother but Libreoffice for example has a similar UI to the classic Microsoft Word so it was not like it was a huge learning curve.
I do their software updates but me doing software updates has just been me typing “sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get full-upgrade” and restarting. If there ever was a problem I would have to fix it but I would have to fix it if there was a problem with Windows too. I find linux to be easier to fix than Windows and the error messages to be easier to figure out. Overall the switch has gone well and there is less I have to worry about.
Put any person who has zero computer experience in front of a windows computer or Linux computer and I doubt they would say the windows computer just works and the Linux one doesn’t.
In my experience, usually with Linux they have less problems and it’s easier to use. Until they need an application that only works on Windows.
I think this is an issue where you are talking about people coming from windows trying to do windows things on linux like run windows software. Of course you can in some cases run windows software on Linux but it is not a fair comparison to blame Linux for not being able to run windows software. Linux has it’s own suite of software and that is often better suited.
In my experience, it’s been a bit of a mixed bag. There are some things that work in Linux, and some things that don’t, even after a bit of fiddling. My desktop’s front panel is completely unusable on Linux, for example.
Windows is at least widespread enough that it’s far more likely that parts will work on it at least to some degree. And sure enough, the front panel works fine there.
Put any person who has zero computer experience in front of a windows computer or Linux computer and I doubt they would say the windows computer just works and the Linux one doesn’t.
I did this experiment on my own kids. They find Linux more usable, and find it hard to believe people tolerate Windows.
There’s also some indoctrination involved.
But they have access to both, and they prefer Linux. I think that the “Windows is genuinely easier” argument doesn’t hold any water anymore.
Linux works better than windows for most apps/system stuff.
But there are certain classes of apps which are not up to par with whatever is available on windows. An office suite is one of them, I just use the Google suite (mostly sheets) in a browser, it works better for me.
I agree with the developers point about lock-in but sadly I don’t have enough time at work to work with libre calc over proprietary alternatives (I have tried it truly but the performance and user experience is just not good enough for someone already past deadlines)
Then i don’t know what you’re doing with your computer, but every time i use linux, all those things that are “awesome and just work on linux” somehow still have lots of annoying gotchas that waste too much of my time.
I’ve got some nice linux servers running that i’m really happy with. But once you go for the linux desktop, it’s just a world of pain compared to windows, no matter how you look at it. I’m more than experienced enough to get it running in the end, but claiming that linux “just works” is delusional…
Just the fact of how the ecosystem is fractured (which is also mentioned in the article here, with running a debian package on fedora), is already something that’ll make it too complicated for a lot of people to handle. And even the things “that just work”, just don’t. For example, i’ve got a steamdeck like device now, with bazzite (steamos like OS). Yes, it’s amazing at running windows games in linux. I heard so many people say how with proton “running windows games on linux just works”. If you stick to the ultra popular games, it for sure does. Go to a game that’s a bit older or lesser known, and no it isn’t. Make time to figure out settings to get it to run, tinker with controller mappings, and in the end, it might just still not work. And pretty much everything on linux feels that way, the initial impression is decent. If you stay on the safe path, it’ll work pretty well. Do something a bit less common: you’re on your own.
And that’s its commonly accepted for trolls to blame the user, and be like “it’s free, so accept it the way it is” when someone dares to ask questions or … even… (do i dare say it?)… complain… Doesn’t make for the most constructive environment…
Linux has achieved many great things, but the linux desktop sure has its use if you’re willing to spend your time on it, but acting as if it’s a better experience than the windows desktop is just delusional. There’s no other way to put it.
I didn’t say Linux just works. I’m just fighting back against the preconceived idea that it’s just a total mess and windows isn’t. I have myself ran into issues with linux. But also, I’ve run into many issues with windows too.
The difference is that when people encounter issues with windows, it’s like well too bad, need to find someone who can fix it. But when they encounter an issue with Linux, it’s like linux sucks, let me get back to Windows as if it didn’t suck at least as much.
The point i guess with the main OS’s like windows/macOS, is that microsoft/apple put in the time to support most edge cases, and most things you can try either work, or aren’t that hard to make work (assuming you don’t go against things they try to force. But that’s not something that most users we’re talking about here do). So for windows, want to install that app for windows XP from 20 years ago? no problem. As mentioned in the article here: want to install that up to date program made for another distro? good luck…
And that’s in the end what it boils down to… It’s a fragmented ecosystem, and many slightly advanced things require that you understand how your computer & OS work. Things that a slightly advanced user can handle in Windows via some UI, will most likely be far harder on linux…
I’d love to use a linux desktop more, but sadly my time is also precious, and i just don’t have the motivation to use it fighting with the linux desktop >_<…
Not so much the user experience, but I’m not aware of any software that doesn’t work with Microsoft, except for ones developed by Apple.
With the latest version of Windows, it’s not even a question as to whether a given piece of software will run.
Networking your home computers still does not work smoothly in Windows. It often stops for no good reason until you reboot everything.
Every single time I try out Linux it’s been a shitshow. Stuff doesn’t work, drive encryption requires multiple passwords to boot up. Updates that fail.
Windows just works. Only apple is more consistent.
I have never seen an encryption implementation that required two passwords to decrypt the disk.
Is it possible the first one decrypted the disk and the second password was for your user account?
Could be. I just remember being perturbed that there wasn’t an easy way to undo that situation.
Most desktop environments have an option for auto login under the user settings. That way you only need to decrypt the disk.
I still end up with other issues.
Right now I have one that attempted an update and ate the storage device. I later find out that the update command is deprecated and shouldn’t be used. Why is it still there then?
Another that installed a DE but the display is sideways and it’s not responding to the config.txt edits to rotate the display. In windows i didn’t need to look anything up, just right click and edit my display settings.
What distribution are you using? The common desktop environments (KDE & Gnome) have simple graphical display configurations similar to what you find in Windows.
Anyone who thinks this is new, please read this, this and this.
And there’s also this. It’s a topic since shortly after the standardization of the Open Document Format 2006. MS then feared to lose whole governments as customers, so they (pseudo)standardized their own format, with a whole bunch of traps (in the format) and abuses of market power.
The thing with “just works” in monopolies is that it eventually stops working. I already have terrible excel bugs all the time on my work computer. Left clicking a cell sometimes just selects half a dozen adjancent cells. You vlick something and all of a sudden the rendering just goes completely haywire… You have two larger tables open and it just crashes…
Things will only get worse from this, until the global economy will loose trillions to being stuck with Microsoft.
The thing with “just works” in monopolies is that it eventually stops working
This gets accelerated when the company starts changing the product just for the sake of having to change something to meet some OKR, or because they need to find a way to incorporate the newest marketing buzz (cloud, AI, etc).
The Office suite was simple to use and performant. Nowadays I watched a college professor struggle for 8 minutes trying to figure out how to save a file locally rather than saving it to OneDrive, because they redesigned everything around that. It also takes an obnoxiously long time to launch, it keeps popping up some Copilot button in inconvenient places too.
16 digit numbers
Still
You’re right but at the end of the day, the average person is content with having their stuff just work for now and that’s a reasonable expectation isn’t it? If it ain’t broke, people aren’t going to go out of their way to protect themselves from a what-if that they may feel is going to maybe mildly inconvenience them when it happens regardless of what it actually is, since they may be ignorant of the true state of how things might be.
And in the end, some are just gonna accept that inconvenience from stuff not working completely rather than switch. People have been saying to switch away from Chrome for years and now even with ad-blocking being nerfed, people are still on it.
The “windows just works” claim is stupid. Especially the statement the author makes on how you just double click an icon and it just works everytime and if ever there is an issue, someone else will eventually fix it.
on windows id just give up if I couldnt solve an issue, on linux I actually find a solution, the solution for windows is click 50 obscure things if it exists, linux is usually modifying something with the terminal which can be scary if you arent used to it and don’t know what commands do, eventually youll realize its mostly heading to a director and editing a file, technically you can click around and do that without opening a terminal, using a file editor and manager instead.
My only issue with Libre Office is that they are not available on mobile phones. I want to use spread sheets to make calculations and projections on my finances if I can’t use my computer at a given moment.
https://github.com/opendocument-app/OpenDocument.droid
I’ve used this a couple times. Seemed okay
I understand your desire, but I’ll be damned if I’m gonna use any spreadsheet software on my phone. I can think of few worse platforms for excel. Even my iPad Pro is a nightmare if I don’t have my Magic Keyboard and a mouse. I’ll crack out a laptop or talk through it with gpt.
I think there is a version on F-droid right?
Only a viewer not full package: https://f-droid.org/packages/org.documentfoundation.libreoffice
Oh
oh, maybe they removed it?
If I recall correctly, it has been released for moile on and off as experimental builds. Last time I grabbed an APK, it wasn’t ready.
Moved to LibreOffice. No regrets. Thank you, Microsoft!
does libre office do scripting? (like VBA?)
LibreOffice Basic, JavaScript, Python. But the macros wouldn’t necessarily be compatible with Excel.
I’ve heard this comment about OpenXML (the xml format of the office documents) before, and i’m a bit on the fence about it.
It’s of course indeed ridiculously complex, but so is office. Microsoft both adds a shit ton of functionality to their documents, and keeps an impressive amount of backwards compatibility.
In the past i heard complaints about part of the OpenXML spec that also allows older binary data in there for backwards compatibility reasons, which of course means for OSS implementations that they don’t just have to implement this spec, but also the older spec that came before to be truly compatible with everything a modern office version can open.
But on the other hand, if i look at it from the side of Microsoft, they opened up their format, they’ve got a gazillion functionalities, should they remove functionality to appease the open source developers? If so which? Should they stop being backwards compatible with documents of decades ago to appease the open source developers? If so how long should they support? Are you going to tell their customers?
Office is an immense program with an immense amount of legacy features, backwards compatibility, …
It’s incredibly complex by nature. And might they have made the format more complex to dissuade competition? Could be. However, in this instance Occam’s razor pushes me more to “write a huge program over a timespan of many decades, with thousands upon thousands of programmers working on it, and you’ll indeed most likely end up with something very complex…”
Office Open XML was only standardized in order to combat the threat posed by Open Document as organisations were starting to mandate use of standardized formats.
You write as if Microsoft did this because they wanted interoperability, when in reality they only begrudgingly accept that some must be allowed in order to avoid losing control of the market.
The real solution would have been to never approve the OOXML standard and not legitimize Microsoft’s attempt to make their proprietary format appear open.
The one thing you have to give Microsoft is backwards compatibility. They make hot garbage, but God damn if you can’t run that garbage from 10 years ago.
Although 10 years ago isn’t that long in computer terms any more. Those are machines that can still run Windows 10 without issue. It’s an older computer, but still perfectly usable these days.
I haven’t done the experiment, I’m curious to know if you can take a random binary compiled for Linux 10 years ago run on the latest version of popular distros. See in which ones it runs.
Depends on it and its dependencies, probably. A lot of the core utilities are generally unchanged enough that they should still work despite being a decade old.
Sure, but it’s not quite the compelling argument it used to be.
Today, I’m not sitting here pining for old Linux software that stopped working. And the small amount of old windows software that did finally stop working actually works now only works on Linux with Wine.
That’s another of the decision points that finally switched to fully favoring Linux, for me, in the last decade.
I would agree, except that every piece of it is significantly more complex than it needs to be. ODF is considerably simpler in part because it makes use of other pre-existing standards for things like dates and times. OOXML redefines so many of those things, and in many cases Microsoft Office’s implementation isn’t actually compatible with their own standard.
Do you have more concrete examples? I’m reasonably familiar with OpenXML, and seeing the date issues in microsoft systems (Excel having the same bug that considers 1900 a leap year, to stay compatible with Lotus Notes), i can imagine them redefining everything just to be in full control ^^'…
Integer storage in spreadsheets… There are a ridiculous number of ways to store any integer, and I don’t just mean because you could theoretically store
1and00000001and they’d be interpreted as the same thing.
The problem: our desire for convenience
This hits it right on the money. As nice as open source and open standards are, at the end of the day none of that matters to the 99% that want/need to do X as fast and painlessly as possible.
To people like my wife MS Office/LibreOffice/Google Docs are all the same thing in the category of productivity suite. And one of those does not meet her where she lives in day to day life. And it doesn’t because there is no money in doing so for LibreOffice. And there is no benefit to her to seek out LibreOffice for her uses.
Hell, just take a look around at the number of people that preach about the evils of Microsoft, Google, or whoever but love them an iPhone and Macbook. As bad as Microsoft and Google can be for screwing over the user with vendor lock-in they don’t hold a candle to Apple. But they get the money despite there being “better” options technically and philosophically for nearly everything they make, but Apple knows all of that pales in importance to 99% of potential customers compared to being convenient.
want/need to do X as fast and painlessly as possible.
Yes, but money is a pain point. Free software eliminated that pain.
The piece on using the tech is a bit much. We cannot get by without a smartphone in modern life and they essentially do not exist outside of apple and google.
Sure they do, but all of the alternatives are not nearly as convenient. But you can absolutely get by without an iPhone or Android phone with Play services.
The example actually proves the point more strongly than LibreOffice vs MS Office does by the increased level of effort it requires of the user to go out of their way to not actively support the bad things Apple and Google do.
Sure they do, but all of the alternatives are not nearly as convenient. But you can absolutely get by without an iPhone or Android phone with Play services.
Effectively, for most people, they don’t.
Most people make a new phone purchase impulsively when involved with negotiating a phone plan at a store or in a rush after they break their old phone and need a new one for life and work almost immediately, the cost benefit analysis for most people simply doesn’t make sense unless they are naturally interested in tech as a hobby or it is related to their career (or are surrounded by friendly people who are).
afaik our digital identification system does not work well outside of iOS or Android (most of the time, not at all - since it breaks on updates and they update basically daily). so we’re stuck with their duopoly. because digital id is mandatory.
Once upon a time they did support linux on desktop but then ubuntu went and decided to make a phone and linux support was mysteriously discontinued a week after.
our digital identification system
which one?
BankID
Ok show me a phone that is readily available that has the ability to log into banking apps etc.
Are you being dense on purpose? I said you could absolutely do it, but it was far more inconvenient.
So you repkied to me qualifying that it is an effective duopoly by saying that there are other companies which is what is implied in what I said?
Who is dense when you can’t understand the practicalities of real life and how business interact with our lives. You can get a linux phone, which is probably below .5% of market share and then sandbox android to use these apps…which is in itself necessitating the use of a google product.
I could walk into the bank also or not talk to people but effectively there are two manufacturers with a duopoly on consumer mobile communications enviromments.
“There are ways” is some cop out bullshit.
I honestly don’t understand why I would ever write up or share a Microsoft document.
As for word, it’s just fucking rich text format. It’s obvious they’re manipulating the format to lock down users with less computer knowledge. Otherwise, why is it so fucking complicated?
Markdown accomplishes 90% of what a word doc does and it is legible with or without rendering.
EDIT: If I want data in or out of a spreadsheet program, I’m using CSV.
All of the “special features” of office docs wind up being security nightmares, unusable junk, or both.
I honestly don’t understand why I would ever write up or share a Microsoft document.
Corporate execs literally cum over MS’s next big thing. A lot of companies use MS-based infrastructure and applications.
My work just issued me a Surface 7 a few weeks ago (RIP my former Thinkpad T15 G2), and while it’s nice, the fucking copilot key is driving me absolutely insane. I can’t disable it unless I turn on “Fn Lock” which switches it’s function to open up the Context menu (i.e. right-click menu). HOWEVER, if I do that, then the F1-F12 keys’ volume, brightness, and home/end/pgup/pgdn functions are disabled. I’m convinced this was an intentional decision by MS.
Corporate execs literally cum over MS’s next big thing. A lot of companies use MS-based infrastructure and applications.
Yeah, I mean I’m in that boat myself. But I have the option of SharePoint or Confluence at work and despite the fact that it also sucks, I’m choosing Confluence ten out of ten times.
I get that some people try to do actual work in these docs, but it strikes me as junk every time I encounter it.
I’d imagine you can run some kind of custom script to disable or reassign the key, similar to what ahk does.
I actually put in an IT ticket over it today right after I made that comment, because I accidentally hit that goddamn key again while typing up an email.
IT came back with - and I shit you not - “Open the Microsoft store and install Microsoft PowerToys”
For context, this company takes security extremely seriously. Just a few months before I started, they had recovered from a major ransomware attack, due to some moron that downloaded an attachment from the wrong email. They don’t even allow flash drives, except for Apricorn encrypted drives, but those you have to sign out directly from IT and the serial number is tracked. Plus the usual KnowBe4 simulations, regular training, etc…
So IT coming back with that response was a pretty big surprise to me 😅
When in save for myself I like rtf or markdown. But when I need on my work it’s normally something from a template or something already on the server that is using Microsoft format, when your employer decide this for you, there isn’t any choice.
No, there’s not often a choice.
But I include and discuss a 4% penalty when making wage calculations in an interview.
Even though Office, OneDrive, Teams, Ansible, Jira and Confluence are different toxic apps/websites, it’s still the same “shit tool stack” penalty, one hit.
My understanding is that Proton Docs web editor is a markdown editor and I’ve seen people complain about the limitations there but I’m not a power user to compare with. Don’t know how well collaborative annotation/suggestions/replace would work with markdown. Fully out of my knowledge base but interested in learning what office text document abilities can’t be done in markdown. There’s still ODF for whatever markdown can’t do
If the XML standard is overly complex, does that mean it’ll be a bigger pain for MS employees to maintain? Sounds like cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face.
Iirc the openXML standard was open sourced due to some anti trust stuff brewing. They then expanded on the standard with proprietary addons that give LibreOffice/Google Docs trouble.
I’mma just going to sit over here in the corner with my AbbiWord and Gnumeric…
microsoft is a dirty bastard
I mean, they could just really suck at writing good software. Isn’t some sort of rule of thumb law to never attribute to malicious intent what can just as easily be explained by stupidity?
There is such a law, but many of us feel that Microsoft has proven malice a few times, when it comes to open standards.
