Just recently moved onto Linux. Most likely not coming back when these kind of things just keep happening. I'm really surprised how well everything works. 120Hz HDR 4k Nvidia no issues on Wayland. Kubuntu 25.04/Plasma 6.3 is very nice. EasyEffects/PipeWire makes audio better compared to Windows. Steam/Proton/Wine works very well for games outside ones that have kernel level rootkits. Outside DualSense controller having issues connecting to bluetooth I can't think of anything that's worse than Windows while many things are better.
Ditto; ~20 years of dotnet dev, 1000+ games on steam. Couldn't be more baked into the ecosystem. Its just the work laptop left with windows now, and the team is working to support a non-windows dev env.
Not OP, but if I was installing Linux for the first time I'd either go with pop_os (not sure if it's as good anymore as last time I checked it, a couples years ago) or kubuntu, because KDE is a bit more familiar to windows users.
I too was experiencing odd/erratic pairing issues with DualSense controllers and this RTL8671B based dongle, and using the older firmware entirely fixed it. Now four controllers can be connected simultaneously without issue.
> Outside DualSense controller having issues connecting to bluetooth
FWIW I use a DualSense controller connected to my Linux computers all the time without issue and without having to do anything special. In fact, Sony is the author of the DualSense driver on Linux[0]. Do you connect anything else over bluetooth? I'm wondering if your bluetooth setup might just be broken in general rather than specifically for DualSense controllers.
Ha! I recently thought I would try it again as the cloud & office are getting really too annoying. Libreoffice is snappier than google docs/sheets in the browser, which I say like this is special, but these days with Electron it really is. And it's on my own system. I'm staying here... It's fast & works well for work and private use.
Check out onlyoffice as well. I use onlyoffice + libreoffice depending on the workload. I find libreoffice to have a better spreadsheet tool but prefer editing/commenting on documents in onlyoffice and it has a more modern aesthetic.
Backup important docs to rtf/txt. I've had Libre/OpenOffice docs blank/all text replaced with hashtags on me suddenly. AFAICT, it's an autosave bug that's never going to be fixed (though I'm not technical enough to know for sure). Personally, I would never use those programs for anything important.
Googling would show that any number of users run into issues with OO/LO file corruption, often from power interruption during saves. The applications seem to handle that in a suboptimal way, and maintainers are unwilling to address it. My suspicion is that their unspoken contention is that the problem is with Windows, not OO/LO.
I recommend backing up to a general file type simply because it's less likely to open in the offending application by default, if the user ever needs to access it.
I eventually did get it working, but man you are luckier than I getting Nvidia to have "no issues". I had to waste an entire weekend getting an Nvidia card working [1].
I love Linux and specifically NixOS but my experience with good audio and non-AMD drivers has been pretty so-so.
Meanwhile, I just tried 3 different flavors of Fedora last week and could not even get to the point where I could log in reliably. Never mind getting the handful of Windows-only apps I still rely on to work. I'm despairing that I may have to let Windows update itself to Win11 while I wait for my next hardware upgrade cycle to roll around so I can try to pick more compatible hardware.
If anyone has any recommendations for how to pick desktop components that will "just work" with Linux I'd love to hear them.
I wonder what issues you've seen (error messages), and what hardware you're using. Fedora has been my goto distribution for more than 15 years. And aside from Nvidia, and Gnome, causing me trouble, it worked great[1]. Though I always install the Xfce spin.
For your Windows applications you can try to use winapps (windows vm behind the scenes, but tucked away from view) https://github.com/Fmstrat/winapps
[1] never update to the latest Fedora version, at least until a couple of months after release. If you don't want to be a beta tester. Yes sometimes they don't a good job with SELinux policies and you'll be dealing with annoying popup notifications from time to time. And yes, if you're using full disk encryption (via LUKS) you really want to enable some flags which Cloudflare engineering contributed back (but are not the defaults), otherwise stuttery desktop behaviour is possible.
> If anyone has any recommendations for how to pick hardware that will "just work" with Linux I'd love to hear them.
Some vendors sell hardware with Linux preinstalled or specifically tested (besides the obvious ones like System76/Framework/Tuxedo, Dell provides an XPS flavor that comes with Ubuntu). You don't need to actually use the preinstalled distro, but buying such models ensures baseline support is solid and it sends a signal to vendors to continue ensuring so.
Then there's Apple's M1/M2 lineup, which provides the smoothest Linux experience you can have today (specific hardware features are not supported yet, the rest works extremely well!).
Other than that, the Arch wiki is typically a good resource that lists quirks of individual devices with Linux.
I guess I should have clarified, my only personal (i.e. not work supplied) computer is a mid-tower desktop, which I'm absolutely not buying pre-built. More looking for how I can tell if e.g. a specific motherboard is going to play nice with Linux or not.
More seriously, it's only the motherboard and the GPU that can be problematic here in the first place, isn't it? So that's far more manageable using websearch than laptops with their gazillion components. But then again I've only built a new PC once these last 10 years, so maybe I was just very lucky with my choice.
> Outside DualSense controller having issues connecting to bluetooth
I've had this issue as well on KDE Plasma. I'm convinced it's some sort of bug within Plasma itself. If I use bluetoothctl to pair the controller, it works fine, might be worth giving that a try if you haven't.
I moved over to Linux about a year or so ago when Microsoft announced they were going to start pushing their AI shit on every Windows system. I created a small partition intending to just give it a shot but ended up never moving back since 99.9% of everything I tried just works. It's really quite amazing how far Linux has come in the past decade alone and right now the only reason I keep Windows on my work machine is because there's still specific dev pipelines I can only do on Windows.
Just out of curiosity, what distro did you go with? I last gave Linux desktop a try about a decade ago (Ubuntu IIRC) and found it still not quite there, but I'm willing to give it another shot so I'd be curious what you had success with.
I ended up going with Nobara which is a Fedora-based distro focused around gaming, so it automates and deals with the typical driver issues and proton setup. Ended up being perfect for everything I need.
We're cutting it close with a decade here but out of the box driver support is absolutely better, especially if you're dealing with AMD GPUs, to the point where I find a fresh install of almost any Linux distro less annoying in terms of support than Windows.
Unfortunately, that's simply not true. Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (in 2016 as the name implies) with gnome 2 and Unity was peak and Ubuntu has regressed since beyond recovery: snap or other desktop containers with unsolved/unsolvable permission problems, systemd, wayland, and any number of other zero sum changes behind the scene devs like to drool over yet not. a. single. user advance or new desktop app. Even the relative "progress" in browser-based collab tools we enjoyed since about 2017 is at risk as FF is left behind by the likes of MS Teams.
I used to use Ubuntu but abandoned it when they moved to "snap". I'm not the most proficient user of Linux, but it was quickly clear that something was really wrong with new versions of Ubuntu. Mint Linux has been working well for me.
I don't think the Snap authors ever used Snap packages. The barrage of update notifications, to close my software constantly... that was super frustrating. All I had installed for snaps was Firefox and Discord. Imagine having a 20+ snap applications installed. What a notification nightmare.
No, this is definitely not true. I dabbled with Linux back when I was in college (hence, a decade ago) both because the computer labs had Linux installed and because it was interesting to me at the time.
There were a bunch of issues with compatibility if you wanted to do any sort of gaming and driver support was pretty bad from what I remember. Flatpaks were barely starting to become a thing, desktop environments were very unrefined and applications like LibreOffice still had a way to go.
If you look at what's happened in the Linux ecosystem in the past decade there are in fact significant improvements and refinements thanks to the hard work of thousands of contributors making it easier and easier to use.
Same here. Work requires I use Windows or Mac, but I've switched most of my home systems over to Mint Linux. The final nail in the coffin for Microsoft for me was when I upgraded my CPU in my desktop, the MS Office liscense I paid for stopped working and they wanted me to pay another few hundred dollars for another liscence. I mainly only used Office for Outlook as I have 30 years of emails in Outlook, but I switched over to Firebird on Linux and have not looked back. The AI stuff going on with Windows is definitely a big part of me wanting to switch too. I do not want what Microsoft is selling anymore.
And one has to wonder, will M/S used these cloud documents for their AI push ? Even if the Word Docs are encrypted, I fully believe Microsoft can read the text in those documents.
People should realize everything you do in Excel and Word is being spied on by Microsoft, this cloud push is making that process easier and faster for M/S.
At the very least, go to Libreoffice. But better yet, as you just did, people need to abandon Microsoft and Apple for Linux or a BSD.
People should realize that everything they do in Windows is being spied on. There's no point in fighting against a user-hostile OS where every setting you use to try to protect yourself can be removed or toggled with the next forced update.
Those applications may work for some, but they are no replacements for Lightroom in my opinion. My Lightroom 4 installation from 2012 (I never upgraded after Adobe went all in on subscriptions and cloud) still beats the latest Darktable/Ansel versions, hands down. The only things I'm missing are a CLI for automation and a few features that RawTherapee has, like switching to a view of one color channel with a single key. Other than that, Adobe somehow got it incredibly right in terms of workflow and features back then. Using the software feels like it was made for photographers, rather than software enthusiasts.
Still, I'm in the same boat as many who wish they could migrate their decades' worth of photos with all their adjustments to a FOSS alternative. For me too, Lightroom is the last application that keeps me from dumping Windows for good. It already lives in a Windows VM on a Linux host these days.
With all due respect Darktable is not a Lightroom replacement, having used Lightroom years ago the recent Darktable releases are maybe sometimes reaching Lightroom UX from back then. I'm sure the technical image processing stuff is best in class, but it's too much for me wanting to make my raw photos look better than what the camera does with jpegs by default. The addition of built in presets is extremely welcome, it should be exposed to newbies way more than it is currently.
First I switched to Linux Mint. Turns out anno 2025 most distros are still made with legacy ThinkPads in mind. Then I installed Fedora KDE. It gives an impression of working. Make no mistake - I have weird display glitches, shit crashes all the time, stuff randomly refuses to work, some devices I have require ridiculous workarounds, basic tasks require cryptic terminal commands, software updates introduce awkward regressions, but I think we've truly reached the milestone where a dedicated person can run Linux as their main desktop system. I suppose in about 30 years we'll have a Linux distribution that can be used on desktop without any IT knowledge.
Of course technically speaking I shouldn't complain because I have provided nothing of value to the Linux ecosystem (how the fuck do I even start, even if I wanted to?), but still, the point stands.
> we've truly reached the milestone where a dedicated person can run Linux as their main desktop system.
You're 20 years too late for this.
The reason why Linux doesn't run well on the latest greatest hardware (and never has) is because the vendors of that hardware range from indifferent to actively hostile to Linux, and to make the system work people have to fight. Buy a legacy thinkpad, or something you've researched, and you'll have fewer problems than with Windows or Macs (which are tied to even more specific hardware and obsoleted by company whim.)
Of course, if you're on the bleeding edge of technology, everyone is using Linux (whether directly or in VMs and containers), so when I say the latest greatest, I mean the latest greatest consumer and business user stuff.
I've never understood comments like this. It's like you're looking at a pool full of people who have been swimming for years and telling you the pool is nice, and saying: "I guess it's finally ready for the real experts now."
Also, if you love vendors so much, you can have one. Buy your Linux computer from somebody who sells Linux computers, knows any problems you'll run into on that specially-selected hardware, and call them when you have a problem, just like you would do for the others.
> Of course technically speaking I shouldn't complain because I have provided nothing of value to the Linux ecosystem
This is the worst point by far. You can complain about anything that is broken, you just can't expect anyone to care (because you haven't obligated anyone to.) The problem isn't complaining, it's complaining badly. Get a vendor, whine to them.
That's completely true, but from the point of view of a user who just wants a working system, also completely irrelevant. If I were to recommend Linux to my mom she wouldn't care why exactly her computer doesn't work correctly, she only cares about the fact that it worked on Windows and doesn't work on Linux.
I hope that as Valve pushes people into gaming on Linux, things will slowly change.
All of that compute can’t compensate for the fact that starlibreopenoffice is atrocious. Big corps have been looking for ways to migrate for decades but fail because it’s so abysmal.
There’s an important generational component that’s getting missed here.
Most children (American children, at least) grew up on Chromebooks. That instills a certain expectation of how these things work — documents save themselves.
To switch to Microsoft Office means adding a cryptic, unnecessary-seeming extra step. I imagine it feels something like having a laptop that's designed to be shut down before closing.
You’ve all heard the stories about college CS students who have to be told what a folder is — and those are the kids who actually want to work with computers. Now step back to the next generation of lawyers and nurses and novelists and think about their lifetime experience.
Definitely true, I think there is a divide where a GenX or Older millennial may say "why would I want you to save my stuff to the cloud" Z and beyond are likely more in the "why wouldn't I save to the cloud?" or at the extreme "you can do something other than save to the cloud?"
And while I think this is to some degree "keeping with the times" MS clearly has ulterior motives to do this, to lock users into an ecosystem, to dangle premium services, to charge for storage etc.
I suspect the HN crowd leans towards pessimistic/jaded views and that like MS is mostly doing this for the other reasons and not to conform to the norms of a population that doesn't really use MS word.
Maybe, but adding a setting for cloud/ local storage is not that complicated or even auto-save to local filesystem. Microsoft is just chasing the sales of “one drive” subscriptions.
I'm almost positive that it's both and also a short-sighted "give the customer what they ask for" approach. You could easily achieve local auto save, or a clear "upload to the cloud" UX, or whatever else. But the user got confused about saving documents, sooooo cloud.
Then the data centralization is a nice plus that makes it impossible to go back on.
The only reason the user got confused was because of the terrible fucking cloud-first save dialogs that they kept pushing. And all the different iterations of OneDrive that weren't the same thing.
It's also getting tiring seeing everything dumbed down for dumb people. I thought that people would learn how to use computers, and become empowered to integrate technology into their lives in the way that works for them. Instead, they have just become dumber than ever and more helpless and dependent.
> You’ve all heard the stories about college CS students who have to be told what a folder is
Back in the olden days of the early 90's when I was in school, I was working for the university's "Unix Group". Since I, being an undergrad, was the low man on the totem-pole there, I was always the one sent out to the various departments to do the support work on their workstations. The CS professors were, without question, the ones who knew the least about how to operate their machines. They mostly had no interest, as they were much more invested in CS theory than in practical use.
> Most children (American children, at least) grew up on Chromebooks. That instills a certain expectation of how these things work — documents save themselves.
I'd say iPads rather than Chromebooks, but the same applies - no concept of a file system, everything just living "in the cloud", the devices themselves being ultimately disposable - as long as you have iCloud set up, you can put your iPad in the shredder, and get all of your content back in under an hour.
For the people who do shut it down, they do it by holding down the power button for 10+ seconds, because that’s how phones do it. On Windows at least, that causes a forced/crash shutdown.
That's not Windows specific. It just forces power off on a firmware level, possibly even lower (the power management IC could have "hold to turn off" built in).
Yep. First party and well behaved third party Mac apps have been doing so since… jeez, 10.7 Lion (released in 2011) I think?
The way it works there is that documents are auto-saved to a non-volatile app-specific temp directory until they’re explicitly saved, at which point they’re moved to the specified location and continue to be auto-saved there. Anybody who uses TextEdit as a temp text stash is familiar with this with the hoard of unsaved documents that comes back even after a cold boot.
Microsoft is just motivated to push cloud storage onto usage.
Word has defaulted to saving in OneDrive (if you turn on autosave and you're signed into an MS account) for years now, I think since the Office 2016 > Office 365 update. The only real change I see is that the document will now be given a name with the date instead of just 'Document 1'. Maybe it's a little more aggressive about turning on autosave for you? The autorecover location is still in appdata.
While incompetence might be an issue, I think the greater problem is that Microsoft is rolling back control and generally sucks at UX.
Why does this app that's been working just fine as desktop software need to save anything to the cloud by default? It's conceptually odd.
I've used Google docs from the beginning, but I actively choose what docs I want on that platform.
All MS had to do was add "save to cloud" as an additional save option along with "save" and "save as" (maybe renamed as "save to desktop") then auto save could activate where your last save location was. This would be good design.
Agreed. Functionality like this should be presented as a choice in an OOBE welcoming screen right after installation. And it should be _a choice,_ something that can be reversed at a later date if the decision was wrong.
Who's incompetence? When half their users need to ask "what's a cloud", that option is too complicated. What's sensible and reasonable and logical to us, isn't to the rest of the world.
Do not decry the value of a hammer. There are more specialized tools, and they have their place. A shared property we value is that you can put the hammer down, and it stays a hammer. It doesn't Develop Ideas about spying on you, it doesn't pivot to being an awl, the handle doesn't spontaneously fall off, you don't have to re-learn how to hammer things.
I have to re-learn how to use software very regularly, and as more and more things become software I have lost some functional skills because there are only 24 hours in a day and I can't stay current on everything. If I haven't done a thing in six years, it means I need to research what the current software tool for doing that thing is, try installing four of those things and land on the one that isn't broken or some type of malware, and then teach myself an entirely new interface over time. I just wanted to hit a nail! My hammer was installed on my old computer! I knew that hammer!
But no, it's never that simple with software. I can learn 150 software tools to do specific things and have to re-learn something every week just to maintain capability. I don't have to do that with hammers, wrenches, saws, etc.
We need more hammer-like tools instead of managed, constantly updated "ecosystems", and when we do find a good one, we need a way to keep it. Because we have finite time and cognitive bandwidth.
"That was deprecated three years ago, why are you still trying to use an old version that doesn't even have security updates? What is wrong with you?! [WONTFIX]"... Fuck you, give me back my fucking hammer. I could do this task I'm trying to do in literally 90 seconds ten years ago; I'm an hour deep into determining how you would even begin to do it today.
I've no idea what you mean by "walled garden" w/r/t MacOS, but I understand it's an article of faith on HN.
Again, for the Nth time, you can run any software you like on a Mac. You can do anything you want. App store? Of course. Direct vendor download? You bet. Build from source? No problem.
Further, this line is out of place here because Microsoft is FAR more invasive about pushing cloud-first storage than Apple has ever been. No app on my Mac default to saving to iCloud. NONE.
Direct vendor download? Sure, as long as it’s signed with an attestation key that’s countersigned by Apple. Running an app not signed this way is definitely possible, but requires invoking a hidden menu and then still has startup delay as the attestation check fails.
HN as always drastically overstates how hard it is to run non-AppStore software.
Yes, the Mac defaults to a stricter policy than most HN readers would want. Mass market computers SHOULD. That they don't is a reason we have so much malware on the Aunt Millie PCs of the world.
HN readers are more technical. We want to do what we want to do, but we have to understand that what WE want isn't what's right for the average user. As long as a platform gives us a path to download a random utility from a buddy's site or whatever, it's fine.
It's very, very easy to set a Mac to run whatever you want. Nothing is hidden about it. Is it different than it was under Sonoma? Yes, but the changes are well documented and there are countless articles online, including at Apple, that explain the trivial steps required.
I mean, by that standard Linux is a walled garden, because you probably can't take all your apps and data with you to another system without significant overhead.
I'm no spring chicken. I've had painful migrations. I'm not interested in tools that don't have an exit. Nothing about a normal Mac setup is locked-in. I could migrate my data to Linux, I expect, with minimal hassle. I mean, I wouldn't, because I enjoy the network effects of using the Apple ecosystem, and I find MacOS more pleasing to interact with than any Linux window manager I've yet seen. But it's absolutely possible for me to leave, and simple to do so.
OneDrive has to manage synchronising the cloud with multiple, potentially independently updated, local copies. This is a much harder problem than anything Google have tried to tackle, with more ways for things to go wrong compared to "no internet connectivity? No documents for you!"
This has the effect that (to a first approximation) everyone knows someone with a horrific OneDrive data loss story, no-one particularly trusts OneDrive with anything actually important, and so no-one wants to be forced to use it for everything.
However, OneDrive's promise is "save your files and photos to OneDrive and access them from any device, anywhere". Accordingly, the model OneDrive actually exposes to the user is directory trees of arbitrary files containing what, for OneDrive's purposes, are opaque blobs. This leads to all the behaviours you'd expect from a distributed system using such a model, and therefore the trust issues the public has with MS distributed systems.
Regaining someone's trust in a vendor after a bad experience, even for a different product, is very hard.
>Somehow, Microsoft managed to make the same feature sound and feel and be creepy.
The company they're imitating (poorly, as always) is one I've found so creepy that I actively go out of my way to distance myself from. For at least the last decade at this point. If Microsoft is being creepy too, this just means they'e successfully imitated the competition... for once.
I'm not sure they're quite the same. If noone else has coined a term for it I'll go with the "cancer cure fallacy" but maybe someone has a better name. Open to suggestions!
They will secretly use your docs to train their models on it, say it was a mistake, pay their $4million dollar fine in 2040 for doing that and laugh the whole time.
To say nothing about censorship and alerting in your private documents. Discussing sensitive biological matters, or unpopular political thoughts? Not a good idea when living in an authoritarian state.
Yep, I'm constantly astonished by adults that insist that Linux is too hard to use on the desktop. My entire family has been using it for years. I raise my kids on it. Works great.
The least technical people will be fine because they only use their 4 programs where a Chromebook would probably be enough.
Between those and the people that can navigate everything on Linux, there'll be mildly technical people. Those may explore things that are out of the ordinary but will be unable or unwilling to fix issues that could arise from that
My family has also been using it for years, but I'm the one who always had to install, update, fix problems, etc.
I think the biggest obstacle to widespread adoption of Linux is not using Linux itself, it's installing it on a computer. 99% of people don't know how to format a USB device, or how to enter the BIOS.
To be honest, I think most non-technical people that are not close to someone technical probably don't even know about Linux and/or just don't care about it.
If it isn't a problem it's not worth fixing. A lot of people don't even know where they are saving their stuff to, so if it's in the cloud or on their device doesn't really matter to them.
I'm not in the US but the third party doctrine looks obscene to me, is this saying I'd have no expectation of privacy for my full name/DOB/address/ID because I legally had to give it to a bank to open an account, which is an essential thing to do in the modern world to get paid into nevermind spend money? I absolutely have an expectation of privacy for all of those details, doubly so if I am mandated to provide them to a third party
> A lot of people don't even know where they are saving their stuff to, so if it's in the cloud or on their device doesn't really matter to them
Until their computer dies, and then they get upset at Microsoft for not having some automatic backup process like they have on the other platforms their friends use.
It's a shorthand for 'it's hard to get everything 100% working after a fresh install and it's hard to have it not break when it updates'. If you manage to get from the out-of-the-box 90% working condition and don't touch too many things afterwards, it works great indeed; hence the recommendations of starting out with legacy hardware so you're closer to 100% than 90% initially.
Yes I moved away from Windows to MacOS but couldnt get used to the UI and they have now sprinkled bad AI tools throughout. I use KUbuntu now which feels a bit like Windows 10 and really is all I need. But what I really want on my Thinkpad with KUbuntu is the perfect open/close screen management like the Macbook has and changing from second monitor to no second monitor often causes issues and doesnt just work argh.. Maybe one of these linux first laptops will fill the void.
> Problems with sleep/suspend modes is a relatively common in Linux.
It is if you slap Linux on your Windows computer and expect it to work. Dell etc have teams whose entire job is ensuring Windows works well on their hardware. These are systems integration teams.
If you try to put Linux on a Windows box, you've signed up to do all the system integration work yourself, without any help or support (eg documentation) from anyone.
The best Linux experience will happen on hardware that was designed to run Linux, with a system integration team to make the hardware/firmware and Os work together, with a support line you can call or write.
I just need to get a dozen kernel engineers in a room with a laptop and a dude who does nothing but open and close the lid every 2s. Test passes when the laptop still is responsive by lunchtime.
That’s fair. So you’re pretty confident most these very annoying Linux hardware issues go away with Linux first hardware? Suggest a couple brands for me to look into please to replace the thinkpad?
Hopefully, but most likely a lot a people will shrug or won't notice. Others will start using Libre Office and discover that it's more than enough for their very basic tasks.
I am using Linux personally for the last 5 years or so. When she bought a new laptop I told her that she wouldn't need windows for her use case and the (free) Linux would be more than adequate.
She is mostly using it for education (university), browsing internet. Just casual stuff.
She then proceeded to install and test the programs she needed and everything worked basically out of the box, so now she continued to use it because it doesn't matter to her what she uses, as long as she can use it.
We recently started rolling out 11 at work, and we have all sorts of group policy hacks to disable stuff... one thing I noticed is that despite copilot being disabled, the button still appears at the top of every office app. I'll have to check on the weekend, but I wouldn't be surprised if we hard enable this option as we have our own OneDrive instance to replace our terabytes of network shares.
Or those working on export controlled content. ITAR is everywhere these days, and it would be un-fun to experience a deemed export of technical data because an engineer didn't watch where their document went and the data center has non-US-persons working in it.
Seems like Microsoft's Modus operandi the last few years has been:
Make anti-consumer move -> get backlash -> repackage same egregiousness while stalling & deflecting -> repeat cycle
Steamrolling their users then getting rewarded with their stock going stratospheric. Excellent!
> Steamrolling their users then getting rewarded with their stock going stratospheric
Welcome to the world of modern capitalism. I'm seriously starting to question if a company can survive on the stock market by creating a solid product and caring about the users of that product.
Someone else mentioned that the kids (what, with their damned loud k-pop music and Tok cloks) are used to using Chromebooks that autosave documents.
Also, MS wants more sales opportunities. If data is on their cloud, they have at least some control over your access of it, and the ease with which it is used in your daily work. It's a pain in the ass to have to manually save stuff, but that's what you'll have to do once you exceed the 5GB free tier limit. I guess you'll probably want to shell out for more space, no?
The good news for your work Mac is that it's your IT and budget departments' headaches, not yours.
We have an enterprise contact with Google with data privacy terms and controls on what happens with that data. I mean, Google will even sign a HIPAA BAA with you if you ask them to.
We don’t have one for the 3 people in the company to need to use Word on occasion.
Local First stalwart that has some legacy || Cloud first "new kid" but you surrender your files.
The issue is, first: they changed the deal. Change by default is bad. People need to learn this because honestly it's an important lesson.
Change is inherently bad, so if you're going to change: have a stonking good reason.
Second: Now the drawbacks of the second "hip" alternative is included the same drawbacks of the first. So, now, Google Office is a strictly superior offering.
Congratulations, I guess?
Yes, more people should use libreoffice, but most people are concerned with compatibility, a sunk cost on their office skills and it's pretty bad UX.
If I am reading this right I assume this is only if you have onedrive enabled?
If that is the case, I think it makes some sense if you are already setup to use that to default to saving there since it makes it easier to find your files on other devices and they be safe. Theoretically if you have it setup you already agree to the risks of storing data in the cloud.
however... The real problem to me is that onedrive is enabled by default and that they are now requiring you to login with a microsoft account to use Windows. If both of those were not the case this makes complete sense.
But until they stop enabling one drive by default and making it a pain in the ass to disable this is bad.
My computer broke while I was traveling a few years ago, so I bought a cheap Windows laptop at Walmart. It took me an hour to figure out get that thing up and running without setting up a Microsoft account online. I even had to change a freaking BIOS setting! I bet you can't even do it at all now.
Probably a good move on Microsoft's part, tbh. Not great for society, but good for Microsoft.
I find it annoying because I often just want a document to live on a local device, and I'll decide when I want to upload it to a cloud service. But a lot of normal, non-tech people don't have any concept of how data is stored on their devices. I can't tell you how many times I've encountered a situation that roughly goes,
"Did you download the file?"
"I guess so."
"Okay. Now go the file and open it."
"Where is it?"
"I don't know. Where did you download it?
"I don't know!"
For a lot of normies, just saving the document in the cloud is going to be easier. The ironic thing is that now I'm the one who is annoyed because I have no idea where my document is saved.
In practice, I do keep a OneDrive account because I find the service useful. But I run Ubuntu on my primary computer, and really only interact with OneDrive when I feel like it through a web browser. I feel much more in control of my own computer and my own data.
I love onedrive and have been a long time user since it was called skydrive. I also love the sharepoint features in onedrive.
But I stopped auto saving by default. I find that simply navigating a document and making markups ends up saving the document when all i wanted to was view it and not save it
I use the modified date filter extensively to figure out what is most relevant and what is not. With autosave, the date modified keeps changing. And going online and restoring the file to an earlier version changes DM to now. Meaning that information is either permanently lost or I have to hack it and change it manually.
I moved over to Linux last July. I had to move back because Google broke something in Google Docs to where Braille support would read everything each time I moved around the document, and I have to do my job. Now I'm on Windows and loving all the NVDA screen reader addons that aren't a thing in Linux because not enough people know accessibility.
Can't say I'm surprised. The office "Save As" dialog boxes have become increasingly more focused on forcing this on users & required ever more clicks to get to say C drive
Same for option to email people documents. On corporate systems its now forcing "share via onedrive/sharepoint"
What next? Even my text files will be default synced to the cloud, and nothing will be beyond the prying eyes of advertisers, governments and data-hungry LLMs?
To be fair, I already sync some of my text files to the cloud, but I choose which ones I sync to which services. This seems to take away our agency.
I think that for "normies", the risk of losing data because of a dead / stolen device (because in all probably they don't have / do backups) is higher than the risk of loss privacy or other problems that HN "techies" may have with this.
Yes, but the risk may be far greater for one than the other.
It’d be a bummer if my cousin lost the term paper he was writing. It would be a Truly Bad Day if a coworker uploaded a sensitive document to an unauthorized (or unexpected!) cloud service and it got compromised and the sensitive data used against us.
The former would be bad for my cousin. The latter would involve lawsuits and smitings. The probability is lower, but the risk is much, much higher.
I'm already annoyed that, on Mac, ever since I installed OneDrive, I can't save Excel files to OneDrive while in Excel to my OneDrive, without Excel being logged in to my OneDrive account.
I have OneDrive because I want it to behave like Dropbox or Google Drive. Bug off, man.
I grew pretty frustrated with WYSIWYG word processors about a decade ago, and moved to a Pandoc->LaTeX->PDF system for everything until about six months ago, when I finally learned Typst and use that for everything now. I just prefer Markdown (or Markdown-adjacent in the case of Typst) and I hate formatting sneaking in with invisible characters.
However, I realize that I'm weird, and I certainly don't blame most people for preferring the Word style of editing, since most people aren't nerdy software engineers.
While a part of me hopes this works as a push for people to use FOSS like LibreOffice, I'm not really holding my breath. I tried getting my parents to switch years ago after they were complaining about having to pay for a subscription to Office, and they were wholly unmoved and didn't like LibreOffice.
In fairness, LibreOffice didn't really do what my parents wanted; the equation editor for LibreOffice is decidedly harder to use than Microsoft's (even compared to the old Mathtype version), and the syntax for their spreadsheet stuff is different enough from Excel that it can lead to a fairly steep learning curve.
I don't think you're weird. I also have some tiers when it comes to typesetting.
Normal documents, 99.999% of the time, are written in Markdown, and stored like that or rendered to PDF, if required.
Everything serious go through LaTeX. I don't care about Typst, I'm happy with LaTeX syntax (I've written my Ph.D. with it, so I don't care if it fights you).
For some Office stuff I need to use office tools. LibreOffice if the other party accepts it or Microsoft Office for the picky documents and people.
A lot of personal calculations are done in Notion databases now, but I can wrangle Calc/Excel/Numbers enough to have them on file, if they are sensitive or need to be detached from Notion.
I'm an old school people. I don't migrate from tool to tool much.
I do use LaTeX sometimes; I don't like Typst's equation syntax as much so if I know I'm going to need more advanced or a lot of math formatting I still do Pandoc or even pure LaTeX sometimes.
I think that LaTeX is mostly fine enough but there are a few bits of bullshit that I find infuriating, e.g. having to remember to do `` for beginning quotes, which apparently I will never remember to do until I look at the rendered document. Also, the errors when compiling are pretty opaque and hard to parse; I've done it enough now to where I can usually figure it out but they're certainly pretty weird to a beginner.
I think we're both kind of weird :). Weird doesn't mean "bad", certainly, I'm just saying that I don't think it's reasonable to ask a random non-techy person to learn LaTeX or how to render with Pandoc. I did my entire undergrad work in Pandoc->LaTeX->PDF, and my entire masters work in Typst; I didn't finish my PhD but all the work I did for that was in vanilla LaTeX.
Importantly, though, I get to do it all using Neovim + tmux, so I can keep using my normal "IDE" at all times.
For spreadsheets, I usually just use Calc for anything that requires privacy, and Google Sheets for anything where privacy doesn't matter. They're both good enough for what I'm doing.
No,no. I also concur on the meaning of "weird", and I totally own it.
LaTeX has its own quirks and doesn't talk kindly to a newcomer, but I know a lot of people (nerd or otherwise) like it for what it is. For some of the users, it's an acquired taste though.
I have written my B.Sc. and M.Sc. stuff in Open/LibreOffice. Then I said never, and migrated to LaTeX for Ph.D. and did everything in 5x speed with 10x less fuss. I have a tendency to learn markup and programming languages fast, so I never felt off while working with it.
I'm more of a screen guy, for tmux works, too. I also still use Eclipse as my serious IDE. VSCode can play over there, heh.
I used to use Google Docs, but Notion's "personal wiki" structure won me for non-technical things. All technical things stay in Obsidian, which is also opened as a public digital garden.
this is cruel. watching a parent in their 60s use ms word on an ipad and watch MS lose the same cloud saved documents. and same parent blaming themselves instead of MS. so yeah screw MS for their cloud bs.
"Furthermore, any new document will be named with the date instead of a traditional name by default."
I can't parse this? They're going to append the date to the filename you give? Is it updated in real time as you edit the document? Or you get multiple files with multiple dates?
I don't use Microsoft software other than for playing the occasional games, this is a good reminder of _why_ I don't. Other than Windows being a hot mess of an operating system half the time, multiple different UI's that don't mesh together, ads being pushed in the start menu, and somehow more hardware problems than I run into on Linux these days.
On my work laptop I've had to move my working folder out of "My Documents" so that going into subfolders doesn't stop and think for ten seconds each while it does... something... with OneDrive.
I just want to get to the files real quick, I don't want to calculate '42' at every fucking folder-open event.
I'm not a very nostalgic motherfucker, so I have no desire to relive computing from the early 90s.
(this may be specific to enforced settings at my workplace, but it feels like this is the same kinda thing)
Linux at home for the last five-odd years and almost daily I'm reminded how good a decision that was.
Lawyers, doctors, accountants etc have legal obligations that regulate how documents containing sensitive information can be stored. Professionals often work on computers away from the office.
Microsoft is potentially staring at tons of lawsuits if their actions result in violations of these privacy regulations.
I don't know what's new on this. For the last two years all Office apps I own have insisted on saving to OneDrive first. I have always had to explicitly click on the path and select another folder. Every. Single. Time.
> The only issue with linux I am wondering about is sharing my CV where most companies need a word file.
Maybe it's regional, but I've never been asked for a Word file resume.
I've never had somebody turn down a PDF. And all of the "Upload you resume" online applications I've seen also support PDF. A lot of them lately will even correctly parse out the info and auto-fill forms with it, but some of them mangle it.
What’s really obnoxious about this is that my Mac and virtually other Mac uses iCloud and that doesn’t appear to be a save location or supported cloud service, so they are automatically fragmenting my files.
Additionally, my Office 365 subscription is a work subscription and this is my personal device, so I don’t want every file I work on to during personal hours to be uploaded to my work’s sharepoint?
I hate Office so much and wish there was a trully viable alternative.
I use Emacs (org-mode with TeX and Beamer exports) for almost everything, it's my office suite among other things. The only time I still need LibreOffice is for diagrams and charts, and even that is slowly being replaced by Mermaid.
Seconded Emacs. I use it for almost everything. I started using it for text editing and it slowly crept into basic web browsing, RSS reader, word processing (with org-mode and Markdown), presentation (through Pandoc/Beamer) and Elisp/C programming. It's gotten to the point where the only four programs I use daily on my Mac are LibreWolf, FreeTube, Logic Pro and Emacs.
Seriously if I could use Logic Pro inside Emacs I would.
If this report is accurate and the change is made quietly and automatically as it predicts then how does this not end up with the mother of all lawsuits? We have several clients in sensitive industries and contractually it is very clear that we must not upload data for those projects anywhere. Surely many others do as well. Anyone working in industries like healthcare or security could get in a lot of trouble for uploading data even once.
Within a dedicated organisation you probably would disable it. If you're a supplier working with multiple clients then each might have their own policies on confidentiality and data sharing. Some of them might want you to manage information using an account they provide on a cloud system they use. Others might completely prohibit external transfers. A third category are OK with using online systems in principle but for legal or regulatory reasons they need to make sure that the data doesn't leave a certain geographic area so you can only use systems that provide that guarantee.
A reasonable policy for dealing with this variety is to default to not transferring anything you're working on outside the relevant parts of your organisation - including use of cloud services - and then enable specifics on a per-client basis according to need. It's like the principle of least privilege. But if you operate that way then any software that quietly starts sharing things without explicit permission is a big problem.
And if this change will affect home users who don't have professionally managed systems as well then the same moral hazard applies. I don't think it's OK to push people into sharing their personal data online without understanding what they're doing and the potential consequences.
Office 365 is a macOS and web-based application too. The implications of cloud-based document storage as the default is greater than just another bullet point in Windows' decline. This will affect anyone, anywhere Office 365 is used.
This is already how alternatives like google docs work, being cloud first so I think it makes sense for Microsoft to follow as its natural to want to be able to read, modify, and share documents from various computers.
This is a naive take because it ignores the presence of the third-party doctrine. The moment any file is uploaded to the cloud, you lose an expectation of privacy. When we decided to put everything in the cloud, I think most people sort of forgot about this, but it doesn't make it not relevant.
My Mac is always trying to get me to save to iCloud by default. I hate it. Usually I catch it and put the document on my local drive, but sometimes it ends up in my iCloud drive, which I avoid using as much as possible.
> My Mac is always trying to get me to save to iCloud by default.
Nothing in macOS has ever attempted to lure me into saving to iCloud Drive.
I thought you might be referring to Apple's office suite rather than macOS, but I just tried Pages and it boringly defaults to local storage as expected.
I'm not doubting you, just saying I've never seen it, and I couldn't reproduce this in TextEdit either. It's quite possible it defaults to that in a fresh OS install, which I haven't done for as long as I can remember.
I'm not on a clean install either, and I have changed the save location from iCloud to a local folder a zillion times. It is similar to how Apple pushes iCloud on iOS, with notifications that can only be "dismissed" by clicking through to an iCloud advert. Steve is rolling over in his grave.
I'm old as dirt but I recall one of the arguments for TPM was shoved down our throats was the ability to tie documents to machines and organizations. Something something... industrial espionage. Now we know that is a lie. They just wanted to fill landfills with old working computers.
My wife switched this year after only ever using Windows and pure dotnet dev.
The first thing she said was "how is it so fast"
She has me for tech support though and she’s a dev which helps.
I would go with popOS or Ubuntu if the tech support isn’t an option.
I too was experiencing odd/erratic pairing issues with DualSense controllers and this RTL8671B based dongle, and using the older firmware entirely fixed it. Now four controllers can be connected simultaneously without issue.
FWIW I use a DualSense controller connected to my Linux computers all the time without issue and without having to do anything special. In fact, Sony is the author of the DualSense driver on Linux[0]. Do you connect anything else over bluetooth? I'm wondering if your bluetooth setup might just be broken in general rather than specifically for DualSense controllers.
[0] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Sony-HID-PlayStation-PS5
Sibling:
> there is a nuanced situation with some Realtek (RTL8671B) bluetooth firmware on Linux that is 'solved' by downgrading firmware version
This is a gotcha. The issue is probably that your user dont have the permissions to interact with udev devices.
See https://codeberg.org/fabiscafe/game-devices-udev
I've started using LibreOffice at home and I'm surprised at how snappier it is compared to Word. Exported PDFs are even lighter that the ones Word do.
Also how would backing up specifically to rtf or txt help? Just back up the original doc files.
Googling would show that any number of users run into issues with OO/LO file corruption, often from power interruption during saves. The applications seem to handle that in a suboptimal way, and maintainers are unwilling to address it. My suspicion is that their unspoken contention is that the problem is with Windows, not OO/LO.
I recommend backing up to a general file type simply because it's less likely to open in the offending application by default, if the user ever needs to access it.
it looks like the cause is a shutdown without flushing buffers so a file is not properly saved. Backups of any file type should be OK.
I love Linux and specifically NixOS but my experience with good audio and non-AMD drivers has been pretty so-so.
[1] https://blog.tombert.com/posts/2025-03-09-egpu/ Not trying to self-plug, just documented my headache.
Or is OSX bad because you can't put it on some random laptop off Amazon?
If anyone has any recommendations for how to pick desktop components that will "just work" with Linux I'd love to hear them.
For your Windows applications you can try to use winapps (windows vm behind the scenes, but tucked away from view) https://github.com/Fmstrat/winapps
[1] never update to the latest Fedora version, at least until a couple of months after release. If you don't want to be a beta tester. Yes sometimes they don't a good job with SELinux policies and you'll be dealing with annoying popup notifications from time to time. And yes, if you're using full disk encryption (via LUKS) you really want to enable some flags which Cloudflare engineering contributed back (but are not the defaults), otherwise stuttery desktop behaviour is possible.
Some vendors sell hardware with Linux preinstalled or specifically tested (besides the obvious ones like System76/Framework/Tuxedo, Dell provides an XPS flavor that comes with Ubuntu). You don't need to actually use the preinstalled distro, but buying such models ensures baseline support is solid and it sends a signal to vendors to continue ensuring so.
Then there's Apple's M1/M2 lineup, which provides the smoothest Linux experience you can have today (specific hardware features are not supported yet, the rest works extremely well!).
Other than that, the Arch wiki is typically a good resource that lists quirks of individual devices with Linux.
I have very real doubts that any laptop can support both Linux and Windows well.
> specific hardware features are not supported yet, the rest works extremely well
I would not describe this as "working well," let alone the "smoothest Linux experience you can have today"
Especially compared to System76, which designs their laptops for Linux, customized the firmware for Linux, and ships with Linux already installed.
More seriously, it's only the motherboard and the GPU that can be problematic here in the first place, isn't it? So that's far more manageable using websearch than laptops with their gazillion components. But then again I've only built a new PC once these last 10 years, so maybe I was just very lucky with my choice.
I've had this issue as well on KDE Plasma. I'm convinced it's some sort of bug within Plasma itself. If I use bluetoothctl to pair the controller, it works fine, might be worth giving that a try if you haven't.
There's no meaningful difference in the desktop Linux ecosystem right now and a decade ago, you're just more open to it as the alternative got worse.
There were a bunch of issues with compatibility if you wanted to do any sort of gaming and driver support was pretty bad from what I remember. Flatpaks were barely starting to become a thing, desktop environments were very unrefined and applications like LibreOffice still had a way to go.
If you look at what's happened in the Linux ecosystem in the past decade there are in fact significant improvements and refinements thanks to the hard work of thousands of contributors making it easier and easier to use.
People should realize everything you do in Excel and Word is being spied on by Microsoft, this cloud push is making that process easier and faster for M/S.
At the very least, go to Libreoffice. But better yet, as you just did, people need to abandon Microsoft and Apple for Linux or a BSD.
Try Darktable or Ansel instead of Lightroom. I'm not gonna tell you Gimp is a good photoshop replacement though ;-)
Still, I'm in the same boat as many who wish they could migrate their decades' worth of photos with all their adjustments to a FOSS alternative. For me too, Lightroom is the last application that keeps me from dumping Windows for good. It already lives in a Windows VM on a Linux host these days.
I use FreeBSD for my daily driver. I now stream games/Windows apps from a dedicated windows VM. It's impressive technology.
Of course technically speaking I shouldn't complain because I have provided nothing of value to the Linux ecosystem (how the fuck do I even start, even if I wanted to?), but still, the point stands.
You're 20 years too late for this.
The reason why Linux doesn't run well on the latest greatest hardware (and never has) is because the vendors of that hardware range from indifferent to actively hostile to Linux, and to make the system work people have to fight. Buy a legacy thinkpad, or something you've researched, and you'll have fewer problems than with Windows or Macs (which are tied to even more specific hardware and obsoleted by company whim.)
Of course, if you're on the bleeding edge of technology, everyone is using Linux (whether directly or in VMs and containers), so when I say the latest greatest, I mean the latest greatest consumer and business user stuff.
I've never understood comments like this. It's like you're looking at a pool full of people who have been swimming for years and telling you the pool is nice, and saying: "I guess it's finally ready for the real experts now."
Also, if you love vendors so much, you can have one. Buy your Linux computer from somebody who sells Linux computers, knows any problems you'll run into on that specially-selected hardware, and call them when you have a problem, just like you would do for the others.
> Of course technically speaking I shouldn't complain because I have provided nothing of value to the Linux ecosystem
This is the worst point by far. You can complain about anything that is broken, you just can't expect anyone to care (because you haven't obligated anyone to.) The problem isn't complaining, it's complaining badly. Get a vendor, whine to them.
Not all. System76, Framework, and others come to mind.
But yes, for the most part, hardware is designed for Windows and only works on Linux despite the vendor, rather than due to them.
I hope that as Valve pushes people into gaming on Linux, things will slowly change.
Most children (American children, at least) grew up on Chromebooks. That instills a certain expectation of how these things work — documents save themselves.
To switch to Microsoft Office means adding a cryptic, unnecessary-seeming extra step. I imagine it feels something like having a laptop that's designed to be shut down before closing.
You’ve all heard the stories about college CS students who have to be told what a folder is — and those are the kids who actually want to work with computers. Now step back to the next generation of lawyers and nurses and novelists and think about their lifetime experience.
Microsoft is just chasing the puck.
And while I think this is to some degree "keeping with the times" MS clearly has ulterior motives to do this, to lock users into an ecosystem, to dangle premium services, to charge for storage etc.
I suspect the HN crowd leans towards pessimistic/jaded views and that like MS is mostly doing this for the other reasons and not to conform to the norms of a population that doesn't really use MS word.
But I'd have to assume it's a more "data driven" reason (ie capturing context of docs).
Then the data centralization is a nice plus that makes it impossible to go back on.
It's also getting tiring seeing everything dumbed down for dumb people. I thought that people would learn how to use computers, and become empowered to integrate technology into their lives in the way that works for them. Instead, they have just become dumber than ever and more helpless and dependent.
Back in the olden days of the early 90's when I was in school, I was working for the university's "Unix Group". Since I, being an undergrad, was the low man on the totem-pole there, I was always the one sent out to the various departments to do the support work on their workstations. The CS professors were, without question, the ones who knew the least about how to operate their machines. They mostly had no interest, as they were much more invested in CS theory than in practical use.
I'd say iPads rather than Chromebooks, but the same applies - no concept of a file system, everything just living "in the cloud", the devices themselves being ultimately disposable - as long as you have iCloud set up, you can put your iPad in the shredder, and get all of your content back in under an hour.
For the people who do shut it down, they do it by holding down the power button for 10+ seconds, because that’s how phones do it. On Windows at least, that causes a forced/crash shutdown.
The way it works there is that documents are auto-saved to a non-volatile app-specific temp directory until they’re explicitly saved, at which point they’re moved to the specified location and continue to be auto-saved there. Anybody who uses TextEdit as a temp text stash is familiar with this with the hoard of unsaved documents that comes back even after a cold boot.
Microsoft is just motivated to push cloud storage onto usage.
Word has defaulted to saving in OneDrive (if you turn on autosave and you're signed into an MS account) for years now, I think since the Office 2016 > Office 365 update. The only real change I see is that the document will now be given a name with the date instead of just 'Document 1'. Maybe it's a little more aggressive about turning on autosave for you? The autorecover location is still in appdata.
In my 10 years using this website daily i am yet to see a microsoft related thread and comments that is not fud, misinformation or straight lies
I as a user know more about their products than any three to four of their employees do combined.
This is a feature that has been among the most loved aspects of its main competitor for more than a decade.
Somehow, Microsoft managed to make the same feature sound and feel and be creepy.
Why does this app that's been working just fine as desktop software need to save anything to the cloud by default? It's conceptually odd.
I've used Google docs from the beginning, but I actively choose what docs I want on that platform.
All MS had to do was add "save to cloud" as an additional save option along with "save" and "save as" (maybe renamed as "save to desktop") then auto save could activate where your last save location was. This would be good design.
Agreed. Functionality like this should be presented as a choice in an OOBE welcoming screen right after installation. And it should be _a choice,_ something that can be reversed at a later date if the decision was wrong.
People who wanted that kind of treatment and walled garden already moved to apple's ecosystem, and people who do not want this stayed with windows.
Now more and more of my non-technical friends are moving towards linux because microsoft is pushing them away.
Apple, as far as i know, still gives you a choice.
Probably mostly applicable to people who know about "ecosystems", rather than normies who view computers mostly as another type of hammer (a tool).
I have to re-learn how to use software very regularly, and as more and more things become software I have lost some functional skills because there are only 24 hours in a day and I can't stay current on everything. If I haven't done a thing in six years, it means I need to research what the current software tool for doing that thing is, try installing four of those things and land on the one that isn't broken or some type of malware, and then teach myself an entirely new interface over time. I just wanted to hit a nail! My hammer was installed on my old computer! I knew that hammer!
But no, it's never that simple with software. I can learn 150 software tools to do specific things and have to re-learn something every week just to maintain capability. I don't have to do that with hammers, wrenches, saws, etc.
We need more hammer-like tools instead of managed, constantly updated "ecosystems", and when we do find a good one, we need a way to keep it. Because we have finite time and cognitive bandwidth.
"That was deprecated three years ago, why are you still trying to use an old version that doesn't even have security updates? What is wrong with you?! [WONTFIX]"... Fuck you, give me back my fucking hammer. I could do this task I'm trying to do in literally 90 seconds ten years ago; I'm an hour deep into determining how you would even begin to do it today.
Again, for the Nth time, you can run any software you like on a Mac. You can do anything you want. App store? Of course. Direct vendor download? You bet. Build from source? No problem.
Further, this line is out of place here because Microsoft is FAR more invasive about pushing cloud-first storage than Apple has ever been. No app on my Mac default to saving to iCloud. NONE.
Yes, the Mac defaults to a stricter policy than most HN readers would want. Mass market computers SHOULD. That they don't is a reason we have so much malware on the Aunt Millie PCs of the world.
HN readers are more technical. We want to do what we want to do, but we have to understand that what WE want isn't what's right for the average user. As long as a platform gives us a path to download a random utility from a buddy's site or whatever, it's fine.
It's very, very easy to set a Mac to run whatever you want. Nothing is hidden about it. Is it different than it was under Sonoma? Yes, but the changes are well documented and there are countless articles online, including at Apple, that explain the trivial steps required.
you can't bring your software with you, you can't bring your licenses with you, and all services are available only inside it.
I'm no spring chicken. I've had painful migrations. I'm not interested in tools that don't have an exit. Nothing about a normal Mac setup is locked-in. I could migrate my data to Linux, I expect, with minimal hassle. I mean, I wouldn't, because I enjoy the network effects of using the Apple ecosystem, and I find MacOS more pleasing to interact with than any Linux window manager I've yet seen. But it's absolutely possible for me to leave, and simple to do so.
There's no lock in.
You're forced by what's given to you and can only use within the garden on only the device you own.
This is still a local app, so it doesn't feel like a natural default.
Corp users’s biggest IT headache is lost Word or Excel files.
This has the effect that (to a first approximation) everyone knows someone with a horrific OneDrive data loss story, no-one particularly trusts OneDrive with anything actually important, and so no-one wants to be forced to use it for everything.
However, OneDrive's promise is "save your files and photos to OneDrive and access them from any device, anywhere". Accordingly, the model OneDrive actually exposes to the user is directory trees of arbitrary files containing what, for OneDrive's purposes, are opaque blobs. This leads to all the behaviours you'd expect from a distributed system using such a model, and therefore the trust issues the public has with MS distributed systems.
Regaining someone's trust in a vendor after a bad experience, even for a different product, is very hard.
The company they're imitating (poorly, as always) is one I've found so creepy that I actively go out of my way to distance myself from. For at least the last decade at this point. If Microsoft is being creepy too, this just means they'e successfully imitated the competition... for once.
Fans: You people will complain about everything!
Person/Company does crappy thing
People complain
Fanboy says "Person/Company could do amazing thing and people would still complain"
... when it's very obvious that company/person didn't do anything good.
I've seen it so many times there must be a name for it. Anyone know what it is?
Step 1: Assume your claim is already true, e.g. "Microsoft is a still good corporate actor in spite of doing X".
Step 2: Manufacture circular logic to support your claim from Step 1.
In other words, the poster is begging the question to be self-evident, rather than producing evidence to support their claim.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2019/07/26/censors...
Between those and the people that can navigate everything on Linux, there'll be mildly technical people. Those may explore things that are out of the ordinary but will be unable or unwilling to fix issues that could arise from that
I think the biggest obstacle to widespread adoption of Linux is not using Linux itself, it's installing it on a computer. 99% of people don't know how to format a USB device, or how to enter the BIOS.
If it isn't a problem it's not worth fixing. A lot of people don't even know where they are saving their stuff to, so if it's in the cloud or on their device doesn't really matter to them.
Third-party doctrine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
Until their computer dies, and then they get upset at Microsoft for not having some automatic backup process like they have on the other platforms their friends use.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Laptop and https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management/Suspend_an... w
It is if you slap Linux on your Windows computer and expect it to work. Dell etc have teams whose entire job is ensuring Windows works well on their hardware. These are systems integration teams.
If you try to put Linux on a Windows box, you've signed up to do all the system integration work yourself, without any help or support (eg documentation) from anyone.
The best Linux experience will happen on hardware that was designed to run Linux, with a system integration team to make the hardware/firmware and Os work together, with a support line you can call or write.
I am thinking Fedora's atomic desktop for family. Any other suggestions?
She then proceeded to install and test the programs she needed and everything worked basically out of the box, so now she continued to use it because it doesn't matter to her what she uses, as long as she can use it.
(She is using Fedora on a Framework laptop)
[1]https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-china-defense-d...
> Microsoft Failed to Disclose Key Details About Use of China-Based Engineers in U.S. Defense Work, Record Shows
Bright as some of them are, it's not their silo.
Steamrolling their users then getting rewarded with their stock going stratospheric. Excellent!
Welcome to the world of modern capitalism. I'm seriously starting to question if a company can survive on the stock market by creating a solid product and caring about the users of that product.
iOS does it with its apps and iCloud but it’s seamless so you don’t mind.
Using OneDrive is like putting your face next to an anus and breathing deeply.
Also, MS wants more sales opportunities. If data is on their cloud, they have at least some control over your access of it, and the ease with which it is used in your daily work. It's a pain in the ass to have to manually save stuff, but that's what you'll have to do once you exceed the 5GB free tier limit. I guess you'll probably want to shell out for more space, no?
The good news for your work Mac is that it's your IT and budget departments' headaches, not yours.
We don’t have one for the 3 people in the company to need to use Word on occasion.
When did Google offer an non-cloud installable app and changed it to upload to the cloud?
I bet all those cool SV people "we're better than Microsoft" aren't using Libre Office on a GNU/Linux system.
Maybe it is time for some donations?
Local First stalwart that has some legacy || Cloud first "new kid" but you surrender your files.
The issue is, first: they changed the deal. Change by default is bad. People need to learn this because honestly it's an important lesson. Change is inherently bad, so if you're going to change: have a stonking good reason.
Second: Now the drawbacks of the second "hip" alternative is included the same drawbacks of the first. So, now, Google Office is a strictly superior offering.
Congratulations, I guess?
Yes, more people should use libreoffice, but most people are concerned with compatibility, a sunk cost on their office skills and it's pretty bad UX.
Folks seem to not understand that Microsoft is an ad company.
If that is the case, I think it makes some sense if you are already setup to use that to default to saving there since it makes it easier to find your files on other devices and they be safe. Theoretically if you have it setup you already agree to the risks of storing data in the cloud.
however... The real problem to me is that onedrive is enabled by default and that they are now requiring you to login with a microsoft account to use Windows. If both of those were not the case this makes complete sense.
But until they stop enabling one drive by default and making it a pain in the ass to disable this is bad.
I find it annoying because I often just want a document to live on a local device, and I'll decide when I want to upload it to a cloud service. But a lot of normal, non-tech people don't have any concept of how data is stored on their devices. I can't tell you how many times I've encountered a situation that roughly goes,
"Did you download the file?" "I guess so." "Okay. Now go the file and open it." "Where is it?" "I don't know. Where did you download it? "I don't know!"
For a lot of normies, just saving the document in the cloud is going to be easier. The ironic thing is that now I'm the one who is annoyed because I have no idea where my document is saved.
But I stopped auto saving by default. I find that simply navigating a document and making markups ends up saving the document when all i wanted to was view it and not save it
I use the modified date filter extensively to figure out what is most relevant and what is not. With autosave, the date modified keeps changing. And going online and restoring the file to an earlier version changes DM to now. Meaning that information is either permanently lost or I have to hack it and change it manually.
We’re already starting to move over to Linux for all our machines.
Same for option to email people documents. On corporate systems its now forcing "share via onedrive/sharepoint"
To be fair, I already sync some of my text files to the cloud, but I choose which ones I sync to which services. This seems to take away our agency.
It’d be a bummer if my cousin lost the term paper he was writing. It would be a Truly Bad Day if a coworker uploaded a sensitive document to an unauthorized (or unexpected!) cloud service and it got compromised and the sensitive data used against us.
The former would be bad for my cousin. The latter would involve lawsuits and smitings. The probability is lower, but the risk is much, much higher.
Truer words have never been spoken. In my personal life, I hate the cloud and will never use any cloud service of any kind.
I have OneDrive because I want it to behave like Dropbox or Google Drive. Bug off, man.
However, I realize that I'm weird, and I certainly don't blame most people for preferring the Word style of editing, since most people aren't nerdy software engineers.
While a part of me hopes this works as a push for people to use FOSS like LibreOffice, I'm not really holding my breath. I tried getting my parents to switch years ago after they were complaining about having to pay for a subscription to Office, and they were wholly unmoved and didn't like LibreOffice.
In fairness, LibreOffice didn't really do what my parents wanted; the equation editor for LibreOffice is decidedly harder to use than Microsoft's (even compared to the old Mathtype version), and the syntax for their spreadsheet stuff is different enough from Excel that it can lead to a fairly steep learning curve.
Normal documents, 99.999% of the time, are written in Markdown, and stored like that or rendered to PDF, if required.
Everything serious go through LaTeX. I don't care about Typst, I'm happy with LaTeX syntax (I've written my Ph.D. with it, so I don't care if it fights you).
For some Office stuff I need to use office tools. LibreOffice if the other party accepts it or Microsoft Office for the picky documents and people.
A lot of personal calculations are done in Notion databases now, but I can wrangle Calc/Excel/Numbers enough to have them on file, if they are sensitive or need to be detached from Notion.
I'm an old school people. I don't migrate from tool to tool much.
I think that LaTeX is mostly fine enough but there are a few bits of bullshit that I find infuriating, e.g. having to remember to do `` for beginning quotes, which apparently I will never remember to do until I look at the rendered document. Also, the errors when compiling are pretty opaque and hard to parse; I've done it enough now to where I can usually figure it out but they're certainly pretty weird to a beginner.
I think we're both kind of weird :). Weird doesn't mean "bad", certainly, I'm just saying that I don't think it's reasonable to ask a random non-techy person to learn LaTeX or how to render with Pandoc. I did my entire undergrad work in Pandoc->LaTeX->PDF, and my entire masters work in Typst; I didn't finish my PhD but all the work I did for that was in vanilla LaTeX.
Importantly, though, I get to do it all using Neovim + tmux, so I can keep using my normal "IDE" at all times.
For spreadsheets, I usually just use Calc for anything that requires privacy, and Google Sheets for anything where privacy doesn't matter. They're both good enough for what I'm doing.
LaTeX has its own quirks and doesn't talk kindly to a newcomer, but I know a lot of people (nerd or otherwise) like it for what it is. For some of the users, it's an acquired taste though.
I have written my B.Sc. and M.Sc. stuff in Open/LibreOffice. Then I said never, and migrated to LaTeX for Ph.D. and did everything in 5x speed with 10x less fuss. I have a tendency to learn markup and programming languages fast, so I never felt off while working with it.
I'm more of a screen guy, for tmux works, too. I also still use Eclipse as my serious IDE. VSCode can play over there, heh.
I used to use Google Docs, but Notion's "personal wiki" structure won me for non-technical things. All technical things stay in Obsidian, which is also opened as a public digital garden.
I can't parse this? They're going to append the date to the filename you give? Is it updated in real time as you edit the document? Or you get multiple files with multiple dates?
I don't use Microsoft software other than for playing the occasional games, this is a good reminder of _why_ I don't. Other than Windows being a hot mess of an operating system half the time, multiple different UI's that don't mesh together, ads being pushed in the start menu, and somehow more hardware problems than I run into on Linux these days.
On my work laptop I've had to move my working folder out of "My Documents" so that going into subfolders doesn't stop and think for ten seconds each while it does... something... with OneDrive.
I just want to get to the files real quick, I don't want to calculate '42' at every fucking folder-open event.
I'm not a very nostalgic motherfucker, so I have no desire to relive computing from the early 90s.
(this may be specific to enforced settings at my workplace, but it feels like this is the same kinda thing)
Linux at home for the last five-odd years and almost daily I'm reminded how good a decision that was.
Now that would require the competent configuration of the software by the government and proper usage by the individual. So leak guaranteed.
“Word customers who do not want their documents to be saved to the cloud by default need to become active to change the default save location.”
Microsoft is potentially staring at tons of lawsuits if their actions result in violations of these privacy regulations.
For now.
The only issue with linux I am wondering about is sharing my CV where most companies need a word file.
For dev work/play time - 100% linux
Maybe it's regional, but I've never been asked for a Word file resume.
I've never had somebody turn down a PDF. And all of the "Upload you resume" online applications I've seen also support PDF. A lot of them lately will even correctly parse out the info and auto-fill forms with it, but some of them mangle it.
I've also heard that OnlyOffice is very good and has better compatibility with Microsoft's formats, but I've never personally used it.
The gaming machine operates significantly better on fedora than it ever did on windows.
I'm on the fence for what to do with my other two machines, but it feels like there's weekly news pushing me away from continuing with windows.
Additionally, my Office 365 subscription is a work subscription and this is my personal device, so I don’t want every file I work on to during personal hours to be uploaded to my work’s sharepoint?
I hate Office so much and wish there was a trully viable alternative.
https://ridaayed.com/posts/create-diagrams-in-emacs-org-mode...
Seriously if I could use Logic Pro inside Emacs I would.
A reasonable policy for dealing with this variety is to default to not transferring anything you're working on outside the relevant parts of your organisation - including use of cloud services - and then enable specifics on a per-client basis according to need. It's like the principle of least privilege. But if you operate that way then any software that quietly starts sharing things without explicit permission is a big problem.
And if this change will affect home users who don't have professionally managed systems as well then the same moral hazard applies. I don't think it's OK to push people into sharing their personal data online without understanding what they're doing and the potential consequences.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
Nothing in macOS has ever attempted to lure me into saving to iCloud Drive.
I thought you might be referring to Apple's office suite rather than macOS, but I just tried Pages and it boringly defaults to local storage as expected.
That's unfortunate, I can only confirm that it doesn't happen to me on current/next versions of macOS.
If that happened to me, I guess I'd just turn it off. https://imgur.com/a/Cl0xyJi