this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2024
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[–] [email protected] 71 points 7 months ago (3 children)

It's the cost of installing Linux. 🤷

[–] [email protected] 57 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (4 children)

Janette in finance is going to murder whoever tries to give her a FOSS alternative to Excel or forces her to fuck with a VM or web Excel.

We remember the last IT admin that tried to do a platform swap on her. RIP Patrick.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I think the most infuriating part about web Excel and desktop Excel is that they don't have feature parity.

There's stuff that works on desktop but not web and it's really frustrating.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Don't you know? Some calculations can only be done locally. They are too complicated to be performed over the cloud. It needs to be done on your i3/4GB RAM PC.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I know your comment was in jest but the backend of these apps runs on cloud, the frontend is still using your local resources and is usually a bloated piece of poop to boot.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Electron: I am in this comment and I do not like it.

Jokes aside, MS Office now auto-generates clipart and various other assets via GenAI which obviously is via cloud. They can do feature parity if they want to. But often with MS products, their products use so much legacy libraries, it's a huge pain for the devs to find their corresponding web-libraries.

I'm pretty sure Office still uses a random API which uses ie6.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 7 months ago

It’s time to move to talking about spreadsheets on Linux instead of gaming on Linux

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago (2 children)

As someone who uses Excel on Windows and Calc on Linux, I can totally understand. There are some big differences so there’s a valid reason for sticking with Excel. Casual users won’t notice anything big, but advanced users will.

On the other hand, if you’re an advanced Excel user, it usually means you’re trying to make it do stuff that it isn’t very good at. If you want stuff that Calc can’t provide, it’s a clear sign you should have written that calculation in R or Python a long time ago.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

And honestly, I've been using Excel for work stuff a lot lately (no OO or I'd use that) and it fucks up a lot and in maddening ways. Click a cell at the bottom of your multi-page sheet "Oh, you must have been trying to click A5 so I'm going to scroll way the fuck up here"

Copy-paste from other (even MS) apps also sometimes does weird shit

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Oh, it certainly has infuriating quirks. Like, if you copy a cell from here and you plan to paste it into 15 different places here and there. Somewhere along the way, you’ll accidentally add some text to another cell, and you lose the content of the clipboard. You need to copy that thing a second time in order to keep on pasting in the remaining places. Like, why is this a feature? Editing one cell suddenly kicks out whatever you had copied earlier? Why?

Fortunately, Calc still has a sensible clipboard that actually remembers what you put there.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I really wish there was a more sensible path from WYSIWYG sheets to full programing language and database. Heck even better find a way to make calculation description procs that can be ran as separate functions for better scalability

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

LabVIEW pulls off visual programming pretty gracefully. It feels like, it’s written by, and for, electrical engineers, so if you’re not familiar with circuit diagrams, it’s going to take a while to wrap your head around it. However, it proves to me that programming can look very different too. Let’s just hope that eventually someone does something similar to matrices, dataframes etc.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago

"Hey Janette. Switching to Linux will save the company $$$$$$$ per year.
Your options are:

  • Create more value than that so it's worthwhile to stay on Windows for you
  • Find a new job
  • Deal with it"
[–] [email protected] 25 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

That's not what this post is about.

I understand, and agree, with the sentiment that more people should switch to Linux, but please don't pretend the answer to every topic regarding Microsoft or Windows is "just switch to Linux". It is for some, but it derails and invalidates a necessary conversation about shitty behaviour by Microsoft.

I have a machine running linux at home, I'm not afraid of a package manager, but Linux is not the answer to everything. Not yet at lesst.

I can't refuse to use windows at work, and much as i would sometimes like to, I can't just go and quit over what OS our computers run. That would end poorly for my livelihood and family.

The purpose of this article is to highlight unfair behaviour by Microsoft, especially towards businesses, which is a topic that needs more attention. Microsoft is in every level of infrastructure in almost every big corporation, and no matter how attractive linux is, that doesn't make the dangers of centralised IT belonging to one company any less relevant.

We should all do more to lobby for more companies and corporations switching to Linux, but replying with "just switch to Linux smh" is not pushing that agenda.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago

i think the problem is the game of peoples reasoning to not get off windows.

I do agree its not the answer to move everyone to linux (just for context, my desktop is a modified windows 11, laptop is garuda(arch based), media nas is debian), its just a subset of the people have really terrible priorities.

for those who have hardware with gen 7 intel or order, yeah the situation kinda sucks. If youre IT at a company, also sucks. for those staying on 10 strictly because privacy reasons, is pretty silly given they already made the tradeoff that they rather trade off some privacy staying on windows to have a reletively hassle free experience installing other stuff (this applies even more to those using windows 7, which I find hilarious how stalwart they are not moving off the OS)

outside of how updates are handled and aome telemetry, windows 11 could be modified to have a very close to windows 10 experience, its just a game of people not wanting to make that jump if they are an individual user. I see it as a game of them not willing to put any effort in any direction to fix their situation.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago

This is the final windows update.