this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
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Let's not get carried away. Office suite (particularly Word, PowerPoint and Excel) is some of the best software I've used. Crazy powerful, easy to use, consistent across iterations. Outlook could have some QOL things but it's still better than Thunderbird. VS Code is awesome too.
LibreOffice is good enough. Thunderbird is good. There is no shortage of development tools on Linux, if anything, it is the best development platform.
I switched 100% for 2012 when I changed job from game development to Linux development . I'd been 100% Linux at home since 2005, but changing work platform was the acid test.
Microsoft can get stuffed. I've not needed them for over a decade.
Yeah, I'm not saying Libre office isn't...fine, or that development tools on Linux aren't good or even better. But the idea that all Microsoft software sucks is as demonstrably false as an opinion statement can be. They're really good, and with Office the alternatives aren't close. Do most people need all the functionality in Excel or PowerPoint? No, but they're great pieces of software and ignoring that is just plain tribalism.
Good enough for who?
I've seen too many cases of word docs being hosed, or not working right in Libre. So from a business standpoint that's a no-go. And that's the challenge.
The very reason why that cross compatibility is so hard and broken is Microsoft sabotaging the fuck out of it. Microsoft has always been about money, dead stop. If theyust make great software for money, they will. If they can get away with mediocre to absolute shit software while sabotaging the competition, then that is what they will do (and have been doing for decades)
So don't work in Word docs. It's not a proper standard anyway.
It's an industry standard.
Go see what lawyers use. Until fairly recently Word Perfect was still a thing for them (well, about 10 years ago anyway).
You don't get to choose the formats other people use, or what you'll have to deal with.
Your attitude is the stereotypical never-had-to-face-reality mindset.
It's a monoply, not a standard. It's not a standard as no one else can properly implement it. There are undocumented binary parts that were meant to be transitory to get through ISO. Which was just one of many dirty MS tricks to get it through ISO. The reference implementation is closed.
I don't expect normal people to understand formats. I expect law makers to.
The UK government got this right : https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-standards-principles/open-standards-principles
The EU have clobbered MS before over this kind of nonsense and should again. And Google and Apple and others.
Competition needs to be possible. We need to avoid today being tomorrow's digital darkage.
Nice pedantry, you're good at purposefully ignoring the forest for the trees.
Industry standard, as in what pretty much everyone uses - you know, a colloquial term, but you knew that and chose to ignore it to get on some high horse.
So you don't get a choice about being incompatible.
I didn't say I liked it, just it is what it is. Let me see you deploy 10,000 laptops/desktops in an enterprise without office, and find out how much that costs you in lost productivity. Or how many things you simply can't do, at all. Like using OneNote, with the server infrastructure for syncing between people with domain level user administration. Nothing, and I mean nothing at all in Linux/OSS world comes anywhere close to the capabilities of ON.
And Excel, again, people have decades of experience and pre-built docs/templates that have little chance of perfectly importing into any other systems.
Similarly, find me a CAD program competitive with Auto desk or Catia that runs on Linux.
Keep on screeching that people should just squander hundreds of man-years of effort to switch, that'll sure convince 'em. People have more important things to do with their time, like the work in front of them.
It's about competition, heathy market and legacy. You can't have that with formats like OOXML. Deliberately so.
I can't find the story, but I think it was of the British library, trying to recover documents in very old Microsoft Word. They had to chain together VMs of old Windows with old Word versions to get it the documents to the modern world. Formating will have been mangled of course.
That is how it is with proprietary "standards". It's like ensuring today is a digital darkage.