The “windows just works” claim is stupid. Especially the statement the author makes on how you just double click an icon and it just works everytime and if ever there is an issue, someone else will eventually fix it.
The problem: our desire for convenience
Bring on the downvotes, but: When it comes to tools like computers, convenience is synonymous with productivity. People aren’t unreasonably demanding to have their hands held, they want to get stuff done. We need to stop acting like
convenienceproductivity is just one of many concerns. It is the primary concern.Freedom is nice but to most people it’s only important if it helps us do the things we want to do.
Yes, exactly that! That convenience == productivity connection is exactly why I am a Linux Mint fan!
Convenience has value, so a lot of people will give their “free” information, attention, and control to commercial entities in exchange for it. Enshittification ensues and many of us are conditioned to beware of things that are simple to use because it REALLY just means you’ve been locked out of 95% of the options.
When a good FOSS project can bring convenience and productivity to more people around the world with NO strings attached, that is an incredibly good thing. It’s like, humanity actually working together just for the sake of the greater good, but doing it on the internet because governments can suck at it.
Damn, I need to find a good open source project to help out this winter when I’m forced to stop my oudoor “engineer turned farmer” hobbies for the season.
Edit: probably something Jellyfin related. Can’t believe I forgot to mention that!
No, what you say makes sense, and I think it’s part of the reason why linux usage (as a daily driver) is starting to increase now versus 20 years ago. It’s just easier to install and use linux distros nowadays.
And most folks who want office for free are going to go with google docs, for the convenience factor.
In addition to that, with great respect to the hard working developers on LibreOffice, at least some of what seems like “unnecessary complexity” in Microsoft’s format is most likely just requirements LibreOffice isn’t solving or haven’t even encountered yet. You don’t get to Office’s size without having to deal with the most insane batshit crazy backcompat or compatibility issues.
They are intentionally obfuscating their file formats. It has nothing to do with complexity or “backwards compatibility” Microsoft has a LONG history of stuff like this.
That may be but without sources that say “let’s make the format more obscure” this is just opinion. Your opinion, OpenOffice opinion, IBM opinion etc.
Look for example at the 1904 dating system that Microsoft still has to support. Real customers still use this shit.
I’m not saying Microsoft has always exhibited good behaviour. But their crappy approach tends to be on the go to market side.
Office still has to support a leap year bug to allow banks to run their crappy Lotus based record keeping. Lotus for Darwin’s sake!! There is so much history in these files and what office has to do with them.
I’ve heard this comment about OpenXML (the xml format of the office documents) before, and i’m a bit on the fence about it.
It’s of course indeed ridiculously complex, but so is office. Microsoft both adds a shit ton of functionality to their documents, and keeps an impressive amount of backwards compatibility.
In the past i heard complaints about part of the OpenXML spec that also allows older binary data in there for backwards compatibility reasons, which of course means for OSS implementations that they don’t just have to implement this spec, but also the older spec that came before to be truly compatible with everything a modern office version can open.
But on the other hand, if i look at it from the side of Microsoft, they opened up their format, they’ve got a gazillion functionalities, should they remove functionality to appease the open source developers? If so which? Should they stop being backwards compatible with documents of decades ago to appease the open source developers? If so how long should they support? Are you going to tell their customers?
Office is an immense program with an immense amount of legacy features, backwards compatibility, …
It’s incredibly complex by nature. And might they have made the format more complex to dissuade competition? Could be. However, in this instance Occam’s razor pushes me more to “write a huge program over a timespan of many decades, with thousands upon thousands of programmers working on it, and you’ll indeed most likely end up with something very complex…”
Office Open XML was only standardized in order to combat the threat posed by Open Document as organisations were starting to mandate use of standardized formats.
You write as if Microsoft did this because they wanted interoperability, when in reality they only begrudgingly accept that some must be allowed in order to avoid losing control of the market.
The real solution would have been to never approve the OOXML standard and not legitimize Microsoft’s attempt to make their proprietary format appear open.
The one thing you have to give Microsoft is backwards compatibility. They make hot garbage, but God damn if you can’t run that garbage from 10 years ago.
Sure, but it’s not quite the compelling argument it used to be.
Today, I’m not sitting here pining for old Linux software that stopped working. And the small amount of old windows software that did finally stop working actually works now only works on Linux with Wine.
That’s another of the decision points that finally switched to fully favoring Linux, for me, in the last decade.
Although 10 years ago isn’t that long in computer terms any more. Those are machines that can still run Windows 10 without issue. It’s an older computer, but still perfectly usable these days.
I haven’t done the experiment, I’m curious to know if you can take a random binary compiled for Linux 10 years ago run on the latest version of popular distros. See in which ones it runs.
Depends on it and its dependencies, probably. A lot of the core utilities are generally unchanged enough that they should still work despite being a decade old.
I don’t buy the argument that windows just works or that it’s somehow better or more stable. The reality is we all have grown to learn about computers specifically using windows and it’s been a steep learning curve. We have gotten familiar with its specificities and its sporadic misbehavior and accepted that as the norm. And people prefer what they are used to even if it’s suboptimal because they would rather not learn something else from scratch, even if in the long run it could be better.
Put any person who has zero computer experience in front of a windows computer or Linux computer and I doubt they would say the windows computer just works and the Linux one doesn’t.
Put any person who has zero computer experience in front of a windows computer or Linux computer and I doubt they would say the windows computer just works and the Linux one doesn’t.
I did this experiment on my own kids. They find Linux more usable, and find it hard to believe people tolerate Windows.
There’s also some indoctrination involved.
But they have access to both, and they prefer Linux. I think that the “Windows is genuinely easier” argument doesn’t hold any water anymore.
the windows just works argument actually refers to the fact that it’s consistent.
If you have a problem with the desktop, nobody needs to ask you which de you use, or which parts you have substituted out. You have a graphics problem, nobody asks if wayland or x11. You have a problem with audio, nobody asks you whether you have pipewire-pulse installed and to use pipewire. Shit’s the same everywhere.
I say this as an arch linux user. The choice we all love, is actually a detriment to the average non-power user.
Apple has even fewer choices and therefore greater consistency.
Put any person who has zero computer experience in front of a windows computer or Linux computer and I doubt they would say the windows computer just works and the Linux one doesn’t.
In my experience, usually with Linux they have less problems and it’s easier to use. Until they need an application that only works on Windows.
I think this is an issue where you are talking about people coming from windows trying to do windows things on linux like run windows software. Of course you can in some cases run windows software on Linux but it is not a fair comparison to blame Linux for not being able to run windows software. Linux has it’s own suite of software and that is often better suited.
In my experience, it’s been a bit of a mixed bag. There are some things that work in Linux, and some things that don’t, even after a bit of fiddling. My desktop’s front panel is completely unusable on Linux, for example.
Windows is at least widespread enough that it’s far more likely that parts will work on it at least to some degree. And sure enough, the front panel works fine there.
Then i don’t know what you’re doing with your computer, but every time i use linux, all those things that are “awesome and just work on linux” somehow still have lots of annoying gotchas that waste too much of my time.
I’ve got some nice linux servers running that i’m really happy with. But once you go for the linux desktop, it’s just a world of pain compared to windows, no matter how you look at it. I’m more than experienced enough to get it running in the end, but claiming that linux “just works” is delusional…
Just the fact of how the ecosystem is fractured (which is also mentioned in the article here, with running a debian package on fedora), is already something that’ll make it too complicated for a lot of people to handle. And even the things “that just work”, just don’t. For example, i’ve got a steamdeck like device now, with bazzite (steamos like OS). Yes, it’s amazing at running windows games in linux. I heard so many people say how with proton “running windows games on linux just works”. If you stick to the ultra popular games, it for sure does. Go to a game that’s a bit older or lesser known, and no it isn’t. Make time to figure out settings to get it to run, tinker with controller mappings, and in the end, it might just still not work. And pretty much everything on linux feels that way, the initial impression is decent. If you stay on the safe path, it’ll work pretty well. Do something a bit less common: you’re on your own.
And that’s its commonly accepted for trolls to blame the user, and be like “it’s free, so accept it the way it is” when someone dares to ask questions or … even… (do i dare say it?)… complain… Doesn’t make for the most constructive environment…
Linux has achieved many great things, but the linux desktop sure has its use if you’re willing to spend your time on it, but acting as if it’s a better experience than the windows desktop is just delusional. There’s no other way to put it.
I didn’t say Linux just works. I’m just fighting back against the preconceived idea that it’s just a total mess and windows isn’t. I have myself ran into issues with linux. But also, I’ve run into many issues with windows too.
The difference is that when people encounter issues with windows, it’s like well too bad, need to find someone who can fix it. But when they encounter an issue with Linux, it’s like linux sucks, let me get back to Windows as if it didn’t suck at least as much.
The point i guess with the main OS’s like windows/macOS, is that microsoft/apple put in the time to support most edge cases, and most things you can try either work, or aren’t that hard to make work (assuming you don’t go against things they try to force. But that’s not something that most users we’re talking about here do). So for windows, want to install that app for windows XP from 20 years ago? no problem. As mentioned in the article here: want to install that up to date program made for another distro? good luck…
And that’s in the end what it boils down to… It’s a fragmented ecosystem, and many slightly advanced things require that you understand how your computer & OS work. Things that a slightly advanced user can handle in Windows via some UI, will most likely be far harder on linux…
I’d love to use a linux desktop more, but sadly my time is also precious, and i just don’t have the motivation to use it fighting with the linux desktop >_<…
Linux works better than windows for most apps/system stuff.
But there are certain classes of apps which are not up to par with whatever is available on windows. An office suite is one of them, I just use the Google suite (mostly sheets) in a browser, it works better for me.
I agree with the developers point about lock-in but sadly I don’t have enough time at work to work with libre calc over proprietary alternatives (I have tried it truly but the performance and user experience is just not good enough for someone already past deadlines)
Not so much the user experience, but I’m not aware of any software that doesn’t work with Microsoft, except for ones developed by Apple.
With the latest version of Windows, it’s not even a question as to whether a given piece of software will run.
Networking your home computers still does not work smoothly in Windows. It often stops for no good reason until you reboot everything.
Every single time I try out Linux it’s been a shitshow. Stuff doesn’t work, drive encryption requires multiple passwords to boot up. Updates that fail.
Windows just works. Only apple is more consistent.
I have never seen an encryption implementation that required two passwords to decrypt the disk.
Is it possible the first one decrypted the disk and the second password was for your user account?
Could be. I just remember being perturbed that there wasn’t an easy way to undo that situation.
Most desktop environments have an option for auto login under the user settings. That way you only need to decrypt the disk.
I still end up with other issues.
Right now I have one that attempted an update and ate the storage device. I later find out that the update command is deprecated and shouldn’t be used. Why is it still there then?
Another that installed a DE but the display is sideways and it’s not responding to the config.txt edits to rotate the display. In windows i didn’t need to look anything up, just right click and edit my display settings.
What distribution are you using? The common desktop environments (KDE & Gnome) have simple graphical display configurations similar to what you find in Windows.
If the XML standard is overly complex, does that mean it’ll be a bigger pain for MS employees to maintain? Sounds like cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face.
Iirc the openXML standard was open sourced due to some anti trust stuff brewing. They then expanded on the standard with proprietary addons that give LibreOffice/Google Docs trouble.
Shit, I’ve been right about microsoft for thirty-plus years and it doesn’t make a damned bit of difference.
They are. A. MONOPOLY. They have never “fought fair”, and it wouldn’t ever occur to them to do so. Their heart is all BOGU.
Wasn’t there even a Simpsons episode about it?
“Buy him out, boys!”
“Buy him out, boys.”
Das Bus
Season 9 / Episode 14 (19:10)
“You don’t think we got rich by writing checks?!? Ahahahaha”
The only reason Apple still exists is because Microsoft didn’t want to get broken up, so they invested in Apple to stay competitive for 150 million in 1997.
That’s not entirely true. It’s true that Microsoft invested in Apple, but it’s not true that they were about to get broken up and that Microsoft money saved them.
I dunno. I mean that’s true, but it’s also the case that Gates stole a lot from Jobs and they knew each other pretty well so it was also like a friendly loan.
Tbf Gates took the boos he got at AppleWorld or whatever it was then pretty well.
My only issue with Libre Office is that they are not available on mobile phones. I want to use spread sheets to make calculations and projections on my finances if I can’t use my computer at a given moment.
I understand your desire, but I’ll be damned if I’m gonna use any spreadsheet software on my phone. I can think of few worse platforms for excel. Even my iPad Pro is a nightmare if I don’t have my Magic Keyboard and a mouse. I’ll crack out a laptop or talk through it with gpt.
I think there is a version on F-droid right?
Only a viewer not full package: https://f-droid.org/packages/org.documentfoundation.libreoffice
Oh
oh, maybe they removed it?
If I recall correctly, it has been released for moile on and off as experimental builds. Last time I grabbed an APK, it wasn’t ready.
The thing with “just works” in monopolies is that it eventually stops working. I already have terrible excel bugs all the time on my work computer. Left clicking a cell sometimes just selects half a dozen adjancent cells. You vlick something and all of a sudden the rendering just goes completely haywire… You have two larger tables open and it just crashes…
Things will only get worse from this, until the global economy will loose trillions to being stuck with Microsoft.
The thing with “just works” in monopolies is that it eventually stops working
This gets accelerated when the company starts changing the product just for the sake of having to change something to meet some OKR, or because they need to find a way to incorporate the newest marketing buzz (cloud, AI, etc).
The Office suite was simple to use and performant. Nowadays I watched a college professor struggle for 8 minutes trying to figure out how to save a file locally rather than saving it to OneDrive, because they redesigned everything around that. It also takes an obnoxiously long time to launch, it keeps popping up some Copilot button in inconvenient places too.
You’re right but at the end of the day, the average person is content with having their stuff just work for now and that’s a reasonable expectation isn’t it? If it ain’t broke, people aren’t going to go out of their way to protect themselves from a what-if that they may feel is going to maybe mildly inconvenience them when it happens regardless of what it actually is, since they may be ignorant of the true state of how things might be.
And in the end, some are just gonna accept that inconvenience from stuff not working completely rather than switch. People have been saying to switch away from Chrome for years and now even with ad-blocking being nerfed, people are still on it.
16 digit numbers
Still
Anyone who thinks this is new, please read this, this and this.
And there’s also this. It’s a topic since shortly after the standardization of the Open Document Format 2006. MS then feared to lose whole governments as customers, so they (pseudo)standardized their own format, with a whole bunch of traps (in the format) and abuses of market power.
Moved to LibreOffice. No regrets. Thank you, Microsoft!
does libre office do scripting? (like VBA?)
LibreOffice Basic, JavaScript, Python. But the macros wouldn’t necessarily be compatible with Excel.
microsoft is a dirty bastard
I think the point about convenience is more about familiarity than Windows being inherently easier. Speaking as someone who switched from Linux to Windows previously, I found the change very difficult as a lot of the FOSS software I was using didn’t have Windows versions. I had a nightmare trying to read one of my LUKS-encrypted drives on Windows. I was practically using WSL for everything. That’s not that Windows is inherently harder than Linux; it’s just that I was used to Linux and the FOSS ecosystem, just as some are used to Windows and their proprietary ecosystem.
If your hardware isn’t working properly, you have to find drivers that run on Linux; if the developer never made Linux-compatible drivers, you have to figure something else out.
Most drivers come pre-installed with the Linux kernel or your distro—I never had to manually install any drivers for my current hardware. Compared to Windows where you will have to go out of your way to install graphics drivers for NVIDIA or AMD depending on your graphics card, if you want to make the most out of your card’s capabilities.
Installers made for Windows don’t need any special TLC; you double-click them and they work.
See, I think if you’ve used Linux for any length of time you’d quickly find the system of package managers way easier than the system of having to hunt down an .exe on the internet, guess whether or not it’s a legit copy or if it’s malware, and manually manage updates for all the different software you have installed.
I agree that people stay on Windows out of convenience, but it’s not convenience as in Windows is inherently easier, but it’s convenience as in you’re used to the way things work on Windows. Because in my perspective, things do “just work” on Linux, and that’s because I’m used to the way things work here.
My old mother, who is completely disinterested in technology, has used a Linux desktop for a decade now without major issues.
If you aren’t a power user the differences between it and Windows are minor. You have windows, icons, menu bars, x closes the application, the box makes it big, right-click to open a menu, left-click to select, it’s all the same stuff. Besides, most of your time is spend in a browser anyway.
Yeah things break some times, but no more than in Windows. Being on a very default Ubuntu installation she can just search for her problems online and blindly run some random console command that probably fixes it, just like on Windows.
Hardware is easier because drivers are generally just magically there. Software is easier because it’s mostly in a repository which automatically installs dependencies and updates and doesn’t come with malware.
By far the biggest problem has been documents and executables that can only be opened in Windows. Mostly PDF forms (fuck you Adobe).
I’ve been on and off into linux for years, but finally decided to go full in on my main. Now using windows is HORRIBLY unintuitive. Its really gone downhill. Xp was peak.
Agreed on your last point. That’s when programs still had proper tool bars and keyboards shortcuts, before the “ribbon” shit started to fuck over everyone’s muscle memory.
It would have made sense for MS to start with “finger painting UI” and then work towards the power user UI - but the other way round makes zero sense to my poor brain.
This is the first computer where I built it with Linux in mind, and man is it a mostly seamless experience. While I also have a soft spot for XP, I would honestly say 7 was peak. Everything was more or less exactly what it said it was. I do IT, and man, is it frustrating trying to navigate both control Panel, and the settings app.
Sometimes when you click on an icon or a link in control panel, it brings you to settings, so you have to type it into the address bar to get where you want in control panel.
I did like 7 a lot too.
The new win 11 ui is utter shit. This is why I like linux, they aren’t going to completely change the damn settings application completely and even if they do, you can grab another distro that didn’t. Plus win11 randomly removing all your right click context menu options. What the actual fuck. First couple days on my shit work pc was me undoing everything win11 did.
Lmao, the context menu back to the old one is also the very first thing I changed on my work PC, Along with removing start button search. But for the rest, I completely agree, nothing is going to change without MY input
Also curious, have you found a good windows explorer replacement? The shortcuts now not actually representing your user folder drives me nuts. I’m currently trying onecommander out, just wondering if you had a suggestion for something different though.
Have you found a good
windows explorerfile explorerI never used this personally (I’m currently a mike mac) but i hear good things about filepilot tech
The first time I updated some 50 programs by running a single update command, I wondered why it hasn’t been the standard since the start.
I learned about Winget command in Windows after spending a few months on Linux updating with pacman -Syu. It’s so much easier to update a bunch of apps at once when I want to instead of having some popup surprise me when I launch the app.
You have to install nvidia still whether you chose to do it manually or rpm. If you did none of this you’re staring at nou and if you never had more than one screen you probably didn’t even notice. And if you never ever had to do anything more complex than documents or watch movies( which you couldn’t do without installing some codecs) you’re probably untouched by it.
Additionally some (complex) software won’t run unless you also install something other than Wayland. This isn’t stuff you’d have to consider on windows. in fact sessions are not even a thing on windows you have to think about when it comes to software or graphics.
And then there’s permissions…
So just pointing out not all drivers have been installed. You do have to customize the build to needs which isn’t so much the case on windows.
That said : it’s not a big pain in the ass once you figure out installing is just like the same command over and over again and there’s no going and downloading from a website or clicking install or clicking through a wizard. ( other than the initial ‘y’)
Overall I found the Linux install process a giant relief over windows.
it’s just a bit to realize first time doing it and would prefer we be transparent about this and not over sell Linux as if it’s some sort of magic coconut oil. Be realistic : yes there’s some learning moments. No, it’s not that bad. Personally I thought it was worth it and less painful than what up I had to do with windows.
EG: I no longer have to keep a folder of ‘favourite software’ in case I had to reinstall windows/get a new computer
I just had to keep a backup list of ‘sudo dnf install’ commands and it just conveniently sits on the non boot drive that is accessible for copy pasting after a fresh install which is really quite nice.
Thank you for being rational here. It drives me bonkers how many people try to act like Linux is “just as easy” as windows. Like, yeah, to some degree it’s getting used to the differences, but there are definitely considerations and complexities that you simply don’t have to worry about with a windows machine.
As a relatively recent convert, I can say it was easier than I was expecting, but it was not “just as easy” as installing windows. It took more time to set up all the extra bits I needed/wanted, and I’m still not fully set up the way I’d like to be.
Same and I’m sure we will get there. Seems with the help tutorials online someone somewhere has found a trick for almost every consideration on Linux. Im 95% of the way there. Dunno where I’d be without those tutorials.
I’m still happy I took a plunge. It was a real plunge though. Lucky for me I’ve worked with Linux (only on the job) so it was likely easier for me to convert than someone who probably never has touched Linux. I cannot imagine the sheer terror of having to step back and learn on a whole brand new OS after being embedded in a different OS the entire time up until now.
As a recent linux convert I found printer drivers and setups to be a pain and getting java runtime working was a process but everything else was about a days worth and it just works. Hell, even hitting the windows key on the keyboard and typing the ms name for stuff pops up the relevant linux program. If you didn’t know you were looking at something different, it wouldn’t be obvious for the most part.
Just curious, what brand of printer do you have?
Brother. Weirdly, the scanner setup was completely painless and even easier than in wondows.
I’ve got a brother printer as well and it was the only driver I had to hunt down and install. Everything else has worked out of the box (Mint).
I did not even notice putting in a driver for my brother but I use it by usb. Is this more a wireless thing?
No, the generic usb driver wouldn’t work for me. I only was able to get it to print a test page weirdly.
I had a way different experience and its kinda funny as I use an lts distro that is even out of date for that. I have things that would not print properly in windows and it was easier to do it with linux.
Once I got it up and running, it has been like you described, way better than windows.
Yup. I started wirh Linux, and trying Windows was a bit of pain.
I had to run some mystery (included in installer) script to create local account (BypassNRO.cmd), then I remember having to change something in registry, but I don’t remember what that was, disable BITS and SysMain because they were slowing down the PC, disable automatic updates in Group Policy Editor because there’s no other way, get printer drivers from archive.org because despite HP saying it should automatically install, Windows said to get it from manufacturers website, and the Bluetooth would just randomly dissapear despite always working on Linux (Mint).
Well, and on Linux Mint I just had to install Nvidia driver and Realtek WiFi drivers in Driver Manager (GUI).
And of course, Arch was a bit harder to set up, but the Wiki is done well, so nothing too crazy. But I should probably revisit it, because honestly, I don’t remember how I set up my PC anymore. I went with encryption and boot separate from ESP, which differ from the default guide.
Disappointing Fox news version of Windows’ take of something somebody at Libre once said about Windows’ domination of markets.
This read like basics. Was hoping for more info on how unusable XML was fot LibreOffice or if it wasn’t (unusable to OSS versions). Obviously, OSS is better for enough reasons that a few in the EU are switching government computers from Windows to Linux.
Yes, corporate & proprietary schtick is lame & crippling. Old news. Guess it needs to be yelled until we research start taking about (marketing) FOSS Solutions.
I’mma just going to sit over here in the corner with my AbbiWord and Gnumeric…
I mean, they could just really suck at writing good software. Isn’t some sort of rule of thumb law to never attribute to malicious intent what can just as easily be explained by stupidity?
There is such a law, but many of us feel that Microsoft has proven malice a few times, when it comes to open standards.
