The “windows just works” claim is stupid. Especially the statement the author makes on how you just double click an icon and it just works everytime and if ever there is an issue, someone else will eventually fix it.
on windows id just give up if I couldnt solve an issue, on linux I actually find a solution, the solution for windows is click 50 obscure things if it exists, linux is usually modifying something with the terminal which can be scary if you arent used to it and don’t know what commands do, eventually youll realize its mostly heading to a director and editing a file, technically you can click around and do that without opening a terminal, using a file editor and manager instead.
The problem: our desire for convenience
Bring on the downvotes, but: When it comes to tools like computers, convenience is synonymous with productivity. People aren’t unreasonably demanding to have their hands held, they want to get stuff done. We need to stop acting like
convenienceproductivity is just one of many concerns. It is the primary concern.Freedom is nice but to most people it’s only important if it helps us do the things we want to do.
I find dealing with Micros~1 a giant pain in the ass. It’s always getting in the way of productivity with pointless rearranging of menus all the time, constantly trying to get me to use One Drive, shoving AI into every corner of everything.
I’m trying to make a spreadsheet to figure out and share budgets, instead I’m spending my time hunting for that menu that disappeared and figuring out how to disable copilot because I’m legally not allowed to share client data with third parties.
This an incredibly tech-brained answer. “Sure, lots of OSS is difficult to install, breaks frequently, and lacks key features, but did you know Microsoft sometimes moves a menu item?”
I love OSS and I want it to succeed but “an item moved” isn’t in the same ballpark as the barriers to OSS adoption.
Micros~1
I see what you did there. 😆
Yes, exactly that! That convenience == productivity connection is exactly why I am a Linux Mint fan!
Convenience has value, so a lot of people will give their “free” information, attention, and control to commercial entities in exchange for it. Enshittification ensues and many of us are conditioned to beware of things that are simple to use because it REALLY just means you’ve been locked out of 95% of the options.
When a good FOSS project can bring convenience and productivity to more people around the world with NO strings attached, that is an incredibly good thing. It’s like, humanity actually working together just for the sake of the greater good, but doing it on the internet because governments can suck at it.
Damn, I need to find a good open source project to help out this winter when I’m forced to stop my oudoor “engineer turned farmer” hobbies for the season.
Edit: probably something Jellyfin related. Can’t believe I forgot to mention that!
No, what you say makes sense, and I think it’s part of the reason why linux usage (as a daily driver) is starting to increase now versus 20 years ago. It’s just easier to install and use linux distros nowadays.
And most folks who want office for free are going to go with google docs, for the convenience factor.
In addition to that, with great respect to the hard working developers on LibreOffice, at least some of what seems like “unnecessary complexity” in Microsoft’s format is most likely just requirements LibreOffice isn’t solving or haven’t even encountered yet. You don’t get to Office’s size without having to deal with the most insane batshit crazy backcompat or compatibility issues.
They are intentionally obfuscating their file formats. It has nothing to do with complexity or “backwards compatibility” Microsoft has a LONG history of stuff like this.
That may be but without sources that say “let’s make the format more obscure” this is just opinion. Your opinion, OpenOffice opinion, IBM opinion etc.
Look for example at the 1904 dating system that Microsoft still has to support. Real customers still use this shit.
I’m not saying Microsoft has always exhibited good behaviour. But their crappy approach tends to be on the go to market side.
Office still has to support a leap year bug to allow banks to run their crappy Lotus based record keeping. Lotus for Darwin’s sake!! There is so much history in these files and what office has to do with them.
Not sure why this author is spreading “paid software is convenient and just works” rhetoric. Simply isn’t the case. You just get addicted to trying to solve your problems with money.
Right?! That’s how this article ends?! “Sorry, but people are lazy, so, uh…Microsoft just wins I guess.”
I 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?
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.
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’ve heard this comment about OpenXML (the xml format of the office documents) before, and i’m a bit on the fence about it.
It’s of course indeed ridiculously complex, but so is office. Microsoft both adds a shit ton of functionality to their documents, and keeps an impressive amount of backwards compatibility.
In the past i heard complaints about part of the OpenXML spec that also allows older binary data in there for backwards compatibility reasons, which of course means for OSS implementations that they don’t just have to implement this spec, but also the older spec that came before to be truly compatible with everything a modern office version can open.
But on the other hand, if i look at it from the side of Microsoft, they opened up their format, they’ve got a gazillion functionalities, should they remove functionality to appease the open source developers? If so which? Should they stop being backwards compatible with documents of decades ago to appease the open source developers? If so how long should they support? Are you going to tell their customers?
Office is an immense program with an immense amount of legacy features, backwards compatibility, …
It’s incredibly complex by nature. And might they have made the format more complex to dissuade competition? Could be. However, in this instance Occam’s razor pushes me more to “write a huge program over a timespan of many decades, with thousands upon thousands of programmers working on it, and you’ll indeed most likely end up with something very complex…”
Office Open XML was only standardized in order to combat the threat posed by Open Document as organisations were starting to mandate use of standardized formats.
You write as if Microsoft did this because they wanted interoperability, when in reality they only begrudgingly accept that some must be allowed in order to avoid losing control of the market.
The real solution would have been to never approve the OOXML standard and not legitimize Microsoft’s attempt to make their proprietary format appear open.
The one thing you have to give Microsoft is backwards compatibility. They make hot garbage, but God damn if you can’t run that garbage from 10 years ago.
Although 10 years ago isn’t that long in computer terms any more. Those are machines that can still run Windows 10 without issue. It’s an older computer, but still perfectly usable these days.
I haven’t done the experiment, I’m curious to know if you can take a random binary compiled for Linux 10 years ago run on the latest version of popular distros. See in which ones it runs.
Depends on it and its dependencies, probably. A lot of the core utilities are generally unchanged enough that they should still work despite being a decade old.
I would agree, except that every piece of it is significantly more complex than it needs to be. ODF is considerably simpler in part because it makes use of other pre-existing standards for things like dates and times. OOXML redefines so many of those things, and in many cases Microsoft Office’s implementation isn’t actually compatible with their own standard.
Do you have more concrete examples? I’m reasonably familiar with OpenXML, and seeing the date issues in microsoft systems (Excel having the same bug that considers 1900 a leap year, to stay compatible with Lotus Notes), i can imagine them redefining everything just to be in full control ^^'…
Integer storage in spreadsheets… There are a ridiculous number of ways to store any integer, and I don’t just mean because you could theoretically store
1and00000001and they’d be interpreted as the same thing.
microsoft is a dirty bastard
There are people for whom this is news? Cheesus chroist
I don’t buy the argument that windows just works or that it’s somehow better or more stable. The reality is we all have grown to learn about computers specifically using windows and it’s been a steep learning curve. We have gotten familiar with its specificities and its sporadic misbehavior and accepted that as the norm. And people prefer what they are used to even if it’s suboptimal because they would rather not learn something else from scratch, even if in the long run it could be better.
Put any person who has zero computer experience in front of a windows computer or Linux computer and I doubt they would say the windows computer just works and the Linux one doesn’t.
the windows just works argument actually refers to the fact that it’s consistent.
If you have a problem with the desktop, nobody needs to ask you which de you use, or which parts you have substituted out. You have a graphics problem, nobody asks if wayland or x11. You have a problem with audio, nobody asks you whether you have pipewire-pulse installed and to use pipewire. Shit’s the same everywhere.
I say this as an arch linux user. The choice we all love, is actually a detriment to the average non-power user.
Apple has even fewer choices and therefore greater consistency.
Anecdotally my parents use linux because of me using it on my computers too and one nice thing about it is that they can have a consistent UI. The kind of changes that happen with at least some well established desktop environments and window managers are not nearly as radical as when Windows changes where things are at in their UI. There might be some UI tweaks here and there depending on your choice of desktop environments but I don’t use rapidly changing DEs on their PC. With some of the simpler well established DEs it isn’t typical that there will be a change so dramatic that you have to relearn how to use it like with Windows 8 or something. There are some such as GNOME that have undergone some heavy changes in the past but you can choose to use simpler ones like say LXDE or Cinnamon.
They mostly use the web browser anyway so it isn’t like it was a really steep learning curve. Since they switched to linux the amount of help I have had to give them has decreased. If my parents did more advanced tasks they would need to learn some new ways of managing their computer yeah but for them they just browse the web, use Libreoffice and use the printer mostly. Even before they switched to linux I had them using a bunch of open source cross platform software for years before that which did help the process go smoother but Libreoffice for example has a similar UI to the classic Microsoft Word so it was not like it was a huge learning curve.
I do their software updates but me doing software updates has just been me typing “sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get full-upgrade” and restarting. If there ever was a problem I would have to fix it but I would have to fix it if there was a problem with Windows too. I find linux to be easier to fix than Windows and the error messages to be easier to figure out. Overall the switch has gone well and there is less I have to worry about.
Put any person who has zero computer experience in front of a windows computer or Linux computer and I doubt they would say the windows computer just works and the Linux one doesn’t.
In my experience, usually with Linux they have less problems and it’s easier to use. Until they need an application that only works on Windows.
I think this is an issue where you are talking about people coming from windows trying to do windows things on linux like run windows software. Of course you can in some cases run windows software on Linux but it is not a fair comparison to blame Linux for not being able to run windows software. Linux has it’s own suite of software and that is often better suited.
In my experience, it’s been a bit of a mixed bag. There are some things that work in Linux, and some things that don’t, even after a bit of fiddling. My desktop’s front panel is completely unusable on Linux, for example.
Windows is at least widespread enough that it’s far more likely that parts will work on it at least to some degree. And sure enough, the front panel works fine there.
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.
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.
https://github.com/opendocument-app/OpenDocument.droid
I’ve used this a couple times. Seemed okay
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?
I’mma just going to sit over here in the corner with my AbbiWord and Gnumeric…
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.
You’re right but at the end of the day, the average person is content with having their stuff just work for now and that’s a reasonable expectation isn’t it? If it ain’t broke, people aren’t going to go out of their way to protect themselves from a what-if that they may feel is going to maybe mildly inconvenience them when it happens regardless of what it actually is, since they may be ignorant of the true state of how things might be.
And in the end, some are just gonna accept that inconvenience from stuff not working completely rather than switch. People have been saying to switch away from Chrome for years and now even with ad-blocking being nerfed, people are still on it.
The thing with “just works” in monopolies is that it eventually stops working
This gets accelerated when the company starts changing the product just for the sake of having to change something to meet some OKR, or because they need to find a way to incorporate the newest marketing buzz (cloud, AI, etc).
The Office suite was simple to use and performant. Nowadays I watched a college professor struggle for 8 minutes trying to figure out how to save a file locally rather than saving it to OneDrive, because they redesigned everything around that. It also takes an obnoxiously long time to launch, it keeps popping up some Copilot button in inconvenient places too.
16 digit numbers
Still
The comment about convenience trumping almost everything else reminded me of this old post (wasn’t originally on The Urban Dictionary but they have it now under the definition of Linux).
If Operating Systems Ran The Airlines
When you board the plane, you are given a seat, four bolts, a wrench and a copy of the seat-HOWTO.html. Once settled, the fully adjustable seat is very comfortable, the plane leaves and arrives on time without a single problem, the in-flight meal is wonderful. You try to tell customers of the other airlines about the great trip, but all they can say is, “You had to do what with the seat?”
The irony here, I think, is that many people will have actually put together the chair they use to sit in front of their computer.
Yes, but only once, until they decide to upgrade the chair.
That’s highlighting perfectly the real problem: too many people can’t assemble basic IKEA furniture properly even with clear, logical, fool-proof instructions.
It’s not given to everyone.
I’m not sure which of the subgroups of this is more frustrating: the ones who refuse to put the necesarry thought towards understanding it but would be able to do so if they did, or the ones who do try their best but still can’t figure out such simple instructions.
I use the term idiot instead of fool. I also use the term resistant instead of proof. Nothing is idiot proof. Things can be idiot resistant though.
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.
