Fuck Windows and Microsoft really. Today I had a meeting call through Teams first thing in the morning so I start my computer 10 minutes earlier than the call because it takes a like 3 or 4 minutes to boot and for Windows to be responsive. Windows decides to apply some past update so it takes 2 or 3 additional minutes which is fine, I am just in time for the meeting call. Well, 10 minutes into the call a notification in windows appears that the computer will restart in 5 minutes and with no option to postpone WTF. Imagine this was an important sales call, an emergency or something else critical, I might be fucked. The computer restarted I started my linux personal computer and I connect my bluetooth headphones to the it but no, they were connected to the Windows computer while it was restarting so I could not just call from it as the microphone started failing a few weeks ago. (I will just replace it, thanks Framework). So fuck my company for using Windows. Fuck Windows for developing such a nightmare OS with so shitty code. This was for sure a patch for a critical vulnerability, like always. And WTF this is Windows for a business, have a fucking super stable branch that does not need patches every other day. I don’t care about your updates to the shitty weather widget, just have a fucking working operating system that let’s me do my work. Fuck Microsoft monopolistic practices that keeps people and businesses from switching to Linux. There is no better publicity for Linux that Windows itself. Most Linux/GNU distros just let you choose when to update.
Come work at Meta, we have Fedora Linux laptops :)
Edit: Maybe we should crowd source a list of companies that let you use Linux. I’ve worked at startups and straight up told the CEO “I’m installing Linux” and that has worked, but corporate companies you can’t get away with that
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Unrelated :P
No thanks
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I separated in paragraphs but I did not preview to see that it needs a double enter for a new line
:(
Then come up with a better alternative to office 365.
Windows isn’t keeping Microsoft around. Its their office software. (and azure)
what makes their office software so much better than, say, libreoffice? i don’t work an office job, and haven’t had the misfortune of running windows since i dropped windows 7, but when i did switch, the programs seemed basically the same. office software seemed like a solved problem by then. what new features has microsoft added and convinced people they need that foss options don’t have?
Good question. I wish I had a better answer than what I’m about to say.
It just is.
I’m a diehard anti-Windows, Linux-lovin’, FOSS crusader myself, but if Microsoft released a copy of MS Office for Linux (as a one-time-purchase), I would buy it today.
For most tasks, you’re right, there’s not much you can’t do in LibreOffice. But the interface is clunkier. Excel makes it easier to make good-looking spreadsheets. And as much as it hurts me to say, looks matter when dealing with nontechnical folks.
Plus there are some things that are just more intuitive in Excel, like certain kinds of charts and graphs. There are some advanced features of Excel that don’t even exist in LibreOffice. Like chart styles and certain team collaboration features.
Compatibility is… okay… For the most part, but having it all guaranteed by a bunch of paid devs would be really nice.
There is a more detailed list here
They are extremely integrated into the rest of the ecosystem and are insanely pervasive among 9-5 desk jockies. They aren’t gonna relearn a spreadsheet software especially when it doesn’t have all the same features as the thing they have been using for 20 years. Not to mention they dont actually give a shit about how much their company is paying for it. The majority of these people dont know what FOSS is and are just using computers because that’s what pays their rent.
Libre office is very far from being a drop in replacement for 365 and will most definitely never replace it. At the end of the day its all about userbase. Why do people still use twitter and Instagram even though there are FOSS alternatives that may be even better? Because that’s what everyone else uses and most people just dont care.
Actually staff and commercial vendors are keeping Windows. Plus no one gets fired for choosing MS products. That IT staff are all Windows certified means Windows will always be the answer. That users are similarly trained and need certain Windows software will mean they demand it too.
I’d be so bold as to say about 90% of windows business users are only using it for office/excel/outlook
Nextcloud and LibreOffice: allow us to introduce ourselves
Nextcloud seems like the first set of office tools that has a chance to actually compete with the entirety of Ms office. They still have a long ways to go, but it’s a hell of a lot better than just stock libreoffice
Yeah have a great time supporting libreoffice across an org of 200/2000/20000 end users. Not happening. Not without a dedicated helpdesk team that ONLY supports users office troubles. The cost of that would be way more than their monthly 365 subscription.
Also theres the infinite number of comparability issues youlll run into if you need to do business with another company that only uses Microsoft.
Also nextcloud is great but it absolutely is not competition to one drive or SharePoint in the enterprise.
A month ago, a windows update made my laptop crawl to a stop. It needed 2-3 hours to respond after a restart/shutdown. It would crash saying the search wasn’t initialised, I couldn’t type into the search. Fucking nightmare
Some governments outside the US either already have or are ditching Windows for Linux.
The differences in sheer speed and responsiveness is something FOSS alternatives need much more publicity about. When the requirements for one product are “help the user do what they want” and the requirements for another product are “synergize the KPIs of these 53 stakeholders in our trillion dollar conglomerate, monetize our market position in every way possible, and check the minimum viable checkboxes to keep end users engaged with the brand” it shows!
Windows to Linux is of course the most significant and worthwhile. As I like to describe it, even using the most full-featured distros out there (Linux Mint Cinnamon gang represent!) any flavor of Linux is like greased lightning compared with windows. And I mean Windows 10, not even 11.
A few weeks ago I turned on an old secondary desktop PC that had been powered off for a month. It had numerous updates, everything except installing a new named version. Even the kernel. I decided to time it. From the time I opened the software update GUI – including typing in my password, letting it download, letting it install, getting the “yo, reboot when you’re ready,” etc – it was done in 5 minutes. And those were 5 minutes where the computer was totally usable. Running the current version of the full featured Linux Mint Cinnamon 22.1 on a PC from 2011!
My favorite recent example is the switch from Plex to Jellyfin. Now granted, fully self-hosting means more IT admin type stuff for me so that family members and I can securely connect remotely. But god damn if every single app I have tried doesn’t feel like warp speed compared with the Plex versions. Did you know that watching my media using the WebOS app on my LG TV does not have to be dog shit slow? And don’t even get me started on phone apps like Finamp. (it really whips the jelly’s ass?)
Your complaints are certainly valid, but the IT of your company should be applying Group Policies to address some of these!
Enterprise version is also more stable than the goddamn “you are the guinea pig” spyware Home and Pro versions. O&O ShutUp10++ for those… Hilariously, they are a Microsoft Partner according to their website; some partnership that is when an automatic update from Microsoft can undo anything their software does. 😂
I’m by no means an expert but a power user… I saw the writing on the wall years ago and now have only one Windows machine explicitly for some hardware that have no Linux drivers but is otherwise very nice and useful.
Windows also used to show me the ugly face of Trump in the start menu even if I didn’t ask for it. That was more than 4 years ago. Recently was accidentally hovering over some ‘copilot’ button in Edge of a friend. And again - pop-up with Trump. So yes: fuck Windows, fuck Microsoft
Wow, that is some nightmare fuel type shit. That’s actually crazy.
I’ve been pretty lucky that I’ve been able to use Linux on my work laptop the past 3 jobs in a row. It really helps that we use Linux production in and when I tell them that I haven’t used Windows in nearly a decade, they’re usually willing to let me work with Linux.
We have to use Windows at work for our high end CAD. There’s no FOSS alternative.
I use Linux at home. Which is basically a, less crap, copy of Windows. But is still missing important stuff.
No offense, but some other folks apparently felt the need to downvote you, probably because modern GNU/Linux is a copy of Windows, which is a copy of Macintosh, which is a copy of Xerox Alto.
GNU/Linux is missing important stuff because manufacturers only pay someone to write drivers for Windows and sometimes Mac, because those are the dominant “normal user” OSes, because those are the OSes that manufacturers support… etc…
sure. those are reasons it’s missing some stuff. But I was referring to other important things also missing from Windows. Which is what Linux seems to follow. Linux has a great opportunity to break away, and come up with something really good. But sadly, there will be reasons not to, I suspect.
For 3D CAD I don’t think there is a good alternative to Solidworks or Autodesk ones but for my company uses BricsCAD which is available on linux (debian/ubuntu) and is almost as good as AutoCAD, it’s basically a copy so skills are quite transferable and it is cheaper also.
I see it as the Da Vinci Resolve of 2D CAD
Great. But AutoCAD and Solidworks are not high end CAD. Acceptable for some I guess. But we need serious CAD.
I thought AutoCAD was pretty much the industry standard for CAD unless something changed.
This. If updates are SO important, then Windows can do it while it’s shutting down.
luckily i can wipe my work laptop and install linux (for now, there are discussions about not letting unmanaged devices on the network at some point…), but what annoys me is seeing how much tax money we send straight to microsoft. i work in the education sector in europe and the majority of the company’s funds comes from the government, to send millions of that straight to the US, especially with the politics going on right now, seems like a horrible idea. and SO many others are doing the same thing, i swear if we invested just 10% of it into FOSS the world would be a better place already and we’d all save money.
100% retaliatory tariff on Microsoft products when Trump enacts his tariffs. And all that money goes to switching government and education over to Linux.
I recently had a spare machine sitting around doing nothing and was feeling a bit masochistic, so I decided to install Windows 11 on it just to see what it was like. I’ve used Windows 10 a tiny bit but essentially haven’t touched Windows in years. A couple of the fun things I noticed:
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After installing, I was going to set a new wallpaper. I double-clicked on a jpeg file and instead of opening it, it popped up with a window asking me what I wanted to do with this apparently unknown file type. I literally said out loud, “what do you mean, it’s a fucking jpeg.” Then it did the same thing for a .zip.
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I also made a restore point once I had all the basics installed, so I could roll back when Windows inevitably fucked up doing an update. I then did the first big update and it fucked it up. “No worries” I thought, “I made a restore point!” I went to restore it, and discovered that for some unknown reason Windows only saves one restore point. This wouldn’t have been a problem, except that Windows had decided to fuck itself up, and then automatically overwrite the manual save point with it’s own save point from immediately after it fucked itself up, leaving that as the only thing to restore to.
I then quite sensibly formatted the drive and went back to using Linux.
One similar thing happened to me on windows 8 (except I wasn’t testing it, I lost everything on my pc that day because it didn’t just fail to update and restore…it just fucked my drive with it !), so it’s not even a new type of issue. Even windows 10 was fucked, had a friend who never used bitlocker, never even knew it was a thing, who got his pc encrypted by it after an update, unable to unlock the damn thing, every solutions failed and had no other choice but to wipe his drive. It’s crazy how bad and unpractical windows can be.
Winblows 10 did the exact same bitlocker crap to my best friend and attorney.
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This sounds like a problem with your organization. I use windows at the hospital where I work, and we don’t run into these kinds of issues. Yeah it is rife with other issues like goading you into using microsoft edge, one drive, and more, but updates are handled by IT.
Too many times I’ve been at the very limit of failing to deliver an assignment. I used to have classes from morning to night (used to get home at 23:00) and sometimes I did homework at uni and scan/upload in my computer since camera-scanned documents don’t look as good, so I had to deliver them ASAP, but Windows would take a LOT of time to load Teams and sometimes it started applying updates at startup, so it would be SLOW AS HELL.
Just some days ago it happened again (the homework was assigned a day before) so I booted up windows and what a surprise (/s) it started applying updates, so Teams wouldn’t even open. I had to send the files from there to my linux computer (I love you, KDE connect!) because I still had to add some things to the document and Teams for Linux loaded in a second lol