I’ve been dual-booting Linux and Windows for a while, with Windows as the fall-back option in case I wanted to use Office for something. Now that they tried to trick me into paying a subscription for their AI slop machine, I’m finally, fully out. It was a pain to actually track down and back-up the stuff that was held for ransom in OneDrive, but now it is done.
Same across the board.
I stopped buying Skype credit once subscriptions were forced.
Welcome! Been like a year and a half for me, and I can’t even imagine ever going back to Windows. Just using it for work is already too much.
I can feel the bloat when I use it now. Like you need to get from point a to b in a hallway. It’s just you…and windows inflatable boat they fully inflated in the hallway between a and b. And you have to squeeze through to go to point b.
Yeah, Linux feels like what using a personal computer was always supposed to be.
I was thinking to myself that I need to cancel mine. Then yesterday I got charged $127 for the yearly renewal.
I thought I was SOL but you can cancel and get most of the money back. So it’s not too late to cancel and rid yourself of it.
Just cancelled my 365 the other day too. Been on Linux for half a year now and forgot I had it until the news of the copilot price increase came out and reminded me. I was happy I could cancel and be refunded the remainder of the term and get some money back in my pocket!
Yes, even though I did not have a subscription, watching them do stuff like this every 2 weeks for the last year or more is what finally pushed me off to Linux as well. I got my parents moved over as well though, and they did have a subscription previously.
The same thing happened with me. This was probably going to be my last year anyway, but i noped out real quick after the increase. Only reason I still had it was because I had some stuff in OneDrive that I was slowly backing up elsewhere. That just gave me the motivation to take care of it finally.
Cancelled mine too. Don’t particularly care about the AI. But I don’t need it and trying to justify increasing the price for it didn’t really work on me.
I’ve also gone all-in on Linux now. While I have a Mac, my gaming PC was left on Windows. Now it’s running Linux Mint and while gaming on Linux has a bit further to go, it’s night and day compared to 10 years ago. This time I feel like I can actually stick with it.
I have to wonder if anyone at Microsoft is paying attention. It’s like New Coke in the 80s. They quickly realized they fucked up and rebranded the original as Classic Coke. I’m wondering if there will be a Windows Classic coming out soon with no AI, no subscription, no forced cloud dependency bullshit. lol probably not but whatever.
Keeping with the soft drink analogy, I think Pepsi tried something similar in the 90s with Crystal Pepsi, which also failed miserably.
If “lime must go up” always, then they need to come up with a better way than product enshitification.
New Coke was different in 2 important ways.
-
It was actually a way to hide the flavor change in the switch to Corn Syrup instead of Sugar, and never intended to be permanent.
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Pepsi existed
There’s no real commercial competition for Microsoft. Linux is great, but there’s nobody for a business to call when shit fucks up. And Apple’s walled garden and high prices make it terrible for enterprise.
The bill I paid for Suse support contact at an old company I worked for begs to differ. The problem is home or smb are a rounding error for MS. They already got your money from hp or Dell etc. When you bought your computer. Making you the product with the ad and the ai bullshit to swallow your data to train their models is all icing on the cake.
There’s enterprise support for several Linux distributions like
https://www.suse.com/services/premium/ (and SEL is a thing) or
https://ubuntu.com/support
Whether those distros meet the demands is a different animal.- People stopped consuming New Coke
As long as people do nothing other than complain and continue to use the product they have no reason to change.
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As long as companies are eating that they will be ok. BUT, like most tech companies, at some point they will pull a broadcom and then the alternatives will thrive.
For the moment they don’t care about what the customer wants because their most important market is enterprise, not the customer. I’m not sure what would change that except hitting a critical mass of C-suite people who get fed up with it.
I recently moved my digital life away from google and microsoft. I previously had the following subscriptions:
- ExpressVPN
- Onedrive
- Bitwarden
- Office 365
And I had a gmail account, which I often used for SSO. I realized that, the total monthly cost of these subscriptions together was more expensive than a single Protonmail *family * subscription, so I cancelled them all, got the family subscription, and now my wife and her sister all have protonmail accounts as well as storage, a password manager, and VPN access. In the process of moving my logins to my protonmail account, so that I don’t have to keep my ancient Facebook account around for signing into things like spotify anymore. Coupled this with moving to the federated internet from reddit and instagram
I also dropped office for libreoffice. MS Office provides dubious value over the free competition, especially with a SAAS model.
Bitwarden
Do you mean Bitdefender (the antivirus)? Bitwarden is free.
Before anyone well ackhuallys me yes, there is a very cheap $0.80/mo plan if you want an authenticator.
I had a bitwarden premium family plan
I’ve actually never even had office, just libreoffice
Libre office is better too. MS builds so much bloat in it hampers functionality hard. I only use MS for work.
This true for most people, but Calc is limiting for certain use cases.
I feel like Windows tries with every change to push it’s users to Linux.
They got me, installed Mint a couple of weeks ago
I purged the Windows partition yesterday, fellt like pouring bleach on a stain…
I killed my windows partition a week ago as well.
Let’s goooo
I feel like Windows tries with every change to push it’s users to Linux.
Even their core applications move to being web based.
We’re already past that point, we’re now at “cram copilot into everything, even if it makes no sense.”
Secret good guy MS - get everyone onto Linux and tank their stock price 😂
You should try OnlyOffice. It is very similar to MS Office and fully compatible with Microsoft formats. It has fully replaced MS Office for me for all office work. Also it can be easely integrated with your private NextCloud. You can install it from Flathub.
Edit: it also lets you edit and convert pdfs like Adobe Acrobat Pro
Is this better than LibreOffice?
PSA: OnlyOffice does/may have close ties to Russia:
I use LibreOffice for this very reason
I’ll be sure not to pay them a dime, then, but the ope source version should be good enough to work with
I have a hard time making the connection that DMS is making.
OnlyOffice is a Russian company, so it naturally has “ties” to Russia.
They have not condemned their government for invading Ukraine, which can be for many reasons. Maybe they approve of it as DMS concludes. But maybe they don’t want to get political at all (hell, look at what a single comment from Andy Yen has done to views of Proton). Maybe they don’t want their government making life difficult for them. There could be a multitude of reasons they didn’t say anything.
The way the statement is written is condemning for lack of evidence. Which is fine as an opinion. But that’s all it is.
Don’t get me wrong, I followed your link because I wanted to know and appreciate the heads up. If there’s shady stuff then I’ll avoid them. I have no ties to OnlyOffice for anything.
But being honest with the info doesn’t support the DMS claim. I’m happy to be wrong if there’s other information out there, but their biased statement makes me distrust DMS more than OnlyOffice.
I think yes, especially for making presentations
Someone comment on this reply so I can down this and try it on my way back from Sam’s Club.
Bulk buying ftw
I tried using it on several occasions, but it is extremely slow for me, with occasional visual glitches… I use Wayland, if it makes any difference. How’s the OnlyOffice performance for you? Maybe I’m doing something wrong?
On Windows it is really sometimes slow for some reason, but on all my Linux devices it works well. Even on cheap laptop
I use Linux, and I have a 10 gen i7 with 32gb of ram. So it must be something with my setup …
I love libre office for quite a bit of the same features.
Let me preface this rant with that I think only office is the best online web based solution, I loved what it could do 8 years ago and I assume it’s a lot better now.
I’m trying to setup nextcloud with only office, again. Nextcloud setup is a btrrze, only office always is and always has been a crime against humanity to setup correctly.
I’ve used only office successfully only once, some 8 years ago or so, in my own company. I’ve made some 10 attempts after that, over the various years, and I always failed. I have some 25 years of professional it experience and only office always eluded me.
Issues are either that I just can’t get it installed and running at all, or that it’s impossible to connect to next cloud.
Installing it with Deb files (or the installation script that does Deb files) is a very bad idea, that never works, the install crashes and usually leaves your server in a broken state, even after removing everything.
So now I am again trying to set it up using docker, so far with little result.
So having said all that: can you give some pointers on what you did to get it working?
The Nextcloud AIO docker container has Collabra installed by default, and the AIO is a joy to use compared to any other way I’ve installed Nextcloud.
Yeah, but collabora isn’t a great option by itself. Only office install is a freak show at best, but once it’s running it’s awesome
One of the organizations I work with uses Word docs with locked fields. How does only office do with that style of chestnut?
Did you mean forms mode?
I’m not sure, I’m using documents produced by a larger org. The message I get if i try to edit the locked parts is:
The author has locked parts of this document. You can make changes only to the unlocked parts.
Btw i tried using Google docs on these Word files and the formatting broke in all kinds of terrible ways.
I know the idea here is to maintain consistent branding among the franchises. Anything sent back to the parent org needs to be in docx format, with no changes to the locked elements. If that can be done with a FOSS program, great! Local use has more leeway, but broken formatting is a nonstarter
Is there any samples to try and check if it works?
I’ve had to fill out a handful of documents with fields that I needed to fill in. They worked fully as expected in LibreOffice and OnlyOffice
Update in my previous message: so now I’m trying to install onlyoffice in a docker container on a server and I can’t even get http to work, less even https. A simple connect to port 80 just gives me connection refused, even though netstat shows docker proxy listening there, port 443 gives me connection opened that right away closes, doing nothing. Logs show nothing
This is the sort of WTF that I really don’t understand. Onlyoffice is really nice, why is the installation such a headache and fight after fight?
I’ve installed countless different services and programs in a myriad of different ways, and 99% of the time it’s a few commands and done. 0.9% of the time I have tondo some significant extra work to get it completely done (nextcloud is here, not that it’s hard but there are so many built in functionalities that you need to perform a number of extra steps) and then there is the 0.1% which is just a right nightmare for no good reason.
I have setup various dockers with little issue, onlyoffice just never works. WHY?
I would go for collabora if it wasn’t s shitshow itself when used in an office setting with dozens of users. Colabora is nice for a single user system, that’s it. I need perfect multi user document editing and onlyoffice offers this.
How do I set this crap up?
I used OnlyOffice via native .deb package. And yes it broke my apt every time and on every update. I managed by manually editing install scripts to make it work. I never used docker before but want give it a try (maybe podman instead). You can also write your problem and questions to !selfhosted@lemmy.world community, maybe they can help you
Deleted my Microsoft account yesterday!
Just going to mention that if you’re okay with non-FOSS office software, I really like Softmaker’s suite (their buy-once non-subscription version).
which distro though
Fedora KDE spin
