Just recently moved onto Linux. Most likely not coming back when these kind of things just keep happening. I'm really surprised how well everything works. 120Hz HDR 4k Nvidia no issues on Wayland. Kubuntu 25.04/Plasma 6.3 is very nice. EasyEffects/PipeWire makes audio better compared to Windows. Steam/Proton/Wine works very well for games outside ones that have kernel level rootkits. Outside DualSense controller having issues connecting to bluetooth I can't think of anything that's worse than Windows while many things are better.
Ditto; ~20 years of dotnet dev, 1000+ games on steam. Couldn't be more baked into the ecosystem. Its just the work laptop left with windows now, and the team is working to support a non-windows dev env.
Wife is not technical at all. Put her on Ubuntu when she freaked out about her windows 7 PC updating automatically to windows 10. She been on it ever since.
Not OP, but if I was installing Linux for the first time I'd either go with pop_os (not sure if it's as good anymore as last time I checked it, a couples years ago) or kubuntu, because KDE is a bit more familiar to windows users.
Pop and Linux Mint are both solid options for newcomers. Personally, I think LM looks better out of the box but Pop is a little easier to grok coming from Windows. Not much of a difference either way though.
I moved over to Linux about a year or so ago when Microsoft announced they were going to start pushing their AI shit on every Windows system. I created a small partition intending to just give it a shot but ended up never moving back since 99.9% of everything I tried just works. It's really quite amazing how far Linux has come in the past decade alone and right now the only reason I keep Windows on my work machine is because there's still specific dev pipelines I can only do on Windows.
Same here. Work requires I use Windows or Mac, but I've switched most of my home systems over to Mint Linux. The final nail in the coffin for Microsoft for me was when I upgraded my CPU in my desktop, the MS Office liscense I paid for stopped working and they wanted me to pay another few hundred dollars for another liscence. I mainly only used Office for Outlook as I have 30 years of emails in Outlook, but I switched over to Firebird on Linux and have not looked back. The AI stuff going on with Windows is definitely a big part of me wanting to switch too. I do not want what Microsoft is selling anymore.
And one has to wonder, will M/S used these cloud documents for their AI push ? Even if the Word Docs are encrypted, I fully believe Microsoft can read the text in those documents.
People should realize everything you do in Excel and Word is being spied on by Microsoft, this cloud push is making that process easier and faster for M/S.
At the very least, go to Libreoffice. But better yet, as you just did, people need to abandon Microsoft and Apple for Linux or a BSD.
People should realize that everything they do in Windows is being spied on. There's no point in fighting against a user-hostile OS where every setting you use to try to protect yourself can be removed or toggled with the next forced update.
Just out of curiosity, what distro did you go with? I last gave Linux desktop a try about a decade ago (Ubuntu IIRC) and found it still not quite there, but I'm willing to give it another shot so I'd be curious what you had success with.
I ended up going with Nobara which is a Fedora-based distro focused around gaming, so it automates and deals with the typical driver issues and proton setup. Ended up being perfect for everything I need.
We're cutting it close with a decade here but out of the box driver support is absolutely better, especially if you're dealing with AMD GPUs, to the point where I find a fresh install of almost any Linux distro less annoying in terms of support than Windows.
No, this is definitely not true. I dabbled with Linux back when I was in college (hence, a decade ago) both because the computer labs had Linux installed and because it was interesting to me at the time.
There were a bunch of issues with compatibility if you wanted to do any sort of gaming and driver support was pretty bad from what I remember. Flatpaks were barely starting to become a thing, desktop environments were very unrefined and applications like LibreOffice still had a way to go.
If you look at what's happened in the Linux ecosystem in the past decade there are in fact significant improvements and refinements thanks to the hard work of thousands of contributors making it easier and easier to use.
Unfortunately, that's simply not true. Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (in 2016 as the name implies) with gnome 2 and Unity was peak and Ubuntu has regressed since beyond recovery: snap or other desktop containers with unsolved/unsolvable permission problems, systemd, wayland, and any number of other zero sum changes behind the scene devs like to drool over yet not. a. single. user advance or new desktop app. Even the relative "progress" in browser-based collab tools we enjoyed since about 2017 is at risk as FF is left behind by the likes of MS Teams.
I used to use Ubuntu but abandoned it when they moved to "snap". I'm not the most proficient user of Linux, but it was quickly clear that something was really wrong with new versions of Ubuntu. Mint Linux has been working well for me.
I don't think the Snap authors ever used Snap packages. The barrage of update notifications, to close my software constantly... that was super frustrating. All I had installed for snaps was Firefox and Discord. Imagine having a 20+ snap applications installed. What a notification nightmare.
I too was experiencing odd/erratic pairing issues with DualSense controllers and this RTL8671B based dongle, and using the older firmware entirely fixed it. Now four controllers can be connected simultaneously without issue.
> Outside DualSense controller having issues connecting to bluetooth
FWIW I use a DualSense controller connected to my Linux computers all the time without issue and without having to do anything special. In fact, Sony is the author of the DualSense driver on Linux[0]. Do you connect anything else over bluetooth? I'm wondering if your bluetooth setup might just be broken in general rather than specifically for DualSense controllers.
Check out onlyoffice as well. I use onlyoffice + libreoffice depending on the workload. I find libreoffice to have a better spreadsheet tool but prefer editing/commenting on documents in onlyoffice and it has a more modern aesthetic.
Ha! I recently thought I would try it again as the cloud & office are getting really too annoying. Libreoffice is snappier than google docs/sheets in the browser, which I say like this is special, but these days with Electron it really is. And it's on my own system. I'm staying here... It's fast & works well for work and private use.
I have a few Excel sheets loaded with legacy macros that Libre can't quite handle. If I didn't need to deal with those sheets that aren't really under my control to rewrite I could probably get off Windows for good.
Backup important docs to rtf/txt. I've had Libre/OpenOffice docs blank/all text replaced with hashtags on me suddenly. AFAICT, it's an autosave bug that's never going to be fixed (though I'm not technical enough to know for sure). Personally, I would never use those programs for anything important.
Googling would show that any number of users run into issues with OO/LO file corruption, often from power interruption during saves. The applications seem to handle that in a suboptimal way, and maintainers are unwilling to address it. My suspicion is that their unspoken contention is that the problem is with Windows, not OO/LO.
I recommend backing up to a general file type simply because it's less likely to open in the offending application by default, if the user ever needs to access it.
It does, but I also found forum posts discussing similar issues with LO back when I had the original issue. I won't risk it; I would rather use applications without a hint of these problems. I've also dropped Evernote after it ate a few of my notes. It's almost impossible to get that user trust back without excising every bit of the concern, and then some, and unfortunately, the LO development community (like many FOSS communities, as well as many proprietary developers) is too self-involved to do that sort of thing.
I eventually did get it working, but man you are luckier than I getting Nvidia to have "no issues". I had to waste an entire weekend getting an Nvidia card working [1].
I love Linux and specifically NixOS but my experience with good audio and non-AMD drivers has been pretty so-so.
I didn't really assign labels of "good" or "bad"; in this case that's a matter of philosophy that I am wholly uninterested in.
I specifically said that I had so-so luck getting Linux working with non-AMD stuff, and regardless of who is ultimately to blame it's still something I had to deal with.
It wasn't a laptop, it was a tiny gaming box. I did buy it with the intention of running Linux on it, and it actually worked great with the vanilla setup with the AMD CPU + GPU. I did do research before I bought it to make sure the drivers should work.
I already had an Nvidia GPU and an eGPU case that I had bought for previous projects with AI (on Linux, but headless). I wanted to use it to play some games that are a bit too intense for the little gaming box (specifically the System Shock remake from 2023).
It's mentioned in the blog post, but getting the eGPU case and getting Nvidia stuff working with regular Gnome wasn't too bad on Linux, only took a few hours. The biggest issue was that I wanted to use the SteamOS interface and that was completely corrupted with the stable Nvidia driver. I had to move to the beta driver and it's still a little broken, but usable. The games themselves work fine.
I also had a lot of issues with audio getting increasingly scratchy as I played, to a point of being completely unusable after about an hour, and that required a lot of trial and error but eventually I was able to search my way through NixOS docs and figure it out.
The card was already two years old so I doubt I could have gotten much support from it, and I am even more skeptical that Nvidia's tech support would have known how to do anything with NixOS.
> Outside DualSense controller having issues connecting to bluetooth
I've had this issue as well on KDE Plasma. I'm convinced it's some sort of bug within Plasma itself. If I use bluetoothctl to pair the controller, it works fine, might be worth giving that a try if you haven't.
Meanwhile, I just tried 3 different flavors of Fedora last week and could not even get to the point where I could log in reliably. Never mind getting the handful of Windows-only apps I still rely on to work. I'm despairing that I may have to let Windows update itself to Win11 while I wait for my next hardware upgrade cycle to roll around so I can try to pick more compatible hardware.
If anyone has any recommendations for how to pick desktop components that will "just work" with Linux I'd love to hear them.
I wonder what issues you've seen (error messages), and what hardware you're using. Fedora has been my goto distribution for more than 15 years. And aside from Nvidia, and Gnome, causing me trouble, it worked great[1]. Though I always install the Xfce spin.
For your Windows applications you can try to use winapps (windows vm behind the scenes, but tucked away from view) https://github.com/Fmstrat/winapps
[1] never update to the latest Fedora version, at least until a couple of months after release. If you don't want to be a beta tester. Yes sometimes they don't a good job with SELinux policies and you'll be dealing with annoying popup notifications from time to time. And yes, if you're using full disk encryption (via LUKS) you really want to enable some flags which Cloudflare engineering contributed back (but are not the defaults), otherwise stuttery desktop behaviour is possible.
I don't think I ever saw an actual error message, just a lot of black screens in various configurations (e.g. switching KVM between machines, waking up from sleep) and lots of weird little glitches in Wayland. I know that my Nvidia 3090 needs to be swapped for an AMD GPU, but I'm not totally convinced that that will solve everything. Particularly the black screen on wake from sleep seems like it could/should be a mobo issue.
I would recommend giving Xfce spin a try for comparison, and when encountering similar issues logging in a separate tty (ctrl-alt-F2 to F12) to check the logs for issues. (journalctl --boot=0, for current boot and journalctl --boot=-1, for previous boot, in case of crashes).
Your best bet is to get a brand that is well known to run Linux if you want it bad enough to get a new laptop. Dell business line, lenovo thinkpad, framework, system76 are all good platforms. If it's not working on your old laptop it's probably only one or two drivers, and you should probably try running with debian, endeavour, ubuntu and a few flavors that might have the driver you need working.
> If anyone has any recommendations for how to pick hardware that will "just work" with Linux I'd love to hear them.
Some vendors sell hardware with Linux preinstalled or specifically tested (besides the obvious ones like System76/Framework/Tuxedo, Dell provides an XPS flavor that comes with Ubuntu). You don't need to actually use the preinstalled distro, but buying such models ensures baseline support is solid and it sends a signal to vendors to continue ensuring so.
Then there's Apple's M1/M2 lineup, which provides the smoothest Linux experience you can have today (specific hardware features are not supported yet, the rest works extremely well!).
Other than that, the Arch wiki is typically a good resource that lists quirks of individual devices with Linux.
My son hit a showstopper bug with Mac this week where it won't recognize and handle Yubikey 2FA. If anyone has a reliable workaround, I'd love to hear it so he can get off Windows for good.
I guess I should have clarified, my only personal (i.e. not work supplied) computer is a mid-tower desktop, which I'm absolutely not buying pre-built. More looking for how I can tell if e.g. a specific motherboard is going to play nice with Linux or not.
More seriously, it's only the motherboard and the GPU that can be problematic here in the first place, isn't it? So that's far more manageable using websearch than laptops with their gazillion components. But then again I've only built a new PC once these last 10 years, so maybe I was just very lucky with my choice.
Yeah I get tired of them trying to suck every bit of data and work that you do into the cloud so they can hoodwink you later with licensing fees and to train their AI. The last straw for me was their "we want to constantly snap shot your screen and index, oh and -wink- it's for your own good, so we'll enable it automatically for you!" I was done at that point and deleted it off my last PC with windows and put Ubuntu on it. I have Mac version of Office that's good enough for now.
>well for games outside ones that have kernel level rootkits
I wish people would stop bringing this up which has not been true for years. Around 40-50% of kernel level anti cheats work and are supported (in user space).
Love Linux. Finally moved over it more than 10y ago and never looked back.
Still a few minor issues though. Sleep doesn't work well with Ubuntu on a desktop PC with an Nvidia card. It frequently wakes up immediately, or the screen remains black upon wake up. And sometimes it just works. Same problem on different PCs.
Just a minor annoyance though. I love Linux. On a recent computer everything is so fast and snappy compared to Windows or even macOS.
With all due respect Darktable is not a Lightroom replacement, having used Lightroom years ago the recent Darktable releases are maybe sometimes reaching Lightroom UX from back then. I'm sure the technical image processing stuff is best in class, but it's too much for me wanting to make my raw photos look better than what the camera does with jpegs by default. The addition of built in presets is extremely welcome, it should be exposed to newbies way more than it is currently.
Those applications may work for some, but they are no replacements for Lightroom in my opinion. My Lightroom 4 installation from 2012 (I never upgraded after Adobe went all in on subscriptions and cloud) still beats the latest Darktable/Ansel versions, hands down. The only things I'm missing are a CLI for automation and a few features that RawTherapee has, like switching to a view of one color channel with a single key. Other than that, Adobe somehow got it incredibly right in terms of workflow and features back then. Using the software feels like it was made for photographers, rather than software enthusiasts.
Still, I'm in the same boat as many who wish they could migrate their decades' worth of photos with all their adjustments to a FOSS alternative. For me too, Lightroom is the last application that keeps me from dumping Windows for good. It already lives in a Windows VM on a Linux host these days.
Looking glass is another option, which uses shared memory [0].
I just have my two monitors hooked up to both my iGPU and dedicated GPU, and switch inputs if I want to use my Windows VM. It means things like colour profiles and VRR work as expected too.
Running them in a Windows VM with an attached GPU works great, I suspect you could use something like Looking Glass [0] as well - though I’d be nervous about colour profiles.
First I switched to Linux Mint. Turns out anno 2025 most distros are still made with legacy ThinkPads in mind. Then I installed Fedora KDE. It gives an impression of working. Make no mistake - I have weird display glitches, shit crashes all the time, stuff randomly refuses to work, some devices I have require ridiculous workarounds, basic tasks require cryptic terminal commands, software updates introduce awkward regressions, but I think we've truly reached the milestone where a dedicated person can run Linux as their main desktop system. I suppose in about 30 years we'll have a Linux distribution that can be used on desktop without any IT knowledge.
Of course technically speaking I shouldn't complain because I have provided nothing of value to the Linux ecosystem (how the fuck do I even start, even if I wanted to?), but still, the point stands.
> we've truly reached the milestone where a dedicated person can run Linux as their main desktop system.
You're 20 years too late for this.
The reason why Linux doesn't run well on the latest greatest hardware (and never has) is because the vendors of that hardware range from indifferent to actively hostile to Linux, and to make the system work people have to fight. Buy a legacy thinkpad, or something you've researched, and you'll have fewer problems than with Windows or Macs (which are tied to even more specific hardware and obsoleted by company whim.)
Of course, if you're on the bleeding edge of technology, everyone is using Linux (whether directly or in VMs and containers), so when I say the latest greatest, I mean the latest greatest consumer and business user stuff.
I've never understood comments like this. It's like you're looking at a pool full of people who have been swimming for years and telling you the pool is nice, and saying: "I guess it's finally ready for the real experts now."
Also, if you love vendors so much, you can have one. Buy your Linux computer from somebody who sells Linux computers, knows any problems you'll run into on that specially-selected hardware, and call them when you have a problem, just like you would do for the others.
> Of course technically speaking I shouldn't complain because I have provided nothing of value to the Linux ecosystem
This is the worst point by far. You can complain about anything that is broken, you just can't expect anyone to care (because you haven't obligated anyone to.) The problem isn't complaining, it's complaining badly. Get a vendor, whine to them.
That's completely true, but from the point of view of a user who just wants a working system, also completely irrelevant. If I were to recommend Linux to my mom she wouldn't care why exactly her computer doesn't work correctly, she only cares about the fact that it worked on Windows and doesn't work on Linux.
I hope that as Valve pushes people into gaming on Linux, things will slowly change.
All of that compute can’t compensate for the fact that starlibreopenoffice is atrocious. Big corps have been looking for ways to migrate for decades but fail because it’s so abysmal.
Word has defaulted to saving in OneDrive (if you turn on autosave and you're signed into an MS account) for years now, I think since the Office 2016 > Office 365 update. The only real change I see is that the document will now be given a name with the date instead of just 'Document 1'. Maybe it's a little more aggressive about turning on autosave for you? The autorecover location is still in appdata.
There’s an important generational component that’s getting missed here.
Most children (American children, at least) grew up on Chromebooks. That instills a certain expectation of how these things work — documents save themselves.
To switch to Microsoft Office means adding a cryptic, unnecessary-seeming extra step. I imagine it feels something like having a laptop that's designed to be shut down before closing.
You’ve all heard the stories about college CS students who have to be told what a folder is — and those are the kids who actually want to work with computers. Now step back to the next generation of lawyers and nurses and novelists and think about their lifetime experience.
Definitely true, I think there is a divide where a GenX or Older millennial may say "why would I want you to save my stuff to the cloud" Z and beyond are likely more in the "why wouldn't I save to the cloud?" or at the extreme "you can do something other than save to the cloud?"
And while I think this is to some degree "keeping with the times" MS clearly has ulterior motives to do this, to lock users into an ecosystem, to dangle premium services, to charge for storage etc.
I suspect the HN crowd leans towards pessimistic/jaded views and that like MS is mostly doing this for the other reasons and not to conform to the norms of a population that doesn't really use MS word.
I'm almost positive that it's both and also a short-sighted "give the customer what they ask for" approach. You could easily achieve local auto save, or a clear "upload to the cloud" UX, or whatever else. But the user got confused about saving documents, sooooo cloud.
Then the data centralization is a nice plus that makes it impossible to go back on.
The only reason the user got confused was because of the terrible fucking cloud-first save dialogs that they kept pushing. And all the different iterations of OneDrive that weren't the same thing.
It's also getting tiring seeing everything dumbed down for dumb people. I thought that people would learn how to use computers, and become empowered to integrate technology into their lives in the way that works for them. Instead, they have just become dumber than ever and more helpless and dependent.
> Most children (American children, at least) grew up on Chromebooks. That instills a certain expectation of how these things work — documents save themselves.
I'd say iPads rather than Chromebooks, but the same applies - no concept of a file system, everything just living "in the cloud", the devices themselves being ultimately disposable - as long as you have iCloud set up, you can put your iPad in the shredder, and get all of your content back in under an hour.
Yep. First party and well behaved third party Mac apps have been doing so since… jeez, 10.7 Lion (released in 2011) I think?
The way it works there is that documents are auto-saved to a non-volatile app-specific temp directory until they’re explicitly saved, at which point they’re moved to the specified location and continue to be auto-saved there. Anybody who uses TextEdit as a temp text stash is familiar with this with the hoard of unsaved documents that comes back even after a cold boot.
Microsoft is just motivated to push cloud storage onto usage.
> The expectation is that your data's available anywhere.
Then why it is not available ? Why can't i run a dotNet program from a network share ?
Why i can see heic files shared in Teams, but my boss cannot open them ?
> You’ve all heard the stories about college CS students who have to be told what a folder is
Back in the olden days of the early 90's when I was in school, I was working for the university's "Unix Group". Since I, being an undergrad, was the low man on the totem-pole there, I was always the one sent out to the various departments to do the support work on their workstations. The CS professors were, without question, the ones who knew the least about how to operate their machines. They mostly had no interest, as they were much more invested in CS theory than in practical use.
Maybe, but adding a setting for cloud/ local storage is not that complicated or even auto-save to local filesystem. Microsoft is just chasing the sales of “one drive” subscriptions.
Yes, they will probably make more money from OneDrive subscriptions but it will be will help and make things easier for 99% of their users (if not higher).
We have to understand that being on this website alone puts us in a group that is not "normal" (from the content of the site, to the UI, to the rules, etc). I think almost everyone here would agree backups are important but what is the "normal" Windows person supposed to do for that if not OneDrive?
External/NAS is out of reach of most people (to manage if not to buy) and it's local and you really want a cloud backup. And while it would be great if we all had e2e encrypted backups where we had the only key, that is just not going to work for most people. They will lose the key, want features (like search) that don't work unless you pull all the data local, want ease of use moving between multiple devices, or <insert 1000 other reasons>.
Yes, yes, I know _you_ (collective) know how to do that, I get that you can set it up for the friends and family in your life, but most people will not learn or put up with the limitations even if someone else manages it for them.
Honestly, a lot of people (both young and old) have no concept of where they are saving their files, I think saving to the cloud by default is the right call. I wouldn't save a document locally unless I knew one of my many backups would get it safely to the cloud in short order if not immediately. If only to cut down on support calls for myself I think this is a welcome change.
All that's changing here is the default, you can still save locally if you want. It's just another layer of training wheels on technology. As much as that chafes people on this website, myself included often, I think it's 100% the right move. The side-effect of making more money from OneDrive is icing on the cake IMHO, not the cake itself.
> Honestly, a lot of people (both young and old) have no concept of where they are saving their files
Microsoft is working hard on this issue since Windows 95. They even push their braindead Documents, Pictures, Videos before anything else. Good luck finding your files when something goes wrong.
Though, it is better than iOS or Android where files are second class citizens and working with them is a PITA.
For the people who do shut it down, they do it by holding down the power button for 10+ seconds, because that’s how phones do it. On Windows at least, that causes a forced/crash shutdown.
That's not Windows specific. It just forces power off on a firmware level, possibly even lower (the power management IC could have "hold to turn off" built in).
While incompetence might be an issue, I think the greater problem is that Microsoft is rolling back control and generally sucks at UX.
Why does this app that's been working just fine as desktop software need to save anything to the cloud by default? It's conceptually odd.
I've used Google docs from the beginning, but I actively choose what docs I want on that platform.
All MS had to do was add "save to cloud" as an additional save option along with "save" and "save as" (maybe renamed as "save to desktop") then auto save could activate where your last save location was. This would be good design.
Agreed. Functionality like this should be presented as a choice in an OOBE welcoming screen right after installation. And it should be _a choice,_ something that can be reversed at a later date if the decision was wrong.
Who's incompetence? When half their users need to ask "what's a cloud", that option is too complicated. What's sensible and reasonable and logical to us, isn't to the rest of the world.
I've no idea what you mean by "walled garden" w/r/t MacOS, but I understand it's an article of faith on HN.
Again, for the Nth time, you can run any software you like on a Mac. You can do anything you want. App store? Of course. Direct vendor download? You bet. Build from source? No problem.
Further, this line is out of place here because Microsoft is FAR more invasive about pushing cloud-first storage than Apple has ever been. No app on my Mac default to saving to iCloud. NONE.
Direct vendor download? Sure, as long as it’s signed with an attestation key that’s countersigned by Apple. Running an app not signed this way is definitely possible, but requires invoking a hidden menu and then still has startup delay as the attestation check fails.
HN as always drastically overstates how hard it is to run non-AppStore software.
Yes, the Mac defaults to a stricter policy than most HN readers would want. Mass market computers SHOULD. That they don't is a reason we have so much malware on the Aunt Millie PCs of the world.
HN readers are more technical. We want to do what we want to do, but we have to understand that what WE want isn't what's right for the average user. As long as a platform gives us a path to download a random utility from a buddy's site or whatever, it's fine.
It's very, very easy to set a Mac to run whatever you want. Nothing is hidden about it. Is it different than it was under Sonoma? Yes, but the changes are well documented and there are countless articles online, including at Apple, that explain the trivial steps required.
I mean, by that standard Linux is a walled garden, because you probably can't take all your apps and data with you to another system without significant overhead.
I'm no spring chicken. I've had painful migrations. I'm not interested in tools that don't have an exit. Nothing about a normal Mac setup is locked-in. I could migrate my data to Linux, I expect, with minimal hassle. I mean, I wouldn't, because I enjoy the network effects of using the Apple ecosystem, and I find MacOS more pleasing to interact with than any Linux window manager I've yet seen. But it's absolutely possible for me to leave, and simple to do so.
Do not decry the value of a hammer. There are more specialized tools, and they have their place. A shared property we value is that you can put the hammer down, and it stays a hammer. It doesn't Develop Ideas about spying on you, it doesn't pivot to being an awl, the handle doesn't spontaneously fall off, you don't have to re-learn how to hammer things.
I have to re-learn how to use software very regularly, and as more and more things become software I have lost some functional skills because there are only 24 hours in a day and I can't stay current on everything. If I haven't done a thing in six years, it means I need to research what the current software tool for doing that thing is, try installing four of those things and land on the one that isn't broken or some type of malware, and then teach myself an entirely new interface over time. I just wanted to hit a nail! My hammer was installed on my old computer! I knew that hammer!
But no, it's never that simple with software. I can learn 150 software tools to do specific things and have to re-learn something every week just to maintain capability. I don't have to do that with hammers, wrenches, saws, etc.
We need more hammer-like tools instead of managed, constantly updated "ecosystems", and when we do find a good one, we need a way to keep it. Because we have finite time and cognitive bandwidth.
"That was deprecated three years ago, why are you still trying to use an old version that doesn't even have security updates? What is wrong with you?! [WONTFIX]"... Fuck you, give me back my fucking hammer. I could do this task I'm trying to do in literally 90 seconds ten years ago; I'm an hour deep into determining how you would even begin to do it today.
OneDrive has to manage synchronising the cloud with multiple, potentially independently updated, local copies. This is a much harder problem than anything Google have tried to tackle, with more ways for things to go wrong compared to "no internet connectivity? No documents for you!"
This has the effect that (to a first approximation) everyone knows someone with a horrific OneDrive data loss story, no-one particularly trusts OneDrive with anything actually important, and so no-one wants to be forced to use it for everything.
However, OneDrive's promise is "save your files and photos to OneDrive and access them from any device, anywhere". Accordingly, the model OneDrive actually exposes to the user is directory trees of arbitrary files containing what, for OneDrive's purposes, are opaque blobs. This leads to all the behaviours you'd expect from a distributed system using such a model, and therefore the trust issues the public has with MS distributed systems.
Regaining someone's trust in a vendor after a bad experience, even for a different product, is very hard.
That sounds like an extreme amount of incompetence to me.
I understand that you run into this problem with third party software like Dropbox, because they aren't natively integrated with the OS and therefore need to do some unreliable file tagging to support basic operations like renaming, moving or copying files, but Microsoft controls the entire OS.
They can scan the filesystem journal for file system operations. They can build custom OneDrive specific features into their file explorer. They have an office suite that can directly integrate with OneDrive.
Yet they chose to not do that and instead decided that they really ought to collect all your data for training AI instead.
>Somehow, Microsoft managed to make the same feature sound and feel and be creepy.
The company they're imitating (poorly, as always) is one I've found so creepy that I actively go out of my way to distance myself from. For at least the last decade at this point. If Microsoft is being creepy too, this just means they'e successfully imitated the competition... for once.
I'm not sure they're quite the same. If noone else has coined a term for it I'll go with the "cancer cure fallacy" but maybe someone has a better name. Open to suggestions!
They will secretly use your docs to train their models on it, say it was a mistake, pay their $4million dollar fine in 2040 for doing that and laugh the whole time.
To say nothing about censorship and alerting in your private documents. Discussing sensitive biological matters, or unpopular political thoughts? Not a good idea when living in an authoritarian state.
Yep, I'm constantly astonished by adults that insist that Linux is too hard to use on the desktop. My entire family has been using it for years. I raise my kids on it. Works great.
The least technical people will be fine because they only use their 4 programs where a Chromebook would probably be enough.
Between those and the people that can navigate everything on Linux, there'll be mildly technical people. Those may explore things that are out of the ordinary but will be unable or unwilling to fix issues that could arise from that
My family has also been using it for years, but I'm the one who always had to install, update, fix problems, etc.
I think the biggest obstacle to widespread adoption of Linux is not using Linux itself, it's installing it on a computer. 99% of people don't know how to format a USB device, or how to enter the BIOS.
To be honest, I think most non-technical people that are not close to someone technical probably don't even know about Linux and/or just don't care about it.
If it isn't a problem it's not worth fixing. A lot of people don't even know where they are saving their stuff to, so if it's in the cloud or on their device doesn't really matter to them.
> A lot of people don't even know where they are saving their stuff to, so if it's in the cloud or on their device doesn't really matter to them
Until their computer dies, and then they get upset at Microsoft for not having some automatic backup process like they have on the other platforms their friends use.
I'm not in the US but the third party doctrine looks obscene to me, is this saying I'd have no expectation of privacy for my full name/DOB/address/ID because I legally had to give it to a bank to open an account, which is an essential thing to do in the modern world to get paid into nevermind spend money? I absolutely have an expectation of privacy for all of those details, doubly so if I am mandated to provide them to a third party
It's a shorthand for 'it's hard to get everything 100% working after a fresh install and it's hard to have it not break when it updates'. If you manage to get from the out-of-the-box 90% working condition and don't touch too many things afterwards, it works great indeed; hence the recommendations of starting out with legacy hardware so you're closer to 100% than 90% initially.
Yes I moved away from Windows to MacOS but couldnt get used to the UI and they have now sprinkled bad AI tools throughout. I use KUbuntu now which feels a bit like Windows 10 and really is all I need. But what I really want on my Thinkpad with KUbuntu is the perfect open/close screen management like the Macbook has and changing from second monitor to no second monitor often causes issues and doesnt just work argh.. Maybe one of these linux first laptops will fill the void.
> Problems with sleep/suspend modes is a relatively common in Linux.
It is if you slap Linux on your Windows computer and expect it to work. Dell etc have teams whose entire job is ensuring Windows works well on their hardware. These are systems integration teams.
If you try to put Linux on a Windows box, you've signed up to do all the system integration work yourself, without any help or support (eg documentation) from anyone.
The best Linux experience will happen on hardware that was designed to run Linux, with a system integration team to make the hardware/firmware and Os work together, with a support line you can call or write.
I just need to get a dozen kernel engineers in a room with a laptop and a dude who does nothing but open and close the lid every 2s. Test passes when the laptop still is responsive by lunchtime.
That’s fair. So you’re pretty confident most these very annoying Linux hardware issues go away with Linux first hardware? Suggest a couple brands for me to look into please to replace the thinkpad?
Hopefully, but most likely a lot a people will shrug or won't notice. Others will start using Libre Office and discover that it's more than enough for their very basic tasks.
I am using Linux personally for the last 5 years or so. When she bought a new laptop I told her that she wouldn't need windows for her use case and the (free) Linux would be more than adequate.
She is mostly using it for education (university), browsing internet. Just casual stuff.
She then proceeded to install and test the programs she needed and everything worked basically out of the box, so now she continued to use it because it doesn't matter to her what she uses, as long as she can use it.
Seems like Microsoft's Modus operandi the last few years has been:
Make anti-consumer move -> get backlash -> repackage same egregiousness while stalling & deflecting -> repeat cycle
Steamrolling their users then getting rewarded with their stock going stratospheric. Excellent!
> Steamrolling their users then getting rewarded with their stock going stratospheric
Welcome to the world of modern capitalism. I'm seriously starting to question if a company can survive on the stock market by creating a solid product and caring about the users of that product.
We recently started rolling out 11 at work, and we have all sorts of group policy hacks to disable stuff... one thing I noticed is that despite copilot being disabled, the button still appears at the top of every office app. I'll have to check on the weekend, but I wouldn't be surprised if we hard enable this option as we have our own OneDrive instance to replace our terabytes of network shares.
Or those working on export controlled content. ITAR is everywhere these days, and it would be un-fun to experience a deemed export of technical data because an engineer didn't watch where their document went and the data center has non-US-persons working in it.
Someone else mentioned that the kids (what, with their damned loud k-pop music and Tok cloks) are used to using Chromebooks that autosave documents.
Also, MS wants more sales opportunities. If data is on their cloud, they have at least some control over your access of it, and the ease with which it is used in your daily work. It's a pain in the ass to have to manually save stuff, but that's what you'll have to do once you exceed the 5GB free tier limit. I guess you'll probably want to shell out for more space, no?
The good news for your work Mac is that it's your IT and budget departments' headaches, not yours.
Local First stalwart that has some legacy || Cloud first "new kid" but you surrender your files.
The issue is, first: they changed the deal. Change by default is bad. People need to learn this because honestly it's an important lesson.
Change is inherently bad, so if you're going to change: have a stonking good reason.
Second: Now the drawbacks of the second "hip" alternative is included the same drawbacks of the first. So, now, Google Office is a strictly superior offering.
Congratulations, I guess?
Yes, more people should use libreoffice, but most people are concerned with compatibility, a sunk cost on their office skills and it's pretty bad UX.
We have an enterprise contact with Google with data privacy terms and controls on what happens with that data. I mean, Google will even sign a HIPAA BAA with you if you ask them to.
We don’t have one for the 3 people in the company to need to use Word on occasion.
If I am reading this right I assume this is only if you have onedrive enabled?
If that is the case, I think it makes some sense if you are already setup to use that to default to saving there since it makes it easier to find your files on other devices and they be safe. Theoretically if you have it setup you already agree to the risks of storing data in the cloud.
however... The real problem to me is that onedrive is enabled by default and that they are now requiring you to login with a microsoft account to use Windows. If both of those were not the case this makes complete sense.
But until they stop enabling one drive by default and making it a pain in the ass to disable this is bad.
My computer broke while I was traveling a few years ago, so I bought a cheap Windows laptop at Walmart. It took me an hour to figure out get that thing up and running without setting up a Microsoft account online. I even had to change a freaking BIOS setting! I bet you can't even do it at all now.
I moved over to Linux last July. I had to move back because Google broke something in Google Docs to where Braille support would read everything each time I moved around the document, and I have to do my job. Now I'm on Windows and loving all the NVDA screen reader addons that aren't a thing in Linux because not enough people know accessibility.
I love onedrive and have been a long time user since it was called skydrive. I also love the sharepoint features in onedrive.
But I stopped auto saving by default. I find that simply navigating a document and making markups ends up saving the document when all i wanted to was view it and not save it
I use the modified date filter extensively to figure out what is most relevant and what is not. With autosave, the date modified keeps changing. And going online and restoring the file to an earlier version changes DM to now. Meaning that information is either permanently lost or I have to hack it and change it manually.
If this report is accurate and the change is made quietly and automatically as it predicts then how does this not end up with the mother of all lawsuits? We have several clients in sensitive industries and contractually it is very clear that we must not upload data for those projects anywhere. Surely many others do as well. Anyone working in industries like healthcare or security could get in a lot of trouble for uploading data even once.
Within a dedicated organisation you probably would disable it. If you're a supplier working with multiple clients then each might have their own policies on confidentiality and data sharing. Some of them might want you to manage information using an account they provide on a cloud system they use. Others might completely prohibit external transfers. A third category are OK with using online systems in principle but for legal or regulatory reasons they need to make sure that the data doesn't leave a certain geographic area so you can only use systems that provide that guarantee.
A reasonable policy for dealing with this variety is to default to not transferring anything you're working on outside the relevant parts of your organisation - including use of cloud services - and then enable specifics on a per-client basis according to need. It's like the principle of least privilege. But if you operate that way then any software that quietly starts sharing things without explicit permission is a big problem.
And if this change will affect home users who don't have professionally managed systems as well then the same moral hazard applies. I don't think it's OK to push people into sharing their personal data online without understanding what they're doing and the potential consequences.
Probably a good move on Microsoft's part, tbh. Not great for society, but good for Microsoft.
I find it annoying because I often just want a document to live on a local device, and I'll decide when I want to upload it to a cloud service. But a lot of normal, non-tech people don't have any concept of how data is stored on their devices. I can't tell you how many times I've encountered a situation that roughly goes,
"Did you download the file?"
"I guess so."
"Okay. Now go the file and open it."
"Where is it?"
"I don't know. Where did you download it?
"I don't know!"
For a lot of normies, just saving the document in the cloud is going to be easier. The ironic thing is that now I'm the one who is annoyed because I have no idea where my document is saved.
In practice, I do keep a OneDrive account because I find the service useful. But I run Ubuntu on my primary computer, and really only interact with OneDrive when I feel like it through a web browser. I feel much more in control of my own computer and my own data.
What next? Even my text files will be default synced to the cloud, and nothing will be beyond the prying eyes of advertisers, governments and data-hungry LLMs?
To be fair, I already sync some of my text files to the cloud, but I choose which ones I sync to which services. This seems to take away our agency.
I think that for "normies", the risk of losing data because of a dead / stolen device (because in all probably they don't have / do backups) is higher than the risk of loss privacy or other problems that HN "techies" may have with this.
Yes, but the risk may be far greater for one than the other.
It’d be a bummer if my cousin lost the term paper he was writing. It would be a Truly Bad Day if a coworker uploaded a sensitive document to an unauthorized (or unexpected!) cloud service and it got compromised and the sensitive data used against us.
The former would be bad for my cousin. The latter would involve lawsuits and smitings. The probability is lower, but the risk is much, much higher.
I use Emacs (org-mode with TeX and Beamer exports) for almost everything, it's my office suite among other things. The only time I still need LibreOffice is for diagrams and charts, and even that is slowly being replaced by Mermaid.
Seconded Emacs. I use it for almost everything. I started using it for text editing and it slowly crept into basic web browsing, RSS reader, word processing (with org-mode and Markdown), presentation (through Pandoc/Beamer) and Elisp/C programming. It's gotten to the point where the only four programs I use daily on my Mac are LibreWolf, FreeTube, Logic Pro and Emacs.
Seriously if I could use Logic Pro inside Emacs I would.
Lawyers, doctors, accountants etc have legal obligations that regulate how documents containing sensitive information can be stored. Professionals often work on computers away from the office.
Microsoft is potentially staring at tons of lawsuits if their actions result in violations of these privacy regulations.
Can't say I'm surprised. The office "Save As" dialog boxes have become increasingly more focused on forcing this on users & required ever more clicks to get to say C drive
Same for option to email people documents. On corporate systems its now forcing "share via onedrive/sharepoint"
I grew pretty frustrated with WYSIWYG word processors about a decade ago, and moved to a Pandoc->LaTeX->PDF system for everything until about six months ago, when I finally learned Typst and use that for everything now. I just prefer Markdown (or Markdown-adjacent in the case of Typst) and I hate formatting sneaking in with invisible characters.
However, I realize that I'm weird, and I certainly don't blame most people for preferring the Word style of editing, since most people aren't nerdy software engineers.
While a part of me hopes this works as a push for people to use FOSS like LibreOffice, I'm not really holding my breath. I tried getting my parents to switch years ago after they were complaining about having to pay for a subscription to Office, and they were wholly unmoved and didn't like LibreOffice.
In fairness, LibreOffice didn't really do what my parents wanted; the equation editor for LibreOffice is decidedly harder to use than Microsoft's (even compared to the old Mathtype version), and the syntax for their spreadsheet stuff is different enough from Excel that it can lead to a fairly steep learning curve.
I don't think you're weird. I also have some tiers when it comes to typesetting.
Normal documents, 99.999% of the time, are written in Markdown, and stored like that or rendered to PDF, if required.
Everything serious go through LaTeX. I don't care about Typst, I'm happy with LaTeX syntax (I've written my Ph.D. with it, so I don't care if it fights you).
For some Office stuff I need to use office tools. LibreOffice if the other party accepts it or Microsoft Office for the picky documents and people.
A lot of personal calculations are done in Notion databases now, but I can wrangle Calc/Excel/Numbers enough to have them on file, if they are sensitive or need to be detached from Notion.
I'm an old school people. I don't migrate from tool to tool much.
I do use LaTeX sometimes; I don't like Typst's equation syntax as much so if I know I'm going to need more advanced or a lot of math formatting I still do Pandoc or even pure LaTeX sometimes.
I think that LaTeX is mostly fine enough but there are a few bits of bullshit that I find infuriating, e.g. having to remember to do `` for beginning quotes, which apparently I will never remember to do until I look at the rendered document. Also, the errors when compiling are pretty opaque and hard to parse; I've done it enough now to where I can usually figure it out but they're certainly pretty weird to a beginner.
I think we're both kind of weird :). Weird doesn't mean "bad", certainly, I'm just saying that I don't think it's reasonable to ask a random non-techy person to learn LaTeX or how to render with Pandoc. I did my entire undergrad work in Pandoc->LaTeX->PDF, and my entire masters work in Typst; I didn't finish my PhD but all the work I did for that was in vanilla LaTeX.
Importantly, though, I get to do it all using Neovim + tmux, so I can keep using my normal "IDE" at all times.
For spreadsheets, I usually just use Calc for anything that requires privacy, and Google Sheets for anything where privacy doesn't matter. They're both good enough for what I'm doing.
No,no. I also concur on the meaning of "weird", and I totally own it.
LaTeX has its own quirks and doesn't talk kindly to a newcomer, but I know a lot of people (nerd or otherwise) like it for what it is. For some of the users, it's an acquired taste though.
I have written my B.Sc. and M.Sc. stuff in Open/LibreOffice. Then I said never, and migrated to LaTeX for Ph.D. and did everything in 5x speed with 10x less fuss. I have a tendency to learn markup and programming languages fast, so I never felt off while working with it.
I'm more of a screen guy, for tmux works, too. I also still use Eclipse as my serious IDE. VSCode can play over there, heh.
I used to use Google Docs, but Notion's "personal wiki" structure won me for non-technical things. All technical things stay in Obsidian, which is also opened as a public digital garden.
I'm already annoyed that, on Mac, ever since I installed OneDrive, I can't save Excel files to OneDrive while in Excel to my OneDrive, without Excel being logged in to my OneDrive account.
I have OneDrive because I want it to behave like Dropbox or Google Drive. Bug off, man.
"Furthermore, any new document will be named with the date instead of a traditional name by default."
I can't parse this? They're going to append the date to the filename you give? Is it updated in real time as you edit the document? Or you get multiple files with multiple dates?
This is already how alternatives like google docs work, being cloud first so I think it makes sense for Microsoft to follow as its natural to want to be able to read, modify, and share documents from various computers.
This is a naive take because it ignores the presence of the third-party doctrine. The moment any file is uploaded to the cloud, you lose an expectation of privacy. When we decided to put everything in the cloud, I think most people sort of forgot about this, but it doesn't make it not relevant.
On my work laptop I've had to move my working folder out of "My Documents" so that going into subfolders doesn't stop and think for ten seconds each while it does... something... with OneDrive.
I just want to get to the files real quick, I don't want to calculate '42' at every fucking folder-open event.
I'm not a very nostalgic motherfucker, so I have no desire to relive computing from the early 90s.
(this may be specific to enforced settings at my workplace, but it feels like this is the same kinda thing)
Linux at home for the last five-odd years and almost daily I'm reminded how good a decision that was.
I don't know what's new on this. For the last two years all Office apps I own have insisted on saving to OneDrive first. I have always had to explicitly click on the path and select another folder. Every. Single. Time.
Office 365 is a macOS and web-based application too. The implications of cloud-based document storage as the default is greater than just another bullet point in Windows' decline. This will affect anyone, anywhere Office 365 is used.
I'm old as dirt but I recall one of the arguments for TPM was shoved down our throats was the ability to tie documents to machines and organizations. Something something... industrial espionage. Now we know that is a lie. They just wanted to fill landfills with old working computers.
> The only issue with linux I am wondering about is sharing my CV where most companies need a word file.
Maybe it's regional, but I've never been asked for a Word file resume.
I've never had somebody turn down a PDF. And all of the "Upload you resume" online applications I've seen also support PDF. A lot of them lately will even correctly parse out the info and auto-fill forms with it, but some of them mangle it.
For CV I use libreoffice and save it as a PDF/a. If it needs to be editable for some reason you can use docx or odt(odt might scare the average office worker so stick with docx).
I don't use Microsoft software other than for playing the occasional games, this is a good reminder of _why_ I don't. Other than Windows being a hot mess of an operating system half the time, multiple different UI's that don't mesh together, ads being pushed in the start menu, and somehow more hardware problems than I run into on Linux these days.
What’s really obnoxious about this is that my Mac and virtually other Mac uses iCloud and that doesn’t appear to be a save location or supported cloud service, so they are automatically fragmenting my files.
Additionally, my Office 365 subscription is a work subscription and this is my personal device, so I don’t want every file I work on to during personal hours to be uploaded to my work’s sharepoint?
I hate Office so much and wish there was a trully viable alternative.
this is cruel. watching a parent in their 60s use ms word on an ipad and watch MS lose the same cloud saved documents. and same parent blaming themselves instead of MS. so yeah screw MS for their cloud bs.
My Mac is always trying to get me to save to iCloud by default. I hate it. Usually I catch it and put the document on my local drive, but sometimes it ends up in my iCloud drive, which I avoid using as much as possible.
> My Mac is always trying to get me to save to iCloud by default.
Nothing in macOS has ever attempted to lure me into saving to iCloud Drive.
I thought you might be referring to Apple's office suite rather than macOS, but I just tried Pages and it boringly defaults to local storage as expected.
I'm not doubting you, just saying I've never seen it, and I couldn't reproduce this in TextEdit either. It's quite possible it defaults to that in a fresh OS install, which I haven't done for as long as I can remember.
I'm not on a clean install either, and I have changed the save location from iCloud to a local folder a zillion times. It is similar to how Apple pushes iCloud on iOS, with notifications that can only be "dismissed" by clicking through to an iCloud advert. Steve is rolling over in his grave.
I guess I'm one of those old-fashioned folks who thinks that having a functionality enabled shouldn't mean that it's used as the default (even after the user repeatedly changes it).
Just recently moved onto Linux. Most likely not coming back when these kind of things just keep happening. I'm really surprised how well everything works. 120Hz HDR 4k Nvidia no issues on Wayland. Kubuntu 25.04/Plasma 6.3 is very nice. EasyEffects/PipeWire makes audio better compared to Windows. Steam/Proton/Wine works very well for games outside ones that have kernel level rootkits. Outside DualSense controller having issues connecting to bluetooth I can't think of anything that's worse than Windows while many things are better.
Ditto; ~20 years of dotnet dev, 1000+ games on steam. Couldn't be more baked into the ecosystem. Its just the work laptop left with windows now, and the team is working to support a non-windows dev env.
This was me a few years back.
My wife switched this year after only ever using Windows and pure dotnet dev.
The first thing she said was "how is it so fast"
Which distribution is she using, out of curiosity? I wonder if I could do this for (to) my wife..
I helped her get started with endeavourOS.
She has me for tech support though and she’s a dev which helps.
I would go with popOS or Ubuntu if the tech support isn’t an option.
Wife is not technical at all. Put her on Ubuntu when she freaked out about her windows 7 PC updating automatically to windows 10. She been on it ever since.
Not OP, but if I was installing Linux for the first time I'd either go with pop_os (not sure if it's as good anymore as last time I checked it, a couples years ago) or kubuntu, because KDE is a bit more familiar to windows users.
Pop and Linux Mint are both solid options for newcomers. Personally, I think LM looks better out of the box but Pop is a little easier to grok coming from Windows. Not much of a difference either way though.
Same
I moved over to Linux about a year or so ago when Microsoft announced they were going to start pushing their AI shit on every Windows system. I created a small partition intending to just give it a shot but ended up never moving back since 99.9% of everything I tried just works. It's really quite amazing how far Linux has come in the past decade alone and right now the only reason I keep Windows on my work machine is because there's still specific dev pipelines I can only do on Windows.
Same here. Work requires I use Windows or Mac, but I've switched most of my home systems over to Mint Linux. The final nail in the coffin for Microsoft for me was when I upgraded my CPU in my desktop, the MS Office liscense I paid for stopped working and they wanted me to pay another few hundred dollars for another liscence. I mainly only used Office for Outlook as I have 30 years of emails in Outlook, but I switched over to Firebird on Linux and have not looked back. The AI stuff going on with Windows is definitely a big part of me wanting to switch too. I do not want what Microsoft is selling anymore.
And one has to wonder, will M/S used these cloud documents for their AI push ? Even if the Word Docs are encrypted, I fully believe Microsoft can read the text in those documents.
People should realize everything you do in Excel and Word is being spied on by Microsoft, this cloud push is making that process easier and faster for M/S.
At the very least, go to Libreoffice. But better yet, as you just did, people need to abandon Microsoft and Apple for Linux or a BSD.
People should realize that everything they do in Windows is being spied on. There's no point in fighting against a user-hostile OS where every setting you use to try to protect yourself can be removed or toggled with the next forced update.
Just out of curiosity, what distro did you go with? I last gave Linux desktop a try about a decade ago (Ubuntu IIRC) and found it still not quite there, but I'm willing to give it another shot so I'd be curious what you had success with.
If you try again, at least go Mint over Ubuntu
I ended up going with Nobara which is a Fedora-based distro focused around gaming, so it automates and deals with the typical driver issues and proton setup. Ended up being perfect for everything I need.
I will second Mint Linux as a recent ex-Windows user. It's been working well for about a year now and I have no desire to go back.
> It's really quite amazing how far Linux has come in the past decade alone
There's no meaningful difference in the desktop Linux ecosystem right now and a decade ago, you're just more open to it as the alternative got worse.
We're cutting it close with a decade here but out of the box driver support is absolutely better, especially if you're dealing with AMD GPUs, to the point where I find a fresh install of almost any Linux distro less annoying in terms of support than Windows.
No, this is definitely not true. I dabbled with Linux back when I was in college (hence, a decade ago) both because the computer labs had Linux installed and because it was interesting to me at the time.
There were a bunch of issues with compatibility if you wanted to do any sort of gaming and driver support was pretty bad from what I remember. Flatpaks were barely starting to become a thing, desktop environments were very unrefined and applications like LibreOffice still had a way to go.
If you look at what's happened in the Linux ecosystem in the past decade there are in fact significant improvements and refinements thanks to the hard work of thousands of contributors making it easier and easier to use.
Unfortunately, that's simply not true. Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (in 2016 as the name implies) with gnome 2 and Unity was peak and Ubuntu has regressed since beyond recovery: snap or other desktop containers with unsolved/unsolvable permission problems, systemd, wayland, and any number of other zero sum changes behind the scene devs like to drool over yet not. a. single. user advance or new desktop app. Even the relative "progress" in browser-based collab tools we enjoyed since about 2017 is at risk as FF is left behind by the likes of MS Teams.
I used to use Ubuntu but abandoned it when they moved to "snap". I'm not the most proficient user of Linux, but it was quickly clear that something was really wrong with new versions of Ubuntu. Mint Linux has been working well for me.
I don't think the Snap authors ever used Snap packages. The barrage of update notifications, to close my software constantly... that was super frustrating. All I had installed for snaps was Firefox and Discord. Imagine having a 20+ snap applications installed. What a notification nightmare.
On a whim, there is a nuanced situation with some Realtek (RTL8671B) bluetooth firmware on Linux that is 'solved' by downgrading firmware version. This random gist has a nice thread https://gist.github.com/peteristhegreat/b48da772167f86f43dec... ..and this fellow Nix wizard has the downgrade expressed in a nix config: https://github.com/Arroquw/nixos-config/commit/9d90d7d659e74...
I too was experiencing odd/erratic pairing issues with DualSense controllers and this RTL8671B based dongle, and using the older firmware entirely fixed it. Now four controllers can be connected simultaneously without issue.
> Outside DualSense controller having issues connecting to bluetooth
This is a gotcha. The issue is probably that your user dont have the permissions to interact with udev devices.
See https://codeberg.org/fabiscafe/game-devices-udev
> Outside DualSense controller having issues connecting to bluetooth
FWIW I use a DualSense controller connected to my Linux computers all the time without issue and without having to do anything special. In fact, Sony is the author of the DualSense driver on Linux[0]. Do you connect anything else over bluetooth? I'm wondering if your bluetooth setup might just be broken in general rather than specifically for DualSense controllers.
[0] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Sony-HID-PlayStation-PS5
Their point was that the dongle's proprietary firmware was buggy. The controllers just triggered the problem.
Where are you getting that from? I see no mention of dongles or firmware in the comment I replied to.
Oh. I thought you were replying to a sibling comment, sorry.
Sibling:
> there is a nuanced situation with some Realtek (RTL8671B) bluetooth firmware on Linux that is 'solved' by downgrading firmware version
I work on a mac, but I have Linux at home.
I've started using LibreOffice at home and I'm surprised at how snappier it is compared to Word. Exported PDFs are even lighter that the ones Word do.
Check out onlyoffice as well. I use onlyoffice + libreoffice depending on the workload. I find libreoffice to have a better spreadsheet tool but prefer editing/commenting on documents in onlyoffice and it has a more modern aesthetic.
Ha! I recently thought I would try it again as the cloud & office are getting really too annoying. Libreoffice is snappier than google docs/sheets in the browser, which I say like this is special, but these days with Electron it really is. And it's on my own system. I'm staying here... It's fast & works well for work and private use.
I have a few Excel sheets loaded with legacy macros that Libre can't quite handle. If I didn't need to deal with those sheets that aren't really under my control to rewrite I could probably get off Windows for good.
Softmaker (Freeoffice) is much snappier. But I stopped using (buying!) it, after they refused to support LanguageTool.
Backup important docs to rtf/txt. I've had Libre/OpenOffice docs blank/all text replaced with hashtags on me suddenly. AFAICT, it's an autosave bug that's never going to be fixed (though I'm not technical enough to know for sure). Personally, I would never use those programs for anything important.
Do you have any kind of source for that? A bug report or a PR or something?
Also how would backing up specifically to rtf or txt help? Just back up the original doc files.
https://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=71&t=8...
Googling would show that any number of users run into issues with OO/LO file corruption, often from power interruption during saves. The applications seem to handle that in a suboptimal way, and maintainers are unwilling to address it. My suspicion is that their unspoken contention is that the problem is with Windows, not OO/LO.
I recommend backing up to a general file type simply because it's less likely to open in the offending application by default, if the user ever needs to access it.
One comment says LibreOffice may have fixed the issue.
it looks like the cause is a shutdown without flushing buffers so a file is not properly saved. Backups of any file type should be OK.
It does, but I also found forum posts discussing similar issues with LO back when I had the original issue. I won't risk it; I would rather use applications without a hint of these problems. I've also dropped Evernote after it ate a few of my notes. It's almost impossible to get that user trust back without excising every bit of the concern, and then some, and unfortunately, the LO development community (like many FOSS communities, as well as many proprietary developers) is too self-involved to do that sort of thing.
I eventually did get it working, but man you are luckier than I getting Nvidia to have "no issues". I had to waste an entire weekend getting an Nvidia card working [1].
I love Linux and specifically NixOS but my experience with good audio and non-AMD drivers has been pretty so-so.
[1] https://blog.tombert.com/posts/2025-03-09-egpu/ Not trying to self-plug, just documented my headache.
That situation is entirely of Nvidia's making.
No argument on that but regardless of whose fault it is, the end user has to deal with the consequences.
Only if you buy a Windows laptop and slap Linux on it.
Or is OSX bad because you can't put it on some random laptop off Amazon?
I didn't really assign labels of "good" or "bad"; in this case that's a matter of philosophy that I am wholly uninterested in.
I specifically said that I had so-so luck getting Linux working with non-AMD stuff, and regardless of who is ultimately to blame it's still something I had to deal with.
> had so-so luck getting Linux working with non-AMD stuff, and regardless of who is ultimately to blame it's still something I had to deal with.
Did you buy the laptop with the intention of running Linux on it?
Did it ship with Linux preinstalled?
Did the vendor support Linux running on that computer? Like, could you call them and get them to provide you help in the case of problems?
It wasn't a laptop, it was a tiny gaming box. I did buy it with the intention of running Linux on it, and it actually worked great with the vanilla setup with the AMD CPU + GPU. I did do research before I bought it to make sure the drivers should work.
I already had an Nvidia GPU and an eGPU case that I had bought for previous projects with AI (on Linux, but headless). I wanted to use it to play some games that are a bit too intense for the little gaming box (specifically the System Shock remake from 2023).
It's mentioned in the blog post, but getting the eGPU case and getting Nvidia stuff working with regular Gnome wasn't too bad on Linux, only took a few hours. The biggest issue was that I wanted to use the SteamOS interface and that was completely corrupted with the stable Nvidia driver. I had to move to the beta driver and it's still a little broken, but usable. The games themselves work fine.
I also had a lot of issues with audio getting increasingly scratchy as I played, to a point of being completely unusable after about an hour, and that required a lot of trial and error but eventually I was able to search my way through NixOS docs and figure it out.
The card was already two years old so I doubt I could have gotten much support from it, and I am even more skeptical that Nvidia's tech support would have known how to do anything with NixOS.
> Outside DualSense controller having issues connecting to bluetooth
I've had this issue as well on KDE Plasma. I'm convinced it's some sort of bug within Plasma itself. If I use bluetoothctl to pair the controller, it works fine, might be worth giving that a try if you haven't.
Meanwhile, I just tried 3 different flavors of Fedora last week and could not even get to the point where I could log in reliably. Never mind getting the handful of Windows-only apps I still rely on to work. I'm despairing that I may have to let Windows update itself to Win11 while I wait for my next hardware upgrade cycle to roll around so I can try to pick more compatible hardware.
If anyone has any recommendations for how to pick desktop components that will "just work" with Linux I'd love to hear them.
I wonder what issues you've seen (error messages), and what hardware you're using. Fedora has been my goto distribution for more than 15 years. And aside from Nvidia, and Gnome, causing me trouble, it worked great[1]. Though I always install the Xfce spin.
For your Windows applications you can try to use winapps (windows vm behind the scenes, but tucked away from view) https://github.com/Fmstrat/winapps
[1] never update to the latest Fedora version, at least until a couple of months after release. If you don't want to be a beta tester. Yes sometimes they don't a good job with SELinux policies and you'll be dealing with annoying popup notifications from time to time. And yes, if you're using full disk encryption (via LUKS) you really want to enable some flags which Cloudflare engineering contributed back (but are not the defaults), otherwise stuttery desktop behaviour is possible.
I don't think I ever saw an actual error message, just a lot of black screens in various configurations (e.g. switching KVM between machines, waking up from sleep) and lots of weird little glitches in Wayland. I know that my Nvidia 3090 needs to be swapped for an AMD GPU, but I'm not totally convinced that that will solve everything. Particularly the black screen on wake from sleep seems like it could/should be a mobo issue.
I would recommend giving Xfce spin a try for comparison, and when encountering similar issues logging in a separate tty (ctrl-alt-F2 to F12) to check the logs for issues. (journalctl --boot=0, for current boot and journalctl --boot=-1, for previous boot, in case of crashes).
Your best bet is to get a brand that is well known to run Linux if you want it bad enough to get a new laptop. Dell business line, lenovo thinkpad, framework, system76 are all good platforms. If it's not working on your old laptop it's probably only one or two drivers, and you should probably try running with debian, endeavour, ubuntu and a few flavors that might have the driver you need working.
> If anyone has any recommendations for how to pick hardware that will "just work" with Linux I'd love to hear them.
Some vendors sell hardware with Linux preinstalled or specifically tested (besides the obvious ones like System76/Framework/Tuxedo, Dell provides an XPS flavor that comes with Ubuntu). You don't need to actually use the preinstalled distro, but buying such models ensures baseline support is solid and it sends a signal to vendors to continue ensuring so.
Then there's Apple's M1/M2 lineup, which provides the smoothest Linux experience you can have today (specific hardware features are not supported yet, the rest works extremely well!).
Other than that, the Arch wiki is typically a good resource that lists quirks of individual devices with Linux.
At this point, I'm skeptical of any laptop that wasn't specifically designed for Linux.
I have very real doubts that any laptop can support both Linux and Windows well.
> specific hardware features are not supported yet, the rest works extremely well
I would not describe this as "working well," let alone the "smoothest Linux experience you can have today"
Especially compared to System76, which designs their laptops for Linux, customized the firmware for Linux, and ships with Linux already installed.
My son hit a showstopper bug with Mac this week where it won't recognize and handle Yubikey 2FA. If anyone has a reliable workaround, I'd love to hear it so he can get off Windows for good.
M3 Macbook Air if it matters.
I guess I should have clarified, my only personal (i.e. not work supplied) computer is a mid-tower desktop, which I'm absolutely not buying pre-built. More looking for how I can tell if e.g. a specific motherboard is going to play nice with Linux or not.
Oh, that's much simpler. Just buy AMD :)
More seriously, it's only the motherboard and the GPU that can be problematic here in the first place, isn't it? So that's far more manageable using websearch than laptops with their gazillion components. But then again I've only built a new PC once these last 10 years, so maybe I was just very lucky with my choice.
And honestly, not supporting kernel level rootkits is a feature, not a bug.
Yeah I get tired of them trying to suck every bit of data and work that you do into the cloud so they can hoodwink you later with licensing fees and to train their AI. The last straw for me was their "we want to constantly snap shot your screen and index, oh and -wink- it's for your own good, so we'll enable it automatically for you!" I was done at that point and deleted it off my last PC with windows and put Ubuntu on it. I have Mac version of Office that's good enough for now.
>well for games outside ones that have kernel level rootkits
I wish people would stop bringing this up which has not been true for years. Around 40-50% of kernel level anti cheats work and are supported (in user space).
https://areweanticheatyet.com/
Love Linux. Finally moved over it more than 10y ago and never looked back.
Still a few minor issues though. Sleep doesn't work well with Ubuntu on a desktop PC with an Nvidia card. It frequently wakes up immediately, or the screen remains black upon wake up. And sometimes it just works. Same problem on different PCs.
Just a minor annoyance though. I love Linux. On a recent computer everything is so fast and snappy compared to Windows or even macOS.
Don't blame Nvidia's bad behavior on Linux.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/linus...
That’s an ancient article - Nvidia have since open sourced their kernel mode drivers - https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules
Yes the user mode side is still closed, but that was never really the issue.
That's not enough to make them be a nice member of the ecosystem. The bar is that the manufacturer submits changes to mainline kernel.
Actually, look at those commits! That repository is ridiculous. It's code thrown over the wall. Nobody but NVidia will ever work on that code.
Only thing that keeps me off Linux is Lightroom and Photoshop. Nothing even remotely comparable. So it's Mac for me, but I get you.
>> Only thing that keeps me off Linux is Lightroom and Photoshop.
Try Darktable or Ansel instead of Lightroom. I'm not gonna tell you Gimp is a good photoshop replacement though ;-)
With all due respect Darktable is not a Lightroom replacement, having used Lightroom years ago the recent Darktable releases are maybe sometimes reaching Lightroom UX from back then. I'm sure the technical image processing stuff is best in class, but it's too much for me wanting to make my raw photos look better than what the camera does with jpegs by default. The addition of built in presets is extremely welcome, it should be exposed to newbies way more than it is currently.
Those applications may work for some, but they are no replacements for Lightroom in my opinion. My Lightroom 4 installation from 2012 (I never upgraded after Adobe went all in on subscriptions and cloud) still beats the latest Darktable/Ansel versions, hands down. The only things I'm missing are a CLI for automation and a few features that RawTherapee has, like switching to a view of one color channel with a single key. Other than that, Adobe somehow got it incredibly right in terms of workflow and features back then. Using the software feels like it was made for photographers, rather than software enthusiasts.
Still, I'm in the same boat as many who wish they could migrate their decades' worth of photos with all their adjustments to a FOSS alternative. For me too, Lightroom is the last application that keeps me from dumping Windows for good. It already lives in a Windows VM on a Linux host these days.
I've tried those (and RawTherapee). They are nowhere even near half the way to Lightroom.
If you need CMYK for production, I would be scared of Gimp.
Not arguing. It is getting close though.
Use moonlight and stream it locally.
I use FreeBSD for my daily driver. I now stream games/Windows apps from a dedicated windows VM. It's impressive technology.
Looking glass is another option, which uses shared memory [0].
I just have my two monitors hooked up to both my iGPU and dedicated GPU, and switch inputs if I want to use my Windows VM. It means things like colour profiles and VRR work as expected too.
[0] - https://looking-glass.io/
I have a colour cal 5k display. That’s not streamable in any sensible way. Nor do I want the latency or interface disparity.
That's a great use case for game streaming tech
Running them in a Windows VM with an attached GPU works great, I suspect you could use something like Looking Glass [0] as well - though I’d be nervous about colour profiles.
[0] - https://looking-glass.io/
First I switched to Linux Mint. Turns out anno 2025 most distros are still made with legacy ThinkPads in mind. Then I installed Fedora KDE. It gives an impression of working. Make no mistake - I have weird display glitches, shit crashes all the time, stuff randomly refuses to work, some devices I have require ridiculous workarounds, basic tasks require cryptic terminal commands, software updates introduce awkward regressions, but I think we've truly reached the milestone where a dedicated person can run Linux as their main desktop system. I suppose in about 30 years we'll have a Linux distribution that can be used on desktop without any IT knowledge.
Of course technically speaking I shouldn't complain because I have provided nothing of value to the Linux ecosystem (how the fuck do I even start, even if I wanted to?), but still, the point stands.
> we've truly reached the milestone where a dedicated person can run Linux as their main desktop system.
You're 20 years too late for this.
The reason why Linux doesn't run well on the latest greatest hardware (and never has) is because the vendors of that hardware range from indifferent to actively hostile to Linux, and to make the system work people have to fight. Buy a legacy thinkpad, or something you've researched, and you'll have fewer problems than with Windows or Macs (which are tied to even more specific hardware and obsoleted by company whim.)
Of course, if you're on the bleeding edge of technology, everyone is using Linux (whether directly or in VMs and containers), so when I say the latest greatest, I mean the latest greatest consumer and business user stuff.
I've never understood comments like this. It's like you're looking at a pool full of people who have been swimming for years and telling you the pool is nice, and saying: "I guess it's finally ready for the real experts now."
Also, if you love vendors so much, you can have one. Buy your Linux computer from somebody who sells Linux computers, knows any problems you'll run into on that specially-selected hardware, and call them when you have a problem, just like you would do for the others.
> Of course technically speaking I shouldn't complain because I have provided nothing of value to the Linux ecosystem
This is the worst point by far. You can complain about anything that is broken, you just can't expect anyone to care (because you haven't obligated anyone to.) The problem isn't complaining, it's complaining badly. Get a vendor, whine to them.
That's completely true, but from the point of view of a user who just wants a working system, also completely irrelevant. If I were to recommend Linux to my mom she wouldn't care why exactly her computer doesn't work correctly, she only cares about the fact that it worked on Windows and doesn't work on Linux.
I hope that as Valve pushes people into gaming on Linux, things will slowly change.
> the vendors of that hardware range from indifferent to actively hostile to Linux
Not all. System76, Framework, and others come to mind.
But yes, for the most part, hardware is designed for Windows and only works on Linux despite the vendor, rather than due to them.
All of that compute can’t compensate for the fact that starlibreopenoffice is atrocious. Big corps have been looking for ways to migrate for decades but fail because it’s so abysmal.
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Windows has been slipping for decades now. Welcome to the penguin!
Microsoft's accouncement: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/microsoft365insider...
Word has defaulted to saving in OneDrive (if you turn on autosave and you're signed into an MS account) for years now, I think since the Office 2016 > Office 365 update. The only real change I see is that the document will now be given a name with the date instead of just 'Document 1'. Maybe it's a little more aggressive about turning on autosave for you? The autorecover location is still in appdata.
And you can change default save location in settings. The main change is that clicking new now automatically saves.
In my 10 years using this website daily i am yet to see a microsoft related thread and comments that is not fud, misinformation or straight lies
Microsoft does it to themselves by making poor announcements and making Windows more and more opaque about simple things like “where is this file”?
That’s because Microsoft has a much bigger platform and many more employees that the big picture gets lost quite frequently.
I as a user know more about their products than any three to four of their employees do combined.
That you can disable it does not make any of the claims of default cloud upload FUD but a fact.
There’s an important generational component that’s getting missed here.
Most children (American children, at least) grew up on Chromebooks. That instills a certain expectation of how these things work — documents save themselves.
To switch to Microsoft Office means adding a cryptic, unnecessary-seeming extra step. I imagine it feels something like having a laptop that's designed to be shut down before closing.
You’ve all heard the stories about college CS students who have to be told what a folder is — and those are the kids who actually want to work with computers. Now step back to the next generation of lawyers and nurses and novelists and think about their lifetime experience.
Microsoft is just chasing the puck.
Definitely true, I think there is a divide where a GenX or Older millennial may say "why would I want you to save my stuff to the cloud" Z and beyond are likely more in the "why wouldn't I save to the cloud?" or at the extreme "you can do something other than save to the cloud?"
And while I think this is to some degree "keeping with the times" MS clearly has ulterior motives to do this, to lock users into an ecosystem, to dangle premium services, to charge for storage etc.
I suspect the HN crowd leans towards pessimistic/jaded views and that like MS is mostly doing this for the other reasons and not to conform to the norms of a population that doesn't really use MS word.
If their reasoning is to support the Chromebook/Phone generation... that would be earnest.
But I'd have to assume it's a more "data driven" reason (ie capturing context of docs).
I'm almost positive that it's both and also a short-sighted "give the customer what they ask for" approach. You could easily achieve local auto save, or a clear "upload to the cloud" UX, or whatever else. But the user got confused about saving documents, sooooo cloud.
Then the data centralization is a nice plus that makes it impossible to go back on.
The only reason the user got confused was because of the terrible fucking cloud-first save dialogs that they kept pushing. And all the different iterations of OneDrive that weren't the same thing.
It's also getting tiring seeing everything dumbed down for dumb people. I thought that people would learn how to use computers, and become empowered to integrate technology into their lives in the way that works for them. Instead, they have just become dumber than ever and more helpless and dependent.
I'm happy saving my work to the cloud, as long as it isn't OneDrive.
Any cloud but that one.
> Most children (American children, at least) grew up on Chromebooks. That instills a certain expectation of how these things work — documents save themselves.
I'd say iPads rather than Chromebooks, but the same applies - no concept of a file system, everything just living "in the cloud", the devices themselves being ultimately disposable - as long as you have iCloud set up, you can put your iPad in the shredder, and get all of your content back in under an hour.
You can have auto-save and automatic file naming without cloud storage
Yep. First party and well behaved third party Mac apps have been doing so since… jeez, 10.7 Lion (released in 2011) I think?
The way it works there is that documents are auto-saved to a non-volatile app-specific temp directory until they’re explicitly saved, at which point they’re moved to the specified location and continue to be auto-saved there. Anybody who uses TextEdit as a temp text stash is familiar with this with the hoard of unsaved documents that comes back even after a cold boot.
Microsoft is just motivated to push cloud storage onto usage.
But why?
The Chromebook user makes a doc, closes the lid, and finds their doc on their phone or web later.
Why wouldn't the Windows user get the same UX?
The expectation is that your data's available anywhere. Even linux users are going to want backups of their own choice so it's available anywhere.
Maybe the user has turned off internet connectivity to help himself to stop procrastinating on the web to help him get the document written.
> The expectation is that your data's available anywhere.
Then why it is not available ? Why can't i run a dotNet program from a network share ? Why i can see heic files shared in Teams, but my boss cannot open them ?
Microsoft removed auto-save of local files from the Mac version years ago.
But how will you figure out what to name a file without pumping it through Copilot!?
> You’ve all heard the stories about college CS students who have to be told what a folder is
Back in the olden days of the early 90's when I was in school, I was working for the university's "Unix Group". Since I, being an undergrad, was the low man on the totem-pole there, I was always the one sent out to the various departments to do the support work on their workstations. The CS professors were, without question, the ones who knew the least about how to operate their machines. They mostly had no interest, as they were much more invested in CS theory than in practical use.
Maybe, but adding a setting for cloud/ local storage is not that complicated or even auto-save to local filesystem. Microsoft is just chasing the sales of “one drive” subscriptions.
Yes, they will probably make more money from OneDrive subscriptions but it will be will help and make things easier for 99% of their users (if not higher).
We have to understand that being on this website alone puts us in a group that is not "normal" (from the content of the site, to the UI, to the rules, etc). I think almost everyone here would agree backups are important but what is the "normal" Windows person supposed to do for that if not OneDrive?
External/NAS is out of reach of most people (to manage if not to buy) and it's local and you really want a cloud backup. And while it would be great if we all had e2e encrypted backups where we had the only key, that is just not going to work for most people. They will lose the key, want features (like search) that don't work unless you pull all the data local, want ease of use moving between multiple devices, or <insert 1000 other reasons>.
Yes, yes, I know _you_ (collective) know how to do that, I get that you can set it up for the friends and family in your life, but most people will not learn or put up with the limitations even if someone else manages it for them.
Honestly, a lot of people (both young and old) have no concept of where they are saving their files, I think saving to the cloud by default is the right call. I wouldn't save a document locally unless I knew one of my many backups would get it safely to the cloud in short order if not immediately. If only to cut down on support calls for myself I think this is a welcome change.
All that's changing here is the default, you can still save locally if you want. It's just another layer of training wheels on technology. As much as that chafes people on this website, myself included often, I think it's 100% the right move. The side-effect of making more money from OneDrive is icing on the cake IMHO, not the cake itself.
> Honestly, a lot of people (both young and old) have no concept of where they are saving their files
Microsoft is working hard on this issue since Windows 95. They even push their braindead Documents, Pictures, Videos before anything else. Good luck finding your files when something goes wrong. Though, it is better than iOS or Android where files are second class citizens and working with them is a PITA.
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> a laptop that's designed to be shut down
For the people who do shut it down, they do it by holding down the power button for 10+ seconds, because that’s how phones do it. On Windows at least, that causes a forced/crash shutdown.
That's not Windows specific. It just forces power off on a firmware level, possibly even lower (the power management IC could have "hold to turn off" built in).
I don't know why the concept of "files" isn't taught in school any more.
> I don't know why the concept of "files" isn't taught in school any more.
Because people who think, do not vote with the right party and, worse, they ask embarassing questions.
More than anything, Microsoft is incompetent at messaging and communications.
This is a feature that has been among the most loved aspects of its main competitor for more than a decade.
Somehow, Microsoft managed to make the same feature sound and feel and be creepy.
While incompetence might be an issue, I think the greater problem is that Microsoft is rolling back control and generally sucks at UX.
Why does this app that's been working just fine as desktop software need to save anything to the cloud by default? It's conceptually odd.
I've used Google docs from the beginning, but I actively choose what docs I want on that platform.
All MS had to do was add "save to cloud" as an additional save option along with "save" and "save as" (maybe renamed as "save to desktop") then auto save could activate where your last save location was. This would be good design.
> Microsoft is rolling back control
Agreed. Functionality like this should be presented as a choice in an OOBE welcoming screen right after installation. And it should be _a choice,_ something that can be reversed at a later date if the decision was wrong.
Who's incompetence? When half their users need to ask "what's a cloud", that option is too complicated. What's sensible and reasonable and logical to us, isn't to the rest of the world.
It's even simpler.
People who wanted that kind of treatment and walled garden already moved to apple's ecosystem, and people who do not want this stayed with windows.
Now more and more of my non-technical friends are moving towards linux because microsoft is pushing them away.
I think the main competitor for Microsoft Office is Google, which indeed defaults to saving documents in the cloud.
Apple, as far as i know, still gives you a choice.
Pages and the rest of the iWork suite save to iCloud by default.
Both Apple and Microsoft give you the choice of where you want to save.
I've no idea what you mean by "walled garden" w/r/t MacOS, but I understand it's an article of faith on HN.
Again, for the Nth time, you can run any software you like on a Mac. You can do anything you want. App store? Of course. Direct vendor download? You bet. Build from source? No problem.
Further, this line is out of place here because Microsoft is FAR more invasive about pushing cloud-first storage than Apple has ever been. No app on my Mac default to saving to iCloud. NONE.
Direct vendor download? Sure, as long as it’s signed with an attestation key that’s countersigned by Apple. Running an app not signed this way is definitely possible, but requires invoking a hidden menu and then still has startup delay as the attestation check fails.
HN as always drastically overstates how hard it is to run non-AppStore software.
Yes, the Mac defaults to a stricter policy than most HN readers would want. Mass market computers SHOULD. That they don't is a reason we have so much malware on the Aunt Millie PCs of the world.
HN readers are more technical. We want to do what we want to do, but we have to understand that what WE want isn't what's right for the average user. As long as a platform gives us a path to download a random utility from a buddy's site or whatever, it's fine.
It's very, very easy to set a Mac to run whatever you want. Nothing is hidden about it. Is it different than it was under Sonoma? Yes, but the changes are well documented and there are countless articles online, including at Apple, that explain the trivial steps required.
> That they don't is a reason we have so much malware on the Aunt Millie PCs of the world.
Please, tell us more. Or are you talking about the OS that run on Aunt Millie PC ? That makes sense.
You can do whatever you want inside the garden, but moving away from it is becoming increasingly harder and harder - hence walled garden.
you can't bring your software with you, you can't bring your licenses with you, and all services are available only inside it.
Different platforms have always had this property. Was VAX/VMS a walled garden because you had to replace software switching to BSD?
I mean, by that standard Linux is a walled garden, because you probably can't take all your apps and data with you to another system without significant overhead.
I'm no spring chicken. I've had painful migrations. I'm not interested in tools that don't have an exit. Nothing about a normal Mac setup is locked-in. I could migrate my data to Linux, I expect, with minimal hassle. I mean, I wouldn't, because I enjoy the network effects of using the Apple ecosystem, and I find MacOS more pleasing to interact with than any Linux window manager I've yet seen. But it's absolutely possible for me to leave, and simple to do so.
There's no lock in.
Not sure why you're being downvoted but this is exactly it.
You're forced by what's given to you and can only use within the garden on only the device you own.
Lol what a shit take
Truly, your analysis and rhetorical skill dazzle us all.
> People who wanted that kind of treatment and walled garden already moved to apple's ecosystem, and people who do not want this stayed with windows.
Probably mostly applicable to people who know about "ecosystems", rather than normies who view computers mostly as another type of hammer (a tool).
Do not decry the value of a hammer. There are more specialized tools, and they have their place. A shared property we value is that you can put the hammer down, and it stays a hammer. It doesn't Develop Ideas about spying on you, it doesn't pivot to being an awl, the handle doesn't spontaneously fall off, you don't have to re-learn how to hammer things.
I have to re-learn how to use software very regularly, and as more and more things become software I have lost some functional skills because there are only 24 hours in a day and I can't stay current on everything. If I haven't done a thing in six years, it means I need to research what the current software tool for doing that thing is, try installing four of those things and land on the one that isn't broken or some type of malware, and then teach myself an entirely new interface over time. I just wanted to hit a nail! My hammer was installed on my old computer! I knew that hammer!
But no, it's never that simple with software. I can learn 150 software tools to do specific things and have to re-learn something every week just to maintain capability. I don't have to do that with hammers, wrenches, saws, etc.
We need more hammer-like tools instead of managed, constantly updated "ecosystems", and when we do find a good one, we need a way to keep it. Because we have finite time and cognitive bandwidth.
"That was deprecated three years ago, why are you still trying to use an old version that doesn't even have security updates? What is wrong with you?! [WONTFIX]"... Fuck you, give me back my fucking hammer. I could do this task I'm trying to do in literally 90 seconds ten years ago; I'm an hour deep into determining how you would even begin to do it today.
Their competitor is cloud native, so where else would it be stored?
This is still a local app, so it doesn't feel like a natural default.
Web applications (even those with interactive editing!) can store all data locally instead of remotely if desired. See Excalidraw for a nice example.
It should be the default for corp accounts. But even home users would benefit form seamless document retrieval (recovery).
Corp users’s biggest IT headache is lost Word or Excel files.
OneDrive has to manage synchronising the cloud with multiple, potentially independently updated, local copies. This is a much harder problem than anything Google have tried to tackle, with more ways for things to go wrong compared to "no internet connectivity? No documents for you!"
This has the effect that (to a first approximation) everyone knows someone with a horrific OneDrive data loss story, no-one particularly trusts OneDrive with anything actually important, and so no-one wants to be forced to use it for everything.
CRDTs have existed for decades and Google uses them along with an offline feature. This is not nearly as hard as you’re making it sound.
CRDTs would be lovely, wouldn't they?
However, OneDrive's promise is "save your files and photos to OneDrive and access them from any device, anywhere". Accordingly, the model OneDrive actually exposes to the user is directory trees of arbitrary files containing what, for OneDrive's purposes, are opaque blobs. This leads to all the behaviours you'd expect from a distributed system using such a model, and therefore the trust issues the public has with MS distributed systems.
Regaining someone's trust in a vendor after a bad experience, even for a different product, is very hard.
That sounds like an extreme amount of incompetence to me.
I understand that you run into this problem with third party software like Dropbox, because they aren't natively integrated with the OS and therefore need to do some unreliable file tagging to support basic operations like renaming, moving or copying files, but Microsoft controls the entire OS.
They can scan the filesystem journal for file system operations. They can build custom OneDrive specific features into their file explorer. They have an office suite that can directly integrate with OneDrive.
Yet they chose to not do that and instead decided that they really ought to collect all your data for training AI instead.
Google drive provides the exact same sync functionality.
They separate Google drive functionality from Google docs sync
>Somehow, Microsoft managed to make the same feature sound and feel and be creepy.
The company they're imitating (poorly, as always) is one I've found so creepy that I actively go out of my way to distance myself from. For at least the last decade at this point. If Microsoft is being creepy too, this just means they'e successfully imitated the competition... for once.
Microsoft could announce that they've made kittens live forever and people would complain.
I don’t think kittens living forever would work out well, if you think about it.
Microsoft: We’ve opted all users not on the Ultimate edition into the mandatory Kitten Soul Cage.
Fans: You people will complain about everything!
There must be a name for this fallacy. You know where it goes:
Person/Company does crappy thing
People complain
Fanboy says "Person/Company could do amazing thing and people would still complain"
... when it's very obvious that company/person didn't do anything good.
I've seen it so many times there must be a name for it. Anyone know what it is?
Begging the Question.
Step 1: Assume your claim is already true, e.g. "Microsoft is a still good corporate actor in spite of doing X".
Step 2: Manufacture circular logic to support your claim from Step 1.
In other words, the poster is begging the question to be self-evident, rather than producing evidence to support their claim.
It's basically shooting the messenger, which is an ad hominem.
I'm not sure they're quite the same. If noone else has coined a term for it I'll go with the "cancer cure fallacy" but maybe someone has a better name. Open to suggestions!
They will secretly use your docs to train their models on it, say it was a mistake, pay their $4million dollar fine in 2040 for doing that and laugh the whole time.
To say nothing about censorship and alerting in your private documents. Discussing sensitive biological matters, or unpopular political thoughts? Not a good idea when living in an authoritarian state.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2019/07/26/censors...
I'm sure there's nothing secret about it as it's probably published in the agreement you acknowledged reading before "agreeing".
And they'll host them on an foreign server farm.
The next reason, following hundreds of others, to start using Linux for the Desktop. If my non technical SO can do it, you can do it as well.
Yep, I'm constantly astonished by adults that insist that Linux is too hard to use on the desktop. My entire family has been using it for years. I raise my kids on it. Works great.
The least technical people will be fine because they only use their 4 programs where a Chromebook would probably be enough.
Between those and the people that can navigate everything on Linux, there'll be mildly technical people. Those may explore things that are out of the ordinary but will be unable or unwilling to fix issues that could arise from that
My family has also been using it for years, but I'm the one who always had to install, update, fix problems, etc.
I think the biggest obstacle to widespread adoption of Linux is not using Linux itself, it's installing it on a computer. 99% of people don't know how to format a USB device, or how to enter the BIOS.
To be honest, I think most non-technical people that are not close to someone technical probably don't even know about Linux and/or just don't care about it.
If it isn't a problem it's not worth fixing. A lot of people don't even know where they are saving their stuff to, so if it's in the cloud or on their device doesn't really matter to them.
> A lot of people don't even know where they are saving their stuff to, so if it's in the cloud or on their device doesn't really matter to them
Until their computer dies, and then they get upset at Microsoft for not having some automatic backup process like they have on the other platforms their friends use.
I made this point elsewhere in this discussion, but it really does matter to them, even though they don't know it.
Third-party doctrine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
I'm not in the US but the third party doctrine looks obscene to me, is this saying I'd have no expectation of privacy for my full name/DOB/address/ID because I legally had to give it to a bank to open an account, which is an essential thing to do in the modern world to get paid into nevermind spend money? I absolutely have an expectation of privacy for all of those details, doubly so if I am mandated to provide them to a third party
Yeah, I probably didn't formulate that well enough. What I meant was that they don't care about it. Sure it matters.
Thanks for the link, didn't know about that, sounds awful..
Ubuntu's Wubi was a great attempt at a "try Linux" solution, but - Canonical being Canonical - killed it.
It's a shorthand for 'it's hard to get everything 100% working after a fresh install and it's hard to have it not break when it updates'. If you manage to get from the out-of-the-box 90% working condition and don't touch too many things afterwards, it works great indeed; hence the recommendations of starting out with legacy hardware so you're closer to 100% than 90% initially.
They just use it as an excuse because change takes effort and might show that there previously believes where wrong.
Yep. It’s 2025 now and Linux on desktop has evolved far from the much maligned days. Gnome should be more than enough for casual purposes.
Yes I moved away from Windows to MacOS but couldnt get used to the UI and they have now sprinkled bad AI tools throughout. I use KUbuntu now which feels a bit like Windows 10 and really is all I need. But what I really want on my Thinkpad with KUbuntu is the perfect open/close screen management like the Macbook has and changing from second monitor to no second monitor often causes issues and doesnt just work argh.. Maybe one of these linux first laptops will fill the void.
Problems with sleep/suspend modes is a relatively common in Linux. There's some good information with tricks and workarounds on
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Laptop and https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management/Suspend_an... w
> Problems with sleep/suspend modes is a relatively common in Linux.
It is if you slap Linux on your Windows computer and expect it to work. Dell etc have teams whose entire job is ensuring Windows works well on their hardware. These are systems integration teams.
If you try to put Linux on a Windows box, you've signed up to do all the system integration work yourself, without any help or support (eg documentation) from anyone.
The best Linux experience will happen on hardware that was designed to run Linux, with a system integration team to make the hardware/firmware and Os work together, with a support line you can call or write.
I just need to get a dozen kernel engineers in a room with a laptop and a dude who does nothing but open and close the lid every 2s. Test passes when the laptop still is responsive by lunchtime.
I just want people to buy from Linux vendors who put in the work rather than yolo'ing it and then complaining about how bad Linux is.
That’s fair. So you’re pretty confident most these very annoying Linux hardware issues go away with Linux first hardware? Suggest a couple brands for me to look into please to replace the thinkpad?
System76 is my go to
Hopefully, but most likely a lot a people will shrug or won't notice. Others will start using Libre Office and discover that it's more than enough for their very basic tasks.
What distribution would you recommend for non technical people?
I am thinking Fedora's atomic desktop for family. Any other suggestions?
Regular Fedora will probably be easier. Most docs are for the regular version. It's not worth the effort figuring out what went wrong with atomic
I've heard good things about Pop!OS working well out of the box on Windows hardware.
What reasons did your non technical SO have for switching?
I am using Linux personally for the last 5 years or so. When she bought a new laptop I told her that she wouldn't need windows for her use case and the (free) Linux would be more than adequate. She is mostly using it for education (university), browsing internet. Just casual stuff.
She then proceeded to install and test the programs she needed and everything worked basically out of the box, so now she continued to use it because it doesn't matter to her what she uses, as long as she can use it.
(She is using Fedora on a Framework laptop)
Seems like Microsoft's Modus operandi the last few years has been: Make anti-consumer move -> get backlash -> repackage same egregiousness while stalling & deflecting -> repeat cycle
Steamrolling their users then getting rewarded with their stock going stratospheric. Excellent!
That's pretty much it. If MSFT stock was punished for such actions, they would stop today.
I just wish they’d wine and dine me after getting fucked so much.
Be a CFO at a major company, Microsoft will wine and dine you while they fuck all your staff.
> Steamrolling their users then getting rewarded with their stock going stratospheric
Welcome to the world of modern capitalism. I'm seriously starting to question if a company can survive on the stock market by creating a solid product and caring about the users of that product.
We recently started rolling out 11 at work, and we have all sorts of group policy hacks to disable stuff... one thing I noticed is that despite copilot being disabled, the button still appears at the top of every office app. I'll have to check on the weekend, but I wouldn't be surprised if we hard enable this option as we have our own OneDrive instance to replace our terabytes of network shares.
FWIW, I don’t have any copilot buttons anywhere (checked Excel, Teams, Outlook), on 24H2.
I wonder what would lawyers and doctors writing very sensitive, liability-ridden info would have to say about this move.
Or those working on export controlled content. ITAR is everywhere these days, and it would be un-fun to experience a deemed export of technical data because an engineer didn't watch where their document went and the data center has non-US-persons working in it.
Guessing it'll be enabled for enterprise copies / machines connected to AD
Not just them. Any business that has things that are considered "company confidential" (isn't that all of them?) should be concerned.
Or how about the DoD?[1]
[1]https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-china-defense-d...
> Microsoft Failed to Disclose Key Details About Use of China-Based Engineers in U.S. Defense Work, Record Shows
They wouldn't say a damn thing. It's IT, not law/billing nor medicine/insurance.
Bright as some of them are, it's not their silo.
That's not how liability works.
As someone who has Word/OneDrive foisted upon them on their work Mac… why would you force this on people?
iOS does it with its apps and iCloud but it’s seamless so you don’t mind.
Using OneDrive is like putting your face next to an anus and breathing deeply.
Someone else mentioned that the kids (what, with their damned loud k-pop music and Tok cloks) are used to using Chromebooks that autosave documents.
Also, MS wants more sales opportunities. If data is on their cloud, they have at least some control over your access of it, and the ease with which it is used in your daily work. It's a pain in the ass to have to manually save stuff, but that's what you'll have to do once you exceed the 5GB free tier limit. I guess you'll probably want to shell out for more space, no?
The good news for your work Mac is that it's your IT and budget departments' headaches, not yours.
While I am not fan of this, remember that most people that dislike Microsoft are using Google Office cloud only products.
Who cares?
When did Google offer an non-cloud installable app and changed it to upload to the cloud?
Because usually everyone that throws stones forgets about their own roofs.
I bet all those cool SV people "we're better than Microsoft" aren't using Libre Office on a GNU/Linux system.
Maybe it is time for some donations?
There are two choices:
Local First stalwart that has some legacy || Cloud first "new kid" but you surrender your files.
The issue is, first: they changed the deal. Change by default is bad. People need to learn this because honestly it's an important lesson. Change is inherently bad, so if you're going to change: have a stonking good reason.
Second: Now the drawbacks of the second "hip" alternative is included the same drawbacks of the first. So, now, Google Office is a strictly superior offering.
Congratulations, I guess?
Yes, more people should use libreoffice, but most people are concerned with compatibility, a sunk cost on their office skills and it's pretty bad UX.
This happens so much in the opposite direction.
Folks seem to not understand that Microsoft is an ad company.
We have an enterprise contact with Google with data privacy terms and controls on what happens with that data. I mean, Google will even sign a HIPAA BAA with you if you ask them to.
We don’t have one for the 3 people in the company to need to use Word on occasion.
Source: pulled out of thin air
To each its own.
If I am reading this right I assume this is only if you have onedrive enabled?
If that is the case, I think it makes some sense if you are already setup to use that to default to saving there since it makes it easier to find your files on other devices and they be safe. Theoretically if you have it setup you already agree to the risks of storing data in the cloud.
however... The real problem to me is that onedrive is enabled by default and that they are now requiring you to login with a microsoft account to use Windows. If both of those were not the case this makes complete sense.
But until they stop enabling one drive by default and making it a pain in the ass to disable this is bad.
One drive is now basically universally active even if not used. See also forcing logging into an online account during windows installation...
My computer broke while I was traveling a few years ago, so I bought a cheap Windows laptop at Walmart. It took me an hour to figure out get that thing up and running without setting up a Microsoft account online. I even had to change a freaking BIOS setting! I bet you can't even do it at all now.
You still can; its a pain in the ass tho. They keep changing it, I suspect in the hope that out of date tutorials will deter less technical users.
I moved over to Linux last July. I had to move back because Google broke something in Google Docs to where Braille support would read everything each time I moved around the document, and I have to do my job. Now I'm on Windows and loving all the NVDA screen reader addons that aren't a thing in Linux because not enough people know accessibility.
More accurate title is: Word documents will be saved to someone else's computer automatically on Windows going forward
I love onedrive and have been a long time user since it was called skydrive. I also love the sharepoint features in onedrive.
But I stopped auto saving by default. I find that simply navigating a document and making markups ends up saving the document when all i wanted to was view it and not save it
I use the modified date filter extensively to figure out what is most relevant and what is not. With autosave, the date modified keeps changing. And going online and restoring the file to an earlier version changes DM to now. Meaning that information is either permanently lost or I have to hack it and change it manually.
If this report is accurate and the change is made quietly and automatically as it predicts then how does this not end up with the mother of all lawsuits? We have several clients in sensitive industries and contractually it is very clear that we must not upload data for those projects anywhere. Surely many others do as well. Anyone working in industries like healthcare or security could get in a lot of trouble for uploading data even once.
If you are working in Healthcare or security wouldn't Onedrive be disabled and therefore it can't autosave to the cloud?
Within a dedicated organisation you probably would disable it. If you're a supplier working with multiple clients then each might have their own policies on confidentiality and data sharing. Some of them might want you to manage information using an account they provide on a cloud system they use. Others might completely prohibit external transfers. A third category are OK with using online systems in principle but for legal or regulatory reasons they need to make sure that the data doesn't leave a certain geographic area so you can only use systems that provide that guarantee.
A reasonable policy for dealing with this variety is to default to not transferring anything you're working on outside the relevant parts of your organisation - including use of cloud services - and then enable specifics on a per-client basis according to need. It's like the principle of least privilege. But if you operate that way then any software that quietly starts sharing things without explicit permission is a big problem.
And if this change will affect home users who don't have professionally managed systems as well then the same moral hazard applies. I don't think it's OK to push people into sharing their personal data online without understanding what they're doing and the potential consequences.
No. IT is an external company those days.
Probably a good move on Microsoft's part, tbh. Not great for society, but good for Microsoft.
I find it annoying because I often just want a document to live on a local device, and I'll decide when I want to upload it to a cloud service. But a lot of normal, non-tech people don't have any concept of how data is stored on their devices. I can't tell you how many times I've encountered a situation that roughly goes,
"Did you download the file?" "I guess so." "Okay. Now go the file and open it." "Where is it?" "I don't know. Where did you download it? "I don't know!"
For a lot of normies, just saving the document in the cloud is going to be easier. The ironic thing is that now I'm the one who is annoyed because I have no idea where my document is saved.
In practice, I do keep a OneDrive account because I find the service useful. But I run Ubuntu on my primary computer, and really only interact with OneDrive when I feel like it through a web browser. I feel much more in control of my own computer and my own data.
What next? Even my text files will be default synced to the cloud, and nothing will be beyond the prying eyes of advertisers, governments and data-hungry LLMs?
To be fair, I already sync some of my text files to the cloud, but I choose which ones I sync to which services. This seems to take away our agency.
I think that for "normies", the risk of losing data because of a dead / stolen device (because in all probably they don't have / do backups) is higher than the risk of loss privacy or other problems that HN "techies" may have with this.
Yes, but the risk may be far greater for one than the other.
It’d be a bummer if my cousin lost the term paper he was writing. It would be a Truly Bad Day if a coworker uploaded a sensitive document to an unauthorized (or unexpected!) cloud service and it got compromised and the sensitive data used against us.
The former would be bad for my cousin. The latter would involve lawsuits and smitings. The probability is lower, but the risk is much, much higher.
We develop exclusively on the Microsoft stack.
We’re already starting to move over to Linux for all our machines.
Let’s hope they don’t disable F12 to directly invoke the local file system Save As dialog.
Interesting, I had no idea that existed. Thanks for the tip!
"There is no cloud ... only someone else's computer."
Truer words have never been spoken. In my personal life, I hate the cloud and will never use any cloud service of any kind.
Glad I don't have to use Word any more or Windows. Everything is in TeXShop+LaTeX for me now. Just files on the disk as it should be.
I use Emacs (org-mode with TeX and Beamer exports) for almost everything, it's my office suite among other things. The only time I still need LibreOffice is for diagrams and charts, and even that is slowly being replaced by Mermaid.
https://ridaayed.com/posts/create-diagrams-in-emacs-org-mode...
Seconded Emacs. I use it for almost everything. I started using it for text editing and it slowly crept into basic web browsing, RSS reader, word processing (with org-mode and Markdown), presentation (through Pandoc/Beamer) and Elisp/C programming. It's gotten to the point where the only four programs I use daily on my Mac are LibreWolf, FreeTube, Logic Pro and Emacs.
Seriously if I could use Logic Pro inside Emacs I would.
Until they decide to default sync all files on disk to the cloud.
That hasn't happened on Mac at least. If it does I will go to Linux.
Lawyers, doctors, accountants etc have legal obligations that regulate how documents containing sensitive information can be stored. Professionals often work on computers away from the office.
Microsoft is potentially staring at tons of lawsuits if their actions result in violations of these privacy regulations.
Can't say I'm surprised. The office "Save As" dialog boxes have become increasingly more focused on forcing this on users & required ever more clicks to get to say C drive
Same for option to email people documents. On corporate systems its now forcing "share via onedrive/sharepoint"
I grew pretty frustrated with WYSIWYG word processors about a decade ago, and moved to a Pandoc->LaTeX->PDF system for everything until about six months ago, when I finally learned Typst and use that for everything now. I just prefer Markdown (or Markdown-adjacent in the case of Typst) and I hate formatting sneaking in with invisible characters.
However, I realize that I'm weird, and I certainly don't blame most people for preferring the Word style of editing, since most people aren't nerdy software engineers.
While a part of me hopes this works as a push for people to use FOSS like LibreOffice, I'm not really holding my breath. I tried getting my parents to switch years ago after they were complaining about having to pay for a subscription to Office, and they were wholly unmoved and didn't like LibreOffice.
In fairness, LibreOffice didn't really do what my parents wanted; the equation editor for LibreOffice is decidedly harder to use than Microsoft's (even compared to the old Mathtype version), and the syntax for their spreadsheet stuff is different enough from Excel that it can lead to a fairly steep learning curve.
I don't think you're weird. I also have some tiers when it comes to typesetting.
Normal documents, 99.999% of the time, are written in Markdown, and stored like that or rendered to PDF, if required.
Everything serious go through LaTeX. I don't care about Typst, I'm happy with LaTeX syntax (I've written my Ph.D. with it, so I don't care if it fights you).
For some Office stuff I need to use office tools. LibreOffice if the other party accepts it or Microsoft Office for the picky documents and people.
A lot of personal calculations are done in Notion databases now, but I can wrangle Calc/Excel/Numbers enough to have them on file, if they are sensitive or need to be detached from Notion.
I'm an old school people. I don't migrate from tool to tool much.
I do use LaTeX sometimes; I don't like Typst's equation syntax as much so if I know I'm going to need more advanced or a lot of math formatting I still do Pandoc or even pure LaTeX sometimes.
I think that LaTeX is mostly fine enough but there are a few bits of bullshit that I find infuriating, e.g. having to remember to do `` for beginning quotes, which apparently I will never remember to do until I look at the rendered document. Also, the errors when compiling are pretty opaque and hard to parse; I've done it enough now to where I can usually figure it out but they're certainly pretty weird to a beginner.
I think we're both kind of weird :). Weird doesn't mean "bad", certainly, I'm just saying that I don't think it's reasonable to ask a random non-techy person to learn LaTeX or how to render with Pandoc. I did my entire undergrad work in Pandoc->LaTeX->PDF, and my entire masters work in Typst; I didn't finish my PhD but all the work I did for that was in vanilla LaTeX.
Importantly, though, I get to do it all using Neovim + tmux, so I can keep using my normal "IDE" at all times.
For spreadsheets, I usually just use Calc for anything that requires privacy, and Google Sheets for anything where privacy doesn't matter. They're both good enough for what I'm doing.
No,no. I also concur on the meaning of "weird", and I totally own it.
LaTeX has its own quirks and doesn't talk kindly to a newcomer, but I know a lot of people (nerd or otherwise) like it for what it is. For some of the users, it's an acquired taste though.
I have written my B.Sc. and M.Sc. stuff in Open/LibreOffice. Then I said never, and migrated to LaTeX for Ph.D. and did everything in 5x speed with 10x less fuss. I have a tendency to learn markup and programming languages fast, so I never felt off while working with it.
I'm more of a screen guy, for tmux works, too. I also still use Eclipse as my serious IDE. VSCode can play over there, heh.
I used to use Google Docs, but Notion's "personal wiki" structure won me for non-technical things. All technical things stay in Obsidian, which is also opened as a public digital garden.
I'm already annoyed that, on Mac, ever since I installed OneDrive, I can't save Excel files to OneDrive while in Excel to my OneDrive, without Excel being logged in to my OneDrive account.
I have OneDrive because I want it to behave like Dropbox or Google Drive. Bug off, man.
"Furthermore, any new document will be named with the date instead of a traditional name by default."
I can't parse this? They're going to append the date to the filename you give? Is it updated in real time as you edit the document? Or you get multiple files with multiple dates?
Data harvesting for LLM training, with no benefit to the user but huge privacy reduction.
This is already how alternatives like google docs work, being cloud first so I think it makes sense for Microsoft to follow as its natural to want to be able to read, modify, and share documents from various computers.
This is a naive take because it ignores the presence of the third-party doctrine. The moment any file is uploaded to the cloud, you lose an expectation of privacy. When we decided to put everything in the cloud, I think most people sort of forgot about this, but it doesn't make it not relevant.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
Microsoft is making it too easy to convince people to use anything else. I'm moving several people to BSD (Linux is too messy).
Shooting for that 7 percent Linux desktop market share!
In other news, government documents from around the world uploaded to a US operated cloud.
| If you mind that Word documents are stored in the cloud by default, you need to modify the default setting.
Now that would require the competent configuration of the software by the government and proper usage by the individual. So leak guaranteed.
The competent OS uses sane defaults.
Well, the NSA thinks its competent for their own needs :3
> government documents from around the world uploaded to a US operated cloud
“Word customers who do not want their documents to be saved to the cloud by default need to become active to change the default save location.”
And hope that the next update doesn’t reverse the settings
I dislike this, rationally or not.
On my work laptop I've had to move my working folder out of "My Documents" so that going into subfolders doesn't stop and think for ten seconds each while it does... something... with OneDrive.
I just want to get to the files real quick, I don't want to calculate '42' at every fucking folder-open event.
I'm not a very nostalgic motherfucker, so I have no desire to relive computing from the early 90s.
(this may be specific to enforced settings at my workplace, but it feels like this is the same kinda thing)
Linux at home for the last five-odd years and almost daily I'm reminded how good a decision that was.
I don't know what's new on this. For the last two years all Office apps I own have insisted on saving to OneDrive first. I have always had to explicitly click on the path and select another folder. Every. Single. Time.
And on Mac things like TextEdit and Apple’s own office tools save them on iCloud by default.
You can turn that off in Settings.
For now.
LibreOffice. It’s one of the best non-MS options out there, and lacks any of this sh*t.
Looks like the list of reasons to avoid window like the plague is growing longer every day.
Office 365 is a macOS and web-based application too. The implications of cloud-based document storage as the default is greater than just another bullet point in Windows' decline. This will affect anyone, anywhere Office 365 is used.
Great! No more expectation of privacy and an entitlement to my computation data.
I'm old as dirt but I recall one of the arguments for TPM was shoved down our throats was the ability to tie documents to machines and organizations. Something something... industrial espionage. Now we know that is a lie. They just wanted to fill landfills with old working computers.
Nah.. Ill grab any old HW between 2005-2015 they throw up :) Who say I need to run newest windows on them, eh? :)
dumb question - but how best to edit/update word files on linux/ubuntu?
The only issue with linux I am wondering about is sharing my CV where most companies need a word file.
For dev work/play time - 100% linux
Libreoffice has always just worked for me, but I don't do anything special with word.
I've also heard that OnlyOffice is very good and has better compatibility with Microsoft's formats, but I've never personally used it.
> The only issue with linux I am wondering about is sharing my CV where most companies need a word file.
Maybe it's regional, but I've never been asked for a Word file resume.
I've never had somebody turn down a PDF. And all of the "Upload you resume" online applications I've seen also support PDF. A lot of them lately will even correctly parse out the info and auto-fill forms with it, but some of them mangle it.
For CV I use libreoffice and save it as a PDF/a. If it needs to be editable for some reason you can use docx or odt(odt might scare the average office worker so stick with docx).
.. and subsequently used to train an AI?
I don't use Microsoft software other than for playing the occasional games, this is a good reminder of _why_ I don't. Other than Windows being a hot mess of an operating system half the time, multiple different UI's that don't mesh together, ads being pushed in the start menu, and somehow more hardware problems than I run into on Linux these days.
This sounds like it's straight-up non HIPPA compliant.
It’s the default for AutoSave, which can be turned off (https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/s/gxcuf89792/images/b..., top left), likely also by group policy.
More training data for MS, and more useless intel for the NSA.
I honestly did not think I was ever going to be coming back to Linux. But here we are. So far I've migrated a laptop and gaming machine to fedora.
The gaming machine operates significantly better on fedora than it ever did on windows.
I'm on the fence for what to do with my other two machines, but it feels like there's weekly news pushing me away from continuing with windows.
What’s really obnoxious about this is that my Mac and virtually other Mac uses iCloud and that doesn’t appear to be a save location or supported cloud service, so they are automatically fragmenting my files.
Additionally, my Office 365 subscription is a work subscription and this is my personal device, so I don’t want every file I work on to during personal hours to be uploaded to my work’s sharepoint?
I hate Office so much and wish there was a trully viable alternative.
Dude, fuck product managers and their incentives
They'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
this is cruel. watching a parent in their 60s use ms word on an ipad and watch MS lose the same cloud saved documents. and same parent blaming themselves instead of MS. so yeah screw MS for their cloud bs.
My Mac is always trying to get me to save to iCloud by default. I hate it. Usually I catch it and put the document on my local drive, but sometimes it ends up in my iCloud drive, which I avoid using as much as possible.
> My Mac is always trying to get me to save to iCloud by default.
Nothing in macOS has ever attempted to lure me into saving to iCloud Drive.
I thought you might be referring to Apple's office suite rather than macOS, but I just tried Pages and it boringly defaults to local storage as expected.
It reliably happens to me when I'm using TextEdit. I go to save from the title bar and it defaults to iCloud.
I'm not doubting you, just saying I've never seen it, and I couldn't reproduce this in TextEdit either. It's quite possible it defaults to that in a fresh OS install, which I haven't done for as long as I can remember.
I'm not on a clean install either, and I have changed the save location from iCloud to a local folder a zillion times. It is similar to how Apple pushes iCloud on iOS, with notifications that can only be "dismissed" by clicking through to an iCloud advert. Steve is rolling over in his grave.
> I'm not on a clean install either, and I have changed the save location from iCloud to a local folder a zillion times.
That's unfortunate, I can only confirm that it doesn't happen to me on current/next versions of macOS.
If that happened to me, I guess I'd just turn it off. https://imgur.com/a/Cl0xyJi
I guess I'm one of those old-fashioned folks who thinks that having a functionality enabled shouldn't mean that it's used as the default (even after the user repeatedly changes it).
All data is to train our AI overlords.
Impressive. Now corporations and governments have one more reason to abandon ship.
Got to figure out how to block the url in the router.
Just switch to Linux. It's very accessible for anyone who might have an account on here.