Technology

The comment about convenience trumping almost everything else reminded me of this old post (wasn't originally on The Urban Dictionary but they have it now under the definition of Linux).

If Operating Systems Ran The Airlines

When you board the plane, you are given a seat, four bolts, a wrench and a copy of the seat-HOWTO.html. Once settled, the fully adjustable seat is very comfortable, the plane leaves and arrives on time without a single problem, the in-flight meal is wonderful. You try to tell customers of the other airlines about the great trip, but all they can say is, "You had to do what with the seat?"

I remember when Microsoft first attempted to prevent the standardisation of Open Document Format (used by LibreOffice and others) and then bullied its way into getting approval for own OOXML standard. Already back then, supporters of FOSS warned that Microsoft would use the overly complicated OOXML to maintain its stranglehold on users of Office-like software.:

Whenever applicable and possible, standards should build upon previous standardisation efforts and not depend on proprietary, vendor-specific technologies. Albeit, MS-OOXML neglects various standards and uses its own vendor-specific formats instead. This puts a substantial burden on all vendors to fully implement MS-OOXML. It seems questionable how any third party could ever implement them equally well, especially when a standard comes with 6000 pages of specifications without serving its minimalistic purpose.

Shit, I've been right about microsoft for thirty-plus years and it doesn't make a damned bit of difference.

They are. A. MONOPOLY. They have never "fought fair", and it wouldn't ever occur to them to do so. Their heart is all BOGU.

I don't buy the argument that windows just works or that it's somehow better or more stable. The reality is we all have grown to learn about computers specifically using windows and it's been a steep learning curve. We have gotten familiar with its specificities and its sporadic misbehavior and accepted that as the norm. And people prefer what they are used to even if it's suboptimal because they would rather not learn something else from scratch, even if in the long run it could be better.

Put any person who has zero computer experience in front of a windows computer or Linux computer and I doubt they would say the windows computer just works and the Linux one doesn't.

Anyone who thinks this is new, please read this, this and this.

And there's also this. It's a topic since shortly after the standardization of the Open Document Format 2006. MS then feared to lose whole governments as customers, so they (pseudo)standardized their own format, with a whole bunch of traps (in the format) and abuses of market power.

The thing with "just works" in monopolies is that it eventually stops working. I already have terrible excel bugs all the time on my work computer. Left clicking a cell sometimes just selects half a dozen adjancent cells. You vlick something and all of a sudden the rendering just goes completely haywire... You have two larger tables open and it just crashes...

Things will only get worse from this, until the global economy will loose trillions to being stuck with Microsoft.

Moved to LibreOffice. No regrets. Thank you, Microsoft!

My only issue with Libre Office is that they are not available on mobile phones. I want to use spread sheets to make calculations and projections on my finances if I can't use my computer at a given moment.

Not sure why this author is spreading "paid software is convenient and just works" rhetoric. Simply isn't the case. You just get addicted to trying to solve your problems with money.

The problem: our desire for convenience

Bring on the downvotes, but: When it comes to tools like computers, convenience is synonymous with productivity. People aren't unreasonably demanding to have their hands held, they want to get stuff done. We need to stop acting like ~~convenience~~ productivity is just one of many concerns. It is the primary concern.

Freedom is nice but to most people it's only important if it helps us do the things we want to do.

Also they already start shortening the live cycle of the non subscription office licenses, calling it „Modern-Lifecycle-Policy“. Up to now you hat 7-10 years of update support. But this year Office 2016 and 2019 phase out, next year already Office 2021! And Office 2024 only has support til 2029. Thats from today only 4 years (at the same price!)

The problem: our desire for convenience

This hits it right on the money. As nice as open source and open standards are, at the end of the day none of that matters to the 99% that want/need to do X as fast and painlessly as possible.

To people like my wife MS Office/LibreOffice/Google Docs are all the same thing in the category of productivity suite. And one of those does not meet her where she lives in day to day life. And it doesn't because there is no money in doing so for LibreOffice. And there is no benefit to her to seek out LibreOffice for her uses.

Hell, just take a look around at the number of people that preach about the evils of Microsoft, Google, or whoever but love them an iPhone and Macbook. As bad as Microsoft and Google can be for screwing over the user with vendor lock-in they don't hold a candle to Apple. But they get the money despite there being "better" options technically and philosophically for nearly everything they make, but Apple knows all of that pales in importance to 99% of potential customers compared to being convenient.

I've heard this comment about OpenXML (the xml format of the office documents) before, and i'm a bit on the fence about it.

It's of course indeed ridiculously complex, but so is office. Microsoft both adds a shit ton of functionality to their documents, and keeps an impressive amount of backwards compatibility.

In the past i heard complaints about part of the OpenXML spec that also allows older binary data in there for backwards compatibility reasons, which of course means for OSS implementations that they don't just have to implement this spec, but also the older spec that came before to be truly compatible with everything a modern office version can open.

But on the other hand, if i look at it from the side of Microsoft, they opened up their format, they've got a gazillion functionalities, should they remove functionality to appease the open source developers? If so which? Should they stop being backwards compatible with documents of decades ago to appease the open source developers? If so how long should they support? Are you going to tell their customers?

Office is an immense program with an immense amount of legacy features, backwards compatibility, ....

It's incredibly complex by nature. And might they have made the format more complex to dissuade competition? Could be. However, in this instance Occam's razor pushes me more to "write a huge program over a timespan of many decades, with thousands upon thousands of programmers working on it, and you'll indeed most likely end up with something very complex...."

I honestly don't understand why I would ever write up or share a Microsoft document.

As for word, it's just fucking rich text format. It's obvious they're manipulating the format to lock down users with less computer knowledge. Otherwise, why is it so fucking complicated?

Markdown accomplishes 90% of what a word doc does and it is legible with or without rendering.

EDIT: If I want data in or out of a spreadsheet program, I'm using CSV.

All of the "special features" of office docs wind up being security nightmares, unusable junk, or both.

The "windows just works" claim is stupid. Especially the statement the author makes on how you just double click an icon and it just works everytime and if ever there is an issue, someone else will eventually fix it.

There's a phrase that gets passed around the tech scene: "Linux is only free if your time has no value." Because, yes, Linux and other open-source apps are free to download and use. In a world driven by money, you'd expect the free version to overtake the paid one. The problem is, the paid option...just works.

Sure, until the paid option does something anti-competitive or gets too expensive or shuts down entirely, and you have to switch to a different paid option, sometimes burning dozens of hours in switching time (and/or hundreds of hours of work through lost or corrupted data) in the process. Not to mention the transition costs of just figuring out the new thing. Why not just switch to something that won't go away, or be changed under your feet?

The problem is that it needs that initial time investment to get it working the way you want it.

Maybe I'm just enough of a tinkerer in any situation that I've put pretty much the same amount of time into fiddling with my Linux settings as I did with my last Windows computer.

If your hardware isn't working properly, you have to find drivers that run on Linux; if the developer never made Linux-compatible drivers, you have to figure something else out.

People have been talking about this for my entire life, but in the past year of my switch to Linux, it has literally never happened once. I downloaded a new, open-source driver for my drawing tablet because it had some extra features that I wanted, but even it worked out of the box. I've never experienced this incompatibility. Honestly I've never even had trouble with software I wanted not being available for my distro.

Am I doing Linux wrong?

Windows doesn't have this problem.

LOL.

Installers made for Windows don't need any special TLC;

ROFL!

you double-click them and they work.

OH wait they're serious?!

Once they're installed, they work. If you need to install a driver, it works. You open a document in Office, it works.

Sure, if you don't run into a permissions issue. And if the system registry doesn't get corrupted. And if you're not on an ARM machine. And if your TPM is the right version. And if you're on the right subversion of Windows. And if a previous install didn't leave some remnant of itself behind. And if you don't want to do anything with an Apple device at all. And if sometimes you have the right fonts installed?

Honestly, I think I've had fewer problems installing Linux applications than Windows applications, but I can't attest to that. I think I can be pretty confident in saying that they're mostly equivalent. Both of them are pretty mature platforms with fairly minimal hiccups, in my experience.

And if something doesn't work, we can yell at Microsoft until they publish a fix that makes it work again.

That's a weird way of spelling "until they ignore it for six months and then lock the support thread for inactivity."

Microsoft has gotten us into a state where we don't need to think, tinker, or troubleshoot our software. We just double-click the icon and wait for it to "just work." If it doesn't, it's someone else's issue to solve, and we flood social media and support emails until the issue is resolved.

Here I have to agree with the article, because whatever the reality of installing applications on Windows, this is the fiction they've sold us. Apple, too. All operating systems have troubles, and all vendors try to downplay them and fix the stuff that causes problems for most of their users. Linux is just honest about the fact that they can't make everything a perfectly smooth experience for everyone.

If the XML standard is overly complex, does that mean it'll be a bigger pain for MS employees to maintain? Sounds like cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.

I'mma just going to sit over here in the corner with my AbbiWord and Gnumeric.........