Hacker News Reader

Comment by wonger_ | Hacker News Reader

> When I see the adware monstrosity that Windows appears to have turned into, I'm actually quite shocked to see sharp folks using it. I must be missing something, like do they have cheat codes to make it usable?

There's at least a few factors:

- like boiling frogs, where things worsen gradually and you don't notice / hurt enough until it's too late

- accumulated bandaids over time to keep it bearable. e.g. knowing what settings to disable, perhaps having powershell scripts to debloat new machines, etc

- inertia. Hard to make big changes in general, even if they would help, because change is hard and usually costly

- forced to use Windows at work

View on HN

I think MS Office is also singularly keeping people on Windows. That’s the only argument I don’t have a response to for getting my parents to switch.

I am confident that the lovely folks working on Wine are working as hard as possible to get maximal compatibility, and Wine (and Proton) is really a marvel of engineering at this point, but man I wish they would figure out how to get MS Office 2024 working.

To be clear, this is not a dig at the Wine people; I suspect MS Office is made purposefully difficult to get working on Wine, but man if they could get that working then there could be a huge exodus.

my solution was old laptop running Apollo and running moonlight on my Linux PC - use office that way. It's not ideal, but it works fine for me

Genuinely interested - why particularly MS Office 2024, and not any older version?

It would have to just be a recent-ish version. I tried getting 2016 working as well and was unsuccessful.

This is an extremely niche problem that is probably not a factor for the vast majority of people: but my organization uses a shared dropbox account for file storage (yes, yes I know). The linux dropbox app does not have the smart download feature where you can see all files and folders but don't need to have them local unless you request them. The only options are to either download the entire dropbox folder, or to selectively sync certain files and folders, and then only be able to see those files and folders.

Given that the dropbox is some 4TB, but I often need to access things that I didn't previously need access to, this is a bit of a deal breaker.

You said it in your first sentence: you know that Dropbox is not designed to function the way you're using it. That's a kind of tech debt that may (will?) bite you in the ass eventually. Linux being incompatible with the way you use Dropbox is just a symptom of poor infrastructure and security practices, though I understand that it's probably out of your hands to fix.

Would some kind of rclone mount work with this?

Do people hate LibreOffice that much?

I use linux full time on my home PCs, and I want Libre Office to work for me.

I _can’t_ get equivalent functionality of Excel’s tables (named range, but it dynamically expands and applies formulas as you add more data). If you’ve got excel handy, open it up select a range and press control-L to see it.

There are endless forum threads of Libre Office boosters misunderstanding what the feature does and offering the halfway there equivalent.

I want this to work, but everyone uses excel’s feature set slightly differently and something will be missing for everyone. It’s incredibly annoying.

What do you end up using at home?

Most recent example, putting together a pretty basic car shopping spreadsheet I’ve just gotten pissed off and not done it.

Yes it’s petty, yes it means I just don’t do something easy. Yes in the end it’s only my problem.

I’ll probably just do it on excel for the web.

I don't use spreadsheets much anymore, and I end up just writing scripts for everything I would use Excel for. This isn't a brag, in fact it's sort of the opposite; I often miss the simplicity of Excel and I think for a lot of my scripts I would save time if I did them in in a spreadsheet.

One of these days, I should probably go through a tutorial series for LibreOffice and Star BASIC and properly learn it.

Anything ‘real’ I’ll do in R, but my wife is not super keen on that where we’re collaborating on something!

I'm not keen on R even at the best of times :)

If I need to do any kind of number crunchy stuff I usually use Julia right now. I really like Julia, it's a very cool language and platform, but for small things it's kind of overkill. I should really learn how to properly use LibreOffice.

We all have our vices! (It's what I learned first, and feel most confident in).

This has been a nice interaction which is increasingly rare online, thanks.

My dad makes extremely liberal use of the VBA in Excel. LibreOffice does have an equivalent, but it's different enough to where he would be forced to port over large amounts of his code.

I think he could get over the different interface but I don't completely blame him for not wanting to redo all his work.

yes. It's terrible. I can't believe it's taken this long to still be awful. The mix of Java. The awful UI. If you're on Mac/Windows, you should buy Office. And if you're on Linux, you should use OnlyOffice, or Google Docs

The online MS Office is pretty good.

As far as I am aware, there is no support for the VBA on Office Online, which is a non-starter for my dad.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com