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this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2024
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I switched to Linux myself but can we please stop lying about Linux being a drop-in replacement? There is enough sofware that does not work.
A lot of Linux users here think the conversation begins and ends with game support. A lot of us use our computers for work and there is a lot of productivity and creative software that does not play nice with Linux. I've probably said this a dozen times here before but I'll say it again: Not all of us use our computers solely for gaming.
I'm a Linux user and I think the conversation should be:
More than half (over 60% ackshually) of Windows PCs in service are still Windows 10. Windows 11 barely cracks 34%.
People should boycott this and demand that Microsoft offer long-term support for Windows 10 like they did Windows 7 and stop trying to force Windows 11 on consumers through dark patterns like this. We have a year to make a huge about this deal in public spaces. This is the kind of thing the reddit userbase used to excel at getting word out about. Enough public outcry over a year could force the issue.
They made their own bed with the arbitrary TPM 2.0 requirement. They can drop that and they'd probably have more adoption of 11 overnight. These are business choices Microsoft is making, while ignoring the reality on the ground for a lot of people who never upgraded to something with a TPM 2.0 chip. It's a choice to and a dark pattern to push them to upgrade.
I am kind of sick of the Linux users acting superior instead of being helpful to people stuck with Windows due to work environments, too.
I'm a Linux User (fuck windows) but I'm stuck with the wife wanting to use windows. So yeah I'll always be on the lookout for helpful ways to keep that shit software from causing security problems in my home network.
Whats the best replacement for Excel? LibreCalc is ok but it lags really far behind Excel in intermediate features. My close friend in analytics switched back to Excel recently because he got so tired of dealing with LibreCalc.
Also do you know if the Affinity suite works well in Wine? Ive messed with a lot of software paid and libre for its purposes but just vibe with Affinity best
Im not asking to sound rude im asking because im genuinely looking down the barrel of this OS change and I do a lot of computer based hobbies and work that are going to be uprooted by this
Office 365. I hate it, but I don't need a windows PC to use it.
Best replacement for excel is: anything that doesn't rape your data whilst pouring sugar in you gas tank. /s
TLDR - R, Python, mariaDB, for real data analysis stuff + minor role for whatever spreadsheet package.
For hobbies / analysis / data manipulation , storage , graphs and general stats fuckery here's my advice; as someone who does this stuff - "badly I might add" - for a shitty public sector organisation that just can't decide whether to bend over M$ barrel or Oracle's barrel:
use R (via R-studio if you need an "environment") for more statsy stuff and easier graphs.
Python for more general mathsy / programmy / web scrapy stuff - can do decent graphs with libraries like plotly and matplotlib stuff like that, scipy, numpy, and pandas are the other basic libraries for analysis and maths and large datasets. peopl like using 'jupyter notebooks' - I don't get it personally - but 50 Phil Ochs fans cant be that wrong.
Set up a mariadb or something if you need databasey stuff, I doubt you need to look at more hardcore stuff like postgresql for "hobbying" ; my personal (1 user) databases were built several years ago and mariadb is just fine for that. but some of the high vol transactional DB at work do use postgresql.
These are all good to learn in my experience, even if you think they're harder than excel; ( are they tho'? array formlae!?). They're sort of interoperable - subject to learning. They - naturally - have their open-source annoyances.: a million ways to do everything, and versioning issues. (Excel still has fucking vlookup() tho' - talk abut legacy baggage - but no it's not as bad as the open souce maelstroms).
You can still ouput data into a spreadsheet for viewing formatting and messing with stuff - but there are other ways.
Footnote: Yes I do still use excel, but normally mostly for final formatted report for customer who wants it. Having R/python directly write data into excel is so much better than letting excel open anything. Excel just can't let an innocent SNOMED code go unmolested; you have to be on high alert if you let excel actually do anything.
Also spreadsheet for messy data cleansing - for looking at mess, to help refine the R/python cleansing script. I'd happily use libre/ods for any of these but I don't fancy putting the request in to IT and . . . having to speak to IT about it.
Yeah I'm just gonna tell our group of 55+ year old mechanical engineers to learn Python; that'll go over really well /s
Surely they have to use stuff like mathcad or equivalent to be an engineer? I've never really used it but it can't be that far off just doing the calculations in python. I think there's "sagemath" too availabe for linux - i'm sure that's not as good as mathcad - but aimed at the same thing i think - and i'm sure it will interoperate with python libraries and R and stuff like that.
I know there are people who claim to be "good at excel" well i only used it for about 15-20 years but then i guess never got "good" at it - i just learned moreabout how bad it is. . Those that were genuinely good at it , as far as I think, did a lot of extra work to mitigate the limitations or create crutches for it. I just got pissed off by it, so i was quite desperate to stop using it as much as possible - it's just only recently i've been allowed to use what i think are more appropriate tools- and i;m grateful for this small, but likely closing "window" f opportunity.
If they're happy with it though, who am I to judge. But if I was doing gemoetry and engineering calculations and ultimately cad, I know i'd not want excel anywhere near my data or my calculation methods.
I wonder if age is really their issue, or if they just DGAF - again if that's the case, good for them.
I on the other hand will probably be walking out when they force us on windows 11 however good or bad it is. /management has already fucked us with sharepoint and dynamics - so maybe i'm just as bad as them when it comes to new fangled shit like: clouds, data-lakes, fabrics and other MS shite. I just want our data on a proper fucking filesystem, that we own. And our data somewhere I can SQL it.
only office works well for me, feels much closer to word and excel
This exactly. I'm an engineer but day-to-day I'm mainly using the Office shite (I tried for suite but ended up with former and happy to run with it) to do my job. The amount of extraneous effort I have to make to do tasks that would have been simple in 2005 is completely ridiculous. Yet on my home computer running Arch BTW, I can do everything instantaneously, the only downside is that some supplier I don't really care for wants my presentation in pptx. If it wasn't for work data security requirements, I'd just use my personal equipment for everything because I'd be able to work so much faster.
Edit: not to mention a lot of FOSS software is better than the professional bullshit (AutoCAD needs to die), it's just a lot more effort to get up to speed with because colleagues around you don't know it (yet)
AutoCAD does need to die, but there absolutely is no real substitute for MasterCAM. I have a windows PC just for running that software, because nothing comes even kinda close. That license is expensive though, holy shit.
Have you tried Bottles and/or Wine?
I've never had a problem running anything from the Adobe or Microsoft Suite for example, in fact I think they run waaay smoother on linux
But yea I get it, a lot of people associate compatibility with gaming only.
Really? So I could use my Wacom Cintique and my 2024 versions of Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Animator on Linux then? Because I use them to make a living and if I cannot use them on Linux easily then there is no point.
As a former Linux user from the early 00’s the biggest hurdle was art software and convincing Linux users that Adobe software means more than just Photoshop…..
Absolutely. Especially software that has to interface with specific hardware, which often times can have issues working properly with Windows VMs.
I can just dedicate some old hardware for baremetal Win10, but not everyone has that luxury.
What Linux software doesn't work?
You took this out of the context it was in.