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Campaigners urge EU to mandate 15 years of OS updates
(www.theregister.com)
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this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2025
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What we REALLY need is to curb microsoft’s market dominance. If more alternatives for OS and usable replacements for MS office em would exist, this would not be a problem and would not need to hamper innovation for the sake of back porting (the main counter-argument as a dev).
Linux and all its flavors?
What’s wrong with libreoffice or anyoffice? For a large percentage of users, Linux is fine, especially as many applications have an online option. For the stuff I do, in Linux, online Office is more than sufficient.
An org I work with provides me with a 365 license, but I I’m more comfortable in Libreoffice.
Office is used bythe majority, but majority doesn’t mean they are right, they are simply more.
LibreOffice is okay for some stuff, but shows its limitations pretty quickly once you use it for more serious tasks.
The only things LibreOffice has going for it, is the price and that the UI doesn’t change. LibreOffice has no good mobile apps.
Better alternatives to Microsoft Office are Google Docs etc. and Apple’s iWork suite. Both have good compatibility with Microsoft’s files and run great on mobile.
Google has ease of use, easy sharing and collaboration. Apple’s iWork has great usability and features and produces beautiful results by default. The suite comes free with every Apple device. Google Docs is free to use as well.
That’s of course ignoring the workhorse called Outlook. You can kind of approach its features with a handful of other applications, but won’t reach the same functionality.
LibreOffice has one unique application in its suite: Base local database. Microsoft Access and FileMaker used to very popular, but faded into the background over the last decade.
Hmmm, I don't agree. The trend is in the opposite direction. Microsoft Windows used to have a larger market share and supported hardware indefinitely. Now that their market share has shrunk, they are also limiting support for older hardware. This only shows correlation, not causation, but it does show that more competition has not improved the issue and that we need laws to do that instead. MacOS, the primary competitor to Microsoft Windows which also has Microsoft Office available, only supports their hardware for 6-8 years as well.
Edit: just to add, if anything, this actually shows that more competition and reduced market share probably increases the pressure to cut support for older hardware because it probably becomes less profitable to do so.
I didn’t go into the specifics but I was thinking more in line with prosumer friendly linux distributions that can be dropped in to replace win 10. I know stuff like linux mint exists for that case.
Got it, thanks for the clarification.