these articles offer ms office alternatives acting like most people write their shopping lists in excel or something. i remember my friend asking for a cheap key for office, and i asked him when was the last time he opened a file in office. after a few seconds of waiting he told me that he opened up an rtf manual for an ancient tomb raider game...told him that almost anything can open an rtf. he lives an officeless life since.

I'm likely going to because windows update is embarrassingly bad if you have 32gb as your goddamn boot drive.

OK, really good article and I like Libreoffice (although I prefer Only office) and Linux. I browse on it, game, watch videos, do pretty much everything. I am also a technical person, who can create a VM in 10 mins, add a required boot parameter, etc.

Now. I want to send this article to my colleague/friend who's not technical at all. In the blog post I read

Start by testing Linux and LibreOffice on a second partition of your PC (for individuals)

"Second partition" literally means nothing to most people. I know: just learn, just read. But most people will not bother, or they will simply not understand the tutorials. That's the unfortunate reality.

I think Linux and Libreoffice can become mainstream if a regular Joe/Jane can buy a laptop from Walmart with a distro and office apps pre-installed and use them like Microsoft Office. Before that time all this Linux and FLOSS stuff is limited to technical, or at least curious people willing to put some effort.

P.S. My relatives are on Linux and Onlyoffice, because I installed it for them. And it's so much easier and more rare for me to manage and troubleshoot than Windows. But I cannot see them installing it by themselves.

Bruh...I'm still running windows 7 in one of my VMs hosted by Debian 😏😏😏

Im seeing these posts twice a day at this point. So someone like myself who is totally ignorant on Linux, I have some questions if anyone can lend advice?

I’ve been on PC windows for over twenty years now. And I use it mostly for video software like davinci resolve. Adobe software workflow. Unreal engine. I use clients harddrives and often times my own for working off of. And often times will send those harddrives to other people and their computers to finish the work. I also occasional play games on steam and Xbox App.

With that said, is it even possible for me to switch over to Linux and keep using all the same software and workflow I have for high end video production workflow?

I've been a full time dev since 2012 and needed a Mac, I had barely used windows over that time but beforehand ran a PC service business.

Anyway, Ive been using Linux as a daily driver for the past 6 months for reasons.

... The other day I got a new cheap laptop I needed to setup for run a single application.

Holy fuck what a shitshow.

It took me 2 hours just to get to the desktop. Shit didn't work, bullshit login screens, ads everywhere.

It was a massive pile of dog shit.

After battling to get the system setup for the rest of the day I gave up, chucked Fedora Kinoite On it... Took 30 minutes from creating boot media to getting a desktop going, chucked the app I needed to run in a Flatpack, chucked it on a USB, and it was up and running.

No bullshit.

Just works.

Truly the year of the Linux desktop.

I really need to stop putting it off and install Linux on my PC and laptops

Don't and done. No problems, highly recommend it

What?! I'm still working on my spreadsheet comparing 7 and 8!

No, no its not. I get it lemmy has a hard on for Linux and libreoffice. But unfortunately its just not gonna happen windows is king. If you like or not its the main dog on the market and enterprises are not going to switch.

OnlyOffice is way better than LibreOffice.

I always find it odd that posts like this get any downvotes at all. Like, are people really that in love with Windows and or Microsoft?

The end of windows 10 support is approaching. Windows 10 will go on for a while yet.

It's not all quite as rosy.

Yes, Linux is much more capable now than it was 10 years ago and it's much more capable of being used as a main system. I myself have been using Linux as my main system for a few years now.

But it's also a fact that a lot of stuff might not work (even if it works for someone else) and that some things are still more difficult than they should be.

For example, on my laptop cannot wake from sleep since kernel 6.11. I have manually sourced a 6.10 from an older version of my distro and keep holding it back, so that I can use my laptop as a laptop. For someone without technical skill, this would mean that their laptop just can't sleep any more. Hibernate also doesn't work.

Another example is that LibreOffice still makes a lot of formatting mistakes when it has to open word documents. And sure, everyone could just switch to odf, but it's not quite as easy to make everyone else switch to odf. It makes it really hard to use LibreOffice in any kind of professional environment. Wouldn't want to make a powerpoint presentation that then looks like shit when it's played on a different PC.

Lastly, Nvidia sucks, but it's also close to the only option for laptops with dGPUs. When I look for laptops with dGPUs available in my area on a price comparison platform, I find 760 laptops with Nvidia GPUs and only 3 with AMD, all of which are priced at least €500 more than comparable Nvidia devices. So if you want to go for a gaming laptop, Nvidia is pretty much the only option, and under Linux it really sucks. Steam games generally work ok for me, but trying to use Heroic Launcher to play anything from my gigantic library of free Epic/Amazon/GoG games, about 10% of the games I tried actually work. And even with those that work, my laptop sometimes just decides that a slide show with 3 FPS is good enough. That stays even after reboots and resets, and after a few days it returns to normal. Only to go back to slideshow mode a few days later.

If you just use your laptop to run a browser, I can recommend Linux 100%.

If you want to do anything else and don't have any technical skills and/or don't want to spend hours fixing things that should just work, I can't fully recommend it.

I've had windows update disabled for years so the fact that it's "end of life" don't mean shit to me. It'll keep chugging along for years more.

That said, I installed Mint a week ago and love it!

Can't wait for the "The end of Windows 11 is approaching..." article in a few years. Keep me posted.

Installed Linux Mint a few months ago and have been dual booting. Hardly use Windows at all now.

Linux is exactly what an OS should be.