I think the biggest obstacle to widespread adoption of Linux is not using Linux itself, it's installing it on a computer. 99% of people don't know how to format a USB device, or how to enter the BIOS.
If it isn't a problem it's not worth fixing. A lot of people don't even know where they are saving their stuff to, so if it's in the cloud or on their device doesn't really matter to them.
Third-party doctrine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
Until their computer dies, and then they get upset at Microsoft for not having some automatic backup process like they have on the other platforms their friends use.
Between those and the people that can navigate everything on Linux, there'll be mildly technical people. Those may explore things that are out of the ordinary but will be unable or unwilling to fix issues that could arise from that
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Laptop and https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management/Suspend_an... w
She then proceeded to install and test the programs she needed and everything worked basically out of the box, so now she continued to use it because it doesn't matter to her what she uses, as long as she can use it.
(She is using Fedora on a Framework laptop)
I am thinking Fedora's atomic desktop for family. Any other suggestions?
Steamrolling their users then getting rewarded with their stock going stratospheric. Excellent!
Welcome to the world of modern capitalism. I'm seriously starting to question if a company can survive on the stock market by creating a solid product and caring about the users of that product.
Bright as some of them are, it's not their silo.
[1]https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-china-defense-d...
> Microsoft Failed to Disclose Key Details About Use of China-Based Engineers in U.S. Defense Work, Record Shows
A reasonable policy for dealing with this variety is to default to not transferring anything you're working on outside the relevant parts of your organisation - including use of cloud services - and then enable specifics on a per-client basis according to need. It's like the principle of least privilege. But if you operate that way then any software that quietly starts sharing things without explicit permission is a big problem.
And if this change will affect home users who don't have professionally managed systems as well then the same moral hazard applies. I don't think it's OK to push people into sharing their personal data online without understanding what they're doing and the potential consequences.
For now.
This is a gotcha. The issue is probably that your user dont have the permissions to interact with udev devices.
My wife switched this year after only ever using Windows and pure dotnet dev.
The first thing she said was "how is it so fast"
People should realize everything you do in Excel and Word is being spied on by Microsoft, this cloud push is making that process easier and faster for M/S.
At the very least, go to Libreoffice. But better yet, as you just did, people need to abandon Microsoft and Apple for Linux or a BSD.
There's no meaningful difference in the desktop Linux ecosystem right now and a decade ago, you're just more open to it as the alternative got worse.
There were a bunch of issues with compatibility if you wanted to do any sort of gaming and driver support was pretty bad from what I remember. Flatpaks were barely starting to become a thing, desktop environments were very unrefined and applications like LibreOffice still had a way to go.
If you look at what's happened in the Linux ecosystem in the past decade there are in fact significant improvements and refinements thanks to the hard work of thousands of contributors making it easier and easier to use.
I've started using LibreOffice at home and I'm surprised at how snappier it is compared to Word. Exported PDFs are even lighter that the ones Word do.
Also how would backing up specifically to rtf or txt help? Just back up the original doc files.
Googling would show that any number of users run into issues with OO/LO file corruption, often from power interruption during saves. The applications seem to handle that in a suboptimal way, and maintainers are unwilling to address it. My suspicion is that their unspoken contention is that the problem is with Windows, not OO/LO.
I recommend backing up to a general file type simply because it's less likely to open in the offending application by default, if the user ever needs to access it.
I use FreeBSD for my daily driver. I now stream games/Windows apps from a dedicated windows VM. It's impressive technology.
Try Darktable or Ansel instead of Lightroom. I'm not gonna tell you Gimp is a good photoshop replacement though ;-)
FWIW I use a DualSense controller connected to my Linux computers all the time without issue and without having to do anything special. In fact, Sony is the author of the DualSense driver on Linux[0]. Do you connect anything else over bluetooth? I'm wondering if your bluetooth setup might just be broken in general rather than specifically for DualSense controllers.
Of course technically speaking I shouldn't complain because I have provided nothing of value to the Linux ecosystem (how the fuck do I even start, even if I wanted to?), but still, the point stands.
You're 20 years too late for this.
The reason why Linux doesn't run well on the latest greatest hardware (and never has) is because the vendors of that hardware range from indifferent to actively hostile to Linux, and to make the system work people have to fight. Buy a legacy thinkpad, or something you've researched, and you'll have fewer problems than with Windows or Macs (which are tied to even more specific hardware and obsoleted by company whim.)
Of course, if you're on the bleeding edge of technology, everyone is using Linux (whether directly or in VMs and containers), so when I say the latest greatest, I mean the latest greatest consumer and business user stuff.
I've never understood comments like this. It's like you're looking at a pool full of people who have been swimming for years and telling you the pool is nice, and saying: "I guess it's finally ready for the real experts now."
Also, if you love vendors so much, you can have one. Buy your Linux computer from somebody who sells Linux computers, knows any problems you'll run into on that specially-selected hardware, and call them when you have a problem, just like you would do for the others.
> Of course technically speaking I shouldn't complain because I have provided nothing of value to the Linux ecosystem
This is the worst point by far. You can complain about anything that is broken, you just can't expect anyone to care (because you haven't obligated anyone to.) The problem isn't complaining, it's complaining badly. Get a vendor, whine to them.
I've had this issue as well on KDE Plasma. I'm convinced it's some sort of bug within Plasma itself. If I use bluetoothctl to pair the controller, it works fine, might be worth giving that a try if you haven't.
I too was experiencing odd/erratic pairing issues with DualSense controllers and this RTL8671B based dongle, and using the older firmware entirely fixed it. Now four controllers can be connected simultaneously without issue.
I love Linux and specifically NixOS but my experience with good audio and non-AMD drivers has been pretty so-so.
[1] https://blog.tombert.com/posts/2025-03-09-egpu/ Not trying to self-plug, just documented my headache.
Word has defaulted to saving in OneDrive (if you turn on autosave and you're signed into an MS account) for years now, I think since the Office 2016 > Office 365 update. The only real change I see is that the document will now be given a name with the date instead of just 'Document 1'. Maybe it's a little more aggressive about turning on autosave for you? The autorecover location is still in appdata.
In my 10 years using this website daily i am yet to see a microsoft related thread and comments that is not fud, misinformation or straight lies
I as a user know more about their products than any three to four of their employees do combined.
When did Google offer an non-cloud installable app and changed it to upload to the cloud?
I bet all those cool SV people "we're better than Microsoft" aren't using Libre Office on a GNU/Linux system.
Maybe it is time for some donations?
Local First stalwart that has some legacy || Cloud first "new kid" but you surrender your files.
The issue is, first: they changed the deal. Change by default is bad. People need to learn this because honestly it's an important lesson. Change is inherently bad, so if you're going to change: have a stonking good reason.
Second: Now the drawbacks of the second "hip" alternative is included the same drawbacks of the first. So, now, Google Office is a strictly superior offering.
Congratulations, I guess?
Yes, more people should use libreoffice, but most people are concerned with compatibility, a sunk cost on their office skills and it's pretty bad UX.
We don’t have one for the 3 people in the company to need to use Word on occasion.
https://ridaayed.com/posts/create-diagrams-in-emacs-org-mode...
Seriously if I could use Logic Pro inside Emacs I would.
This is a feature that has been among the most loved aspects of its main competitor for more than a decade.
Somehow, Microsoft managed to make the same feature sound and feel and be creepy.
People who wanted that kind of treatment and walled garden already moved to apple's ecosystem, and people who do not want this stayed with windows.
Now more and more of my non-technical friends are moving towards linux because microsoft is pushing them away.
Apple, as far as i know, still gives you a choice.
Again, for the Nth time, you can run any software you like on a Mac. You can do anything you want. App store? Of course. Direct vendor download? You bet. Build from source? No problem.
Further, this line is out of place here because Microsoft is FAR more invasive about pushing cloud-first storage than Apple has ever been. No app on my Mac default to saving to iCloud. NONE.
you can't bring your software with you, you can't bring your licenses with you, and all services are available only inside it.
You're forced by what's given to you and can only use within the garden on only the device you own.
Probably mostly applicable to people who know about "ecosystems", rather than normies who view computers mostly as another type of hammer (a tool).
I have to re-learn how to use software very regularly, and as more and more things become software I have lost some functional skills because there are only 24 hours in a day and I can't stay current on everything. If I haven't done a thing in six years, it means I need to research what the current software tool for doing that thing is, try installing four of those things and land on the one that isn't broken or some type of malware, and then teach myself an entirely new interface over time. I just wanted to hit a nail! My hammer was installed on my old computer! I knew that hammer!
But no, it's never that simple with software. I can learn 150 software tools to do specific things and have to re-learn something every week just to maintain capability. I don't have to do that with hammers, wrenches, saws, etc.
We need more hammer-like tools instead of managed, constantly updated "ecosystems", and when we do find a good one, we need a way to keep it. Because we have finite time and cognitive bandwidth.
"That was deprecated three years ago, why are you still trying to use an old version that doesn't even have security updates? What is wrong with you?! [WONTFIX]"... Fuck you, give me back my fucking hammer. I could do this task I'm trying to do in literally 90 seconds ten years ago; I'm an hour deep into determining how you would even begin to do it today.
This is still a local app, so it doesn't feel like a natural default.
Corp users’s biggest IT headache is lost Word or Excel files.
Why does this app that's been working just fine as desktop software need to save anything to the cloud by default? It's conceptually odd.
I've used Google docs from the beginning, but I actively choose what docs I want on that platform.
All MS had to do was add "save to cloud" as an additional save option along with "save" and "save as" (maybe renamed as "save to desktop") then auto save could activate where your last save location was. This would be good design.
Fans: You people will complain about everything!
Person/Company does crappy thing
People complain
Fanboy says "Person/Company could do amazing thing and people would still complain"
... when it's very obvious that company/person didn't do anything good.
I've seen it so many times there must be a name for it. Anyone know what it is?
This has the effect that (to a first approximation) everyone knows someone with a horrific OneDrive data loss story, no-one particularly trusts OneDrive with anything actually important, and so no-one wants to be forced to use it for everything.
However, OneDrive's promise is "save your files and photos to OneDrive and access them from any device, anywhere". Accordingly, the model OneDrive actually exposes to the user is directory trees of arbitrary files containing what, for OneDrive's purposes, are opaque blobs. This leads to all the behaviours you'd expect from a distributed system using such a model, and therefore the trust issues the public has with MS distributed systems.
Regaining someone's trust in a vendor after a bad experience, even for a different product, is very hard.
The company they're imitating (poorly, as always) is one I've found so creepy that I actively go out of my way to distance myself from. For at least the last decade at this point. If Microsoft is being creepy too, this just means they'e successfully imitated the competition... for once.
If that is the case, I think it makes some sense if you are already setup to use that to default to saving there since it makes it easier to find your files on other devices and they be safe. Theoretically if you have it setup you already agree to the risks of storing data in the cloud.
however... The real problem to me is that onedrive is enabled by default and that they are now requiring you to login with a microsoft account to use Windows. If both of those were not the case this makes complete sense.
But until they stop enabling one drive by default and making it a pain in the ass to disable this is bad.
The only issue with linux I am wondering about is sharing my CV where most companies need a word file.
For dev work/play time - 100% linux
I've also heard that OnlyOffice is very good and has better compatibility with Microsoft's formats, but I've never personally used it.
It’d be a bummer if my cousin lost the term paper he was writing. It would be a Truly Bad Day if a coworker uploaded a sensitive document to an unauthorized (or unexpected!) cloud service and it got compromised and the sensitive data used against us.
The former would be bad for my cousin. The latter would involve lawsuits and smitings. The probability is lower, but the risk is much, much higher.
To be fair, I already sync some of my text files to the cloud, but I choose which ones I sync to which services. This seems to take away our agency.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2019/07/26/censors...
I can't parse this? They're going to append the date to the filename you give? Is it updated in real time as you edit the document? Or you get multiple files with multiple dates?
On my work laptop I've had to move my working folder out of "My Documents" so that going into subfolders doesn't stop and think for ten seconds each while it does... something... with OneDrive.
I just want to get to the files real quick, I don't want to calculate '42' at every fucking folder-open event.
I'm not a very nostalgic motherfucker, so I have no desire to relive computing from the early 90s.
(this may be specific to enforced settings at my workplace, but it feels like this is the same kinda thing)
Linux at home for the last five-odd years and almost daily I'm reminded how good a decision that was.
The gaming machine operates significantly better on fedora than it ever did on windows.
I'm on the fence for what to do with my other two machines, but it feels like there's weekly news pushing me away from continuing with windows.
Truer words have never been spoken. In my personal life, I hate the cloud and will never use any cloud service of any kind.
We’re already starting to move over to Linux for all our machines.
But I stopped auto saving by default. I find that simply navigating a document and making markups ends up saving the document when all i wanted to was view it and not save it
I use the modified date filter extensively to figure out what is most relevant and what is not. With autosave, the date modified keeps changing. And going online and restoring the file to an earlier version changes DM to now. Meaning that information is either permanently lost or I have to hack it and change it manually.
However, I realize that I'm weird, and I certainly don't blame most people for preferring the Word style of editing, since most people aren't nerdy software engineers.
While a part of me hopes this works as a push for people to use FOSS like LibreOffice, I'm not really holding my breath. I tried getting my parents to switch years ago after they were complaining about having to pay for a subscription to Office, and they were wholly unmoved and didn't like LibreOffice.
In fairness, LibreOffice didn't really do what my parents wanted; the equation editor for LibreOffice is decidedly harder to use than Microsoft's (even compared to the old Mathtype version), and the syntax for their spreadsheet stuff is different enough from Excel that it can lead to a fairly steep learning curve.
Normal documents, 99.999% of the time, are written in Markdown, and stored like that or rendered to PDF, if required.
Everything serious go through LaTeX. I don't care about Typst, I'm happy with LaTeX syntax (I've written my Ph.D. with it, so I don't care if it fights you).
For some Office stuff I need to use office tools. LibreOffice if the other party accepts it or Microsoft Office for the picky documents and people.
A lot of personal calculations are done in Notion databases now, but I can wrangle Calc/Excel/Numbers enough to have them on file, if they are sensitive or need to be detached from Notion.
I'm an old school people. I don't migrate from tool to tool much.
I think that LaTeX is mostly fine enough but there are a few bits of bullshit that I find infuriating, e.g. having to remember to do `` for beginning quotes, which apparently I will never remember to do until I look at the rendered document. Also, the errors when compiling are pretty opaque and hard to parse; I've done it enough now to where I can usually figure it out but they're certainly pretty weird to a beginner.
I think we're both kind of weird :). Weird doesn't mean "bad", certainly, I'm just saying that I don't think it's reasonable to ask a random non-techy person to learn LaTeX or how to render with Pandoc. I did my entire undergrad work in Pandoc->LaTeX->PDF, and my entire masters work in Typst; I didn't finish my PhD but all the work I did for that was in vanilla LaTeX.
Importantly, though, I get to do it all using Neovim + tmux, so I can keep using my normal "IDE" at all times.
For spreadsheets, I usually just use Calc for anything that requires privacy, and Google Sheets for anything where privacy doesn't matter. They're both good enough for what I'm doing.
LaTeX has its own quirks and doesn't talk kindly to a newcomer, but I know a lot of people (nerd or otherwise) like it for what it is. For some of the users, it's an acquired taste though.
I have written my B.Sc. and M.Sc. stuff in Open/LibreOffice. Then I said never, and migrated to LaTeX for Ph.D. and did everything in 5x speed with 10x less fuss. I have a tendency to learn markup and programming languages fast, so I never felt off while working with it.
I'm more of a screen guy, for tmux works, too. I also still use Eclipse as my serious IDE. VSCode can play over there, heh.
I used to use Google Docs, but Notion's "personal wiki" structure won me for non-technical things. All technical things stay in Obsidian, which is also opened as a public digital garden.
Most children (American children, at least) grew up on Chromebooks. That instills a certain expectation of how these things work — documents save themselves.
To switch to Microsoft Office means adding a cryptic, unnecessary-seeming extra step. I imagine it feels something like having a laptop that's designed to be shut down before closing.
You’ve all heard the stories about college CS students who have to be told what a folder is — and those are the kids who actually want to work with computers. Now step back to the next generation of lawyers and nurses and novelists and think about their lifetime experience.
Microsoft is just chasing the puck.
The way it works there is that documents are auto-saved to a non-volatile app-specific temp directory until they’re explicitly saved, at which point they’re moved to the specified location and continue to be auto-saved there. Anybody who uses TextEdit as a temp text stash is familiar with this with the hoard of unsaved documents that comes back even after a cold boot.
Microsoft is just motivated to push cloud storage onto usage.
But I'd have to assume it's a more "data driven" reason (ie capturing context of docs).
Nothing in macOS has ever attempted to lure me into saving to iCloud Drive.
I thought you might be referring to Apple's office suite rather than macOS, but I just tried Pages and it boringly defaults to local storage as expected.
Additionally, my Office 365 subscription is a work subscription and this is my personal device, so I don’t want every file I work on to during personal hours to be uploaded to my work’s sharepoint?
I hate Office so much and wish there was a trully viable alternative.
iOS does it with its apps and iCloud but it’s seamless so you don’t mind.
Using OneDrive is like putting your face next to an anus and breathing deeply.
nickslaughter02•5h ago
bhawks•4h ago
Now that would require the competent configuration of the software by the government and proper usage by the individual. So leak guaranteed.
guappa•4h ago
delfinom•4h ago
JumpCrisscross•4h ago
“Word customers who do not want their documents to be saved to the cloud by default need to become active to change the default save location.”
croes•4h ago