Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by throwawayjava | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

throwawayjava

> Curiously, we see a similar situation today with open source software

I strongly disagree. Here are four notable counter-examples:

1. Desktop Linux. I'm a religious Linux desktop user, but MacOS is definitely a better operating system.

2. Office suites. Libreoffice/OpenOffice/whatever-we're-supposed-to-call-it-these-days is stuck in the 1990s.

3. Videogames.

4. Large web services (Google Search, GMail, Facebook).

Notice that four these examples, where closed-source software outshines OSS in quality, cover 90+% of most people's computer time...

Open source software seems to do especially well mostly when the end-user of the software product is a programmer/software engineer/IT type.

View on HN

How is LibreOffice being stuck in the 1990s a problem? MS Office was essentially feature-complete by Office 95, and LibreOffice does everything Office 95 does. It seems all the major changes since then (Clippy, Adaptive Menus, Ribbon Menus) have no value to experienced users.

I second this, Office has become less and less usable over the years. They keep hiding features and menu items that I use and constantly move around what is not hidden.

Libreoffice is a breath of fresh air for me to use.

The only thing they have improved in the newer office is the intruduction of 64 bit excel so I can do large (100x100+) matrix operations without external plugins.

Most of LibreOffice is pretty good, but Impress is awful. Last month I put together a presentation. I wanted three slides with a few bullet points and a handful of images, but I gave up on Impress after encountering multiple different show-stopping bugs.

The only good thing I can say about Impress is that every time it crashed, it successfully restored my editing state when I started it up again.

I don't think anyone cares about that beast enough to maintain it properly. It should just be scrapped and its resources directed towards Calc and Writer

LibreOffice is a pain if you want to do anything that looks remotely attractive. MS Office, unfortunately, wins hands down at that (and at general usability and power).

Being unable to use MS Office was one of my big regrets of working on Linux for a long time. When I finally learnt LaTeX, that at least removed the need for Word ;-) (Although I still miss PowerPoint, LO Impress really doesn't impress me very much at all.)

How do you feel about the Beamer class for LaTeX? I suspect it's better than Impress (I strive to not actually prepare slideshows in life, but I don't always manage to).

I've dipped into it, but haven't had the opportunity to do much with it yet. My impression is that it's fantastic for preparing academic presentations (where it's all about the content and you want to be able to create some decent equations), but not necessarily what I would use to create a fancy product pitch or anything like that.

Beamer is nice if you have a few weeks on your hands to spare. :P If you need to throw together a presentation for 3 days from now and you don't already know exactly what it should look like I wouldn't recommend it.

I rarely have to do presentations and know little of latex but gave beamer a try recently when I had a presentation to do. It's very simple syntax and I learned nearly everything I needed in a couple of hours.

The last time I used powerpoint (several years ago) I found the learning curve much higher and even after I started getting the hang of things had to keep fighting it for stuff like code snippets.

Throw in a makefile with an inotifywait watcher and you've got a WYSIWYG interface.

Give WPS Office a go on Linux... it's been the most similar to MS Office I've found (in terms of both file format and UI).

I find that remarkjs (https://github.com/gnab/remark) has removed a big class of situations where I previously needed PowerPoint.

And has the advantage that videos actually work reliably.

This is an important point and a really big advantage as I've painfully found out over the years when videos have not worked as intended.

> have no value to experienced users

That's precisely his point: Experienced users deal well with open-source software, because much of that was designed with them in mind. But in all too many cases, it doesn't play well with pretty much everybody else.

But office software is typically used in offices, and considering the enormous productivity gains from using it correctly, it makes sense for employers to either hire experienced users, or to train their inexperienced users. Tweaking the interface might help beginners feel more comfortable, but it won't make them work anywhere near as effectively as somebody who actually knows what they're doing.

> That's precisely his point: Experienced users deal well with open-source software, because much of that was designed with them in mind.

I'd call myself experienced but I could never use Open/LibreOffice. It wasn't just the UI; they just couldn't even open MS Office documents without destroying half of their layouts.

When did you last try it? That certainly was the case 10 years ago or so, but current versions of Libre office at least in my experience, do pretty well with Microsoft Word layouts.

My other observation was that a lot of the "formatting" that I see in office documents is unnecessary and only there because the software makes it easy.

> When did you last try it? That certainly was the case 10 years ago or so

I tried it 5 minutes ago.

Here's an example: https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1YHaKdXh2olSeVdX8ybhF1SG6fyDm...

Is your link correct? Firefox on Linux tells me it's not redirecting correctly.

Yes it is (though a redirect loop wouldn't be in my control anyways). It works fine for me in both Chrome and Firefox on both Windows and WSL.

Most likely you're blocking cookies or some Google domains or something. Try on a clean browser. Or try

  wget --content-disposition "$link"

> My other observation was that a lot of the "formatting" that I see in office documents is unnecessary and only there because the software makes it easy.

The problem with that statement is: if a colleague sends me his Word document, I don't care how unnecessary his formatting may or may not be, I want to see the stupid thing on my laptop, preferably in the same state he saved it in! And right now, LibreOffice rarely delivers on that.

How much of that is down to Microsoft bribing people to support its own super complex, hard to implement standard OOXML in place of ODF?

https://www.pcworld.com/article/136627/article.html

I don't know.

I'd argue they have negative value to experienced users.

I know plenty of professionals who work wonders with MS Office and who love working with it. Calling them all "unexperienced users" strikes me as pretty opinionated.

Just because I would rather solve the task with R instead of Excel doesn't make me a more experienced user, it simply makes me an experienced open-source user rather than an experienced Microsoft user.

> MS Office was essentially feature-complete by Office 95

Were Excel data tables the same before 2007 (or was it 2010)? Right now they're very easy to use but not sure about earlier.

>MS Office was essentially feature-complete by Office 95,

Sorry but that comes across as a bit ignorant in my opinion. It seems to me you have never studied how non-programmer powerusers use excel/word/powerpoint. People are running their entire businesses on excel macros/ms access/and other cobbled-together systems. Heck, I don't think you could even do pivot tables till office 2007. That rules out a large chunk of the financial industry.

What did Mac OS build off of? Would that be possible without OSS? Same for the large web services. How far would any of those companies have gotten without open source?

No one is arguing that unfunded projects will kick the ass of funded ones. However, innovation that can be shared will produce more innovation.

>Would that be possible without OSS?

In the case of Mac OS, probably. UNIX licenses are available and it's not like Apple has exactly turned Darwin into a vibrant open source community.

As far as large web and cloud services more broadly? It would certainly be a much different world.

Mac OS came from Mach, an open source microkernel from CMU in the 80s. Although Objective-C was originally proprietary, NeXT implemented it on GCC and open sourced it.

The origin of modern MacOS/iOS is definitely open source.

Absolutely. My point was that, absent open source alternatives, Mac OS [EDIT: OS X specifically] could have been created on top of a proprietary UNIX. The lack of open source Unix alternatives would likely not have had much of an impact on Mac OS and certainly Apple hasn't taken advantage of the open source development model for Mac OS.

> Mac OS came from Mach

I believe you mean OS X, not MacOS.

Apple could switch OS X to entirely proprietary underpinnings and few customers would even notice. In fact, OpenStep ran just fine on top of NT. [And also on top of then-non-open Solaris].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep

OS X = MacOS.

Apple confusingly renamed OS X to MacOS a few years ago.

obnoxiously, it's actually macOS, not MacOS.

Having been using Mac os for a while at work, I can't say it is superior. More supported, but equally as broken as my expectations for any os.

Office suites just don't build for Linux. Mainly because the people buying are not there, I would wager. For personal, I still loathe most.

Games, it's true. But the same situation. Luckily, I don't do 3d shooters anymore. Steam mostly works. Otherwise, most of my game time is on the PS4.

> Open source software seems to do especially well mostly when the end-user of the software product is a programmer/software engineer/IT type.

Yes. The article and the parent regard industrial benefits.

Most of the propriety alternatives that you mention derive a great deal of their value from networked capabilities, made possible due to the proliferation of GNU+Linux on servers.

In this way, the availability of GNU+Linux without traditional copyright restrictions has been a huge boon to the commercial software industry, just as the availablity of printed knowledge without traditional copyright restrictions was a huge boon to various German industries.

99+% of people’s time? I think you missed out web browsers. The majority of which are open source.

Not sure this also counts but almost 100% (leave a side asm.js/webasm for now) of the code run by browsers (JavaScript) also comes eith access to source.

The JavaScript that arrives at the browser is usually not source code in the way that licenses tend to define the term (which is the preferred form for modifying the program). It's usually at least minified.

It's kind of an interesting situation since it looks like source code even though it really isn't.

Looking at the source code of nonfree Javascript is not recommended. You could be sued if you happen to write something similar and can't claim anymore that you invented it independently ("white-room").

That's not really true - most JavaScript is minified and a lot is obfuscated.

And a lot is transpiled from another language. I'd say very few major sites send you readable hand written JavaScript.

Open source does well when companies build commercial products on top of it and then pay the developers.

I agree with you there. I love open-source, I barely use anything else. And yet I have to admit that much of it is absolutely not user-friendly in the sense of "I can explain this to my grandmother in under 10 minutes".

Much of it is technically amazing, and absolutely fantastic for technical users, but not really suited for the general consumer market. (With some notable exceptions, of course - see Firefox.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com