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Comment by m23khan | Hacker News Reader

after using linux (even those with GUIs) for over 13 years, I would personally still buy laptop with windows installed as primary OS.

The ease of day-to-day apps such as Microsoft Office, especially Word and Excel is unparalleled. If you are into DB and work in place that has MS SQL, MS SQL combined with SQL Studio is a very powerful feature. IDE selection is somewhat better because you have more options available -- things like Visual Studio (even for non Microsoft programming languages) are available.

If you go down Linux route and you need GUI, a portion of your time would be consumed by hunting for and finding analyzing options available for you on Linux -- for GUI stuff, Windows seem to be default.

In my opinion, if I am buying a non-Apple laptop, unless Microsoft rolls out a Linux distro with emphasis on GUI and which they will support and develop, I won't bother with Linux as my default OS on my machine.

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As a Linux on the desktop user for 15+ years (who has had some OSX boxes for some time and also has to run Windows from time to time), here's what I love about running Linux as my daily desktop driver:

* all software I need can be installed with some CLI commands

* similar to the server envs I tend to

* no hassle with anti-virus/malware/trojans/etc (I merely install clam-av for some compliance thingy, that's all)

* basic tools are top quality (I hate the default terminal apps on both OSX and windows)

* I can use decade old scripts to do all kinds of helpful tasks for me (backups, music mgmt, etc.)

* no need to look for some pirated software because I created some file with some software that I now do not have the license for at hand

* I know really well how to fix problems and that knowledge stays relevant (the OS is not moving stuff around all the time)

* Less resource hungry (apart from the browser)

There are some things I'm not too happy with as well:

* Having to read reviews before I can buy some hardware

* Touchpad not as good as Apple's

* Not sure if some USB-C docking station actually will work for me (no review from Linux users found at this point)

* The Hi-PDI screen story is far from perfect (yet slowly progressing)

Here at my job we have some devs using Linux (mostly Ubuntu 18.04) on recent Dell XPS 15 (Kaby Lake and up) with Dell's Thunderbolt 3 docks

Cheers. I'm looking for info on a USB-C dock with a Thinkpad T480.

Turns out some are using plain USB-C dongles to connect to external monitors and USB-A peripherals

that while also being able to charge the machine through usb-c, that's what i'm looking for :)

I think they are using the barrel jack to charge it - get back here in 24 hours and I'll have an answer to whether it works :)

my machine, a Lenovo T420, does not even have another option for charging than usb-c...

It seems like most of those are a non-issue if you aren't working on a Microsoft stack.

Word and Excel are probably worth running Windows/Mac over Linux GUI alone if you have to spend any time in them, which I do in a non-Microsoft stack for business-related things. I'd imagine most people have to spend some non-negligible time in these.

O365/open source office products come nowhere close.

I read often on HN how Excel is used a lot, but I don't really understand the use cases. If you're a software developer, what would you use Excel for? Maybe it's because I work for small companies, but I've almost never had Excel come up at work, and in the few cases where it did, LibreOffice was sufficient because those were very small and simple sheets.

95% of my work has always been in the source tree (so git), some kind of ticket or project software (Jira, redmine, etc), and a wiki-like documentation system (Confluence, mediawiki). And of the remaining 5% most would be some kind of stuff with a Web interface on the network. I'm pretty sure I haven't edited a Word doc for 5 years. Is this really the exception I get to encounter because of avoiding "corporate" companies?

I've seen anything and everything passed around in Excel.

Project timelines, infrastructure descriptions/allocations, working on systems that allow users to deposit parts of their workflows via spreadsheets (financial related), some RFPs come and are returned in Excel form.

I can't speak to any exceptions but I personally use Word and Excel semi-daily.

I also believe there are a variety of people on HN beyond traditional strictly software devs. DevOps, Cloud-related (myself), Product Managers, Project Managers and the like.

> Word

99% of uses can be trivially replaced by plain text, Markdown, or Org. For the others you probably want a real typesetting system anyway, so Word would still not be appropriate.

> Excel

If you're at a point where it feels appropriate to use vendor-specific spreadsheet features then you have already outgrown by far spreadsheets. It's probably both simpler and more maintainable to decouple your data from your code by using a database (even SQLite, if you still want to pass files around) and/or a scripting language instead.

My main use cases for MS Word is RFP responses, architecture descriptions, requirement definitions. Neither of those options would satisfy that an an inter-operable way with the rest of the relevant people.

I guess if you're purely writing code all day then I could understand never needing productivity suites, but I assume most roles have either customer-facing or organizational interactions beyond consuming Jira tickets.

Using a database and scripting is overkill for 90% of things and is just over-engineering a problem that spreadsheets already solves well and are understood by the people who are meant to read them.

> RFP responses

This might as well just be a PDF. The source format shouldn't matter if the recipient is just going to read it.

> architecture descriptions, requirement definitions

A hierarchical plain text document (biasing towards Org if you want internal links) would satisfy the same use case and play much better with source control.

> Using a database and scripting is overkill for 90% of things and is just over-engineering a problem that spreadsheets already solves well and are understood by the people who are meant to read them.

It's not a binary. I don't particularly like Python or SQLite, but I'd take a couple of quick and dirty Python+SQLite scripts over a bunch of unstructured spreadsheets any day.

All of those things are collaborative. Project managers aren't going to learn how to edit those documents. Sales guys aren't going to start including their bits with markdown and the marketing team isn't going to fiddle with images in markdown.

Its a solved problem, I don't see why you would want to engineer so much around such simple tasks for the only reason seemingly to be not using Microsoft.

> All of those things are collaborative.

Indeed. So why on earth would you pay for tools that make all version control systems barf?

> Project managers aren't going to learn how to edit those documents. Sales guys aren't going to start including their bits with markdown and the marketing team isn't going to fiddle with images in markdown.

It's not that hard. Ask a random nine-year-old to come up with a formatting syntax and they'd likely come up with something with a canny resemblence Org.

> Its a solved problem, I don't see why you would want to engineer so much around such simple tasks for the only reason seemingly to be not using Microsoft.

Why would you use a overcomplicated WYSIWYG editor to make a few things bold and add a list? Why would you pay for that miserable experience?

Ask a random nine-year-old to create a Word document. If triviality is your concern, everyone is at some point required to learn Word. It is quite literally one of the first software anyone in the US is introduced to. You are absolutely guaranteed to encounter it at some point K-12 or and in college. Random markdown syntax and git, not so much. The idea that you are going to dictate how you communicate to and share with the rest of your organization (sales, marketing, compliance, legal) because of an affinity for software related tooling is laughable.

> 99% of uses can be trivially replaced by plain text, Markdown, or Org.

For organizing content, yes. For communicating with others, no. For example, we are using Word documents on the edge, when communicating externally. We cannot expect them to access our internal wiki, and neither we want them to.

> If you're at a point where it feels appropriate to use vendor-specific spreadsheet features then you have already outgrown by far spreadsheets. It's probably both simpler and more maintainable to decouple your data from your code by using a database (even SQLite, if you still want to pass files around) and/or a scripting language instead.

Sure, if you have the budget to do it right. The excel-based solutions are often done so, because everyone has excel anyway, and the one coming with that has no budget or buy-in to procure the server-based solution.

> For organizing content, yes. For communicating with others, no. For example, we are using Word documents on the edge, when communicating externally. We cannot expect them to access our internal wiki, and neither we want them to.

You can't just copy the Markdown (or whatever format your wiki uses)? Most of them read fine as plain text.

> Sure, if you have the budget to do it right. The excel-based solutions are often done so, because everyone has excel anyway, and the one coming with that has no budget or buy-in to procure the server-based solution.

You don't need a server to use SQL (see: SQLite, H2, Derby, or even Access).

> You can't just copy the Markdown (or whatever format your wiki uses)? Most of them read fine as plain text.

In the process you will lose links, images, etc. Additional complication is, if these are multiple wiki pages, you have to save each separately.

You are not going to explain that to normal users. (Ever explained to a user, why he cannot attach word documents into bug tracker, but he is supposed to put the content of the document right into the appropriate text fields? Not fun).

> You don't need a server to use SQL (see: SQLite, H2, Derby, or even Access).

The reason why Access is not being used is, that it is not a part of the most sold Office SKUs (neither SoHo nor Pro). In fact, I just tried to quickly find out, which are the the non-365 SKUs that do include Access, and I failed.

And again, normal users are not going to use sqlite, h2 or derby without having some kind of forms frontend. Access would be ok, but it is not accessible to everyone who has Excel anyway.

> In the process you will lose links

Err, no? They're preserved in the source just fine.

> images

Good riddance.

> Additional complication is, if these are multiple wiki pages, you have to save each separately.

Depends on your wiki system. For example, Gollum[0] (GitHub's wiki) stores everything in a Git repo, so it's trivial to get everything out using your regular file management tools.

> And again, normal users are not going to use sqlite, h2 or derby without having some kind of forms frontend.

DBeaver seems fine to me, and supports pretty much everything.

[0]: https://github.com/gollum/gollum

We are talking about normal users there, not developers. Think salespeople, assistants, project/product managers. They are not going to use git or dbeaver. Nor they are going without their diagrams, charts, schemas or links rendered inline.

If you understand this, you will understand why Word and Excel are still a thing.

What kind of GUI do you actually __need__ on Linux? Word's and Excel's ease of day-to-day use comes not from UX, but purely from purposely made compatibility issues, literally designed to make it harder for you to work with other people using Microsoft's Word and Excel. IDEs are just preference and MS SQL is available for Linux these days.

I say this as a long-term Mac user, but I do sometimes wonder how much more polished & supported desktop/laptop Linux would be if Apple hadn't shipped a BSD-based OS on fantastic hardware with access to Office & etc.

I'm sure I would've gone that route in 2001, when I needed a platform to support freelance LAMP work, if my Mac hadn't literally already had most everything installed already.

Even emacs. ;)

For DB stuff, I'd suggest DBeaver which is great. For code stuff, I migrated over to the JetBrains suite of things. For the rest of the stuff like video games, I still stick with windows. I know about proton but it still not there yet for me because it turns out some of my most played games have denuvo.

Especially with the recently released WSL2, Windows is becoming a viable general-purpose development platform.

If I was doing any development, I think I'd use Linux over Windows purely for the filesystem performance

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