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Comment by stiray | Hacker News Reader

I have dumped windows completely after spending some time on windows 8 (fyi: system level developer, but... Well i did my share on aix, hpux, solaris, linux, vms too, but I did love windows... Before the age of manifests, putting com interfaces into kernel32.dll,...)

What troubles me THE most on linux is interoperability of applications, there is literally nothing replacing microsoft "office" (not a product Office) stack, it is not a problem for my expertise, but for ordinary John Doe (or lets call him "the manager"), Exchange, Outlook, Sharepoint, Lync (Skype for business) integrated into Office mesh... They have great product. This is the target that linux must pursue. But it is not there. Still struggling to reinvent hot water (systemd, dbus,...), as it is more fun. But not more usable. Anyway, i am satisfied with my shell...

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> putting com interfaces into kernel32.dll

I think I read this claim from you here before. What's up with that?

These days, kernel32 (split off into kernelbase and others in the Vista and Win7 days) mostly has small wrappers to ntdll.

A COM interface is really just a C++ VTable. So the "overhead" of that is basically minimum 3 function pointers and some indirect calls. What is the problem with having a COM object passed to a kernel32 function? Would you have the same objection if it were a (barely any different) function pointer plus an extra pointer for context?

The complaint about manifests maybe made me think this was about WinSXS or something. Which I would agree is engineered kind of poorly, but I doubt it's the worst thing in Windows.

[Disclaimer. I worked as an IC SDE at MS from 2008-2011.]

Hmm the average joe is already using google drive rather than office et al. Works on linux and mac better than the office stack works on windows.

Average student is using Google Docs and Drive but the office workers I hear are driven by corporate culture, and traditional places of work like accounting offices haven’t culturally embraced these kinds of solutions.

Things is like publisher, illustrator, etc. can replace word. Open office is respectable. But all the google docs champions need to wake up.

Google docs is absolutely inferior in its power, formatting options, display performance, ability to write mathematical equations and diagrams directly into the document, etc.

Every time I had to produce a non-trivial report in google docs I grind my teeth and end up rendering these things elsewhere and insert them as png.

Additionally, google docs gives you no ownership over the software or the files I find it's commercial model unsettling.

For diagrams try draw.io

What do you use for math document formatting and presentation? The publishing world I'm aware of is still running on Adobe.

LaTeX

It's not like we are using modern products in most local companies I've worked for in the last decade. Everyone is still on 2008 and older office products. Hell I'm lucky we have AutoCAD LT 2014 at my current job. Its the most up to date piece of software in the whole office other than web browsers.

Google drive absolute shit on Linux.

Idk what it’s like on Windows but all Linux has is the web UI anyway so it’s probably the same.

It feels almost intentionally bad, I’m not sure what’s going on there but I’m pretty sure you couldn’t pay me to use it. IMO at least with SMB you don’t have to use that godawful file manager.

I agree. I've used rclone and another ML based program (forgot its name) with varying success for GDrive on Linux. RClone seems to be the best so far for my use case.

I wish Google provided better integration of GDrive w/Linux...

I'd be very surprised if this were true. My experience is that in actual offices, MS Office is king and it would be very hard to move most workflows away from it without exactly replicating it bug-for-bug.

To be honest i never worked in such a backwards office where people still use ms office

Like it or not that is the majority of offices everywhere.

Bug-for-bug? Nah. Just come up with something even remotely as productivity-enhancing as Excel is and you might have a shot. Fact is, people who think this already exists underestimate that powerhouse of productivity. It is possibly the most used programming environment on earth.

Even Excel isn't as productivity enhancing as Excel is. Microsoft has been trying to get people into .net macros for years but a lot of places are still using VBA.

Here's my hot take, as a Linux distro developer with an Office356 sub: Excel is absolutely ridiculous and anyone who thinks anything in the FOSS world can compare or stand up to what Excel does is completely deluding themselves, and this is a major reason why Excel will never be replaced, or even touched, by FOSS solutions. PowerQuery is absolutely game changing (and no I will not accept "but you can cobble together awk and 5 other tools to run a preprocessing pipeline before opening your spreadsheet", that's not competition, it's a joke.)

I hate saying this considering how much LibreOffice, etc have invested -- but OTOH I imagine they understand their competition better than the average programmer who uses Office suites to track their month-to-month finances and thinks they've got it figured out.

There is the fact that actually challenging Excel as a product and implementing any competitor would technically require a substantial amount of labor and effort, on a very large scale. But that's just one part; the fact is that you can't actually win a battle unless you're willing to analyze where you've already lost. I think most FOSS users don't actually realize how badly they are losing to products like Office or even (the inferior, IMO) G-Suite. This isn't surprising in the grand scheme considering how much software freedom we've lost in the past few decades; it's just one more lost battle, but it still stings.

This isn't a situation that pleases me, but at the end of the day between an O365 family sub and the alternatives, it was very easy to make the choice given the returns I got.

TBF, depending on data size I’ve had much better results with awk and friends than with Excel.

I was really surprised to learn that according to Okta’s Businesses at Work 2019 report[1] Microsoft Office is still significantly more popular than G Suite, at least in the workplace:

> Office 365 increased its lead and continues to dominate the total pool of apps by number of customers, and it’s growing its active unique users by 55% year over year.

I wrote a bit about the report[2]. Another interesting finding is that people actually prefer using Microsoft Office products:

> Our survey found that 67% of knowledge workers prefer Microsoft Word over Google Docs, while only 15% report the opposite. When it comes to email, 49% prefer Microsoft Outlook over Gmail, while 35% report the opposite.

[1]: https://www.okta.com/businesses-at-work/2019/

[2]: https://blog.robenkleene.com/2019/08/31/office-suite-market-...

The Google Docs word processor objectively sucks, it's barely a rich text editor.

To wit, you can't even define custom styles!

And both Word and Google Docs pale in comparison to LaTeX for demanding customization work. But "barely a rich text editor" suffices for the vast universe of documents which barely need rich text.

Except when your target market is captured by network effects and demands a particular file format regardless of how appropriate it is for the material.

The lack of custom styles is really problematic for a very common use case, documentation. I'd rather use Markdown for the purely tech stuff, but I thought I'd use Docs for collaborating with non or less technical people. That just doesn't work, too tedious.

Yes, it does. At the same time it works incredibly well for collaborative editing. But the number of quirks and errors in the product are enough to drive you mad.

I use Linux exclusively and have since 2003. Also, I don't put any of my work in google drive/docs/GSuite for anything. Google simply has enough of my life, I'm not giving them my business data as well.

At every company I've worked at gmail and google drive are blocked at the firewall. I dont know how any big company would allow their data to be stored or copied externally.

> Exchange, Outlook, Sharepoint, Lync (Skype for business) integrated into Office mesh... They have great product.

After a multi-year hiatus of using Windows (because my customers were running mostly on Linux, Mac OS or did BYOD), on my current industrial/research project I'm back to using Office (Skype for Biz, Outlook for team comm and partially Sharepoint, Excel and even PowerPoint (!) for spec docs) on Windows VMs and I have to say I can't fathom how these people can get anything done at all. Lync/Skype4b is bordering on ususable for me (normal Skype works just fine), and it not being available for Linux is a show-stopper. The only tolerable tool that doesn't get in the way all the time is Excel, and even that has laughably primitive versioning in SP compared to tools of the git era. With this office software lineup I think web-based tools will totally dominate the next decade.

Classic office suites on Linux is a sufficiently well solved problem with Open Office/Libre Office IMO, and I don't expect it to get any better, ever. The reason is simply that classic office software where people print out, sign, scan, paper-mail, and fax letters has run its course.

The stumbling block at this point (and quite frankly, for most of time) for Linux / Unix office suites hasn't been features. It's been OEM bundling/tying, enterprise bundling/tying, and a "good enough" widespread and effectively universal userbase / skillset.

In establishing standards, diversity is a weakness, unfortunately.

I believe Skype for Business has been discontinued, but I may be wrong.

Edit: I actually bothered to check and the EOL is 2021. New customers are directed to Teams. I used Teams at work, and it’s crap quality UX, but it does the job. For chat at least. (PowerPoint crashed on me multiple times this week from within Teams.)

Yeah, that's the problem. Linux Desktop evangelists think they can slap a new coat of paint on this cobbled-together kludge of disparately developed software and that'll be "good enough for everyone". They don't seem to understand the way desktop software fits into workflows that aren't their own.

A "cobbled-together kludge of disparately developed software" is how I would describe the average Windows' user's workstation. You only need to boot it to be immediately hit by a barrage of dysfunction. I think you're simply comfortable in your own mess.

I use Linux on 3 of the 5 computers I interact with frequently, and the Windows mess is not comparable to the Linux mess.

I use Linux on 3 of the 4 computers I interact with frequently and my experience is the exact opposite of yours. The linux ecosystem might be a mess but at least it is usable, unlike windows, where it is painful to do even the simplest task.

I'm having a hard time thinking of a simple task that is easier on Linux.

Here's an example in the other direction: install a piece of software to a different disk than the OS resides on. This is trivial in most Windows software, but requires recompilation from source for most Linux software.

> I'm having a hard time thinking of a simple task that is easier on Linux.

Installing any program, compiling a c file, opening non-zip archives, writing an iso to a usb, counting the lines that contain a certain word in a file, removing the preinstalled spyware, etc.

> install a piece of software to a different disk than the OS resides on

Windows is certainly much better than this than most distros (although it is not perfect, many programs such as the sims 2 expansion packs for example had issues with being installed in another disk). That being said, I am pretty sure that Nix does not have this issue.

tbf, those workflow probably can be replaced by a much better alternative. The only downside is people who wouldn’t learn a newer system of interaction with their computer. It’s like 737 Max8 except that mistakes and problems won’t cause lives to be lost.

Please, do suggest it. I, personally dont see a product group in oss that would function in that manner. Yes, you can set up LibreOffice with postfix, dovecot, nextcloud (with sh__load of plugins),... But the integration of it, even after some serious scripting is nowhere near from the microsoft solutions. You only have a bunch of lonely programs knowing how to do their job... more or less... well but completely unaware of each other. And quite frankly, I know it is "trendy" to run everything in browser, but to me (just a personal opinion, don't take it personally - I am old, I have seen mainframes, ibm,... and I know you will all be sorry for locking in into cloud vendors, saas solutions,...but at that point I wont care any more), browser is a joke. A huge step back in IT compared to what desktop apps already have.

> well but completely unaware of each other

The dysfunction on the main GUI level is even more obvious: using command line is still not necessary for a Windows user. Linux would be utterly unusable without the command line and the command line programs. I believe that even those who write GUI and GUI apps themselves aren't using them.

I actually agree with you. But I think the need for office software is grossly exaggerated. There’s no reason how one couldn’t articulate reason as well in a markdown file. Excel is the only thing remotely useful but even that can be replaced with pandas. The whole workflow itself - the fancy stuff, is unnecessary complex.

> Sharepoint

Sharepoint is an abomination, always was and always will be. It's not something that you'd use voluntarely.

Amen.

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