Comment by alerighi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alerighi | Hacker News Reader

As a Linux user, I prefer much more the old Microsoft.

Nowadays Microsoft business shifted from selling licenses to making money selling the user data, that is something far worse and concerning. Take a look at this, they suggest the user to use Word online, buy for what reason? Simple, to collect their user data. Or have you tried to install Windows 10 recently? They do everything to force you to sign up with a Microsoft account, think about a non expert user that buys a computer and thinks that is necessary to register one, also they propose to accept default settings that enable all the possible data collection.

Also they are doing harm in other ways, especially against the FOSS community, despite the stupid slogans 'Microsoft loves Linux', no they don't, they are just trying to get the Linux developers to switch to Windows, they made installing Linux on a computer more complex thanks to UEFI and secure boot, and they offered the solution, why do you have to install Linux first place, we have the WSL, you can run your Linux software inside Windows so you have no reason to install it bare metal.

> As a Linux user, I prefer much more the old Microsoft.

Me too. I prefer excel from 1991-1993 era. It fit on three 2.5" floppys, and did the basics perfectly.

Around Office 2004 I started to encounter weird formatting bugs (e.g., rotated axes would sometimes be clipped off the screen if I resized the chart), and this has persisted to today where Office Excel (v15) on macOS still fucks up the fonts, e.g. this morning I couldn't change the the x-axis font label: it was frozen as Calibri. Maddening.

I try to use Google Sheets for simple sharing spreadsheets, or gnuplot+awk for technical precision, but the industry is so MS heavy it is challenging. I've seen an uptick in Google Docs/Sheets/Slides usage over the past 5 years that is encouraging.

MS is clearly a monopoly on office productivity software, but slowly becoming a duopoly as Google Apps pick up momentum. Star Office still hurts too much when switching between Linux <> PC. (And Apple's Pages/Numbers? LOLOLOLOL)

I think there's a simple explanation here which is a lot less exciting than you suggest. Namely that Microsoft is pushing Office online to better compete with Google's offerings. Similarly, they're pushing use of a Microsoft account mainly for the convenience this offers to non-technical users with things like synced settings and automatically backed up documents.

They continue to offer options to use a local account for those that want it and I really see no problem with pushing an account as the default option for the majority of users. No one complains that Apple pushes iCloud accounts on people.

> Similarly, they're pushing use of a Microsoft account mainly for the convenience this offers to non-technical users with things like synced settings and automatically backed up documents.

This doesn't jive with the progression of their efforts to hide the option away. At first it was a small text link on that portion of the install screen, then it was that link plus another, now it looks like this [0].

[0] https://www.howtogeek.com/442609/confirmed-windows-10-setup-...

> They continue to offer options to use a local account for those that want it

But they're doing an excellent job of hiding that option. Over the last month, three people I know were unable to find it without help.

UFEI and secure boot predate the current CEO of Microsoft's tenure....

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