You'll get a lot of resistance and rationalisation about why they don't think Linux or BSD or whatever isn't as good, and that the training time is better used to just work.
She would tell me stories about how impressed her peers were with seeing her do something as basic as copy and paste, and navigating files + folders.
There is a generation of kids that have only ever grown up on tablets + the web, so; the desktop + office app market + ecosystem is ripe for disruption.
Maybe it's done right this time, and not married to a single browser version(ha) or platform runtime.
> There is a generation of kids that have only ever grown up on tablets + the web, so; the desktop + office app market + ecosystem is ripe for disruption.
I'm not aware of any generation for which being comfortable with those things hasn't put one in, at least (I'm being very conservative), the top 20% of computer literacy. Most people are bad at just using a computer—given how long it's been a problem, there's either a lot of essential complexity there that cannot be mitigated or avoided to improve usability, or we as an industry have just done a terrible job designing desktop operating systems for regular people. I don't think tablets et c. have much to do with it.
When Windows itself is changing so much that it hardly resembles what it used to be, there's going to be a lot of relearning anyway.
On the other hand, you can make Linux look like any version of Windows if you really wanted to.
And also, can’t you just disable Secure Boot?
[1]: "On Ubuntu, all pre-built binaries intended to be loaded as part of the boot process, with the exception of the initrd image, are signed by Canonical's UEFI certificate, which itself is implicitly trusted by being embedded in the shim loader, itself signed by Microsoft.
On architectures or systems where pre-loaded signing certificates from Microsoft are not available or loaded in firmware, users may replace the existing signatures on shim or grub and load them as they wish, verifying against their own certificates imported in the system's firmware."
[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UEFI/SecureBoot#How_UEFI_Secure_Boot...
I've not done it personally as most of my machines I just disable Secure Boot, but it's an option if you know about it and buy carefully.
I see what you mean now, I screwed up reading your first comment.
Even though Secure Boot can be disabled on most hardware afaict [0] that's still a step consumers won't take so the point still stands easily. Especially with the amount of "you will break everything and kick a a puppy" that manufacturers throw in there to disuade anyone who manages to get to the menu.
[0] worked at a repair ahop until 1.5ish weeks ago, have disabled SB on a lot of hardware.
IIRC I read an anecdote a few years back that if MS ever lost the code to their office products they couldn't re-implement it 100% compatible again since they don't completely abide by any standards like the Open Document Format.
I will always continue to harbor hatred for MSs Office products since when I had to write a big piece of homework for 9th grade in school (a "Facharbeit", kinda like a mini Bachelor's thesis as an intro to scientific writing) I then had to transfer the file from my computer via USB drive to my fathers' PC to print it out. Naive as i was, I didn't think to double-check the formatting after the transfer since it was the same software on the same version on the same OS etc. Ended getting a "1 (very good)" for content but the formatting grade was so bad it dragged the combined mark down to a "3 (satisfactory)". Since then I'll only print documents after converting to pdf and double-checking everything is ok and will never voluntarily use an MS Office product ever again.
Linux would kill it if it made it trivially easy to run Windows inside a sanitised and privatised container or VM that prevented telemetry and all the other nonsense.
I suspect a lot of people would accept a modest performance hit if that were possible.
Microsoft has done an amazing job convincing the office world they need Windows, when they don't need a single feature that it provides in 99% of cases.
Can this be done on Linux? Frequently. Can it be done in a web browser? Rarely effectively and often not at all.
File comparison, hard applications, legacy code, can be compiled to WASM and run quite well in the browser. The pieces are in place to do it, they just need polishing and tuning to make it ubiquitous. Even Excel could be compiled like this but again MS wants to own you and pin you over a barrel while extracting everything they can from you, so Excel won't be available. But many/most Spreadsheets can be done in Libreoffice, or code or no/low code alternatives.
Not when you're working on proprietary/confidential/classified information.
>But many/most Spreadsheets can be done in Libreoffice, or code or no/low code alternatives.
Not when you're working on spreadsheets that you need to send to organizations that heavily rely on MS Office.
Why not? The WASM approach the OP is suggesting works entirely locally, the web is simply pushing client code to your browser.
Because "the web is simply pushing client code to your browser". Untrusted code. Which may violate the confidentiality of you document. I still don't get it why companies which deal with "confidential information" are very happy to put those documents in the cloud. But ... it is their data and they decide what to do with it.
Is the WASM "untrusted"? Sure, I guess, all code you haven't written yourself is "untrusted" by default. Why would a native application shipped via CD or download be any more "trusted"?
Oh and it's soooo slow :(
However Excel Online breaks down quickly with large file sizes, loses formatting and struggles mightily with complex macros.
[1]: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/excel-blog/new-condit...
This is annoying, but already much better than the Windows story, because you can customize things right down to the kernel level and generally get the result you're looking for in a pretty direct fashion. I now have it set up so that it detects the model of keyboard I plugged in and redirects specific models to specific macro layers - a seemingly obvious two-keyboards use case that can be a serious hassle on Windows without resorting to a hardware solution.
And that browser more likely is owned by oogle...
For example: right now, it's impossible to edit a document online with Track Changes without showing all the changes (which makes documents practically unreadable). And you don't even have pages online, documents are shown with a continuous layout where it's difficult to know where pages start and end.