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Comment by djao | Hacker News Reader

1. Word works just fine in a web browser. Yes, it's not the full featured version, but I don't need the full featured version.

2. I know a lot of people even on Windows who use Gimp because they get more value out of using Gimp for free than paying for an Adobe subscription.

3. I don't really see much in the way of random problems on Linux, but even if I did, I'll take that over the constant problems caused by ads embedded in the OS.

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You don't even need Microsoft office. Libre office works wonderful and it's FREE.

People usually need one major thing out of their Office software: the ability to open and save Office documents from other people. LibreOffice is not there, nor will it ever be, because at the end of the day, it's the user's risk to use a non first party software.

It's not about the actual capabilities of the software, it's about getting along with other humans. And the power dynamics of that.

Now, to be fair, first-party MS Office also has this problem. The online versions can't handle absolutely everything that the desktop applications generate (although they do better than Libreoffice), and even compatibility between, say, Office 95 and modern MS Office is not 100%. I believe MS Office is architecturally incapable of complete compatibility, since its file format is basically a binary dump tied to the current version.

One of the many reasons why my particular industry has standardized on TeX/LaTeX/PDF is because it gets along much better with other humans in terms of file format compatibility over the time scale of decades.

Indeed they do. It's a farce that schools, governments use MS Office and treat the document formats as a standard, because they are too volatile to work like that. But alas, here we are. The phenomenon I describe exist and it doesn't just exist, Microsoft made it happen consciously. Windows as the de-facto standard application platform for the PC is another such achievement of theirs. Is not perfect as well, is similarly entrenched.

For what it's worth, I use LibreOffice and I even conduct my business with open source tools, as much as I can. Usually I get away with it, and for the rest, there's a Windows VM ready to go.

Libreoffice tends to break on more complicated documents. For example this implementation of a CPU in Excel (https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/02/16_bit_cpu_excel/) doesn't work in Libreoffice.

OK that is just nonsense

Both Photoshop and Word are industry standards. For Photoshop, one can't just swap it out, and if you think one can then that only shows you are not even a novice user, much less a professional who needs it for work.

With all respect, only a very small minority of Windows users actually *need Photoshop for work.* If you are one of them, I fully agree, you need Photoshop.

As for Word, I use Word (unwillingly) for work, and I am able to get what I need from just the web version. My "complicated" documents are typeset in LaTeX, not Word, and LaTeX is the standard in my industry.

> Both Photoshop and Word are industry standards. For Photoshop, one can't just swap it out,

Ah, I thought we were talking about normal users, not the sliver of professionals that use photoshop for their job.

I bet djao thought the same thing.

Which makes the rest of your comment a misaimed criticism.

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