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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

I wish my parents would switch. Look at my comment history if you want more details, but TL;DR the auto update to windows 11 bricked my mom’s laptop and I had to do some weirdness with Linux to save her files and then wipe the computer.

Since I am a software person I have become the person that my parents call for IT help, and increasingly I have grown pretty frustrated with Windows. I have been trying to convince them to move to Zorin or Mint or something or to buy a Mac, and they will not yield.

In a bit of fairness to them, the biggest issue is MS Office; they did recently try LibreOffice and the MS Office online, and they had shortcomings with both. Since I have been wholly unsuccessful at getting any modern Office to work on Linux (without virtualization), so now I don’t have a case for them to move.

Which is annoying, because I really hate having to deal with it.

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Try giving LTSC versions a go. Parents get a Windows, and you get much less headaches. Those get long security updates (Win 10 still being updated until 2032 for example), and they get no feature updates. The bloat is also cut down, no Store, no Cortana, etc. So overall, it's much easier to deal with. And it's a fully valid Windows, I do my gaming on it, and I have it installed for parents as well. Activation can be done by massgrave or by spinning up your own activation emulation server (under 10 minutes), and pointing the Windows to it (3 commands).

What were their shortcomings with LibreOffice?

My dad complained about StarBasic being different enough from VBA to where he'd be forced to port over large amounts of his spreadsheets over. He also uses the paid version of Mathtype to do his equation editing, which I'm not sure would work in Linux even if Word did run on Wine, at least not the direct integration.

I am drawing a blank over what my mom was complaining about but I do recall that it was valid. Something to do with Word.

It's tough for me to give full rebuttals to any of this, because I don't really use any WYSIWYG stuff for documents anymore and just use Typst or LaTeX/Pandoc for everything now. That works fine on Linux but of course that's understandably a non-starter for most people.

At this point I think the only thing I could realistically do to get them to switch, and I doubt it would be successful, would be to convince them that Winboat would be fine.

That makes sense. I think for most people the main, or even only issue, with LibreOffice is the switching cost of compatibility with their existing documents and then the ongoing annoyance of dealing with MS files people send them.

Unfortunately I don't think there will ever really be a way around that.

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