Comment by traceroute66 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by traceroute66 | Hacker News Reader

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> End users don't care, companies don't care

Look, I'm the last person in the world to defend Microsoft but ....

End users do care. But they also have a lifetime of Windows usage and a whole bunch of Windows software. Sure you could run your Windows software in an emulator but that's just another thing for Mom & Pop to learn.

Its fine for a techie to say "I switched to Linux and its fine", but for a complete non-techie who has spent their life on Windows its a big ask.

Companies also care but it also has to make hard-nose business sense.

So when Microsoft turns up your doorstep and says ... "hey, you can have email, MDM, cloud-based file server, conferencing, calling and your old favourites Word, Excel, Outlook and Powerpoint all for $20 a month .... and all locked behind secure 2FA authentication" what the hell do you expect company management to say ? Its a bit of a no-brainer really.

In addition you are a company, you employ people. Its a productivity killer to tell all those people who have been using Word/Powerpoint/Excel/Outlook all their lives to go learn something else.

> Its fine for a techie to say "I switched to Linux and its fine", but for a complete non-techie who has spent their life on Windows its a big ask.

Feels like a Catch-22, Windows is popular because of the status quo and because it also happens to be what's taught in schools (at least over here) and what you run into in workplaces. Why? Because Windows is popular - of course you should teach it!

At the same time, modern mainstream Linux distros (think Mint, not Arch) are pretty stable and the UI/UX can be more pleasant instead of dealing with the occasional bit of Windows BS. Despite that, there are still some functionality gaps - AD and Group Policy in org settings, I would say that LibreOffice is good enough but now office stuff is being pushed into cloud (which I think sucks but oh well, people benefit a bunch from Google Docs and MS kinda just made the OneDrive/Teams/365/whatever experience be weird), as well as some Windows software just not running on Linux distros even with Wine and whatnot and sometimes there not being Linux native versions, which has gotten better in the past years.

But for a machine for a non-technical user whose mind isn't corrupted with Windows'isms and who will mostly do web browsing and cares that any downloaded files will display (videos, images, PDFs and office docs and such)... I'd say it's already a pretty good option! It's just the case that those users almost don't exist and anyone who might try to assist them will also almost always either assume Windows as the default (e.g. if they gotta call in to some support), or won't even know how to help with Linux cause of the aforementioned status quo.

Do they really "teach Windows" in schools? I see way more people treat the browser as the OS, if they even use a non-mobile device.

Your comment is full of phrases that answer why consumers and enterprise won't switch: "pretty stable", "good enough", "a pretty good option". This are true for the Windows default; why switch?

Windows would be 'taught' as a byproduct of another activity involving Windows software, usually starting with Office/365.

Sadly, schools don't have real computers any more, it's all chromebooks. Gen Alpha is going to be completely computer illiterate.

My kid has had a public-school-provided Windows laptop since 3rd grade. I don't doubt chromebooks are the majority but I can't find any consistent stats on how wide the margin is.

Even if it had been a chromebook, it's still massively more computer exposure than my generation got. We got to play Oregon Trail on an Apple IIe once a month or whatever until high school, when we might use Wordperfect on occasion.

I would expect that whether a generation becomes computer literate will depend on whether they use computers in work or daily life.

I don't understand, we didn't have computers at all and didn't end up illiterate. Why are you underestimating kids so much?

Over here, in Latvia, yes. We were taught about the basics of computers and how to use Windows in primary education, various Office features and software like physics tests running on Windows in secondary education and even in the university most of it was Windows-centric when it came to the user devices (not servers or VMs). And also stuff like more Office, some graphics editing software, I bet some people had chosen courses with 3D modeling, MATLAB and so on. Luckily a lot of the software is cross platform nowadays so if someone had a Linux distro outside of the computer lab on their personal device and wanted to do some homework, they weren’t completely abandoned but still.

Wonder if Chromebooks have taken over since.

AD/Group Policies should have been killed long ago with remote RDP/VNC and VM's with 3D support. Once you can rollback your settings trivially with disk images, AD/GP's are dead since cheap firewalls and virtual network segmentations are everywhere.

How does remote RDP/VNC kill AD and Group Policy? You still need AD to provide centralized authentication/authorization. And you still need Group Policy to configure the VMs according to the corporate standards - disk images may work for the initial rollout but not for applying future changes.

That's a KVM role. The idea in the 21th century it's to spawn a personal VM per user. Network boundaries would be defined in hypervisor devel, (VLANs, network share accesses and so on), you would need nearly no GPO's but different WMI setups with options prebaked.

The old NT based ACL's/GPO's and such are obsolete as I said when a cheap Linux KVM server can do tons of stuff by itself and firewalls (even professional ones) are dirt cheap. The old world died long ago.

You shouldn't be backing up profiles, accounts or settings from an AD domain. We should already have instant VM booting (from the network) with everything snapshotted to a working state since long ago.

Network boundaries are insufficient. A file share might need to be read-write for some users and read-only for others. Database access is even more granular.

Different users will have licenses to different software. Maintaining individualized VM images isn't sustainable.

Microsoft and Google are ubiquitous which is the main reason most people use them. (Apple is out there but different) My office computer was swapped for a Chromebook... Which is awful but hey, Google endorses it, so it must be okay, right?

Microsoft's habit has been to rush things out and fix in post. Constant updates. The entire thing is a mess but there is little choice.

It's really hard to pin down a company like MS with broad generalities; it's such a massive, multi-personality beast. Example: as a homogenized entity it's impossible to reconcile their consumer desktop behaviours with their approach to developers. The same creature that pushes ads in the OS also let's you build software that doesn't even need windows to run? There are good pieces and some great people at MS, and there are obviously some real psychotic a-holes too.

The whole model of Big Tech is very gangsterish — steal and store private property, and eliminate the competition by excluding them. You can't even download a lot of programmes now without going through Google Play or the Apple store, which is an issue going beyond mere security.

End users mostly don't know what Windows is. You can see this when someone picks up a tablet and opens Google Docs.

Do people actually use Word? I can’t remember the last time I saw a docx file at a job. At least five years ago…

They do but the mode has changed from Word.exe to https://www.o365.com/word or sharepoint -> word doc.

That’s depends on your job. If you’re a line chef or florist, then you probably don’t use Word much. But that doesn’t mean MS Office isn’t still heavily used in other industries.

I think our florist sent a word doc with the proposal details for our wedding arrangements. I wonder how many catering contracts and menus are designed in word also

This is a moot point, but line chefs wouldn’t be the ones writing menus or signing catering contracts.

Otherwise I think we’re in completely agreement.

Why not? If it is a small shop, Word has all the features both simple and intermediate ones (like putting shadows on images or removing background). So a 2-5 person businesses can handle their digital needs at very low cost.

The alternatives usually implement limited set of features (Google Sheets) and/or terrible outdated interfaces (Libre Office).

It’s not about Words capabilities. It’s because a line chef’s responsibility wouldn’t be to create menus let alone manage catering contracts.

You’d expect that more from the executive chef. Perhaps also the sous chef.

This is why I said it’s a moot point. Because It’s not really about MS Word.

> Do people actually use Word?

I mean, for starters just walk into any law firm.

Especially the junior desks who do the donkey work of turning contract drafting notes from the Seniors into reality. Their entire careers are based around knowing Word templates and macros like the back of your hand. Those dudes probably know more about Word than Microsoft does.

And a whole niche side-industry has established around them, for example people writing software to diff Word files.

What do you see instead? Aside from a smaller startup that used google-everything every enterprise I've worked with uses MS Office extensively, with a big push to the subscription web version from local installs.

Across the 6 companies in the tech space I've worked in over the years (ranging from 500 - 200,000 employees with the median being 10,000) have been GSuite/Google Docs for their word processing need but with various wiki software (most notably confluence) overlapping quite heavily too.

Yes, but tech is special. And even in tech I presume you're only talking about computer tech, or even more specifically software tech? There's the entire rest of the business world which uses Word because what else would they use? Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft [sic]. Every single OEM computer aimed at businesses is likely to have Office preinstalled, except these days it's the 365 version.

I am encountering it almost not at all. I work in a org that basically doesn't know that Linux exist and outside of top management nobody uses Word. Excel is still massively useful.

Google docs exclusively.

I know someone who sends screenshots of their entire desktop pasted into a word doc in portrait mode

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