Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

I work with seniors, who use W11. Aspects of change from W10 confused them, but their primary requests are two quite different things

1) please stop making dark patterns preference onedrive backup and let us run a local file backup cleanly without needing to de-install software

2) please make the charming folded complex flower-like shape an alpha channel overlay so we can make it lie over a background colour of our own choosing, not the one(s) you pre-package

one of them is "stop innovating" and the other is "innovate more" -I think the union over them both is "be nicer"

There is a third one: work better with Apple so that outlook handles photos and icloud mail oauth sync better, but there is a blame game with two parties in that one. An amazingly high number of seniors seem to want apple devices (iphone, ipad) to work with Windows home compute, and no amount of me suggesting they get a mac makes them want to get a mac "office doesn't work properly" mainly the issue. (thats nonsense, but they believe what they believe)

You called them seniors? Like senior citizens?

I guess as a senior sysadmin before I got absorbed into cloud I'll say they're right! Legacy backup is found, I just discovered yesterday, in control panel I believe and it's called Windows 7 "File History and Restore".

Implying you're one thousand years old and using a legacy system if you don't use Onedrive.

Yes. Senior Citizens. Home users. Legacy backup is there, but MS both de-preference it, and use dark pattern labels on boxes to make it hard to stop one drive from nagging you about what MS want you to do.

And, if you did do a network attached install, your actual Document paths now lie UNDER the one drive anchor mount and so you have to un-do things, in order to be cleanly able to delete one drive: If you don't do this, your files can disappear because they are on local disk, under a one drive protected directory which will be wiped.

Oh, and it does registry edits to wire One drive into office, so there's all kinds of sneaky paths which make this visible. And these are >75yo, declining faculties people. It's hugely unfair.

(I volunteer for a local not-for-profit assisting seniors, older people, with their ICT burdens)

> and no amount of me suggesting they get a mac makes them want to get a mac "office doesn't work properly" mainly the issue. (thats nonsense, but they believe what they believe)

Do they use Office-Office (or Microslop Copilot 365 xXxQuickScoperz42069xXx or whatever it's called today)? Is there any reason they can't use Libreoffice and the like, or does that fail instantly when they try it for whatever reason? Or is the idea of using not-Office-Office rejected instantly and you can't even get them to the point of trying it?

My grandma's been on Libreoffice for 10+ years, since she doesn't use any of the fancy features of actual Word and Excel. In reality, she'd probably be fine on Wordpad (although she would need an actual spreadsheet program, but even Calc is overkill for her, and it works fine anyway), so I fail to see why seniors would complain about not being able to use an office program, assuming you can get them in front of a Mac running one.

They use Office (YYYY) locally. They repudiate 365 on the quite reasonable take that its rental not ownership, but forget if they found the right bundle, the rental would give them decent cloud (this is when onedrive as a backup can be sensible)

Mostly, they are addicted to menu position and one specific thing word does in showing you content, but different for each person.

I am doing the "how do I make libreoffice look like Word" tunings for font and menu, and so far, I think its close enough I could re-visit this with them but getting them to even agree to look at my own MBP is a struggle.

Older people feel they are losing agency, control. I try not to just tell them what to do. It's better if they decide, than if they give up and ask me to decide for them. The organisation I work with emphasises that older people have a right to dignity even when they're wrong.

There is a cohort happy on linux. I just chose not to work with them because I saw the cohort with a mixture of iPad and Windows as more interesting. (I am a BSD and Mac person mostly)

> Mostly, they are addicted to menu position and one specific thing word does in showing you content, but different for each person.

Fair enough, and I'd agree with them that the button should just stay in the same place, but given that they're on the same version of Office YYYY still since they bought that version whenever, the button doesn't actually move for them, even though the later versions of Office have probably also moved it.

They tried libreoffice, the function or task they regard as exemplar in wor did not work, or had a button misplaced, and this became "why I can't switch from office YYYY to libreoffice.

From experience, I can assure you LibreOffice is no real equivalent to Office. I can guarantee you that you will have people asking you about stuff that Office does just fine but isn't really possible in LibreOffice or is a major hassle.

I have been the one touting alternatives since I was very young and foolish (in particular advocating for the free Apple suite), but I have run into enough problems I couldn't solve that I don't bother anymore.

Microsoft is winning with Office because everyone else is more incompetent than them; it's simple as that. If someone could come up with a true, cheaper competitor, everybody would switch, regardless of the file format arguments. In fact, the generalized use of Google Suite for the simple stuff shows that it is the case. When people insist on Office, they generally have a good reason, and you should trust them.

I consistently see .docx files and people using Office and Google's alternative, and they don't even use templates. They use nothing more than a few fonts, some size adjustments, bold/italic/underline, maybe a table and and an image if they're fancy.

Unless they just can't handle the buttons being in a different place, as ggm said, I can't see what functionality the average user is missing. Fair enough that the Excel wizard is missing their macros, but most people are far from the level.

What are these problems you (or anyone you've met) couldn't solve? I have a hard time imagining what that could even be in the first place, since the scope of required functionality is so small; again, my grandma could probably use Wordpad if it came down to it, and from what I see other people using Word for, that seems to be true in the general case too.

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