Skype has a competitor called Google Hangouts that works just fine in the browser.
Word has a competitor called Google Docs that works just fine in the browser.
Desktop-only apps need to adapt or get left behind.
Word has a competitor called Google Docs that works just fine in the browser.
Desktop-only apps need to adapt or get left behind.
Chromebooks are fine "Mom Machines" most of the time, or fine laptops to stash in your car in case of unanticipated need.
My opinion is that people need to stop attempting to conflate the market of true casuals, served by phones on the low end, tablets on the middle end, and netbooks like the Chromebook on the high end, with the market of serious users needing real desktop operating systems and applications, using laptops on the low end and high-powered desktops on the high end.
They are separate use cases, and we're best served if each segment focuses on itself instead of trying to be all things to all people. Manufacturers seem scared that if they don't provide it all, they'll be obsoleted, but I believe it's just the opposite; there's enough overlap in these markets to share (for instance, I have a smartphone, a tablet, a Chromebook, a real laptop, and multiple big huge desktops; certainly atypical, but normal people are fairly likely to have a smartphone, tablet or Chromebook, and a real laptop, and that's not going to change anytime soon). The paranoia is wasting a lot of our time.
but the original argument in this thread was that chromebooks couldn't do things that "your mother" needed to do. Google docs can't replace all the power-user features of MS Office. but that doesn't make a chromebook unsuitable for everybody.
I haven't used Word since Word 97, and I have never come across a use case that Open/LibreOffice, Google docs or Latex couldn't solve for me. I would imagine that the same would apply for most people.
On the other hand, I remember collaborating on many reports using Google docs because that was the only application featuring decent real time multi user editing.
LibreOffice Calc sucks, but LO know it, and Kohei Yoshida is working very hard to make it not suck. LO 4.2 will be much faster. Then they just need to recreate VBA ...
Or do you mean better than Excel? If it's better than Excel at the sort of sheet I mean, that's important news for the people who run such sheets - they'd be moving to Linux yesterday.
Regardless, it shouldn't matter what OS. Gnumeric runs on Windows, and I've had Excel running on Linux w/ Wine...
Thankfully the world is changing, MS products are no longer as essential as they once were. Excel really is the last holdout...
Doing references and placing images in Latex, on the other hand, was a breeze once I got a hang of its programmatic behavior.
Maybe it's better in Word now though. As I said, it's been a while since I seriously used it.
And even those only when flying outside of Europe, as here we can use QR Codes on smartphone screen at the gate.