dabockster

> plenty of developer talent

> number of humans that are literate enough in business, marketing, communications, and software development to pull this off

> There aren’t the same thing.

That's exactly what I'm saying! Heck, I just talked to a senior dev from AWS a week ago that was a massive technical expert, but obviously couldn't code their way to an actual product on their own. Which is fine, and hence my original comment on the current rarity of those skillsets.

> “Remake microsoft office suite, but cheaper” won’t work

Ehhhhhhh hard to say really. The one-time payment versions of Office still exist, work totally fine, and have excellent add-on extension support. You could move the economics around a bit between consumers and extension developers, but that would probably be it.

I think the big takeaway here is that unionization can sometimes be just trading one bad manager for another. It's not a silver bullet to fix a workplace.

That being said, though, I do encourage unionization in general. But you have to be aware of which union you'd be entering into a relationship with as well.

I want viable alternatives too. But Microsoft's stuff accounts for a million+ edge cases that you don't really encounter until you're neck deep into whatever you're working on.

For the sake of conversation, though, there's SoftMaker Office:

https://www.softmaker.com/en/products/softmaker-office

But they're a subscription too. You save only $20 a year for less features than Office 365 as well (especially the lack of an email program). For most people, that savings and "no Microsoft" isn't enough.

> LibreOffice

No.

I think it is economically viable but we as devs have to realize our true worth here beyond just a paycheck.

> the last pre-subscription version

Heads up that you can still buy perpetual licenses to Office either directly from Microsoft or through other sellers throughout the internet.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...

Office 2000/XP with the XML based file formats would be perfect.

Not the same feature set at all. And doesn't LibreOffice still have decade+ long issues on anything that isn't strictly word processing?

Which is funny because here in Seattle there is starting to be a resurgence of DTP to some degree. But it's very underground and, being already in a tech hub, likely very niche from a macroeconomics viewpoint.

> Nobody has developed a real alternative. It seems like most companies are more than willing to leave this entire market to Microsoft.

I'd say it's more that this is the actual "developer shortage" that was being talked about a decade ago, but everyone mistakenly and stupidly interpreted it to be a shortage of tech workers for the larger firms. The number of humans that are literate enough in business, marketing, communications, and software development to pull this off are extremely few and far between right now. And even then, I just listed four specialties that historically have been specialized by a single person for each field - something like this would require a given person having a sufficient breadth of knowledge in all of them at the same time. It's a very tall order.

And that's all just to compete on Windows. Adding Mac and Linux into the mix makes it even harder.

Oof that's bad. Makes it seem like ChatGPT is really more hacked together than we all want to admit.

Then Arch is a special exception for sure.

> You set it up once, exactly the way you like it, and it runs stable forever.

No it doesn't. You still have security patches to install and stuff. And one minor patch can still introduce a breaking change that largely destroys your install.

Pretending that this can be mitigated because it's open source goes straight back to my RTFM comment. You're basically saying that someone has to learn a ton of computer science stuff to be able to use Linux. I'm saying that cannot and should not be the case.

Linux based operating systems have to be able to be used to most of their capability by someone with less than a K-12 education. Anything short of that is a non-starter.

That, plus fewer studios mean less creativity goes to the mainstream. If you thought AI slop was bad, go re-watch Star Wars Episode 8.

And not everyone wants to use a cloud AI either. Remember that when tons of cash is on the table, things like license agreements become less enforceable and more of a "don't get caught in the cookie jar" thing. All it would take is something similar to what's going on with book authors/publishers - a major AI provider exposed as using other firms' proprietary code without even considering to get a license - to totally blow up the "safety" of cloud based coding agents.

Local models are becoming more and more capable but the tooling still needs to get better for those.

The failed merger and similar clawback clause between Kroger and Albertsons is currently destroying a significant part of the supply chain for food in the Pacific Northwest. Grocery stores that have been open for 50-75 years - stores where whole neighborhoods and towns were built around - are closing forever, leaving those areas as food deserts.

Either way, this entertainment merger is going to get ugly. Consumers are absolutely going to get harmed either way with that clawback clause.

> sometimes I just don’t have the patience for fiddling around with computers to coax them into doing what I want them to

You shouldn't have to do that even on Linux. It's a big thing that holds Linux back.

> After it suggested some undocumented kernel param with the nvidia kernel module, I said that's it, let's try something else and reinstalled with Gnome.

> To my surprise, it worked without issue. I've been using it like this for weeks now.

> I have no idea if the explanation is good or not but chatgpt said it's because my hardware + proprietary nvidia driver + plasma wayland was a bad combination.

GNOME has more paid devs than KDE and therefore has better quality overall. It sucks as I love KDE's UX but I had rough patches using it as well.

> not everyone has the time or the will to tinker

And the more RTFM style talk I hear about getting Linux to work, the more I want to buy a bunch of Mac Minis instead. I have actual work to do.

> Arch is great (because it is)

It's good as a cutting edge OS but I don't consider it the most stable.

This kind of bug shouldn't happen in the first place. Totally unacceptable move by the CachyOS team.

> If you're using something that isn't KDE or GNOME you're probably going to hit rough edges.

Anymore it's literally anything that isn't GNOME. Red Hat is basically keeping that project going.

> Desktop Linux is more of a love project, it has basically no real support.

Ubuntu and RHEL exist, but you're right that they're outliers. This is potentially the next killer app if someone wants to take this on.

If this was a paid job, both you and sprash would have been fired or at least PIP'ed several comments ago. This kind of behavior has ZERO place in any code project - professional or volunteer.

> All of the X11 based WMs are slowly bit-rotting.

An absolute metric TON of code in general that is/was largely dependent on free $0 volunteer labor has been bit rotting for the past 5 years. The COVID pandemic and the ongoing tech layoffs have really opened our eyes to just how much tech got built for free by firms pushing "always be coding" down our throats in the 2010s. It's why the only truly stable Linux OSes right now are largely Ubuntu and RHEL (even more RHEL lately) - you get what you pay for if no one else is footing the bill.

> Arch based

Lately, I've been going the opposite route and using RHEL more and more. I've had a couple breaking changes lately that have been caused by software under rolling release practices, which has made me begin to appreciate operating systems where their APIs and stuff get sort of frozen in time for up to a decade. In fact, this is still a big feature of Microsoft Windows.

I mean, if a server distro can be made to be "LTS" for 5-10 years, then why can't we have a decent desktop Linux OS be like that as well (besides Ubuntu)?

> In my experience, distributions changing the defaults and customizations seems to be the norm rather than the exception.

Which makes each and every one of those totally different operating systems that can run similar code to each other. We need to stop thinking of these as Linux "distros" and start thinking of these as totally separate and distinct operating systems that are based around the Linux kernel. Sort of like a business cooperative model.

No citation needed. It should be an assumption and thought as a malicious cybersecurity threat.

It would only be effective if HN blocked the majority of known ways to spoof someone's location (eg blocking connections made through Tor and the largest VPN providers, at the very least).

I'd only support displaying country flags if that block was implemented. Otherwise hard no.

You clearly don't know how Swing or Eclipse SWT works under the hood.

Java's big strength is that it's a memory safe, compiled, and sandboxed low level platform with over a quarter century of development behind it. But it historically hasn't handled computer graphics well and can feel very slow and bloated when something needs that - like a GUI. That weakness is probably a big reason why Microsoft rewrote Minecraft after they bought it.

> Personally I'm hesitant to allow mine (I use Cline personally) access to a web search MCP and I tend to give it only relatively trustworthy URLs.

Web search MCPs are generally fine. Whatever is facilitating tool use (whatever program is controlling both the AI model and MCP tool) is the real attack vector.