Comment on No More Windows! Indian Defence Services are Switching to Linux: Indian Govt offices to use Linux distribution, replacing Microsoft Windows

• raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Exchange, Outlook, Teams, OneNote, Sharepoint are commonly used in such an environment, followed by Forms (HR department loves these and rightly so), Onedrive and PowerBI

  Having worked and working with many of these:

  • Exchange is like poor man’s IMAP - it sucks in that it’s a closed ecosystem excluding non microsoft apps for emails
  • Outlook is worse than Thunderbird by far
  • Sharepoint is a clusterfuck of content management, especially(!) with in-website office document editing
  • Onedrive is only deemed “useful” because it is forced on people to share files e.g. in Teams, and because it is integrated into many IT environments to store homefolders etc. In effect, it’s a giant piece of spyware were users store their data in “clouds” that secret services will happily tap into
  • Teams is godawful in terms of UI - it’s decent conferencing, but so is matrix, with a much better chat interface / more flexibility for the user

  FOSS office products have been far superior to what’s available on windows for at least a decade. There’s certainly occasionally one or the other app on windows that may shine in one aspect or two, but overall the bloatware user experience on windows is killing productivity of anyone who knows how to operate a keyboard.

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  • jesterraiin@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I’m sorry, dude, but now these are emotions talking through you, not actual valid points., especially since it’s obvious that your knowledge about MS dates back to 2010, I assume? It had evolved. Massively. So much it became hard to compete with, even if you take the money into accoutn.

    You didn’t like it, but the fact is that I am now sitting in a corpo office, part of a body spanning across countries and continents, where what you don’t like and think bad, works well enough that nobody complains. It’s very rich corpo. It can afford a legion of experienced Linux technicians and sysadmins, and yet it prefers to pay money, serious money for licences in subscription mode. Think about it for a moment - corpos squeeze money of everything. They are greedy, to the point they wouldn’t spare a cent to save a dying man. And yet they prefer to pay for MS.

    Once again: Linux/FOSS needs to start to listen to what users actually want. Scornful “this is better, use this” won’t do.

    Until it changes, “20xx - the year of Linux”. 😉

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    • kayos@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      This is true. I value FOSS immensely. But it’s not for everyone. It’s not for the non tech. It’s not for the people willing to embrace change; and let’s be honest ms has always done file sharing best. They still do. Yes you have to pay the man. Buy good things cost money.

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      • jesterraiin@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Same.

        FOSS is crucial to the survival of freedom in IT (broad sense) - whoever claims otherwise, doesn’t understand what is going on all around him.

        But it doesn’t mean that Linux/FOSS is allowed to stay blind and deaf and resist evolution, especially if it wants to become something more than a set of tools for network administrators…

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    • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I disagree. The part that you don’t see is that people prefer to use Windows products because that’s what they grew up with and they never used anything else. The majority of windows users only likes windows because posts like yours scare them away from even trying Linux. Windows is a catastrophic user experience and the majority of users put up with that because they think “that’s normal”.

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      • jesterraiin@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        I worked in environments where MS Office and Star/Open/Apache/Libre Office was used, and Tbird was installed in addition to whatever Windows email client. I’m not even discussing other pieces of software, these are enough to make a point, I think. There was hardly a person who prefered the alternatives. These tools were perceived as slow, unreliable, uncooperative and the lack of compatibility, document-wise, only strengthened these opinions.

        As for “posts scaring people away…” Do you seriously think that whatever people write in the Internet is enough to convince big corps, governments and other massive groups of recipients? Come on…

        I disagree with your take on corpo environment. If what you’re saying would be true, then it’d be far more profitable for corpo to hire a bunch of Linux-oriented technicians and thus save costs of IT layer. But corpos don’t do that. You’re suggesting a paradox - a body that relies on cost-cutting and making everything as profitable as possible, that also is ok with wasting money on something that’s allegedly easy to replace.

        Again: you’re doing what Linux/FOSS community usualy does. Instead of acknowledging the points and asking “what can be done to make this work”, you’re saying that your choice is better, good enough to work no matter what environment, what userbase is there, all conseuences and the contradictory evidence be damned.

        This might work as Apple’s strategy, but it won’t as hell work in case of Linux/FOSS.

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