Most users could work with Linux without problems. They are using their browser, maybe a mail client and maybe some office suite to write stuff. If you mention this on the internet, there will always be someone who shows up and complains that his personal workflow with some obscure software that powers the nuclear reactor that he is running as hobby in his home won’t work with Linux.
It’s kind of the same with discussions about commuting/bicycles/cars. If you’re discussing that maybe more people could commute by bike, the same people will show up and complain that this would not be possible for them because they live on a remote mountain top in the scorching desert far away from civilization and it’s raining every day where they live.
andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
MS Office’s lie of WYSIWYG and the idiotic requirements to follow absurdly complicated formatting guidelines and them not rendering the same from system to system or even correctly is the most brutal offender. If we used simplistic markdown without page-breaking in the GUI, there could’ve been no point to buy Office, but we don’t, and itso hsppens I had encountered many times where some arbitrary cosmetic request like ‘you can’t have less than X lines per page’ caused people toy with formatting or rewriting their documents… only for it showing differently on the other side >:ç Thus leading to even worse things like PDF.
It being the most used piece of office software renders the voluntary switch close to impossible.
Obelix@feddit.org 1 day ago
Let’s be honest: That totally is a monopolistic tactic of Microsoft and regulators would do great to force this open. Force them to release a Linux Office. Force them to really make their file format transparent so that everybody can write working parsers
andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
I agree. They need to be either pressured or abandoned.
I feel like they would need to rewrite it completely in that case, partially because no one knows how their legacy code works and partially because it’s completely broken.
Google with it’s billions and a promise of more free data did great with how office formats work. They set some little limits of what user can do compared to MS Word so ending up with a broken table or whatever is harder, and they aslo strong-armed their way into adoption with their obvious mechanics of real-time collaboration.
I’m not sure about MS users coming to Linux, but their marketshare was already bled by Google. And if in some scenario Google releases their own internal XML format for these, I guess it’d work too.