Comment on Microsoft announces new Windows changes in response to the EU's (DMA) Digital Markets Act for EEA users, including Edge not prompting users to set it as the default unless opened

• rottingleaf@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  even then Libreoffice isn’t good enough for half the staff in my accounting firm because it lacks certain features for now.

  The worst part is where some functionality breaks in a document bigger than a holiday card. I mean formulae vanishing.

  I think OOO around year 2009 was very stable and without such annoying bugs. But I haven’t tested it there TBH.

  Seriously, feature parity is a dead end. If there were a cross-platform office suite that would at least support the absolutely necessary things with a format not much more complex than org-mode, big documents (300 pages without degrading performance) and UTF-8, it would be fine. I think. That format can even be XML-based, just … why would you have vanishing objects in a document past their certain number? Do they have an unsigned byte counter somewhere?

  source
• utopiah@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I would love to, but we stiill use Windows specific software

  If I had 1 cent every time I read that… and I pulled those cents together… and then paid software developers to build that missing software for other OSes like Linux… then we’d gradually see less of those comments.

  It’s as if the isolation was the business model, proprietary software insuring that alternatives do not exist because users do not bother to get together and unstuck themselves from glowingly dangerous (security wise but probably even financially dependencies.

  Hopefully initiatives like NLNet are precisely trying to alleviate such challenges. Until them compatibility layers like Proton are showing the way with arguably some of the most complex and demanding in terms of performance software, namely games.

  source

  • Vinstaal0@feddit.nl ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    If I had 1 cent every time I read that… and I pulled those cents together… and then paid software developers to build that missing software for other OSes like Linux… then we’d gradually see less of those comments.

    There is a version of the software that works in the browser, but it’s not really that great. That’s what you get when you legally need to use specific software (even the Dutch tax office still use the same old version we use). There are other alternatives, but it’s a massive investment of time to test and switch to that. Something we are forced to do in the near future, but it’s gonna take a lot of time inclusing a lot of time of people with hourly rates of over the 200 EUR excluding VAT. I estimate it will cost us maybe 50% of our yearly revenue to fully switch an organisation to Linux and we will loose a lot of people working here where there are a lot of issues with finding new people for accounting firms.

    I have been trying to install Microsoft Office in Linux mint on my personal PC cause I have more issues with LibreOffice when using MSOffice files (and the people receiving the files will be using MSOffice as well) than I have with games. I tried it using Bottles (Wine) with multiple different installers, but no luck so far.

    Not sure what NLNet is going to do about software lol, I believe you mean something different. NLNet is an instance that is there for people living with lymphedema and/or lipedema and their loved ones.

    source

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Because laws were made by incompetent and malicious people.

      Laws should mandate protocols and formats, not implementations. Protocols and formats mandated by the law should be simple. The whole humanity was just fine transmitting telegrams by Morse code consisting of letter groups. Then it was just fine with fax. If what we absolutely require to stay productive needs to be so astronomically complex that one programmer, given ready libraries for XML, encodings, compression etc, can’t write a fully functional and usable by everyone editor for that in 1 month - then such a protocol or format is not good enough to be mandated by law.

      source

      • Vinstaal0@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        Blame the US for that, they are generally the country that goes most against international countries, things like ISO codes for dates, accounting standards, but also things like the way they make invoices etc.

        The ISO standards are generally made to make it easier to communicate with each other and here in Europe we also have some really good things going with the VAT rulings and later on with the invoice exchange protocol that is mandatory in Belgium from 2026 onwards.

        I also think that beliving that “laws where made by incompetent and malicious people” is a glass half empty way of looking against it and as somebody who has a decent amount of hours learning national and international laws (mostly about taxes) I understand that a lot of them where just made in a different time and people abusing the system cause “quick” fixes to be applied instead of rewriting the enitre relevant law.

        source
    • utopiah@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Not sure what NLNet is going to do about software lol, I believe you mean something different.

      That NLNet nlnet.nl funding FLOSS project.

      There are also BlueHats in France showing how administration is using AND consequently funding FLOSS code.gouv.fr/en/bluehats/ by paying for sysadmin, feature dev, maintenance, etc.

      source