I’ve been dual-booting Linux and Windows for a while, with Windows as the fall-back option in case I wanted to use Office for something. Now that they tried to trick me into paying a subscription for their AI slop machine, I’m finally, fully out. It was a pain to actually track down and back-up the stuff that was held for ransom in OneDrive, but now it is done.
Just going to mention that if you’re okay with non-FOSS office software, I really like Softmaker’s suite (their buy-once non-subscription version).
I recently moved my digital life away from google and microsoft. I previously had the following subscriptions:
- ExpressVPN
- Onedrive
- Bitwarden
- Office 365
And I had a gmail account, which I often used for SSO. I realized that, the total monthly cost of these subscriptions together was more expensive than a single Protonmail *family * subscription, so I cancelled them all, got the family subscription, and now my wife and her sister all have protonmail accounts as well as storage, a password manager, and VPN access. In the process of moving my logins to my protonmail account, so that I don’t have to keep my ancient Facebook account around for signing into things like spotify anymore. Coupled this with moving to the federated internet from reddit and instagram
I also dropped office for libreoffice. MS Office provides dubious value over the free competition, especially with a SAAS model.
Bitwarden
Do you mean Bitdefender (the antivirus)? Bitwarden is free.
Before anyone well ackhuallys me yes, there is a very cheap $0.80/mo plan if you want an authenticator.
I had a bitwarden premium family plan
I was thinking to myself that I need to cancel mine. Then yesterday I got charged yesterday $127 for the yearly renewal.
I thought I was SOL but you can cancel and get most of the money back. So it’s not too late to cancel and rid yourself of it.
Going to dump it when the wife’s done with school. I was only keeping it for that and one game. So sick of subscriptions and the product isn’t even good except for Excel.
I mean, you have to use the heck out Excel to get into features that aren’t in free projects like Libreoffice or OnlyOffice as well.
And once you are using those you are probably better off using sqlite or even running a full SQL server.
Have you tried running Office in a bottle?
Same, Microsoft is about to force my laptop to update and I am about to own zero devices that run Windows.
There is no coming back either, which is what makes the schadenfeude of Microsoft (the dog) really actually catching the car this time so funny and satisfying.
I think it is going to make heads spin how fast the idea that Windows has unassailable hegemony in the desktop space becomes an antiquated idea. There is an asteroid in the sky, and the time of dinosaurs is over lol.
All the alarm bells should be going off at Microsoft hq and I know they probably feel like they are sitting pretty and are nice and future proofed in their business plan it is amazing and makes my heart sing.
Sorry not sorry you law breaking, monopoly chasing, morally bankrupt losers. You might be richer than I ever will be, but lets be honest, that is because I have standards about what I am willing to do for money.
They dgaf about us. Their Enterprise clients are their cash cows. But we are rid of their fleas nonetheless
Yeah I know that is how they see it but the generational wave they have been coasting on was the fact that computer nerdy kids would learn the ins and outs of windows software long before even entering the workplace.
Microsoft has been taking advantage of the fact that kids like me would be so excited to learn computers that they would learn the basics of just poking around the desktop before they could read.
Nowadays that is gone, there is no playful connection and the sea of change will butterfly effect consequences into the future and cause a million symptoms of an issue we all know microsoft will never actually value or address.
Microsoft has been functioning this entire time with a special unspoken in with nerdy kids who grow up to build important and valuable computer tools. Microsot has steamrolled that, and on the scale of 10+ years I am not sure there will be anything Microsoft can actually do to mitigate the strategic defeat that is going to cause even if they are able to be honest and lucid about it.
More and more computer nerdy kids are going to learn the shit out of Linux because it is where they game and it feels welcoming to them (i.e. it doesn’t feel like sneaking into a suffocatingly boring office full of identical cubicles that gives periodic blaring notifications on a gambling casino nobody your parents know can afford called the Stock Market).
I can’t understate how much this will lead to microsoft completely losing the plot, because no one could ever suggest this as a danger in a microsoft boardroom and be taken as seriously as they should.
gets popcorn I for one and going to enjoy the show
Really looking forward to see steamos on a workstation 😁❤️
I can finally say that I’m making the move to Linux now, as I’m dual booting Fedora. I plan to try to do my regular browsing and activity on Fedora, while keeping my school work and what little gaming I do (laptop user) on Windows. Hell, once I get confident enough in my Linux skills, I’ll probably move the school stuff over to Fedora too.
I’m doing it mostly cause I’ve read the privacy horror stories, but also because I just hated Windows 11. Like there’s nothing about it that is worth staying for… The excessive resource use, random settings being changed that you have to dig to find, the shitty Co-Pilot ads, and the fact I won’t be able to use office once I graduate… Yeah no.
Good thing is I’m a cyber student, so guess I’m just getting a head start for a easier grade in my future Linux class lol.
Bro I use windows for mostly gaming and it forced me to update to 24h2 which broke most games.
Unless you’re specifically referring to games with kernal-level anti-cheat, I’m curious as to what games you need Windows for.
Could you clarify on this a bit? I’m genuinely curious what the update did to the games as many use windows for the same.
Some games just dont run at all basically, you get a black screen. I could roll it back with the recovery but it would suck bad if I could not. Disabled updates for now.
Do you know if this is all windows or specific versions/on specific hardware? That’s such a weird thing to have effecting potentially all windows versions. Very interesting though, thanks for clarifying.
I had this issue on NFSU2 (yes I still play it) and after changing the widescreen fix it seems to be resolved at the moment. But sucks that Windows provides breaking changes with updates.
which distro though
Fedora KDE spin
What distro are you using, and how difficult was it for you to get started with it?
I’m currently making a list of distros and looking at each’s pros and cons, including:
- what did work out of the box?
- what required more work to fix / workaround?
I’ve heard PopOS/Linux Mint are great starters. I personally run ZorinOS which is based on Ubuntu. It’s beautiful, had built in customization, and has a free version (I paid for the pro version because I liked it so much and wanted to support it).
You’ll find occasional headaches in all Linux distros just because it’s not windows so compatibility can require work arounds depending what you wanna run. But it’s worth it. Feels so much faster and in your control which is nice. Also if you screw up the distro you can just boot another distro from the flashdrive you used to install in the first place (keep the ISO handy just in case ;) ).
The way to go about this is to just download Linux Mint and begin using it. No additional overthinking is necessary. You’ll be able to get Steam working pretty easy, if that’s your thing. Internet bowsers and a word processor are already installed and working out of the box.
my unsolicited 2c is to checkout mint
Agreed, using Mint after dropping Windows. Haven’t turned back. Have a piece of work software that requires windows to some degree, so I’ve installed Bottles to assist with that and it’s been pretty good for me so far.
Mint easy to use and requires the least maintaining I kinda wanted kde tho at that time.
Fedora KDE is easy to use with good KDE defaults, and its up to date without being unstable.
This is a while ago btw when I wanted KDE but I also heard OpenSUSE KDE is good aswell
It is, but I found openSUSE a weird distro to install and maintain, and it used a bare Plasma install with all the off putting defaults KDE has. Maybe it’s better these days.
isn’t there a mint version with plasma?
It’s only with mate,xfce and Cinnamon but ngl I just installed another distro that supported kde or let’s you pick no desktop.
Personally, I’ve found the most supported software from Linux mint
I started trying out Linux a few years ago, on a few different computers. Well first, a really long time ago, but I was a Mac user for a long time, and then switched to Windows in 2018, so my modern Linux experience started in 2021 or so.
On my home PC I started with Mint, but because I was doing some programming, ran into problems because the compilers and CMake there were too old to compile a few things I needed to work on (CUDA was the problem for CMake, C++20 was the problem for the compilers). Switched to Tumbleweed, was happy with that for a while.
Meanwhile, on my laptop, I switched from Manjaro to Fedora KDE spin after some stability problems, and was so pleasantly surprised by how it was both solid and up-to-date, that I ended up moving everything to that.
Edit: biggest problem I had was when I tried to install Mint on an office PC that I built for myself. Mint didn’t support the on-board ethernet so I had no way of getting it online, and after getting lost in forum posts, gave up.
I used to recommend Mint a lot, but it’s falling too far behind hardware wise and in the front end. Lack of default Wayland support and so many unsupported hardware is not where you want to be sending new users today.
+1 for Fedora based distros at this point. I tend to push Nobara because it has a lot of hardware tweaks built in to give a better out of the box experience, but I can’t really say vanilla Fedora has had issues as long as I was on an AMD platform.
Mint is cool. But, that mint in other menu. LMDE bookworm based. Rock solid and no slugish
I have to wonder if anyone at Microsoft is paying attention. It’s like New Coke in the 80s. They quickly realized they fucked up and rebranded the original as Classic Coke. I’m wondering if there will be a Windows Classic coming out soon with no AI, no subscription, no forced cloud dependency bullshit. lol probably not but whatever.
Keeping with the soft drink analogy, I think Pepsi tried something similar in the 90s with Crystal Pepsi, which also failed miserably.
If “lime must go up” always, then they need to come up with a better way than product enshitification.
New Coke was different in 2 important ways.
-
It was actually a way to hide the flavor change in the switch to Corn Syrup instead of Sugar, and never intended to be permanent.
-
Pepsi existed
There’s no real commercial competition for Microsoft. Linux is great, but there’s nobody for a business to call when shit fucks up. And Apple’s walled garden and high prices make it terrible for enterprise.
There’s enterprise support for several Linux distributions like
https://www.suse.com/services/premium/ (and SEL is a thing) or
https://ubuntu.com/support
Whether those distros meet the demands is a different animal.- People stopped consuming New Coke
As long as people do nothing other than complain and continue to use the product they have no reason to change.
The bill I paid for Suse support contact at an old company I worked for begs to differ. The problem is home or smb are a rounding error for MS. They already got your money from hp or Dell etc. When you bought your computer. Making you the product with the ad and the ai bullshit to swallow your data to train their models is all icing on the cake.
-
As long as companies are eating that they will be ok. BUT, like most tech companies, at some point they will pull a broadcom and then the alternatives will thrive.
What I’ve done is just bought a second hand key for Office 2014, and it works like a charm. Got it for like $10, and no money went to M$, and it has been working for several years without a problem.
For my personal desktop, at least. For my laptop rocking Linux I’ve been using LibreOffice without a problem.
MAS will also work for many office versions.
What was painful about getting the stuff out of OneDrive?
When I did this it was straight forward.
- Sync to local
- Move all to new directory (his triggers a mass deletion on OneDrive)
- Sync to seafile (in my case)
mainly it was because I was trying it from my linux desktop, and if you try to download a large collection of files from the onedrive web interface it’s 50/50 if it fails half-way through
Ah yes. I’ve had the same issue. The web download is hit and miss. Totally understand, and a warranted description of that experience.
What was it you would fallback to use Office for that you couldn’t do on Linux?
It mostly has to do with formatting things: sometimes I’ll go to a conference, and they want the slides put on their computer, and powerpoint might display differently than on my Linux laptop, or collaborating on Word documents, where formatting can be somewhat fragile. In the past few conferences though, I got by fine with my laptop, making a PDF of the slides as a backup… So I was confident that things will turn out okay before I pulled the plug.
Just cancelled my 365 the other day too. Been on Linux for half a year now and forgot I had it until the news of the copilot price increase came out and reminded me. I was happy I could cancel and be refunded the remainder of the term and get some money back in my pocket!
