Get over it: Microsoft is a Linux and open source company these days (Opinion column)

The Register ^ | Jul 13, 2022 | Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

[Dr. Sivana]

OTOH, it's almost impossible to not have to deal with microsoft to some degree.

You are so right. I have a dual boot rig (too lazy pretending to be paranoid to make a proper VM for the Windows partition). Libre Office has its limitations. For serious Word Processing (which I rarely do now) WordPerfect for Windows is much better (Microsoft gave Corel money decades ago to stop making the heavily touted, premature Linux version), and Excel handles larger spreadsheets even in the Excel 2013 incarnation that I now use as I despise Microsoft's rental/cloud approach. I like my cloud within MY control, thank you.

Of course, numerous specialty websites work better in MS environments.

[dayglored]

> Linux is a better operating system in every way these days. It has more hardware compatibility, flexibility, and general usefulness.

I spend every day in all three OSes: Linux, Win10, MacOS. Time-wise, it's about 65% Linux, 25% Win10, 10% MacOS, mainly because I spend most of my time in xterm/Bash and Firefox, both of which are best in Linux. Win10 has the required Office365 apps (Outlook, mandated by my employer) and a couple webapps that work best in Google Chrome on Win10. MacOS has the MS-Teams native app and Chrome for conf-calls over Teams or Zoom, which are most stable by far on the Mac.

FWIW, I could not do what I need to do, exclusively on MacOS or Win10 -- they don't support the kinds of work I do most of the time. OTOH, I would not be happier with only Linux -- I could do it, but it would have annoying side-effects. Having the other environments for the things they do better is how I prefer to work.

[ShadowAce]

Win10 has the required Office365 apps (Outlook, mandated by my employer) and a couple webapps that work best in Google Chrome on Win10. MacOS has the MS-Teams native app and Chrome for conf-calls over Teams or Zoom, which are most stable by far on the Mac.

Interesting. Outlook does have a web-enabled version that you can run from any OS. Also, Teams and Zoom both have a Linux client. While the Teams client is iffy (sux big time), Zoom seems fairly stable.

[oldvirginian]

And don’t forget about sleeping on rubber sheets! ☢️

[daniel1212]

"You are right. It is a fairly expensive setup. I buy a desktop PC and run it for 10+ years before upgrading. I like having a full sized tower with slots and available 5.25” and 3.5” bays for capacity and upgrades should they become invented within the ten-year period. I am three years in and for raw capacity my setup ranks in the top 2% (”aircraft carrier”). I didn’t spring for a fancy graphics card as my work/personal use doesn’t require serious gaming (MAME with my son is all I do for that) or 3D modeling/animation."

You could build your own for about $600, not inclgd the OS. I do not do gaming and have no need for a dedicated graphics card, so in building this PC I went with the $100 (in 2019) Ryzen 3200G which you can easily overclock to 4.0Ghz. However, I could not get my 3200ghz memory (64GB) to run close to that speed when OC'd so I stuck with 3.6Ghz. All the drives are SSD, with the OS on a Silicon Power 512GB NVMe M.2 PCIe Gen3x4. Thanks be to God that I was able to but and build this, which has been much used for His purposes.

[dayglored]

Yeah, when I’m away from my workstation I use the web version of Outlook and Teams, typically using Chrome browser on whatever OS I have at hand. I haven’t had occasion to use the Linux client for Zoom, but I’ll agree that the Linux Teams client sucks. Having all three OSes at hand, I try various combinations until I find what works best. I just want to get work done.