It seems like the FOSS community is continuing to grow, and FOSS apps keep getting better (Immich reallh blew my mind recently), which is a big win 😎 but there are still many apps I use that I would kill for an open source alternative. I am curious what you guys think? Are there any apps you’d love alternatives for?
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Exactly… easily replaceable but you have an endless whining of users that imagine they might somehow in the future need this one feature that office has but alternatives don’t.
That’s an increasingly small number, if only because now Google is in that market, too.
However, there is a second reason you need Office, and that’s compatibility. I don’t use Office for work normally, but I still have an Office account (which, annoyingly, is how you pay for Office now), because I have clients who want to work on their formats and it doesn’t make sense for me to work around compatibility and have an argument about it instead of just paying for the damn thing and working with whatever software other people want to work.
But if I was by myself and didn’t need to work with anyone else ever? Yeah, I would not miss much from Office, honestly.
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I object to that “work out of the box” comment. I have lost more work hours to OneDrive being terrible than to any single other technical reason. Office has at least as many quirks and inefficiencies as any of its alternatives.
It’s a bit of a standard and it doesn’t… not… work? So yeah, it’s the go-to you have to have as a fallback for things to not get annoying when you work with multiple other people outside your same organization on something. Alternatives are as good or better, though, especially if you consider commercial ones as well as FOSS ones.
But yeah, it’s priced just so that it makes sense to pay for it and not use it over not having it ready to go when you need it. On purpose. Which sucks.
Windows is a different story. Quirky and annoying yes, but not more so than the alternatives and definitely the standard for big chunks of things in ways that it’s not trivial to replace.
Teams is also the meeting system furthest from “just works” in my experience. Not sure where all the Microsoft apologists get those ideas that stuff made by Microsoft “just works”.
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I don’t even know if I give them that. I guess pricing things just at the edge of you begrudgingly buying them instead of going elsewhere is “marketing” if you squint. I mean, by all accounts they’re worse at branding than Apple and worse at PR than literally everybody else in their competing markets. After a certain critical mass it probably doesn’t matter much, I suppose. At least not short term.
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