The (libre) office suite is geared towards business and school stuff, they are far from perfect but does 90% of what people need.
Word/LibreOffice Writer
Have their uses, just keep the document below like 50 pages.
LaTeX is great for academic papers and when you need the document to look crisp!
And you are right about Markdown it’s great for many documents.
Excel/Calc
Spreadsheets are great for data entry and some calculations especially financial stuff. You can’t do that as easily inside a source file.
PowerPoint, you are probably right about beamer?
Access
Utter garbage “database” maybe if you need something to keep your record collection? If you know the basics of relational databases and a bit of SQL any proper DB is soo much better.
So, regarding md & beamer: I’m kinda into that “less is more” mindset when it comes to every day -ish writing. Like yeah, you can spend a few hrs formatting the info a certain way, but if that’s not a typography thingy - who’s really going to care how the stuff is aligned or whether it’s divided into 100500 columns?
Md has just enough features to structure the text, and when you need to share, you just compile the doc into PDF which is at least supposed to look the same everywhere. Basically the same for beamer, although you can shove animations in there (right, cause why tf shouldn’t PDF support animations after all)
Beamer has a very high steep learning curve, especially when you just want a few slides to show preliminary results. In PowerPoint you literally drag the image, resize, and that’s it.
Also I feel that beamer pushes the user towards the “bullet point” presentation, which sometimes can be very boring.
For documents, I love latex, but I actually prefer LibreOffice or onlyoffice when it comes to presentations.
It’s in the beta, but actively being developed. You can do a lot of stuff already, but a lot of stuff is either not implemented or janky. Overall I can cope with that. If you want to add something, just know how to write in Rust.
Excel, not true. I mean libreoffice calc just works for a lot but not for easy basic graphs. And it does not do the job better at graphically ebabling users to do data analysis
Python and matplotlib aren’t hard… Plus you get pandas, numpy, and so on. Alternatively, R studio does such stuff ootb, as far as I remember
Idk, excel always seemed unnecessarily limiting and complicated to me compared to proper programming languages. Although that may be because I was taught cpp before this crap.
It’s way too reliant on their cloud infrastructure though, causing it to detect and react to malware slower than other solutions and it turns to shit the second the network disconnects. The PC security channel on YouTube has some good analysis of it.
To be honest, for most users, if they’re not on the Internet; it’s not that big of a deal for their antivirus to be less effective. Most threats come from being dumb on the web.
I think a lot of tech-savvy adults care about E2E on blue iMessage bubbles. I won’t talk about sensitive information via green, that’s all going to signal.
This just comes off as defensive and needy. I’m not even sure if encryption is affected by syncing with icloud, I was just raising a concern if that was a real reason for using it
Imma burst your bubble (pun intended) but that’s such a small part of the population and even such a small part of the tech savvy population that I don’t think it’s much of an argument.
That’s fair! I’m just going by my own experiences. But I have a lot of tech-savvy friends and acquaintances and even many non-tech-savvy mates are into Signal vs SMS because it’s secure, has great audio/video chat, and it’s not owned by shudders Facebook. I personally do not touch any google or Facebook products or services.
Apple gives it funny colours? Google messages just change saturation. Also for some reason I can’t send RCS (and e2e encrypted) messages to my relatives with apple phones. But I got most of them to use Signal :>
YAML will be granted a grace period as a recursive acronym, but as punishment they must remove the questionable contraction and will henceforth be YANML.
Of course not. There is a market for investing very little for some cheap malware and then putting it out there, waiting for the small amount of people (out of a billion of desptop users) falling for it. Also you go for the weakest link in defense, so scamming random desktop users is rarely a technical feat. It usually exploits the human, not the system.
But we also all know how money is actually distributed. So millions of random users being scammed for some money is still not the high reward scenario a server is. Much more work is invested there because the rewards are so much higher. And yet even then you often target people as the weak link. System security for a company is mainly user security. Teaching them to not fall for for scams as an entry way to the system. And there are a lot of professionals that basically made this their own social science of how I convey those things the best, how I enforce and regularly refresh those lessons, how to make people stick to best practices.
Are you trying to tell me this all happens in parallel to a technical server structure that actually isn't that safe but rarely exploited because nobody could be bothered to check for vulnerabilities as it's just Linux and the adoption rate is low?
I think you’re right. A single desktop, unless it is either someone in a position of power or access to trade secret files, is not a time effective attack vector.
A server on the other hand can access all of that stuff across an entire organization.
Not just that but whenever you hear that company xyz was hacked and their data leaked, what do you think was powering their servers? Most likely Linux. Sure, they usually have more things exposed to the internet, but users install way more apps so the attack surface is vastly bigger in home computers running Linux than servers.
This is such a weird take to be honest… it’s weird to want CS lecturers to work in their free time, it’s weird to expect their applications to be better, and it’s weird because this is something that many lecturers and programmers already do… so I don’t get it, and it feels disrespectful to all of the volunteer foss maintainers?
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