I have a pretty good streak without Windows, I use macOS and Linux, and everything I need is available. If not, I can use Wine, and it works. And Proton is just amazing, the number of games you can play with it without ONE SINGLE PROBLEM is just insane.
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.
The entire dev team has Macs. Most have Intels. Many are on M1. Some are on M2.
Security/IT teams feel the pain, dealing with all sorts of weird things. And their solution lately is saying “fuck it” and giving the dev a M2. Which is a bandaid as what if M3 and onwards continues to break something?
Fortunately, my team builds software and runs everything through docker.
It’s not like this came out of the blue. The PowerPC to Intel transition was recent enough that it’s still fully documented on the web with forum posts by frustrated users. It’s Apple. Their attitude has always been that users have to deal with it.
And yet they have a reputation for being easy to use.
That’s Apple brainwashing. Anyone who ever tried to offer remote support via TeamViewer probably knows how Mac users then fail to grant screen recording and input permissions to TeamViewer. Before they do that on their own, they can get any remote support.
Are they doing full blown ARM processor’s now? I thought they still had enough devices less than three years old that still used Intel because of the COVID manufacturing delays.
Gather around kids, I’ll tell you a story of the olden days. Back when it first came out I installed gentoo, and at the time the recommended process was to start from stage1. And of course I was a true believer and spent a lot of time optimizing cflags. I could get the base system running in maybe half a day, on the third try on average (I was distro hopping a lot). I used gnome at the time, and it wasn’t that bad to bring it up. Less than 24 hours. But if you wanted openoffice (there was no libreoffice at the time), oh boy, you could say goodbye to your system for a good day and then some. Assuming that it didn’t fail and then you had to change cflags, recompile half the system and try again. But man, when it finished the system would fly sooo smooth.
It used to be K Desktop Environment, but it’s called Plasma since KDE became the organization behind KDE Plasma. This is because they make things other than the desktop environment, like apps such as Krita or Kdenlive, which aren’t DE specific.
Plenty of old apps still run fine. I’ve got VB6 apps I wrote in the mid 2000s that still run. A previous employer has DLLs from 1999 still running in production on Windows Server - VB6 COM components with hundreds of thousands of lines of code in total. I’m reasonably sure than Office 2000 still works, too.
You do sometimes have to change the compatibility settings and run the apps as administrator (since they were designed for Windows 9x which didn’t have separate admin permissions) but often they work.
Even some 16-bit apps work fine as long as you use a 32-bit version of Windows (Windows 10 or older; 11 dropped the 32-bit build). The 64-bit versions of Windows don’t have the NTVDM component that’s required to run 16-bit Windows and DOS apps. It’s an optional component on 32-bit Windows and you need to manually install it.
A lot of effort is put in to backwards compatibility in Windows - Raymond Chen has blogs and books about it.
it often was hit or miss with games though. I remember some games from 95/98 to run on 2000, then not on XP, somehow on Vista and 7, but not on 10. And other games ran on XP, but not Vista and 7…
The disc copy of Fallout 3 will not install on new windows due to games for windows no longer working. At least last time I tried to install it that was the case.
It’s usually the apps themselves doing weird things - Using undocumented APIs, expecting the system to be set up in a particular way, relying on bugs in the OS, etc. Windows tries, and actually emulates old bugs for popular apps so they continue to work, but it can’t be bug-compatible forever.
Apps/games that work on XP should mostly work on newer versions as long as you set them to run with Windows XP compatibility (in the settings of the EXE), but there’s definitely edge cases.
Drivers are definitely out. Some games are really iffy. Especially from the Win 9x era, where they’d do stupid things like look for a 9 in the version string of Windows, or get the amount of RAM as a 32 bit signed int, so refuses to install if you have 4GB RAM or more.
We had a lot of dodgy old DOS programs that were fine under Win98, but XP broke them.
More semantically than some other answers, GNU software is generally on Linux computers, so if GNL was Not Linux, than it would be even more confusing for it to be on a Linux computer.
I think if you need to make the destiction, GNU+Linux is probably the best option for the whole software set and kernel included and if you want to talk about the operating system, I think naming your distribution and following it up with “a distribution of Linux” would be the most accurate, if you are in a situation where accuracy counts.
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