I’ve been listening to Security Now for over 10 year now. Steve Gibson is highly intelligent and does an excellent job of explaining technical topics like how a new exploit actually works and how the mitigation functions, without making the listener feel like they need a PHD first.
Both Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson occasionally have opinions I don’t agree with, and they’ve had sponsors in the past that turned out later to have their own issues. But they’ve been quick to remove sponsors that are actively bad, and they’re honest about their relationships with their sponsors anyway.
It’s also refreshing to hear a more pragmatic (realistic) approach to balancing security with usability. Ie: your grandma doesn’t work for the NSA, so she doesn’t need a custom-built secure desktop with YubiKey running Qubes. She needs a password vault or notebook and you to occasionally update her machine.
Softmaker Freeoffice has worked brilliantly for me. It’s very familiar if you are used to Microsoft Office, and it seems to do the compatibility part very, VERY well.
Not all his videos are privacy focused but Louis Rossmann is a good right to repair and privacy advocate. Very entertaining to watch when he gets irritated haha.
I second every suggestions about Libreoffice. It’s free, open source and works in Windows, MacOS and Linux.
The problems lies in the different rendering engine. If you have table of contents, floating image and anything that impact text flow; it will be rendered differently between the two apps.
I still use Libreoffice as my primary editor, but if I need to send docs to other people, I will export it to PDF. But if I really need to send docx or pptx, I will format it in WPS office before sending the docs to others.
Thanks for the suggestions. I was going to use libreoffice as the main editor but then use open office if my document had images or anything that doesn’t play nice with libreoffice but the pdf suggestion sounds better
Due to its proprietary nature, finding software that can properly read those files can be tricky.
LibreOffice is the usual go-to for folks wanting an office suite, that respects privacy, and FOSS. It can read docx files, but it can mess up formatting. Still, for many it’s the preferred choice. It’s got the best reputation.
Now if formatting REALLY matters, take a look at OnlyOffice. It handles those MS formats so much better. It’s not a bad suite, but it’s hard to beat the good reputation Libreoffice has gained.
Yeah another person said it gets funky with formatting but that’s not a huge deal for me as the most complex formats for the class syllabus I like to just have a copy but probably nothing I can’t do by saving it as a pdf
And like I said in those comments my own documents aren’t complex mostly just using tab and enter to make my documents more readable for myself
Ah I see good to know. For me formatting issues aren’t a super big deal and sounds like it’s outweighed with its reputation here. I guess if it does become an issue I can simply hop over to open office but I’ll cross that bridge when I get there
Also didn’t see your bottom question at first but I’m on windows and edit documents both on my home laptop and one I bring to my classes which is why being able to play nice with proton drive is a must for me.
I was planning on using MS Office originally when writing the posts but 1) I didn’t know if it was going to work after my subscription expired, and 2) I wanted to see what else is out there
So in the description you said edit, but here you say read (syllabus). If just reading is the requirement, there was a word reader, not sure if it is still available. I also believe once subscription expires, you still will be able to view, just edit.
Also what’s wrong with your school requiring word document and not providing a free license for the software? My college at least provided free license during my class.
As other alternatives I don’t have better than libre office (at the time I was using, libre office didn’t exist and I used OpenOffice, I still was using it, primarily, because of using Linux on my laptop) and submitted my work as PDF and didn’t have problems, but my class were requirements in computer science so I’m sure I wasn’t the only one doing it.
And M$ published its specifications, so Libreoffice devs could support it. But here comes the funny part: M$ (deliberately?) doesn’t follow the specification it published. So the formatting problems of LibreOffice come from M$, because they don’t follow their specs, but M$ can just do whatever they want because of its market share.
Not only are they insanely long, MS strategically doesn’t follow its own specs in places so other software using the specs “fuck up formatting” even if they follow MS’s specs perfectly.
It’s a “standard” only in the sense that Microsoft took the MS Office binary file formats (which are basically just writing the internal state of Word/Powerpoint/whatever to disc), serialized it to XML, half-assed some bullshit documentation for it, and bribed the standards body to rubber-stamp it. It’s still, at it’s core, basically defined by whatever nonsense Microsoft’s implementation does.
Like I said I have all these files on proton drive
Assuming I stick with word and don’t move to libreoffice like a few comments have suggested- in a desktop environment is really the only difference that it’s now going to open in a web browser, I’m just asking incase it doesn’t play nice with proton drive
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