TCB13

TCB13, 1 year ago

Id’ say your comparison pictured is not valid. It’s not the same document in both programs

Yes its the same document. The only thing I did is “open a copy” because the document was locked in the other editor.

If one truly wants to share final documents use pdf not a draft format like docx.

People share unfinished documents with each other and formatting should hold, otherwise how can you collaborate?

TCB13, 1 year ago

It’s completely inapt for actual engineering and technical work.

Depends on the engineering field, I have out a few specific examples of highly payed engineering fields that can’t get away from Windows.

TCB13, 1 year ago

I have very little problem exchanging documents

Yes but you still have some little annoyances here and there. Is it worth having to fight your software to get your job done? Isn’t just easier and more productive to use MS Office (ROI described above and whatnot).

Teams and GoToMeeting are why I started using Edge. It is just a nicer workflow if Teams and Outlook are in the same browser.

See this is what most people feel about Office, its just nicer to use the Microsoft thing and not ever having to worry about anything.

While I agree that for some people LibreOffice might work, there’s the following simple test:

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/cbc2faa8-0542-4535-92ce-a84a94381ad9.jpeg

TCB13, 1 year ago

I only work with libre formats at work. If someone wants to collaborate, they can easily install libre office or gimp or freecad or gnu cash or whatever. Most libre software is free and cross-platform.

Okay so tell me, you’re working on a budget with a potential customer that uses MS Office. You want to win that customer and do a big project for him, would you “bitch” about him about using MS Office and ask him to install LibreOffice whenever the spreadsheet formulas don’t work properly?

What if said potential customer is a big company with strict IT policies? What if the person can’t even install software or is older and unable do it but very proficient with Excel?

Are you willing to lose a potential big customer, a project that will pay your bills for months just because a boomer can’t or won’t be able to install LibreOffice?

TCB13, 1 year ago

Many of your points are management bullshit.

Yes, they are and I never said they weren’t management BS. Nevertheless management pays the bills, management makes the decision.

The key point is that they want a contract with a company so they can discard the responsability of failures on someone out of their own company.

You’re just saying what I said before…

The last problem is from Microsoft that worked hard these last years to remove any compatibility between office and other softwares of this kind

Yes, but the end result is that nobody sane would even risk not using MS Office and that’s what it is.

Large companies need an it service for Windows on top of the licences and infrastructure. It’s way cheaper with Linux.

It depends, integration between MS products and services usually comes out of the box or working with minimal setup while with open-source solutions / Linux that isn’t always the case. Also Windows sysadmins are usually cheaper because you can get more and they require less training to be “efficient” than Linux ones.

The biggest work with an enterprise Linux is to make it compatible with the shitty Windows environment, and the compliance with the useless security thought for windows.

Yes but you still have do it and it has a cost. Simply going full Windows is cheaper at that point.

TCB13, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

Linux in corporation fails in multiple ways, the most prevalent is that people need to collaborate with others that use proprietary software such as MS Office that isn’t available for Linux and the alternatives such as LibreOffice aren’t just good enough. It all comes down to ROI, the cost of Windows/Office for a company is cheaper than the cost of dealing with the inconsistencies in format conversions, people who don’t know how to use the alternative X etc etc. This issue is so common that companies usually also avoid Apple due to the same reason, while on macOS you’ve a LOT more professional software it is still very painful to deal with the small inconsistencies and whatnot.

Linux desktop is great, I love it, but it gets it even worse than Apple, here some use cases that aren’t easy to deal in Linux:

• People who need the real MS Office because once you have to collaborate with others Open/Libre/OnlyOffice won’t cut it;
• Designers who use Adobe apps that won’t run properly without having a dedicated GPU, passthrough and a some hacky way to get the image back into your main system that will cause noticeable delays. Who wants to deploy GPU passthroughs for others? Makes no sense;
• People that run old software / games because not even those will run properly on Wine;
• Electrical engineers: Circuit Design Suite (Multisim and Ultiboard) are primarily designed for Windows. Alternatives such as KiCad and EasyEDA may work in some cases but they aren’t great if you’ve to collaborate with others who use Circuit Design Suite;
• Labs that require data acquisition from specialized hardware because companies making that hardware won’t make drivers and software for Linux;
• Architects: AutoCAD isn’t available (not even the limited web version works) and Libre/FreeCAD don’t cut it if you’ve to collaborate with AutoCAD users;
• Developers and sysadmins, because not everyone is using Docker and Github actions to deploy applications to some proprietary cloud solution. Finding a properly working FTP/SFTP/FTPS desktop client (similar WinSCP or Cyberduck) is an impossible task as the ones that exist fail even at basic tasks like dragging and dropping a file.

If one lives in a bubble and doesn’t to collaborate with others then native Linux apps might work and might even deliver a decent workflow. Once collaboration with Windows/Mac users is required then it’s game over – the “alternatives” aren’t just up to it.

Windows licenses are cheap and things work out of the box. Software runs fine, all vendors support whatever you’re trying to do and you’re productive from day zero. Sure, there are annoyances from time to time, but they’re way fewer and simpler to deal with than the hoops you’ve to go through to get a minimal and viable/productive Linux desktop experience. It all comes down to a question of how much time (days? months?) you want to spend fixing things on Linux that simply work out of the box under Windows for a minimal fee. Buy a Windows license and spend the time you would’ve spent dealing with Linux issues doing your actual job and you’ll, most likely, get a better ROI.

From a more market / macro perspective here are some extra reasons:

• Companies like blame someone when things go wrong, if they chose open-source there’s isn’t someone to sue then;
• Buying proprietary stuff means you’re outsourcing the risks of such product;
• Corruption pushes for proprietary: they might be buying software that is made by someone that is close to the CTO, CEO or other decision marker in the company, an old friend, family or straight under the table corruption;
• Most non-tech companies use services from consulting companies in order to get their software developed / running. Consulting companies often fall under the last point that besides that they have have large incentives from companies like Microsoft to push their proprietary services. For eg. Microsoft will easily provide all of a consulting companies employees with free Azure services, Office and other discounts if they enter in an exclusivity agreement to sell their tech stack. To make things worse consulting companies live of cheap developers (like interns) and Microsoft and their platform makes things easier for anyone to code and deploy;
• Microsoft provider a cohesive ecosystem of products that integrate really well with each other and usually don’t require much effort to get things going - open-source however, usually requires custom development and a ton of work to work out the “sharp angles” between multiple solutions that aren’t related and might not be easily compatible with each other;
• Open-source requires a level of expertise that more than half of the developers and IT professionals simply don’t have. This aspect reinforces the last point even more. Senior open-source experts are more expensive than simply buying proprietary solutions;
• If we consider the price of a senior open-source expert + software costs (usually free) the cost of open-source is considerable lower than the cost of cheap developers + proprietary solutions, however consider we are talking about companies. Companies will always prefer to hire more less expensive and less proficient people because that means they’re easier to replace and you’ll pay less taxes;
• Companies will prefer to hire services from other companies instead of employees thus making proprietary vendors more compelling. This happens because from an accounting / investors perspective employees are bad and subscriptions are cool (less taxes, no responsibilities etc);
• The companies who build proprietary solutions work really hard to get vendors to sell their software, they provide commissions, support and the promises that if anything goes wrong they’ll be there. This increases the number of proprietary-only vendors which reinforces everything above. If you’re starting to sell software or networking services there’s little incentive for you to go pure “open-source”. With less companies, less visibility, less professionals (and more expensive), less margins and less positive market image, less customers and lesser profits.

Unfortunately things are really poised and rigged against open-source solutions and anyone who tries to push for them. The “experts” who work in consulting companies are part of this as they usually don’t even know how to do things without the property solutions. Let me give you an example, once I had to work with E&Y, one of those big consulting companies, and I realized some awkward things while having conversations with both low level employees and partners / middle management, they weren’t aware that there are alternatives most of the time. A manager of a digital transformation and cloud solutions team that started his career E&Y, wasn’t aware that there was open-source alternatives to Google Workplace and Microsoft 365 for e-mail. I probed a TON around that and the guy, a software engineer with an university degree, didn’t even know that was Postfix was and the history of email.

TCB13, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

I could officially install any Linux distro to the company laptop (which I did of course) fully replacing the wintoys. Could use the machine as I liked, no corporate mandated BS spyware or anything.

Yes, and when the company gets hacked they can sue you for not keeping “your” computer secure enough. When I started my career on the field I also had those ideias that companies are evil and want to spy on everyone and enforce stupid policies on computer and whatnot.

Eventually I moved to heavily restricted environments where once you see what’s going on there you simply wouldn’t even open WhatsApp on that machine, let alone surf unknown websites. You wouldn’t do it not because the fear of being monitored but by the amount of liability you would be exposing yourself if you did. Trust me, the company isn’t bad, predatory but at a certain level you simply think twice. In fact they even reconize that people might want to surf random websites or use some personal accounts and provide a secure virtualized extra browser (restricted from the internal network) but still no way in hell people even think about using it for something so simple such as WhatsApp.

To be fair, this way of thinking might be the best. Just assume people will want to have a personal messaging app, email or whatever on the side and deploy some virtualized / restricted local or remote solution so they can do it without creating risks for themselves or to the company. At least this way you’re still under control and people wouldn’t be trying to bypass your security everyday…

TCB13, 1 year ago

your colleagues to adapt to you nor you can decide which OS

Sometimes its not even about colleagues, check my reply before lemmy.world/comment/6509728

TCB13, 1 year ago

Proton is all fun and games until you find out they don’t support IMAP/SMTP without a bridge.

TCB13, 1 year ago

How would browser games survive with that solution tho? They most likely require some server…

TCB13, 1 year ago

My question is: what’s wrong with browser bookmarks and something SIMPLE to sync them between like devices like floccus (+ webdav server)?

TCB13, 1 year ago

Potentially yes, but for instance I’ve been looking for a way to have the following players offline and it seems harder than expected:

• weather.ambient-mixer.com/the-perfect-storm
• mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/rainNoiseGenerator.php
• mynoise.net/…/thunderNoiseGenerator.php
• mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/fireNoiseGenerator.php

Any tips?

TCB13, 1 year ago

Yes yes, but what about magic / automated solutions? Wasn’t that the great advantage of Linkwarden?

TCB13, 1 year ago

Oh you mean the ones here: flashpointarchive.org and www.flashgamearchive.com

TCB13, 1 year ago

Yes you do ahaha

TCB13, 1 year ago

why is it Postgres db…

Why on earth are you using that? Just use WebDAV, you’ll only be required to have some WebDAV server such as Nginx and it will sync GB of notes without issues. joplinapp.org/help/apps/sync/webdav/ medium.com/…/build-a-webdav-server-with-nginx-866…

I would’ve NEVER ever moved to Joplin if it wasn’t able to sync with WebDAV. I’m not into having a special daemon running on a server for that task, makes zero sense.

TCB13, 1 year ago

It’s 2024, avoid Proxmox and safe yourself a LOT of headaches down the line.

You most likely don’t need Proxmox and its pseudo-open-source bullshit. My suggestion is to simply with with Debian 12 + LXD/LXC, it runs VMs and containers very well. Proxmox ships with an old kernel that is so mangled and twisted that they shouldn’t even be calling it a Linux kernel. Also their management daemons and other internal shenanigans will delay your boot and crash your systems under certain circumstances.

What I would suggest you to use use instead is LXD/Incus.

LXD/Incus provides a management and automation layer that really makes things work smoothly - essentially what Proxmox does but properly done. With Incus you can create clusters, download, manage and create OS images, run backups and restores, bootstrap things with cloud-init, move containers and VMs between servers (even live sometimes).

Another big advantage is the fact that it provides a unified experience to deal with both containers and VMs, no need to learn two different tools / APIs as the same commands and options will be used to manage both. Even profiles defining storage, network resources and other policies can be shared and applied across both containers and VMs.

I draw your attention to containers (not docker), LXC containers because for most people full virtualization isn’t even required. In a small homelab if you can have containers that behave like full operating systems (minus the kernel) including persistence, VMs might not be required. Either way LXD/Incus will allow for both and you can easily mix and match and use what you require for each use case.

For eg. I virtualize the official HomeAssistant image with LXD because we all know how hard is to get that thing running, however my NAS / Samba shares are just a LXD Debian 12 container with Samba4, Nginx and FileBrowser. Sames goes for torrent client that has its own container. Some other service I’ve exposed to the internet also runs a full VM for isolation.

Like Proxmox, LXD/Incus isn’t about replacing existing virtualization techniques such as QEMU, KVM and libvirt, it is about augmenting them so they become easier to manage at scale and overall more efficient. I can guarantee you that most people running Proxmox today it today will eventually move to Incus and never look back. It woks way better, true open-source, no bugs, no BS licenses and way less overhead.

Yes, there’s a WebUI for LXD as well!

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/9caa6ea8-17b1-48f6-a8c2-ff3f606f3482.pnghttps://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/a5a110b2-ed6f-431f-a767-0a21fb337a6b.png

TCB13, 1 year ago

it gives me an actual IP on my router’s subnet for my machines

Yes you configure LXD/Incus’ networking to use a bridge and it will simply delegate the task to your router instead of proving IPs itself. One of my nodes actually runs the two setups at the same time, I’ve a bunch of containers on an internal range and then my Home Assistant VM getting an IP from my router.

TCB13, 1 year ago

This was a discussion about management solutions such as Proxmox and LXD and NOT about containerization technologies like Docker or LXC. Also Proxmox uses the Proxmox VE Kernel that is derived from Ubuntu.

Your comment makes no sense whatsoever. I’m not even sure you know the difference between LXD and LXC…

TCB13, 1 year ago

Seriously, download MAS and choose Ohook. Enjoy your permanently serialized and activated MS Office. :)

TCB13, 1 year ago

They’re just creating a situation where people forget how to do thing without a magic tunnel or whatever. We’ve seen this with other things, and a proof of this is the fact that you’re suggesting you’ll require a static IP while in fact you won’t.

TCB13, 1 year ago

However, the “give something away for free until they can’t live without it then force them to pay” model is pretty classic in tech by now.

Yes, this is a problem and a growing one, like a cancer. This new self-hosting and software development trends are essentially someone reconfiguring and mangling the development and sysadmin learning, tools and experience to the point people are required to spend more than ever for no absolute reason other than profits.

TCB13, 1 year ago

“Uncensored” models are bullshit everything but uncensored. Just ask them for a Windows XP Pro key and you’ll see how uncensored they really are.

TCB13, 1 year ago

Is this yet another MS product like VSCode that is free forever but has a license that only allows to official builds to be used and/or running on their servers or…?

TCB13, 1 year ago

What am I doing wrong here?

Using Nextcloud for anything obviously. I do the same with Nginx / simple WebDAV server and everything works just fine.