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I am certainly guilty of this problem. I've pretty much hated MS Word for about 10 years now, more or less since I started being an engineer for a living. I hat

I am certainly guilty of this problem. I've pretty much hated MS Word for about 10 years now, more or less since I started being an engineer for a living. I hated its equation editor, I hated how the documents ended up looking, I hated the damn spacing between the letters, every time I used it I always felt like my documents ended up looking like ransom letters. I discovered LaTeX + Pandoc, and it created documents that I thought looked much nicer, and I could use trusty Vim to work with it, so it felt perfect, and I subsequently made fun of people who insisted on using Word. After about two years of doing this, my dad eventually snapped back saying "Tom, we're all really sorry we didn't become software engineers, I guess we'll all quit our jobs and go back to college," which (rightly) made me feel like an asshole. Obviously this stuff was easy to me, I live and breath in text editors and in plain text, but I had to realize that not everyone is trying to create publisher-worthy documents. They want a document that looks good enough to share with some coworkers, or print out for a school report, and for that MS Word will work fine for most use cases. They don't really want to sit there and learn the minutia of how to compile with `pdflatex` and dissect its weird error messages. They didn't really feel the need to finagle with begin and end tags, and that's totally fine, people should use the right tool for the right job. After that I would still recommend LaTeX (particularly if the document required equations), but I became substantially less pushy about it.

lostlogin 5y ago
> I've pretty much hated MS Word Do you mean the app, the web or the Teams version? Or is it the way each allows different things, blocks certain actions or displays differently? It is incredible that this mess is the industry standard.
- tombert 5y ago
  I was referring to the app, whatever was recent in 2011 or so. 2007 I think? I haven't used it in a long time. I always wanted my documents (and particularly equations) to look as nice as the formatting in my textbooks, and it felt like no matter how much finagling I did (which was not an insignificant amount of time being spent), it never looked quite as good. Also, I never fully knew what copy-paste was actually going to do. Was it going to copy the source formatting? Was it going to adopt the style of where I was pasting? Was it going to do neither and just break everything? I was never sure, so I always ended up pasting into Notepad and then re-copying it to guarantee all the formatting was stripped out. And sometimes there would be just a vanilla "I pressed a random keystroke by accident, all the formatting broke, and undo doesn't appear to do anything" issues. This might just be gross incompetence on my end (it wouldn't be the first time) but nearly everyone I've described this issue to has experienced similar problems. Also, I can't remember the details of it, and it's possibly fixed now, but I had issues with the equation editor simply not having all the symbols I needed. In fairness, I have similar complaints about most of the other WYSIWYG word processors, so I don't mean to pick on MS Word specifically (most of these complaints apply to Pages and LibreOffice as well).
  - lostlogin 5y ago
    > I never fully knew what copy-paste was actually going to do. On a Mac, Option+Shift+Command+V is paste without style. I can’t understand why this wasn’t the default (or when Command+V is pressed). Edit: > I was referring to the app, whatever was recent in 2011 or so. 2007 I think? I haven't used it in a long time. I was raging at my world. Things have got much, much worse in the MS Office world. Going back to it after a long absence had me baffled. It’s all online now, except when it isn’t, or when it sort of isn’t and it does not work well.
    - tombert 5y ago
      I was on Windows at the time. I'm sure there's an equivalent in Windows but I never learned it, presumably because I was too lazy.
      - frosted-flakes 5y ago
        In Word, if you paste something, it will show a little tooltip menu beside the pasted content that allows you to change if it keeps source formatting, adopts destination formatting, or has no formatting.
    - II2II 5y ago
      > On a Mac, Option+Shift+Command+V is paste without style. On Windows, it used to be Control-Shift-V. Unfortunately, it does not work in Office 2016 (and likely other recent versions). While the new approach is more flexible, it would have been nice if they kept the old behaviour bound to the old key combination. I agree with recent versions of Office being a baffling mess. The only reason why I keep Office 2016 around is for the rare case that I need to send an editable document to someone else and I have no intent to upgrade since figuring out that mess is more trouble than it's worth.
- dhosek 5y ago
  The thing is, the vast majority of written communications are just fine in Word. And Word is a lot easier to integrate into other workflows than is LaTeX (and this is from someone who's finishing a book on using LaTeX right now). There are plenty of times that I wish for the kind of control that I have in LaTeX when using other platforms, but for just plain writing, I have to confess that Word is far more ergonomic and I haven't opened a LaTeX document to write fiction in for more than twenty years.
  - tombert 5y ago
    How do you feel about Markdown? It sometimes has issues, but generally speaking I feel like Markdown converted to LaTeX looks pretty good, and I think that Markdown is usually fairly pleasant to work with.
    - Arainach 5y ago
      Markdown is designed to be simple and minimalist. It works well for the specific set of things it is designed to do, but once you need anything else - images, headers/footers, color, page numbers, and so on - it collapses entirely.
      - tombert 5y ago
        > Markdown is designed to be simple and minimalist. Fair enough. > It works well for the specific set of things it is designed to do, but once you need anything else - images, It's never been particularly hard for me to add images in markdown when rendering with Pandoc. It's fairly easy to add images and adjust their size and whatnot, not 100% what you're referring to. > headers/footers, Yeah, I'll give you that one, you gotta muck with the preamble YAML in pandoc to get headers, and that's some irritating LaTeX. > Color Also fair, not sure it's possible to have color in Markdown->PDF with Pandoc. > page numbers, Page numbers are output by default in Pandoc with Markdown. You can also add an optional Table of Contents if needed. Not sure where that rumor started.
        5y ago
analog31 5y ago
The word users may think they're more productive. And they might be right. I strategically avoid that question because I don't want it to drive my choice of tools.
dctoedt 5y ago
For short, quick-turnaround documents that get exchanged and redlined by multiple non-technical types (e.g., contracts): Microsoft Word, because it's the global standard and the network effect is in full force. For books and similar long docs: Definitely LaTeX (preferably with Emacs org-mode), because Word has a way of f[oul]ing up automatic cross-references even in short documents; pandoc can then turn the LaTeX into whatever other format you want.
- tombert 5y ago
  > For short, quick-turnaround documents that get exchanged and redlined by multiple non-technical types (e.g., contracts): Microsoft Word, because it's the global standard and the network effect is in full force. I agree for most people, though I feel like I'm pretty quick with Markdown + Pandoc -> LaTeX. Definitely agree with the citations stuff though; Pandoc's BibTeX support is generally good, and I've had substantially fewer headaches with it than trying to get the reference stuff in MSWord to work.
- 1-more 5y ago
  > For books and similar long docs Weirdly enough I know someone with a book published by a big programming book company, and they accept manuscripts in Word only.
  - smogcutter 5y ago
    This is likely unrelated to typesetting: it’s for the track changes feature. The final files that go to the printer are probably not produced by word.
    - 1-more 5y ago
      Oh yeah that's for sure. And since they have a house style for everything it'd be a bit silly to faff about making your \lstset look just so when the printer would need to re-set (reset?) all of it.
- TacticalCoder 5y ago
marcosdumay 5y ago
Yet everybody seems to have the time and inclination to manage list numbering in Word, that doesn't work at all, does not allow direct manipulation, and has all the relevant information hidden. It's just that people don't mind losing months of productivity in a couple of years if it means saving a couple of full days of learning. (A few times this even is the correct choice...) Anyway, I'll keep pushing for Libre Office. Word is a complete bullshit of a tool. If people's work involves numbering every odd paragraph into a list, they are probably better with LaTeX, but they won't learn it anyway. Yet, Writer simply works.
- sethammons 5y ago
  more people are probably hit by the list managing mess, but the one that got me recently was a blue line of some sort. Some margin or page break or something. My attorney asked if I could help him remove the blue line from the middle of the page he was typing out on a contract we were working on. For the life of me, I was unable to remove the blue line in <10min of effort. I had to say sorry, talk to your tech guy.
  - plank 5y ago
    My solution for these problems (kind of like turn off/turn on): Create a new word document, and copy-paste stuff in front and stuff after to the new document. Sometimes this works when normal editing doesn’t.
    - maxerickson 5y ago
      The Show Styles, Style Inspector and Reveal Formatting panes all help with stuff like this. The last one should give a pretty clear hint to where the line is defined.
    - Moru 5y ago
      Our solution to anything like this has always been copy to notepad and back again. Old people knows exactly what is meant but people 25 and younger usually don't understand why or how. Seems to be a generational thing. Lately even notepad preserves utf8 so the method is starting to break together :)
prpl 5y ago
A nobel prize winner in physics, who I had an office across the hall from, once asked me ~10 years ago if I knew how to write ħ in Microsoft word. Unfortunately, I did not, and I was unable to help him. I was glad he asked me though. I probably should have tried what I just did though, google it, and copy+paste.
- codetrotter 5y ago
  On my desktop computer that runs Linux, and where I mostly type code and write in English, I use US English as the input and a Dvorak-based layout in hardware that I made for my programmable keyboard. Since I very rarely type in my native tongue on that computer, and I annoyingly frequently have had to reinstall the OS from scratch, I no longer bother with customizing xmodmap or similar things on that computer. So the few times when I have to type æ, ø or å on that computer, I just Google aelig, oslash or aring respectively and I go to the Wikipedia article about the letter or some other page from the results that has the letter on it and copy it from there. Works well enough given how rarely I type any of those letters on that computer.
  - Seredo 5y ago
    You could use US Intl. keyboard layout and use RAlt+z/l/w for æ/ø/å. If you have a QMK Firmware keyboard you could even reprogram it to use Alt + '/;/[ to send these keys and you'll have æ/ø/å in the usual position.
  - djokkataja 5y ago
    > and I annoyingly frequently have had to reinstall the OS from scratch Is there a story behind that?
    - codetrotter 5y ago
      One of the reasons is that the computer in question has a problem where suddenly everything completely freezes, and I have to forcibly reboot the computer with the hardware reset button. And sometimes after rebooting I find that files on the file system have become corrupted. Sometimes the machine will run for days without freezing up. Sometimes it can freeze up after just a couple of hours. Sometimes I am browsing the web when it happens. Sometimes I am writing code and compiling stuff when it happens. I think the longest uptime I have had on it after the problem started without it freezing has been maybe 8 days. It’s been like this for a long while. A couple of years at least. And when it freezes it’s not just the UI. It even stops responding to ping. A few months back someone suggested that it may be due to a faulty PSU. But even after changing the PSU to a new one, it still happens. And it’s been happening both with different Linux distros and with FreeBSD. My hardware is: - MSI B350 Tomahawk motherboard - AMD Ryzen 7 1700 CPU - MSI GeForce GTX 1060 6GB graphics card - Crucial DDR4 2133Mhz 32GB ECC (2x16GB) CT2K16G4WFD8213 RAM I bought those components in March of 2018, according to the order history in my account on the store where I bought it. I don’t remember if I ever did run a memory test, but I will do so again anyways soon because I am suspecting that faulty RAM may be the reason. It just takes a long time to run a memory test on 32 GB of RAM and so whenever I think about needing to run it I don’t have time to do so at that moment. But as I am typing this I realize that I’ve got to go ahead and actually find time for running it soon. Another couple of ideas I’ve had is that maybe the graphics card or the nvidia drivers are to blame. Or that I may have damaged some component with static electricity at some point. Or maybe it’s a thermal issue. I most recently did a fresh install earlier today, and at the same time I switched out the SSD that was in it for another one. As far as I can remember though, I think I was having this kind of problem even before I was using the SSD that I switched out today. But I am not sure about that. So it could be that the SSD was the problem. But it may be a few days until it freezes again if it’s not the reason. Or it could happen in some hours. I’ve also tried to look for clues in /var/log/syslog but haven’t really known what to look for specifically. And since even pinging the machine stops working when it freezes I am not sure the system would even be able to write to any logs at the moment that it freezes, since it seems that at that point pretty much everything has stopped working. Currently I am running tail -F /var/log/syslog in a terminal in the hopes of either seeing something relevant frozen on screen, or in the surrounding output when I reboot the machine since I will then know which line of output I should begin looking in the vicinity of. But yeah, a memory test is the next thing I plan to do after that.
akvadrako 5y ago
I think even for casual users LyX (a LaTeX editor) is better than Word for documents with simple layouts or many equations. Word is really complicated to understand and often makes formatting more difficult than it needs to be. So this doesn't seem like an elitist thing.
- tombert 5y ago
  Sure, but even if you're technically right, for Word there's a million tutorials and YouTube videos if you get stuck, not to mention that basically every office seems to have "that MS Office person" who seemingly knows every single trick imaginable in Word. Even if Word is more complicated, it's relatively cheap and easy to unblock yourself. I've not used LyX, but I suspect that it doesn't have nearly the same level of domain knowledge in the corporate world, artificially making it harder to learn. Is that fair? No, not at all, but that just seems to be how it is.
- Thrymr 5y ago
  > I think even for casual users LyX (a LaTeX editor) is better than Word for documents with simple layouts or many equations. That really depends on what you mean by "casual users". It's a lot of overhead for someone who isn't familiar with LaTeX already. I've tried showing this to students, and it's a much heavier lift than MS equation editor for limited tasks. Of course for professional typesetting or many complex equations LyX will win, but truly "casual" use it isn't close IMO.
  - akvadrako 5y ago
    Well in college I only used LyX and I never knew LaTeX and I never found it easier to learn Word's equation editor.
- netizen-936824 5y ago
  When I first got into LaTeX I tried LyX. Horrible, clunky experience. I never recommend it to anyone, instead I recommend just using VSCodium and associated plugins, its a far smoother experience
glitchc 5y ago
That Word doesn't work (well) in Linux is a big reason why I still have Windows on my home computers.
coldtea 5y ago
>but I had to realize that not everyone is trying to create publisher-worthy documents Not to mention most LaTeX documents look like crap - the might get the "standard LaTeX paper-like formatting" but as a formatting it's nothing special to write home about, and the fonts don't look particularly good either. What I find especially funny, is there was a foreign commercial book from LaTex experts (and contributors), about LaTex, typeset in LaTex (of course), whose typesetting was all over the place -- including text running off the page inadvertently.
- tombert 5y ago
  I guess there’s no accounting for taste, but I quite like the default LaTeX font, better than most of the fonts I tried in Office.
- wpietri 5y ago
  Like you, I've never liked it. TeX has always struck me as more focused on the needs of a narrow set of TeX users, not the readers. And Bob Cringely tells a story about Knuth and the invention of TeX: """ It was a major advance, and in the introduction he proudly claimed that the printing once again looked just as good as the hot type of volume 1. Except it didn’t. Reading his introduction to volume 3,1 had the feeling that Knuth was wearing the emperor’s new clothes. Squinting closely at the type in volume 3, I saw the letters had that telltale look of a low-resolution laser printer—not the beautiful, smooth curves of real type or even of a photo typesetter. There were “jaggies”— little bumps that make all the difference between good type and bad. Yet here was Knuth, writing the same letters that I was reading, and claiming that they were beautiful. “Donnie,” I wanted to say. “What are you talking about? Can’t you see the jaggies?” But he couldn’t. Donald Knuth’s gray matter, far more powerful than mine, was making him look beyond the actual letters and words to the mathematical concepts that underlay them. Had a good enough laser printer been available, the printing would have been beautiful, so that’s what Knuth saw and I didn’t. This effect of mind over what matters is both a strength and a weakness for those, like Knuth, who would break radical new ground with computers. Unfortunately for printers, most of the rest of the world sees like me. The tyranny of the normal distribution is that we run the world as though it was populated entirely by Bob Cringelys, completely ignoring the Don Knuths among us. """ From Accidental Empires. Which you can get as a book, but he uploaded a scan to his blog here: https://www.cringely.com/2013/02/10/accidental-empires-part-8-chapter-2-the-tyranny-of-the-normal-distribution/ https://www.cringely.com/2013/02/10/accidental-empires-part-...
TacticalCoder 5y ago
> "Tom, we're all really sorry we didn't become software engineers, I guess we'll all quit our jobs and go back to college," which (rightly) made me feel like an asshole. The problem is that MS Word kinda require you to be a software engineer to be able to use it and produce a document which does not look like a ransom letter (and even then, it doesn't look great). Word, just like Excel, are extremely complex and complicated software. Sure, they can be used in a "simple" manner, but god forbid regular users to select something by mistake then click on the wrong button (among the myriad of buttons around). > I discovered LaTeX + Pandoc, and it created documents that I thought looked much nicer About any document editor or typesetting program produces documents that are better looking than Word. It's not a thought.
wly_cdgr 5y ago
Why use big Word when small Notepad do trick?
maxerickson 5y ago
Did you notice they released a new layout engine for Word sometime in the last ten years? Did you turn on kerning?

lostlogin 5y ago

> I've pretty much hated MS Word Do you mean the app, the web or the Teams version? Or is it the way each allows different things, blocks certain actions or displays differently? It is incredible that this mess is the industry standard.

tombert 5y ago
I was referring to the app, whatever was recent in 2011 or so. 2007 I think? I haven't used it in a long time. I always wanted my documents (and particularly equations) to look as nice as the formatting in my textbooks, and it felt like no matter how much finagling I did (which was not an insignificant amount of time being spent), it never looked quite as good. Also, I never fully knew what copy-paste was actually going to do. Was it going to copy the source formatting? Was it going to adopt the style of where I was pasting? Was it going to do neither and just break everything? I was never sure, so I always ended up pasting into Notepad and then re-copying it to guarantee all the formatting was stripped out. And sometimes there would be just a vanilla "I pressed a random keystroke by accident, all the formatting broke, and undo doesn't appear to do anything" issues. This might just be gross incompetence on my end (it wouldn't be the first time) but nearly everyone I've described this issue to has experienced similar problems. Also, I can't remember the details of it, and it's possibly fixed now, but I had issues with the equation editor simply not having all the symbols I needed. In fairness, I have similar complaints about most of the other WYSIWYG word processors, so I don't mean to pick on MS Word specifically (most of these complaints apply to Pages and LibreOffice as well).
- lostlogin 5y ago
  > I never fully knew what copy-paste was actually going to do. On a Mac, Option+Shift+Command+V is paste without style. I can’t understand why this wasn’t the default (or when Command+V is pressed). Edit: > I was referring to the app, whatever was recent in 2011 or so. 2007 I think? I haven't used it in a long time. I was raging at my world. Things have got much, much worse in the MS Office world. Going back to it after a long absence had me baffled. It’s all online now, except when it isn’t, or when it sort of isn’t and it does not work well.
  - tombert 5y ago
    I was on Windows at the time. I'm sure there's an equivalent in Windows but I never learned it, presumably because I was too lazy.
    - frosted-flakes 5y ago
      In Word, if you paste something, it will show a little tooltip menu beside the pasted content that allows you to change if it keeps source formatting, adopts destination formatting, or has no formatting.
  - II2II 5y ago
    > On a Mac, Option+Shift+Command+V is paste without style. On Windows, it used to be Control-Shift-V. Unfortunately, it does not work in Office 2016 (and likely other recent versions). While the new approach is more flexible, it would have been nice if they kept the old behaviour bound to the old key combination. I agree with recent versions of Office being a baffling mess. The only reason why I keep Office 2016 around is for the rare case that I need to send an editable document to someone else and I have no intent to upgrade since figuring out that mess is more trouble than it's worth.
dhosek 5y ago
The thing is, the vast majority of written communications are just fine in Word. And Word is a lot easier to integrate into other workflows than is LaTeX (and this is from someone who's finishing a book on using LaTeX right now). There are plenty of times that I wish for the kind of control that I have in LaTeX when using other platforms, but for just plain writing, I have to confess that Word is far more ergonomic and I haven't opened a LaTeX document to write fiction in for more than twenty years.
- tombert 5y ago
  How do you feel about Markdown? It sometimes has issues, but generally speaking I feel like Markdown converted to LaTeX looks pretty good, and I think that Markdown is usually fairly pleasant to work with.
  - Arainach 5y ago
    Markdown is designed to be simple and minimalist. It works well for the specific set of things it is designed to do, but once you need anything else - images, headers/footers, color, page numbers, and so on - it collapses entirely.
    - tombert 5y ago
      > Markdown is designed to be simple and minimalist. Fair enough. > It works well for the specific set of things it is designed to do, but once you need anything else - images, It's never been particularly hard for me to add images in markdown when rendering with Pandoc. It's fairly easy to add images and adjust their size and whatnot, not 100% what you're referring to. > headers/footers, Yeah, I'll give you that one, you gotta muck with the preamble YAML in pandoc to get headers, and that's some irritating LaTeX. > Color Also fair, not sure it's possible to have color in Markdown->PDF with Pandoc. > page numbers, Page numbers are output by default in Pandoc with Markdown. You can also add an optional Table of Contents if needed. Not sure where that rumor started.
      - 5y ago

analog31 5y ago

The word users may think they're more productive. And they might be right. I strategically avoid that question because I don't want it to drive my choice of tools.

dctoedt 5y ago

For short, quick-turnaround documents that get exchanged and redlined by multiple non-technical types (e.g., contracts): Microsoft Word, because it's the global standard and the network effect is in full force. For books and similar long docs: Definitely LaTeX (preferably with Emacs org-mode), because Word has a way of f[oul]ing up automatic cross-references even in short documents; pandoc can then turn the LaTeX into whatever other format you want.

tombert 5y ago
> For short, quick-turnaround documents that get exchanged and redlined by multiple non-technical types (e.g., contracts): Microsoft Word, because it's the global standard and the network effect is in full force. I agree for most people, though I feel like I'm pretty quick with Markdown + Pandoc -> LaTeX. Definitely agree with the citations stuff though; Pandoc's BibTeX support is generally good, and I've had substantially fewer headaches with it than trying to get the reference stuff in MSWord to work.
1-more 5y ago
> For books and similar long docs Weirdly enough I know someone with a book published by a big programming book company, and they accept manuscripts in Word only.
- smogcutter 5y ago
  This is likely unrelated to typesetting: it’s for the track changes feature. The final files that go to the printer are probably not produced by word.
  - 1-more 5y ago
    Oh yeah that's for sure. And since they have a house style for everything it'd be a bit silly to faff about making your \lstset look just so when the printer would need to re-set (reset?) all of it.
TacticalCoder 5y ago

marcosdumay 5y ago

Yet everybody seems to have the time and inclination to manage list numbering in Word, that doesn't work at all, does not allow direct manipulation, and has all the relevant information hidden. It's just that people don't mind losing months of productivity in a couple of years if it means saving a couple of full days of learning. (A few times this even is the correct choice...) Anyway, I'll keep pushing for Libre Office. Word is a complete bullshit of a tool. If people's work involves numbering every odd paragraph into a list, they are probably better with LaTeX, but they won't learn it anyway. Yet, Writer simply works.

sethammons 5y ago
more people are probably hit by the list managing mess, but the one that got me recently was a blue line of some sort. Some margin or page break or something. My attorney asked if I could help him remove the blue line from the middle of the page he was typing out on a contract we were working on. For the life of me, I was unable to remove the blue line in <10min of effort. I had to say sorry, talk to your tech guy.
- plank 5y ago
  My solution for these problems (kind of like turn off/turn on): Create a new word document, and copy-paste stuff in front and stuff after to the new document. Sometimes this works when normal editing doesn’t.
  - maxerickson 5y ago
    The Show Styles, Style Inspector and Reveal Formatting panes all help with stuff like this. The last one should give a pretty clear hint to where the line is defined.
  - Moru 5y ago
    Our solution to anything like this has always been copy to notepad and back again. Old people knows exactly what is meant but people 25 and younger usually don't understand why or how. Seems to be a generational thing. Lately even notepad preserves utf8 so the method is starting to break together :)

prpl 5y ago

A nobel prize winner in physics, who I had an office across the hall from, once asked me ~10 years ago if I knew how to write ħ in Microsoft word. Unfortunately, I did not, and I was unable to help him. I was glad he asked me though. I probably should have tried what I just did though, google it, and copy+paste.

codetrotter 5y ago
On my desktop computer that runs Linux, and where I mostly type code and write in English, I use US English as the input and a Dvorak-based layout in hardware that I made for my programmable keyboard. Since I very rarely type in my native tongue on that computer, and I annoyingly frequently have had to reinstall the OS from scratch, I no longer bother with customizing xmodmap or similar things on that computer. So the few times when I have to type æ, ø or å on that computer, I just Google aelig, oslash or aring respectively and I go to the Wikipedia article about the letter or some other page from the results that has the letter on it and copy it from there. Works well enough given how rarely I type any of those letters on that computer.
- Seredo 5y ago
  You could use US Intl. keyboard layout and use RAlt+z/l/w for æ/ø/å. If you have a QMK Firmware keyboard you could even reprogram it to use Alt + '/;/[ to send these keys and you'll have æ/ø/å in the usual position.
- djokkataja 5y ago
  > and I annoyingly frequently have had to reinstall the OS from scratch Is there a story behind that?
  - codetrotter 5y ago
    One of the reasons is that the computer in question has a problem where suddenly everything completely freezes, and I have to forcibly reboot the computer with the hardware reset button. And sometimes after rebooting I find that files on the file system have become corrupted. Sometimes the machine will run for days without freezing up. Sometimes it can freeze up after just a couple of hours. Sometimes I am browsing the web when it happens. Sometimes I am writing code and compiling stuff when it happens. I think the longest uptime I have had on it after the problem started without it freezing has been maybe 8 days. It’s been like this for a long while. A couple of years at least. And when it freezes it’s not just the UI. It even stops responding to ping. A few months back someone suggested that it may be due to a faulty PSU. But even after changing the PSU to a new one, it still happens. And it’s been happening both with different Linux distros and with FreeBSD. My hardware is: - MSI B350 Tomahawk motherboard - AMD Ryzen 7 1700 CPU - MSI GeForce GTX 1060 6GB graphics card - Crucial DDR4 2133Mhz 32GB ECC (2x16GB) CT2K16G4WFD8213 RAM I bought those components in March of 2018, according to the order history in my account on the store where I bought it. I don’t remember if I ever did run a memory test, but I will do so again anyways soon because I am suspecting that faulty RAM may be the reason. It just takes a long time to run a memory test on 32 GB of RAM and so whenever I think about needing to run it I don’t have time to do so at that moment. But as I am typing this I realize that I’ve got to go ahead and actually find time for running it soon. Another couple of ideas I’ve had is that maybe the graphics card or the nvidia drivers are to blame. Or that I may have damaged some component with static electricity at some point. Or maybe it’s a thermal issue. I most recently did a fresh install earlier today, and at the same time I switched out the SSD that was in it for another one. As far as I can remember though, I think I was having this kind of problem even before I was using the SSD that I switched out today. But I am not sure about that. So it could be that the SSD was the problem. But it may be a few days until it freezes again if it’s not the reason. Or it could happen in some hours. I’ve also tried to look for clues in /var/log/syslog but haven’t really known what to look for specifically. And since even pinging the machine stops working when it freezes I am not sure the system would even be able to write to any logs at the moment that it freezes, since it seems that at that point pretty much everything has stopped working. Currently I am running tail -F /var/log/syslog in a terminal in the hopes of either seeing something relevant frozen on screen, or in the surrounding output when I reboot the machine since I will then know which line of output I should begin looking in the vicinity of. But yeah, a memory test is the next thing I plan to do after that.

akvadrako 5y ago

I think even for casual users LyX (a LaTeX editor) is better than Word for documents with simple layouts or many equations. Word is really complicated to understand and often makes formatting more difficult than it needs to be. So this doesn't seem like an elitist thing.

tombert 5y ago
Sure, but even if you're technically right, for Word there's a million tutorials and YouTube videos if you get stuck, not to mention that basically every office seems to have "that MS Office person" who seemingly knows every single trick imaginable in Word. Even if Word is more complicated, it's relatively cheap and easy to unblock yourself. I've not used LyX, but I suspect that it doesn't have nearly the same level of domain knowledge in the corporate world, artificially making it harder to learn. Is that fair? No, not at all, but that just seems to be how it is.
Thrymr 5y ago
> I think even for casual users LyX (a LaTeX editor) is better than Word for documents with simple layouts or many equations. That really depends on what you mean by "casual users". It's a lot of overhead for someone who isn't familiar with LaTeX already. I've tried showing this to students, and it's a much heavier lift than MS equation editor for limited tasks. Of course for professional typesetting or many complex equations LyX will win, but truly "casual" use it isn't close IMO.
- akvadrako 5y ago
  Well in college I only used LyX and I never knew LaTeX and I never found it easier to learn Word's equation editor.
netizen-936824 5y ago
When I first got into LaTeX I tried LyX. Horrible, clunky experience. I never recommend it to anyone, instead I recommend just using VSCodium and associated plugins, its a far smoother experience

glitchc 5y ago

That Word doesn't work (well) in Linux is a big reason why I still have Windows on my home computers.

coldtea 5y ago

>but I had to realize that not everyone is trying to create publisher-worthy documents Not to mention most LaTeX documents look like crap - the might get the "standard LaTeX paper-like formatting" but as a formatting it's nothing special to write home about, and the fonts don't look particularly good either. What I find especially funny, is there was a foreign commercial book from LaTex experts (and contributors), about LaTex, typeset in LaTex (of course), whose typesetting was all over the place -- including text running off the page inadvertently.

tombert 5y ago
I guess there’s no accounting for taste, but I quite like the default LaTeX font, better than most of the fonts I tried in Office.
wpietri 5y ago
Like you, I've never liked it. TeX has always struck me as more focused on the needs of a narrow set of TeX users, not the readers. And Bob Cringely tells a story about Knuth and the invention of TeX: """ It was a major advance, and in the introduction he proudly claimed that the printing once again looked just as good as the hot type of volume 1. Except it didn’t. Reading his introduction to volume 3,1 had the feeling that Knuth was wearing the emperor’s new clothes. Squinting closely at the type in volume 3, I saw the letters had that telltale look of a low-resolution laser printer—not the beautiful, smooth curves of real type or even of a photo typesetter. There were “jaggies”— little bumps that make all the difference between good type and bad. Yet here was Knuth, writing the same letters that I was reading, and claiming that they were beautiful. “Donnie,” I wanted to say. “What are you talking about? Can’t you see the jaggies?” But he couldn’t. Donald Knuth’s gray matter, far more powerful than mine, was making him look beyond the actual letters and words to the mathematical concepts that underlay them. Had a good enough laser printer been available, the printing would have been beautiful, so that’s what Knuth saw and I didn’t. This effect of mind over what matters is both a strength and a weakness for those, like Knuth, who would break radical new ground with computers. Unfortunately for printers, most of the rest of the world sees like me. The tyranny of the normal distribution is that we run the world as though it was populated entirely by Bob Cringelys, completely ignoring the Don Knuths among us. """ From Accidental Empires. Which you can get as a book, but he uploaded a scan to his blog here: https://www.cringely.com/2013/02/10/accidental-empires-part-8-chapter-2-the-tyranny-of-the-normal-distribution/ https://www.cringely.com/2013/02/10/accidental-empires-part-...

TacticalCoder 5y ago

> "Tom, we're all really sorry we didn't become software engineers, I guess we'll all quit our jobs and go back to college," which (rightly) made me feel like an asshole. The problem is that MS Word kinda require you to be a software engineer to be able to use it and produce a document which does not look like a ransom letter (and even then, it doesn't look great). Word, just like Excel, are extremely complex and complicated software. Sure, they can be used in a "simple" manner, but god forbid regular users to select something by mistake then click on the wrong button (among the myriad of buttons around). > I discovered LaTeX + Pandoc, and it created documents that I thought looked much nicer About any document editor or typesetting program produces documents that are better looking than Word. It's not a thought.

wly_cdgr 5y ago

Why use big Word when small Notepad do trick?

maxerickson 5y ago

Did you notice they released a new layout engine for Word sometime in the last ten years? Did you turn on kerning?