7 ms·

These problems tend to work themselves out naturally - when you purposefully damage your user experience, you lose the early tech adopters that originally drove

These problems tend to work themselves out naturally - when you purposefully damage your user experience, you lose the early tech adopters that originally drove your product growth. They instead flock to a competitor that leaves you holding your bag of a shitty product. There are a few companies flirting with this dangerous line right now and it opens them up completely for disruption, which is the opposite of what they want.

lordnacho 5y ago
I wish this was true, but there are a heck of a lot of office workers who have grown up with Windows and can never be trained to use anything else. You'll get a lot of resistance and rationalisation about why they don't think Linux or BSD or whatever isn't as good, and that the training time is better used to just work.
- lucasyvas 5y ago
  You're not wrong, but office users should be locked to a browser in 2022 anyway. What do they need Windows for? They can all use a web browser. Microsoft has done an amazing job convincing the office world they need Windows, when they don't need a single feature that it provides in 99% of cases.
  - Pasorrijer 5y ago
    As an officer worker, there are many many things I do that cannot be done in a web browser. File comparison tools, macros and complex excel queries, hard applications for both new and legacy critical programs... Can this be done on Linux? Frequently. Can it be done in a web browser? Rarely effectively and often not at all.
    - lucasyvas 5y ago
      That's fair - I would still be curious to know what percentage of office workers run Windows that don't actually need to.
    - hackerfromthefu 5y ago
      I'd have to say that, today, all of those can be done in the browser except Excel. File comparison, hard applications, legacy code, can be compiled to WASM and run quite well in the browser. The pieces are in place to do it, they just need polishing and tuning to make it ubiquitous. Even Excel could be compiled like this but again MS wants to own you and pin you over a barrel while extracting everything they can from you, so Excel won't be available. But many/most Spreadsheets can be done in Libreoffice, or code or no/low code alternatives.
      - the_snooze 5y ago
        >File comparison, hard applications, legacy code, can be compiled to WASM and run quite well in the browser. Not when you're working on proprietary/confidential/classified information. >But many/most Spreadsheets can be done in Libreoffice, or code or no/low code alternatives. Not when you're working on spreadsheets that you need to send to organizations that heavily rely on MS Office.
        apetresc 5y ago
        > Not when you're working on proprietary/confidential/classified information. Why not? The WASM approach the OP is suggesting works entirely locally, the web is simply pushing client code to your browser.
        hulitu 5y ago
        > Why not? The WASM approach the OP is suggesting works entirely locally, the web is simply pushing client code to your browser Because "the web is simply pushing client code to your browser". Untrusted code. Which may violate the confidentiality of you document. I still don't get it why companies which deal with "confidential information" are very happy to put those documents in the cloud. But ... it is their data and they decide what to do with it.
        apetresc 5y ago
        I think you're still misunderstanding. The documents don't need to be "in the cloud", the WASM in your browser can operate on them locally. Is the WASM "untrusted"? Sure, I guess, all code you haven't written yourself is "untrusted" by default. Why would a native application shipped via CD or download be any more "trusted"?
    - 3np 5y ago
      Isn't Excel feature-complete in the browser now, macros and all? https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365
      - Pasorrijer 5y ago
        In theory, yes. However Excel Online breaks down quickly with large file sizes, loses formatting and struggles mightily with complex macros.
      - sjy 5y ago
        VBA macros aren't supported. Last time I checked even conditional formatting wasn't supported, although I see now it was added in January 2022 [1]. Even so, as with many other features, the web UI is different and more limited. Links to documents stored locally or on an SMB share don't work. Scrolling through thousands of rows is laggy. Generally, Excel Online is useless for the complex spreadsheets used in large enterprises, which themselves are often workarounds for the limitations of the web apps the enterprise is supposed to run on. [1]: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/excel-blog/new-conditional-formatting-experience-in-excel-for-the-web/ba-p/3066188 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/excel-blog/new-condit...
    - syntheweave 5y ago
      I can vouch for personal experience with macros and Linux, since I made my return to it this month. It's not ideal yet, but it's workable, and there's a generational transition taking place while moving from x11 to Wayland, since the two have different notions of input, so you have to wander through some compatibility stuff to find your way. This is annoying, but already much better than the Windows story, because you can customize things right down to the kernel level and generally get the result you're looking for in a pretty direct fashion. I now have it set up so that it detects the model of keyboard I plugged in and redirects specific models to specific macro layers - a seemingly obvious two-keyboards use case that can be a serious hassle on Windows without resorting to a hardware solution.
      - oblio 5y ago
        They were talking about Excel macros, not sure if you're talking about the same kind of macros.
    - zo1 5y ago
      Just wait till they start running those "native" programs in a VM on a server and streaming the UI to you in a browser for interaction.
      - hulitu 5y ago
        Last i heard they experimented with windows running in the cloud and the user having just a kind of thin client. It is hilarious that 20 years after SUN's "The network is the computer" and some years after freedesktop's initiatives "wayland", "X is obsolete" "X on network sucks", Microsoft is coming doing just this.
  - mamcx 5y ago
    Beware what you ask for: Browsers are becoming an OS, and ARE far more abusive with users. And that browser more likely is owned by oogle...
  - aksss 5y ago
    I think you’re projecting, and severely unfamiliar with the software.
  - Al-Khwarizmi 5y ago
    Not sure if with "should" you are talking about some kind of ideal world. But in 2022 in the real world, this cannot be done. Online Word is a joke. I would like to use it (because I hate MS Office, so if I could go without having it installed and taking room in my HD and start menu, it would be great) but it's unusable even for my quite basic needs. A sister comment talks about advanced stuff like Excel macros, etc.; but even very basic functionality is not available. For example: right now, it's impossible to edit a document online with Track Changes without showing all the changes (which makes documents practically unreadable). And you don't even have pages online, documents are shown with a continuous layout where it's difficult to know where pages start and end.
  - hulitu 5y ago
    MS Office in browser is like Teams: terrible. Aparently MS decided to rewrite the UI for the browser app and even they acknoledge that is not working (do you want to open in desktop app ?)
- userbinator 5y ago
  who have grown up with Windows and can never be trained to use anything else. When Windows itself is changing so much that it hardly resembles what it used to be, there's going to be a lot of relearning anyway. On the other hand, you can make Linux look like any version of Windows if you really wanted to.
  - spaetzleesser 5y ago
    If you want Linux to compete, you need spreadsheet software as good as Excel and a word processor that's 100% compatible with Word. I tried to use LibreOffice for a while but Calc ins't there yet and I had tons of formatting problems when I sent documents to Words users. After dealing with this for a while you just give up and start using Office again.
    - jart 5y ago
      I don't want to pull back the curtain too much or tramp on everyone's hopes, but Linux can't compete with Microsoft because of UEFI. The PCs being sold today only allow Microsoft's software to run. In order to distribute a Linux distro, you have to ask Microsoft to give you a shim where they've signed your private key, so that you can share your own signed kernel builds with others. Therefore you can't publish a Linux desktop for consumers without being in league with the adversary.
      - sgjohnson 5y ago
        Is there a source for this? And also, can’t you just disable Secure Boot?
      - seanp2k2 5y ago
        Source? I've installed Ubuntu on half a dozen newish UEFI computers, some of which came with OEM Windows, over the past few years with no trouble https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UEFI/SecureBoot https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UEFI/SecureBoot
        5y ago
- creakingstairs 5y ago
  That’s true but the new generation have grown up with (for better or worse) web/apps. Once they are the main workforce, they will be much less reluctant to switch to whatever OS.
- jasonjayr 5y ago
  My kid just graduated high school last year. She would tell me stories about how impressed her peers were with seeing her do something as basic as copy and paste, and navigating files + folders. There is a generation of kids that have only ever grown up on tablets + the web, so; the desktop + office app market + ecosystem is ripe for disruption. Maybe it's done right this time, and not married to a single browser version(ha) or platform runtime.
  - brimble 5y ago
    > She would tell me stories about how impressed her peers were with seeing her do something as basic as copy and paste, and navigating files + folders. > There is a generation of kids that have only ever grown up on tablets + the web, so; the desktop + office app market + ecosystem is ripe for disruption. I'm not aware of any generation for which being comfortable with those things hasn't put one in, at least (I'm being very conservative), the top 20% of computer literacy. Most people are bad at just using a computer—given how long it's been a problem, there's either a lot of essential complexity there that cannot be mitigated or avoided to improve usability, or we as an industry have just done a terrible job designing desktop operating systems for regular people. I don't think tablets et c. have much to do with it.
tcmart14 5y ago
I don't think pleasing tech adopters is what help windows at this point. Maybe 20 year ago, sure. Today, most consumers of Windows that are not business/enterprise, are probably doing it more so because that was the defacto OS for them when they were in grade school, and it has been the defacto OS on most computers sub $1K. We are seeing some market shift to chrome OS and there is probably a good future where Chrome OS displaces Windows massively. If it does, it won't be because of tech adopters and such. It will be because Chrome OS is what is gaining popularity for kids in school and they will grow up being used to. Edit: Defacto above meaning, when I go into best buy, that is what is pre-loaded. Or I go to walmart, that is what comes on the computer. Edit: 'there is probably a good future where Chrome OS' typo or poor wording. Meant to say something along the lines of, 'there is probably a good chance that a Chrome OS future happens'
- Espressosaurus 5y ago
  If you think Chrome OS is going to save you, you haven't been paying attention to Google for the past 10 years.
  - tcmart14 5y ago
    I didn't say it was going to save me. I do think I had a type that said 'good future.' I meant to put something along the lines of 'good probability of a future.' Chrome OS is going to be another user hostile environment for sure. But the point is, Chrome OS has a good shot at displacing windows not because it is better or less user hostile, but because it is putting cheap machines in the hands of kids who will one day, grow up, and enter the workforce and lead the workforce later on.
    - userbinator 5y ago
      Chrome OS has a good shot at displacing windows not because it is better or less user hostile, but because it is putting cheap machines in the hands of kids who will one day, grow up, and enter the workforce and lead the workforce later on. That's even worse, because as the saying goes, those who never had freedom (or ownership, for that matter) won't miss it.
skoskie 5y ago
Add MacOS to the list. The continued crippling of the OS for power users keeps pushing us toward the iOS experience, and it’s killing me. I can’t see details of my own log files for privacy reasons. The new Finder design is just awful and accomplished nothing for all the change. Now I learn I can’t make hardlinks for directories on APFS. The list goes on.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  Yes, I moved away too. So much dumbing down, so many things changed just for the sake of it. And of course no settings to revert it. Eventually it was just too annoying to upgrade. A lot of it is security hardening but the problem is I have to give all control to Apple. There is no way for me to change anything in the read only OS part without the whole rigmarole of booting into recovery mode and blessing my changes with every update. There should be a way I can sign my own changes. It's the Apple way or the highway. And I'm running into more and more issues when the Apple way is just not good enough for me. I'm really so happy with having options again with KDE. No more opinionated software for me.
  - raxxorrax 5y ago
    They have long understood that security is always an argument to throw into the pot to justify their changes. Boot malware isn't really a widely spread problem in 22 and MS still pushes TPM 2.0. It is probably less about user security than control about users and machines.
    - scarface74 5y ago
      This is what can happen when you turn off SIP on the Mac. You can’t trust developers to not be careless and/or malignant. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/no-it-wasnt-a-virus-it-was-chrome-that-stopped-macs-from-booting/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/no-it...
      - digisign 5y ago

lordnacho 5y ago

I wish this was true, but there are a heck of a lot of office workers who have grown up with Windows and can never be trained to use anything else. You'll get a lot of resistance and rationalisation about why they don't think Linux or BSD or whatever isn't as good, and that the training time is better used to just work.

lucasyvas 5y ago
You're not wrong, but office users should be locked to a browser in 2022 anyway. What do they need Windows for? They can all use a web browser. Microsoft has done an amazing job convincing the office world they need Windows, when they don't need a single feature that it provides in 99% of cases.
- Pasorrijer 5y ago
  As an officer worker, there are many many things I do that cannot be done in a web browser. File comparison tools, macros and complex excel queries, hard applications for both new and legacy critical programs... Can this be done on Linux? Frequently. Can it be done in a web browser? Rarely effectively and often not at all.
  - lucasyvas 5y ago
    That's fair - I would still be curious to know what percentage of office workers run Windows that don't actually need to.
  - hackerfromthefu 5y ago
    I'd have to say that, today, all of those can be done in the browser except Excel. File comparison, hard applications, legacy code, can be compiled to WASM and run quite well in the browser. The pieces are in place to do it, they just need polishing and tuning to make it ubiquitous. Even Excel could be compiled like this but again MS wants to own you and pin you over a barrel while extracting everything they can from you, so Excel won't be available. But many/most Spreadsheets can be done in Libreoffice, or code or no/low code alternatives.
    - the_snooze 5y ago
      >File comparison, hard applications, legacy code, can be compiled to WASM and run quite well in the browser. Not when you're working on proprietary/confidential/classified information. >But many/most Spreadsheets can be done in Libreoffice, or code or no/low code alternatives. Not when you're working on spreadsheets that you need to send to organizations that heavily rely on MS Office.
      - apetresc 5y ago
        > Not when you're working on proprietary/confidential/classified information. Why not? The WASM approach the OP is suggesting works entirely locally, the web is simply pushing client code to your browser.
        hulitu 5y ago
        > Why not? The WASM approach the OP is suggesting works entirely locally, the web is simply pushing client code to your browser Because "the web is simply pushing client code to your browser". Untrusted code. Which may violate the confidentiality of you document. I still don't get it why companies which deal with "confidential information" are very happy to put those documents in the cloud. But ... it is their data and they decide what to do with it.
        apetresc 5y ago
        I think you're still misunderstanding. The documents don't need to be "in the cloud", the WASM in your browser can operate on them locally. Is the WASM "untrusted"? Sure, I guess, all code you haven't written yourself is "untrusted" by default. Why would a native application shipped via CD or download be any more "trusted"?
  - 3np 5y ago
    Isn't Excel feature-complete in the browser now, macros and all? https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365
    - Pasorrijer 5y ago
      In theory, yes. However Excel Online breaks down quickly with large file sizes, loses formatting and struggles mightily with complex macros.
    - sjy 5y ago
      VBA macros aren't supported. Last time I checked even conditional formatting wasn't supported, although I see now it was added in January 2022 [1]. Even so, as with many other features, the web UI is different and more limited. Links to documents stored locally or on an SMB share don't work. Scrolling through thousands of rows is laggy. Generally, Excel Online is useless for the complex spreadsheets used in large enterprises, which themselves are often workarounds for the limitations of the web apps the enterprise is supposed to run on. [1]: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/excel-blog/new-conditional-formatting-experience-in-excel-for-the-web/ba-p/3066188 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/excel-blog/new-condit...
  - syntheweave 5y ago
    I can vouch for personal experience with macros and Linux, since I made my return to it this month. It's not ideal yet, but it's workable, and there's a generational transition taking place while moving from x11 to Wayland, since the two have different notions of input, so you have to wander through some compatibility stuff to find your way. This is annoying, but already much better than the Windows story, because you can customize things right down to the kernel level and generally get the result you're looking for in a pretty direct fashion. I now have it set up so that it detects the model of keyboard I plugged in and redirects specific models to specific macro layers - a seemingly obvious two-keyboards use case that can be a serious hassle on Windows without resorting to a hardware solution.
    - oblio 5y ago
      They were talking about Excel macros, not sure if you're talking about the same kind of macros.
  - zo1 5y ago
    Just wait till they start running those "native" programs in a VM on a server and streaming the UI to you in a browser for interaction.
    - hulitu 5y ago
      Last i heard they experimented with windows running in the cloud and the user having just a kind of thin client. It is hilarious that 20 years after SUN's "The network is the computer" and some years after freedesktop's initiatives "wayland", "X is obsolete" "X on network sucks", Microsoft is coming doing just this.
- mamcx 5y ago
  Beware what you ask for: Browsers are becoming an OS, and ARE far more abusive with users. And that browser more likely is owned by oogle...
- aksss 5y ago
  I think you’re projecting, and severely unfamiliar with the software.
- Al-Khwarizmi 5y ago
  Not sure if with "should" you are talking about some kind of ideal world. But in 2022 in the real world, this cannot be done. Online Word is a joke. I would like to use it (because I hate MS Office, so if I could go without having it installed and taking room in my HD and start menu, it would be great) but it's unusable even for my quite basic needs. A sister comment talks about advanced stuff like Excel macros, etc.; but even very basic functionality is not available. For example: right now, it's impossible to edit a document online with Track Changes without showing all the changes (which makes documents practically unreadable). And you don't even have pages online, documents are shown with a continuous layout where it's difficult to know where pages start and end.
- hulitu 5y ago
  MS Office in browser is like Teams: terrible. Aparently MS decided to rewrite the UI for the browser app and even they acknoledge that is not working (do you want to open in desktop app ?)
userbinator 5y ago
who have grown up with Windows and can never be trained to use anything else. When Windows itself is changing so much that it hardly resembles what it used to be, there's going to be a lot of relearning anyway. On the other hand, you can make Linux look like any version of Windows if you really wanted to.
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  If you want Linux to compete, you need spreadsheet software as good as Excel and a word processor that's 100% compatible with Word. I tried to use LibreOffice for a while but Calc ins't there yet and I had tons of formatting problems when I sent documents to Words users. After dealing with this for a while you just give up and start using Office again.
  - jart 5y ago
    I don't want to pull back the curtain too much or tramp on everyone's hopes, but Linux can't compete with Microsoft because of UEFI. The PCs being sold today only allow Microsoft's software to run. In order to distribute a Linux distro, you have to ask Microsoft to give you a shim where they've signed your private key, so that you can share your own signed kernel builds with others. Therefore you can't publish a Linux desktop for consumers without being in league with the adversary.
    - sgjohnson 5y ago
      Is there a source for this? And also, can’t you just disable Secure Boot?
    - seanp2k2 5y ago
      Source? I've installed Ubuntu on half a dozen newish UEFI computers, some of which came with OEM Windows, over the past few years with no trouble https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UEFI/SecureBoot https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UEFI/SecureBoot
      - 5y ago
creakingstairs 5y ago
That’s true but the new generation have grown up with (for better or worse) web/apps. Once they are the main workforce, they will be much less reluctant to switch to whatever OS.
jasonjayr 5y ago
My kid just graduated high school last year. She would tell me stories about how impressed her peers were with seeing her do something as basic as copy and paste, and navigating files + folders. There is a generation of kids that have only ever grown up on tablets + the web, so; the desktop + office app market + ecosystem is ripe for disruption. Maybe it's done right this time, and not married to a single browser version(ha) or platform runtime.
- brimble 5y ago
  > She would tell me stories about how impressed her peers were with seeing her do something as basic as copy and paste, and navigating files + folders. > There is a generation of kids that have only ever grown up on tablets + the web, so; the desktop + office app market + ecosystem is ripe for disruption. I'm not aware of any generation for which being comfortable with those things hasn't put one in, at least (I'm being very conservative), the top 20% of computer literacy. Most people are bad at just using a computer—given how long it's been a problem, there's either a lot of essential complexity there that cannot be mitigated or avoided to improve usability, or we as an industry have just done a terrible job designing desktop operating systems for regular people. I don't think tablets et c. have much to do with it.

tcmart14 5y ago

I don't think pleasing tech adopters is what help windows at this point. Maybe 20 year ago, sure. Today, most consumers of Windows that are not business/enterprise, are probably doing it more so because that was the defacto OS for them when they were in grade school, and it has been the defacto OS on most computers sub $1K. We are seeing some market shift to chrome OS and there is probably a good future where Chrome OS displaces Windows massively. If it does, it won't be because of tech adopters and such. It will be because Chrome OS is what is gaining popularity for kids in school and they will grow up being used to. Edit: Defacto above meaning, when I go into best buy, that is what is pre-loaded. Or I go to walmart, that is what comes on the computer. Edit: 'there is probably a good future where Chrome OS' typo or poor wording. Meant to say something along the lines of, 'there is probably a good chance that a Chrome OS future happens'

Espressosaurus 5y ago
If you think Chrome OS is going to save you, you haven't been paying attention to Google for the past 10 years.
- tcmart14 5y ago
  I didn't say it was going to save me. I do think I had a type that said 'good future.' I meant to put something along the lines of 'good probability of a future.' Chrome OS is going to be another user hostile environment for sure. But the point is, Chrome OS has a good shot at displacing windows not because it is better or less user hostile, but because it is putting cheap machines in the hands of kids who will one day, grow up, and enter the workforce and lead the workforce later on.
  - userbinator 5y ago
    Chrome OS has a good shot at displacing windows not because it is better or less user hostile, but because it is putting cheap machines in the hands of kids who will one day, grow up, and enter the workforce and lead the workforce later on. That's even worse, because as the saying goes, those who never had freedom (or ownership, for that matter) won't miss it.

skoskie 5y ago

Add MacOS to the list. The continued crippling of the OS for power users keeps pushing us toward the iOS experience, and it’s killing me. I can’t see details of my own log files for privacy reasons. The new Finder design is just awful and accomplished nothing for all the change. Now I learn I can’t make hardlinks for directories on APFS. The list goes on.

GekkePrutser 5y ago
Yes, I moved away too. So much dumbing down, so many things changed just for the sake of it. And of course no settings to revert it. Eventually it was just too annoying to upgrade. A lot of it is security hardening but the problem is I have to give all control to Apple. There is no way for me to change anything in the read only OS part without the whole rigmarole of booting into recovery mode and blessing my changes with every update. There should be a way I can sign my own changes. It's the Apple way or the highway. And I'm running into more and more issues when the Apple way is just not good enough for me. I'm really so happy with having options again with KDE. No more opinionated software for me.
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  They have long understood that security is always an argument to throw into the pot to justify their changes. Boot malware isn't really a widely spread problem in 22 and MS still pushes TPM 2.0. It is probably less about user security than control about users and machines.
  - scarface74 5y ago
    This is what can happen when you turn off SIP on the Mac. You can’t trust developers to not be careless and/or malignant. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/no-it-wasnt-a-virus-it-was-chrome-that-stopped-macs-from-booting/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/no-it...
    - digisign 5y ago