4 ms·

I don't think Excel is worse on a phone than on desktop because people don't think it's capable of "real work". It's worse because the whole interface of Excel

I don't think Excel is worse on a phone than on desktop because people don't think it's capable of "real work". It's worse because the whole interface of Excel is designed around a mouse and keyboard. The tiny little cells, the dragging things to be wider and narrower, typing everything - everything is designed around using a very accurate pointer and a keyboard. I have no idea how you'd use Excel productively on a phone. Even if the cells are the same size as they are on a desktop, the screen is tiny, so you'd not be able to see anything. And if the cells are smaller, then they're even harder to use. They actually need to be bigger to be a decent touch interface, and then you'd be constantly scrolling around. The same applies to things like text editors. Phone keyboards are awful for typing anything except English prose. The only reason they're usable for typing is the autocorrection features. I turned mine off for a while and then you really realise how precise you have to be to type everything correctly on a phone. You certainly can't write code on them - imagine switching to the symbols keyboard every couple of seconds. It just doesn't make sense. It's bad enough typing a URL.

fragmede 3y ago
Right. And we can see that by looking at the iPad, a device halfway between a full size computer and a smartphone. Throw in a keyboard, and you can definitely use Google Sheets (Excel is so 90's), and I'd dare say you can do a lot more with a ipad today including the Internet than you ever could on Windows 98 without. The world's progressed since Windows 98 for good and bad. There are a multitude of cloud services that let you program from your iphone or ipad. Yes, that's not gcc running locally and yeah something's been lost along with progress. I miss it too. But we live in the present, not the past. Linux is going through its own debacle with Wayland and snap, there's no clear path forwards and it looks like that's just how things are now. Like how it's 2023 and Sonos is the only game in the multi-room-audio town due to patents unless you want to hack something up.
- memefrog 3y ago
  There's no "debacle with Wayland". There was some controversy a few years ago, and some people will stick with X forever for the same reason that there are still people that will resolutely stick with sysvinit. But Wayland is not controversial in the mainstream any more than systemd is. Snaps, on the other hand? Yeah there's certainly some controversy there. The clear aim there is a walled garden distribution. But the good thing is that you can just not use Ubuntu. Nobody is forced to use Ubuntu. I don't know anyone with a Sonos. Yamaha's multi-room audio hasn't had any problems for me.
  - zaat 3y ago
    I'm not sure you get to decide what is controversial and what's mainstream without hard numbers behind your statements. As a single datapoint, I can say that systemd is awesome but Wayland is still crap, whenever I try to stick with it I hit a stupid issue within few weeks, debug and analyze for a week, then when I remember that I have enabled Wayland I go back to X and everything just work. I have zero ideological or personal affiliation here, I just want my stuff to work.
    - memefrog 3y ago
      I don't really care whether you have issues with something Wayland-related. You can't "enable Wayland" anyway because Wayland isn't software, it's just a protocol. If you have a problem with Wayland it's like having a problem when you enable HTTP/2 on your web server. The problem is with the particular server, or the particular browser, or something in between. If you have a Wayland issue, you don't have a Wayland issue, you actually have a Gnome issue or a Firefox issue or something. Regardless there is no 'Wayland debacle' that Linux is 'going through' with 'no clear path forwards'. There is a clear path forwards, and it isn't really controversial at all. Wayland is the clear path forwards, and in the long-run is the clearly better choice. But it is a big change and in an "ecosystem" that is so decentralised that kind of change takes a long, long time. Enabling Wayland in your particular environment might not be the best choice yet, whether because of bugs with your desktop environment or the applications you use, or because of features that aren't there yet or just general instability. But for most people it's been enabled for years and years now and it's just... better. No more screen tearing, no more buggy insecure X display server. It says something powerful that people whinged and moaned at first about it, but that their revealed preferences tell a different story: nobody was so annoyed that they were prepared to maintain X going forward. Clearly it can't actually be that important to them.
      - acka 3y ago
        Conspicuously absent from your arguments why Wayland isn't controversial: NVIDIA. Trick question long did it take to settle the controversy over which memory manager to use? The answer is indeterminable, as it is still ongoing. The NVIDIA proprietary drivers used with GBM and Wayland still work like crap, the driver architecture is stacked heavily in favor of EGLStreams, and there is no fix but to either switch to Nouveau and lose performance, CUDA, and lots of HW-accelerated video codecs, use GNOME or KDE and hope that they don't drop support for NVIDIA, or hope and pray that someday NVIDIA will open-source its drivers so that others can fix their bugs for them.
- rchaud 3y ago
  > Throw in a keyboard, and you can definitely use Google Sheets (Excel is so 90's), and I'd dare say you can do a lot more with a ipad today including the Internet than you ever could on Windows 98 without. If you're going to be using Google or web apps, why even bother paying the Apple tax?
  - NavinF 3y ago
    Battery life and responsiveness. Eg there's no alternative to the M2 Pro CPU. It's not just pareto optimal, but at the top of the leaderboard in both metrics
    - mambru 3y ago
      Just got a mini pc with AMD, which can hold its ground against a mac mini, but costs ~4 times less (602€ vs 2259€). Comes with 32GB of RAM, 1 TB SSD, and Linux works great! https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-um773-lite?variant=43717641896181 https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-um773-lite?... https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-amd_ryzen_7_7735hs-vs-apple_m2_pro_10_cpu_16_gpu https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-amd_ryzen_7_7735hs...
      - NavinF 3y ago
        That's a desktop. I mentioned battery life because I was talking about laptops and tablets. btw price grows exponentially with single threaded performance, which in turn determines responsiveness. Your link shows that the M2 Pro is much more performant even compared to your desktop. 2689 vs 2023 is a huge gap: https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-amd_ryzen_7_7735hs-vs-apple_m2_pro_10_cpu_16_gpu#:~:text=6%20(Single%2DCore)-,Geekbench%206,-is%20a%20benchmark https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-amd_ryzen_7_7735hs...
        mambru 3y ago
        Sure, it's a desktop with a 35-50W TDP, M2 Pro is around 30W? I agree M2 is better, but not at 4x the price for 1 My responsiveness is great, and Linux experience for my UC (dev) is much better. Another comparison link: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/5186vs5138/Apple-M2-Pro-10-Core-3480-MHz-vs-AMD-Ryzen-7-7735HS https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/5186vs5138/Apple-M2-Pro...
TheSpiceIsLife 3y ago
Connect the phone to a larger display and a keyboard and mouse. Pretty good setup for people who’s only computer is their phone.
Kwpolska 3y ago
Did you actually try using Excel on your phone? (The Microsoft 365 app is free, you don't need a subscription to use many features of the mobile Excel app.) The cells are displayed at a size that is comfortable to read on a phone (which means you need to scroll). When you click on a cell, you get two handles (top left and bottom right) to grow/shrink the selection. On double-tap, a small popup toolbar appears, where you can select Fill, which makes the handles control the usual Excel filling feature. The cell headings have handles to make the cells wider. It just works, and while there are no macros, and some other advanced things might be missing, it's pretty good for most typical editing.
jeroenhd 3y ago
Excel on a phone is dog slow for some reason (seriously, I've run Excel on a Pentium II, you don't need this much CPU power) but the UI is fine. Cells are large enough to comfortably interact with but not big enough to cause problems. The lack of space for UI hides a large part of the standard Excel ribbon, but there's absolutely nothing that prevents Excel from working on your phone. Phone keyboards don't always need to be QWERTY. Setting flags on input controls to hide autocomplete or to focus on numeric/mathematic input is trivial. Microsoft Excel displays its custom keyboars optimized for formula entries for phones, with formula autocomplete available as well. Word is dog slow as well, but Google Docs seems like a fine text editor for most cases. GDocs isn't that extensive a text editor to begin with, but you've got everything you need to type out a document. In fact, I think many people under thirty will be faster typists on the phone with autocomplete than in their keyboards sitting behind a computer. A whole generation is currently doing their homework on a phone! I wouldn't want to program on a phone keyboard and tasks that need a lot of UI (like PowerPoints) probably aren't very comfortable either, but for Excel and Word you don't need a computer at all. I don't know what office suite you've tried or what device you've tried it on, but it's really not as bad as you make it seem. It'll be terrible for someone who's used to working on a PC, just like using Excel is terrible for someone who's been working on phones their entire life.

fragmede 3y ago

Right. And we can see that by looking at the iPad, a device halfway between a full size computer and a smartphone. Throw in a keyboard, and you can definitely use Google Sheets (Excel is so 90's), and I'd dare say you can do a lot more with a ipad today including the Internet than you ever could on Windows 98 without. The world's progressed since Windows 98 for good and bad. There are a multitude of cloud services that let you program from your iphone or ipad. Yes, that's not gcc running locally and yeah something's been lost along with progress. I miss it too. But we live in the present, not the past. Linux is going through its own debacle with Wayland and snap, there's no clear path forwards and it looks like that's just how things are now. Like how it's 2023 and Sonos is the only game in the multi-room-audio town due to patents unless you want to hack something up.

memefrog 3y ago
There's no "debacle with Wayland". There was some controversy a few years ago, and some people will stick with X forever for the same reason that there are still people that will resolutely stick with sysvinit. But Wayland is not controversial in the mainstream any more than systemd is. Snaps, on the other hand? Yeah there's certainly some controversy there. The clear aim there is a walled garden distribution. But the good thing is that you can just not use Ubuntu. Nobody is forced to use Ubuntu. I don't know anyone with a Sonos. Yamaha's multi-room audio hasn't had any problems for me.
- zaat 3y ago
  I'm not sure you get to decide what is controversial and what's mainstream without hard numbers behind your statements. As a single datapoint, I can say that systemd is awesome but Wayland is still crap, whenever I try to stick with it I hit a stupid issue within few weeks, debug and analyze for a week, then when I remember that I have enabled Wayland I go back to X and everything just work. I have zero ideological or personal affiliation here, I just want my stuff to work.
  - memefrog 3y ago
    I don't really care whether you have issues with something Wayland-related. You can't "enable Wayland" anyway because Wayland isn't software, it's just a protocol. If you have a problem with Wayland it's like having a problem when you enable HTTP/2 on your web server. The problem is with the particular server, or the particular browser, or something in between. If you have a Wayland issue, you don't have a Wayland issue, you actually have a Gnome issue or a Firefox issue or something. Regardless there is no 'Wayland debacle' that Linux is 'going through' with 'no clear path forwards'. There is a clear path forwards, and it isn't really controversial at all. Wayland is the clear path forwards, and in the long-run is the clearly better choice. But it is a big change and in an "ecosystem" that is so decentralised that kind of change takes a long, long time. Enabling Wayland in your particular environment might not be the best choice yet, whether because of bugs with your desktop environment or the applications you use, or because of features that aren't there yet or just general instability. But for most people it's been enabled for years and years now and it's just... better. No more screen tearing, no more buggy insecure X display server. It says something powerful that people whinged and moaned at first about it, but that their revealed preferences tell a different story: nobody was so annoyed that they were prepared to maintain X going forward. Clearly it can't actually be that important to them.
    - acka 3y ago
      Conspicuously absent from your arguments why Wayland isn't controversial: NVIDIA. Trick question long did it take to settle the controversy over which memory manager to use? The answer is indeterminable, as it is still ongoing. The NVIDIA proprietary drivers used with GBM and Wayland still work like crap, the driver architecture is stacked heavily in favor of EGLStreams, and there is no fix but to either switch to Nouveau and lose performance, CUDA, and lots of HW-accelerated video codecs, use GNOME or KDE and hope that they don't drop support for NVIDIA, or hope and pray that someday NVIDIA will open-source its drivers so that others can fix their bugs for them.
rchaud 3y ago
> Throw in a keyboard, and you can definitely use Google Sheets (Excel is so 90's), and I'd dare say you can do a lot more with a ipad today including the Internet than you ever could on Windows 98 without. If you're going to be using Google or web apps, why even bother paying the Apple tax?
- NavinF 3y ago
  Battery life and responsiveness. Eg there's no alternative to the M2 Pro CPU. It's not just pareto optimal, but at the top of the leaderboard in both metrics
  - mambru 3y ago
    Just got a mini pc with AMD, which can hold its ground against a mac mini, but costs ~4 times less (602€ vs 2259€). Comes with 32GB of RAM, 1 TB SSD, and Linux works great! https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-um773-lite?variant=43717641896181 https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-um773-lite?... https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-amd_ryzen_7_7735hs-vs-apple_m2_pro_10_cpu_16_gpu https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-amd_ryzen_7_7735hs...
    - NavinF 3y ago
      That's a desktop. I mentioned battery life because I was talking about laptops and tablets. btw price grows exponentially with single threaded performance, which in turn determines responsiveness. Your link shows that the M2 Pro is much more performant even compared to your desktop. 2689 vs 2023 is a huge gap: https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-amd_ryzen_7_7735hs-vs-apple_m2_pro_10_cpu_16_gpu#:~:text=6%20(Single%2DCore)-,Geekbench%206,-is%20a%20benchmark https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-amd_ryzen_7_7735hs...
      - mambru 3y ago
        Sure, it's a desktop with a 35-50W TDP, M2 Pro is around 30W? I agree M2 is better, but not at 4x the price for 1 My responsiveness is great, and Linux experience for my UC (dev) is much better. Another comparison link: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/5186vs5138/Apple-M2-Pro-10-Core-3480-MHz-vs-AMD-Ryzen-7-7735HS https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/5186vs5138/Apple-M2-Pro...

TheSpiceIsLife 3y ago

Connect the phone to a larger display and a keyboard and mouse. Pretty good setup for people who’s only computer is their phone.

Kwpolska 3y ago

Did you actually try using Excel on your phone? (The Microsoft 365 app is free, you don't need a subscription to use many features of the mobile Excel app.) The cells are displayed at a size that is comfortable to read on a phone (which means you need to scroll). When you click on a cell, you get two handles (top left and bottom right) to grow/shrink the selection. On double-tap, a small popup toolbar appears, where you can select Fill, which makes the handles control the usual Excel filling feature. The cell headings have handles to make the cells wider. It just works, and while there are no macros, and some other advanced things might be missing, it's pretty good for most typical editing.

jeroenhd 3y ago

Excel on a phone is dog slow for some reason (seriously, I've run Excel on a Pentium II, you don't need this much CPU power) but the UI is fine. Cells are large enough to comfortably interact with but not big enough to cause problems. The lack of space for UI hides a large part of the standard Excel ribbon, but there's absolutely nothing that prevents Excel from working on your phone. Phone keyboards don't always need to be QWERTY. Setting flags on input controls to hide autocomplete or to focus on numeric/mathematic input is trivial. Microsoft Excel displays its custom keyboars optimized for formula entries for phones, with formula autocomplete available as well. Word is dog slow as well, but Google Docs seems like a fine text editor for most cases. GDocs isn't that extensive a text editor to begin with, but you've got everything you need to type out a document. In fact, I think many people under thirty will be faster typists on the phone with autocomplete than in their keyboards sitting behind a computer. A whole generation is currently doing their homework on a phone! I wouldn't want to program on a phone keyboard and tasks that need a lot of UI (like PowerPoints) probably aren't very comfortable either, but for Excel and Word you don't need a computer at all. I don't know what office suite you've tried or what device you've tried it on, but it's really not as bad as you make it seem. It'll be terrible for someone who's used to working on a PC, just like using Excel is terrible for someone who's been working on phones their entire life.