4 ms·

The article says "we can’t be bothered to get used to a different word processor" and links to LibreOffice, but in my experience, it's not about "getting used t

The article says "we can’t be bothered to get used to a different word processor" and links to LibreOffice, but in my experience, it's not about "getting used to" - it's simply that the UX of LibreOffice is absolutely atrocious. The UX is extremely overloaded with features with little organization or structure, making it hard to find the few features you actually need, and every simple thing requires 3x as many clicks as with other products. I tried making slides with LibreOffice, and even though I don't need any of the collaboration features and would prefer to work locally, I ended up deleting my entire presentation and just starting over from scratch with Google Slides, because that was easier than trying to do anything in LibreOffice.

consteval 2y ago
To be completely 100% fair, all these all describe microsoft products. All of them. Overloaded with features, with no consistency, wonky behaviors, and 3x as many clicks as everything should take. The reason we look past it is, well, we're used to it. Software is 95% inertia, 5% quality.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
  I think MS Office was reasonably fine (at least the old menu based versions), and there's still a massive difference (at least 2x) between Microsoft and LibreOffice. Inertia is a big thing, but with many open source products and UX, I'd say that quality is often a similarly big if not bigger factor.
  - consteval 2y ago
    Personally I disagree. Older versions of office were better, yes, but we've been on ribbons for a while now. It's awful UX, we're all just used to Microsoft making shit software that mostly works so we look past it. This is pretty consistent across all Microsoft products. Over time they sort of deteriorate and rot. We're up to, like, a dozen different settings windows in Windows now. Half of them don't have an "apply" button. The other half don't even report when configuration fails. And, cherry on top, Microsoft has taken a "pretend it didn't happen" approach to modern error reporting. So, you don't even have a number to take to customer service. It's difficult to take Microsoft software seriously when Excel can't open two workbooks with the same name (for three decades, btw) and Windows says "oops! Windows made a fucky wucky :(" when anything bad happens. And, heaven forbid you have to configure IIS on Windows Server. Jesus Christ, I would rather blow my head off, blend the flesh chunks into a smoothie, and then drink the aforementioned smoothie by pouring it into my now exposed neck hole. But, bright side, at least NTFS is only 1000x slower than competing filesystems (ext4, btrfs, zfs). So, you can grab a cup of coffee while trying to open the logs on your failing Windows Server.

consteval 2y ago

To be completely 100% fair, all these all describe microsoft products. All of them. Overloaded with features, with no consistency, wonky behaviors, and 3x as many clicks as everything should take. The reason we look past it is, well, we're used to it. Software is 95% inertia, 5% quality.

tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
I think MS Office was reasonably fine (at least the old menu based versions), and there's still a massive difference (at least 2x) between Microsoft and LibreOffice. Inertia is a big thing, but with many open source products and UX, I'd say that quality is often a similarly big if not bigger factor.
- consteval 2y ago
  Personally I disagree. Older versions of office were better, yes, but we've been on ribbons for a while now. It's awful UX, we're all just used to Microsoft making shit software that mostly works so we look past it. This is pretty consistent across all Microsoft products. Over time they sort of deteriorate and rot. We're up to, like, a dozen different settings windows in Windows now. Half of them don't have an "apply" button. The other half don't even report when configuration fails. And, cherry on top, Microsoft has taken a "pretend it didn't happen" approach to modern error reporting. So, you don't even have a number to take to customer service. It's difficult to take Microsoft software seriously when Excel can't open two workbooks with the same name (for three decades, btw) and Windows says "oops! Windows made a fucky wucky :(" when anything bad happens. And, heaven forbid you have to configure IIS on Windows Server. Jesus Christ, I would rather blow my head off, blend the flesh chunks into a smoothie, and then drink the aforementioned smoothie by pouring it into my now exposed neck hole. But, bright side, at least NTFS is only 1000x slower than competing filesystems (ext4, btrfs, zfs). So, you can grab a cup of coffee while trying to open the logs on your failing Windows Server.