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Yeah, Proton and Wine seem perfect for gaming, but I have never seen someone get Office right. That might be an audience difference or perhaps MS deliberately f

by 9x39 1y ago

Yeah, Proton and Wine seem perfect for gaming, but I have never seen someone get Office right. That might be an audience difference or perhaps MS deliberately frustrates that attempt. You could try 11 IOT LTSC[1] which is super-stripped down like an appliance. Set a few GPOs, get her files synced, set remote access. You could even do something like DeepFreeze if she's prone to clicking on the wrong thing. Restricting her to running Chrome and Office with Applocker is a possibility for her safety - I have literally interrupted scammers "from Microsoft" on the phone with the elderly and naive. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-windows-11-iot-enterprise-ltsc https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-windows-...

tombert 1y ago
I'm not sure my mom even does anything that the browser Office won't do; she uses Excel heavily but she's not using any advanced formulas or VBA or anything, and her use of Microsoft Word is generally using pretty basic formatting. Honestly I don't think that she does anything that can't easily be handled by Google Drive or OnlyOffice. That doesn't matter though; the web browser is a complete non-starter, and if it doesn't have the Microsoft Office branding she doesn't want to go for it. This didn't used to bother me much, until Microsoft decided it would be best to brick her computer because the people who run Windows Update don't know what they're doing. The one job of Windows Update is to not break shit, and they've proven incapable of that. Whomever works on it should be embarrassed for working on one of the most consistently hated pieces of technology know to humanity. I thought about using one of those appliance releases of Windows, but I also don't really want to LARP as a Windows Sysadmin, especially since I don't even have a Windows computer in my house. If I were to somehow convince her to use Linux, there would be "security via ignorance"; she doesn't know anything about how to use Linux so she wouldn't do much outside of the easy, relatively safe path, and if she did break it then it would be much easier for me to log in and fix it with tmate or Tailscale + SSH.
- 9x39 1y ago
  If she insists on Office and won't try Google Drive, perhaps you could experiment with setting up Office in a Chrome PWA for her and sidestep Windows?

by 9x39 1y ago

tombert 1y ago

I'm not sure my mom even does anything that the browser Office won't do; she uses Excel heavily but she's not using any advanced formulas or VBA or anything, and her use of Microsoft Word is generally using pretty basic formatting. Honestly I don't think that she does anything that can't easily be handled by Google Drive or OnlyOffice. That doesn't matter though; the web browser is a complete non-starter, and if it doesn't have the Microsoft Office branding she doesn't want to go for it. This didn't used to bother me much, until Microsoft decided it would be best to brick her computer because the people who run Windows Update don't know what they're doing. The one job of Windows Update is to not break shit, and they've proven incapable of that. Whomever works on it should be embarrassed for working on one of the most consistently hated pieces of technology know to humanity. I thought about using one of those appliance releases of Windows, but I also don't really want to LARP as a Windows Sysadmin, especially since I don't even have a Windows computer in my house. If I were to somehow convince her to use Linux, there would be "security via ignorance"; she doesn't know anything about how to use Linux so she wouldn't do much outside of the easy, relatively safe path, and if she did break it then it would be much easier for me to log in and fix it with tmate or Tailscale + SSH.

9x39 1y ago
If she insists on Office and won't try Google Drive, perhaps you could experiment with setting up Office in a Chrome PWA for her and sidestep Windows?