sbird

In the past, the things that Apple has done well has generally been good build quality and long support. There are exceptions, yes, but they’re usually better than their competitors in that field. Performance was always similar (or worse) for the price until Apple Silicon came around.

In modern times, all manufacturers produce laptops with excellent build quality (even smaller ones like Framework, Tuxedo, System76, etc.), all devices are generally supported for a while (+ can be extended with things like Linux), and performance is nowadays a race between the Mac and PC. You can do all the things on PC on Mac and vice versa.

What has always been the case and never gone away is Apple’s locked down ecosystem. They don’t support standard protocols, USB file transfer with iPhones is a nightmare on non-Macs (though it works fine for me on Linux right now, I imagine it depends on your distro and kernel, and it didn’t work for me a few years ago), all the iServices being closed and not interoperable with non-iDevices, poor repairability, setting the standard / trend for the worse, etc.

In terms of the operating system, it’s pretty different. For Windows, 2000 and XP were the golden age and it’s (mostly) been downhill from there, Windows 10 / 11 being the most egregious requiring an online account. CoPilot and broken updates certainly don’t help. MacOS is very closed and everything needs to be done the “Apple way”, and you need Apple hardware to run it (for the most part, see Hackintoshes).

Linux has always been an awesome alternative, though it doesn’t ship on many devices, it had excellent support on lots of hardware (unlike MacOS) and didn’t require any online crap (unlike Windows), app development is much more open than MacOS while being as convenient as the App Store (unlike Windows), and FOSS software are the GOATs. There are so many options for distros, desktop environments, depending on your hardware or preferences, and you can have full control over your system, or it can “just work” for grandma. It’s awesome! There’s recently been lots of development with Valve on the gaming side and there has been a drive towards Linux due to Microsoft breaking Win11 constantly and pushing CoPilot spyware (more users, more developers, more apps, more drivers, etc.!)

The Linux desktop has never been better, and there is no reason not to switch! You can even get Linux on a Mac if you wanted too, thanks to the team at Asahi Linux!

I’m running EndeavourOS (the easy mode Arch-based distro before CachyOS) with Niri (scrolling tiling WMs are neat!), but if you want to get started with Linux, I would not recommend either if you aren’t interested in config files and making something exactly how you want it to. Mint is awesome if you like Cinnamon, and Fedora is also good (though owned by Red Hat/IBM). The -buntus are also fine, but snaps, aside from using a proprietary and centralised repo, are often broken and not very user-friendly to fix. Debian is excellent if you have an older device and want stability, it’s been there since the beginning. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is fun if you want to try rolling release, and of course Arch-based distros like CachyOS (or standard Arch with archinstall) are also good if you are fine with the “scary” black text box (that’s all it is really).

If you want to experiment with an ARM device (laptop, tablet, or even phone), Nura is awesome! It’s not fully there on everything, but it’s fun to mess around in and try out apps that those devices were never intended to run!

Oops yeah that is a good point! Amended the comment.

You’re confusing OpenOffice (dead project pretty much, hasn’t seen updates in ages) with OnlyOffice (the Russian one with the licensing shenanigans and “AI first” stuff, UI is M365-like and very similar to the LibreOffice “Tabbed” UI)

I haven’t used any of them in ages, I know Collabora is focused on their online suite. Looking at OnlyOffice’s website, they are positioning themselves as an “AI-first” office suite (the LLM tools have been changed to be optional and installed separately since a recent update, but still a bad look)

And WPS Office was always owned by a Chinese company and continues to be closed-source, so no changes there. Again, the same sort of “AI-first” stuff on their homepage, yikes

LibreOffice, not OpenOffice. I believe LibreOffice was forked from OpenOffice, and the latter hasn’t had any updates in ages.

I imagine that the UI you selected was the one of the “compact” or “single toolbar” options? It is a little confusing that some of the one functions disappear with those, it would be helpful if it was listed which ones were missing

It’s never that MS Office files don’t work on LibreOffice (formatting is a little different but almost never broken), it’s always files exported from LibreOffice that MS Office misreads (because Microsoft can’t be bothered to follow standards are anti-competitive)

Apparently it looks identical to MS Office, so it isn’t “better” than MS Office or LibreOffice in a functional sense (arguably less so since it’s probably very buggy code)

I wouldn’t say it’s people (normal people would be using MS Office or LibreOffice most likely) excited that it’s LLM generated, though some AI Bros probably are, I imagine some outlets are promoting this to sell whatever the new model is these days. And when there is a lot of news around a topic, it’s covered by more and more people (something about all press is good press here)

LibreOffice is an awesome piece of kit! On setup, they let you select the “tabbed” UI if you prefer something closer to MS office.

Collabora Office is another one that seems neat, have not used it before though. OnlyOffice has weird Russian ties and GPL incompatible licensing shenanigans, I would avoid them for the most part. WPS Office has the best compatibility with MS Office files on Linux I think, but it’s closed-source so not great either. There’s always running a VM / dual booting if you must use MS Office.

Honestly, MS office files have worked fine on LibreOffice, the only big issue I’ve found is that translucent images are a little broken when going from Impress to PowerPoint (all images share the same opacity for some reason?)

Double negatives are fun! It’s a little weird how, depending on the context and language, they can either be positive or extra-negative. “I don’t see nothing!” is often used to mean you can’t see anything, the double negatives reinforce each other rather than cancel out into a positive meaning. Similar for “I don’t have no …” or “we don’t need no …”

If you didn’t know, CoMaps has a desktop Linux and macOS version! I believe GNOME Maps (also on Linux) recently got better offline maps support too

So I’m doubly wrong! That’s kind of neat

That’s actually pretty cool, I’ll be making an XMPP account then. Adding to my collection of chat apps!

Oh whoops, I didn’t know that! That’s kind of neat, didn’t know had encryption. I will amend my comment

Well, there’s also IRC and XMPP. Could those work better for older devices? Dunno, but neither are encrypted, so don’t use them for anything sensitive. Signal is good if you want security, they’ve been audited a lot, but they are based in the U.S. which isn’t great.

I’ve also heard of Stoat (formerly Revolt) and Fluxer, both are relatively new, but I would prefer Matrix over both since it’s more easily self-hostable (+ all those different clients to choose from!)

edit: I really didn’t know, but looks like XMPP does support encryption! (and it’s enabled by default on most clients!)

I have tried it before, it’s neat, but notifications are not reliable since it is peer to peer (both devices need to be online for a connection), a bit like Briar if you’ve used that before. I don’t think it uses the Tor network, so it might be faster than Briar (but also less anonymous?)

I don’t have experience with the jami daemon though, so can’t comment if that solves the peer to peer issue.

I personally like Matrix the best, since you have federation, options for encrypted chats, self-host able with Continuwuity (or Synapse), lots of alternative clients for nearly every OS (even mobile Linux, you have Fractal! FluffyChat also works but it’s definitely oriented towards Android devices)