[neilv]

Apt username, for a pragmatic strategy.

A variation I've done occasionally is to run the Microsoft Windows software in a VM on my Linux laptop.

When I last had the MS office suite inflicted upon me, a couple years ago, I was able to run it in a Web browser on Linux.

It's important to remember, though, that these measures probably won't work long-term.

Historically, MS will tend to shamelessly do whatever underhanded things they can get away with at that point in time. The only exception being when they are playing a long con, in which case they will pretend to play nice, until some threshold of lock-in (or re-lock-in) is achieved, and only then mask-off, with no sense of shame. (It's usually not originating bottom-up from the ICs, and I know some nice people from there, but upper corporate is totally like that, demonstrating it again and again, for decades.)

Also, a company requiring to run Microsoft software is probably also a bad place to work in other regards.

[alsetmusic]

> Also, a company requiring to run Microsoft software is probably also a bad place to work in other regards.

My current employer is so great that I have casually mentioned that I might stay until I retire a bunch of times since joining. I've never said that about any other job. We have Word because there are industry requirements that it meets in terms of formatting legal documents. Can other apps supplant it? Possibly, but no one is spending the time and money to find out and it's not my decision to make.

I understand the motivation of the statement, but it's a fallacy.

[neilv]

You just described an exceptionally good place to work (because, how many places would an employee casually mention a bunch of times that they might stay until retirement).

Congrats on findind that situation, but I don't think it's evidence of fallacy of my statement.

[vee-kay]

> Historically, MS will tend to shamelessly do whatever underhanded things they can get away with at that point in time. The only exception being when they are playing a long con, in which case they will pretend to play nice, until some threshold of lock-in (or re-lock-in) is achieved, and only then mask-off, with no sense of shame.

The Windows 10 bait n switch to Windows 11.

Hundreds of millions of PC users worldwide on old hardware using old Windows OSes were offered Win10 as free upgrade, with the promise that Win10 is the final Windows edition.

Later though, M$ announced Win11 and it would work only on new hardware (BIOS TPM 2.0 constraint), and Win10 is no longer being supported for personal use (except via some complicated ways to get an extension for the Win10 updates). And not only is Win11 buggy and full of ads, its performance is also bad.

Well, the good thing is that such shenanigans are pushing PC users to migrate to Linux.

[matsz]

Valve saw the writing on the wall when Windows 8 was released. Their investment made Linux more feasible for the average user.

This makes me wonder how much better the world would be if corporations didn't have to answer to shareholders. Valve isn't publicly traded, Microsoft is.

[GFischer]

It's thanks to Valve that I'm considering switching to Linux (I'll probably still need a Windows machine around for various reasons).

They really did a good job.

[vee-kay]

You can run Windows on a VM on Linux if you just need to run any Windows apps for some temporary tasks.

[lp0_on_fire]

> Also, a company requiring to run Microsoft software is probably also a bad place to work in other regards.

Microsoft being shitty notwithstanding…I think you don’t really grasp just how prevalent Microsoft is in the business world - it is not the indicator you think it is.

[tracker1]

Too true... even then, there are some MS things I actually like... VS Code and C# at the top of the list. I also like a lot of the things in MS office over alternatives in practice. LibreOffice is just annoying to me every time I use it, and I use it regularly, OnlyOffice has been less reliable still. I still don't equate any of the alternatives to Visio as close to equal despite regularly using them as well.

That said, I emphatically despise a lot of the decision making behind Windows and a lot of MS products... I really wish it was managed/governed more by technical influences than business/fincancial ones in practice. You can see where a lot of the lines are drawn and it's a bit fascinating.

[jjkaczor]

Have a new laptop arriving shortly with enough RAM and storage, that - me being a historically "Windows as primary OS" kind-of-person, with the enshitification of their adding CoPilot to everything and turning Windows 11 into an "agentic" OS, my installation will be Linux-first, and then run Windows via LKVM (hopefully with proper pass-through for TPM + GPU).

Yes - I have "noodled" with Linux in VM's and Raspberry Pi's - but it has never been my primary OS.

Thanks to Microsoft, that is about to change...

[thewebguyd]

> Also, a company requiring to run Microsoft software is probably also a bad place to work in other regards.

This seems like an over generalization, though I agree with your other points. Microsoft is not a good company, but are any of the big tech behemoths?

I could buy an argument that requiring Windows for devs might be a red flag, unless said company is making Windows software or games, but there are plenty of valid reasons to standardize on Windows & Microsoft 365 across the office, especially in very large companies. Even if a company issues macs, they are still probably on M365 unless they are in silicon valley or a startup using Google Workspace.

Consumers aren't Microsoft's customer, and to be honest, I get the vibe that Microsoft would just prefer to stop selling to and catering to consumers/personal users entirely for Windows. Windows in an enterprise, properly reined in by a competent IT department, isn't too bad. Windows gives a lot of tools to IT and the business that you would otherwise have to build yourself, which for non-tech company or a company where software isn't their revenue generating product, has a lot of appeal.

The distaste everyone feels for it is because Windows isn't built for the end user anymore, it's built for the person signing the checks at the company, who usually has different needs. Doesn't mean it's a bad product (although, it's not great), just that you, the user, isn't who its designed for.

[xarope]

some companies don't have a choice; in a previous AEC job (architecture/engineering/construction), we had to deploy windows to use Autodeck Revit.

Now servers and other backend stuff, on the other hand, linux and illumos.

[thewebguyd]

This is common I'd argue in most businesses.

Despite Microsoft's behavior and all of Windows' flaws, when properly managed and controlled in an enterprise, it's not so bad, and there's still a ton of software out there that is Windows only.

Where I work now is pretty much like that. Windows on end-user endpoints, Linux everywhere else.