[quchen]

In my recent experience, a new culture of "I switched to Linux and it's fine" is establishing itself. It's on HN, sometimes on YouTube, sometimes my friends are unhappy with ads in their OS. It takes a very good reason to switch OS (most workflows break, after all), and I think the reasons are piling up into mainstream unhappiness.

[grepfru_it]

I switched to Linux. It was great! Then I got some contract work with Redhat. It was great! I completed the contract and provided a summary of my work in a .odt file I wrote on Fedora using LibreOffice. Suddenly it was not great! The team at RedHat said they could not open my file. That’s odd, I’m using their OS. Ok I’ll send the file in LibreOffice’s conversion to Word 2003 format. They opened the file and they said the formatting was off. They said can you just save it in Word and send it to us? I informed them I was using their operating system. They didn’t respond. I sent another message and said I could move to a different computer. Suddenly it was great again! I got paid handsomely for that work, but I had to use Windows.

This is why I do not believe you can switch to Linux. Because the world still runs on Microsoft. It was not until office for Mac reached feature parity (with office for Windows) when companies seriously considered macOS. Currently office for the web has not reached that parity. So the world is still smiling at Linux the same way you would at your 9 year old nephew saying “aww how cute” and then going back to the real world

[adrian_b]

When you create LibreOffice documents and you want to send them to others, which may not be LibreOffice users, the normal procedure is to export your documents as PDF files, which ensures that anyone can use them.

Less frequently, you may want to export your documents to MS formats, if you want them to be editable, but that is much less foolproof than exporting to PDF.

I have worked for many years in companies where almost everybody was using MS Office, while I preferred to use LibreOffice (nowadays Excel remains better than any alternative, but I actually prefer LibreOffice Write to MS Word, because I think that the latter has regressed dramatically during the last 2 decades). Despite that, my coworkers were not even aware that I was using LibreOffice, as all the documentation generated by me was in PDF format.

Product documentation in any serious company should be in PDF format anyway, not in word processor formats that cannot be used by anyone who does not have an appropriate editor or viewer. Even using MS Office is not a guarantee that you can use any MS Office document file, as I have seen cases when recent MS Office versions could not open some ancient MS Office files, which could be opened by other tools, e.g. they could be imported in LibreOffice.

[skeeter2020]

PDF is THE choice for cross-platform presentation and printing, but a real PITA for collaboration, funny enough one of the places where the web version of Word is pretty decent. A lot of industries live in Word/Office, and "generate PDF" is a pretty small part of their workflow. Also remember that printing to PDF without an expensive purchase was not a thing for many decades; I've only stopped using the Win2PDF license I bought 25 years ago on my most recent computers!

[viraptor]

Not that I don't believe you, but something feels off...

> conversion to Word 2003 format

That's a twenty year old almost-dead binary format. Why would you do that instead of .docx? Or just a PDF.

> They opened the file and they said the formatting was off.

Who cares about formatting on a work summary? Did it have something more interesting than you can put in .rtf?

> not until office for Mac reached feature parity

It hasn't. There's still a difference in feature support.

[kenjackson]

People often will use .doc rather than .docx when they’re trying to convert to a format that non-Word apps are more likely to be able to parse.

And bad formatting can result in an almost unreadable document. For example all bullet levels becoming the same, which is an example of something I’ve seen before.

None of this seems off to me.

[viraptor]

It's the opposite. .doc was never fully reverse engineered properly, but .docx is way easier to handle and was for quite a while.

[kenjackson]

Yeah, I believe you're right.

[graemep]

> That's a twenty year old almost-dead binary format.

I assume its an old story as recent version of MS Office can read ODF formats.

[shiroiuma]

Why on earth would you not just send a PDF? LibreOffice even has a handy button just for exporting directly to PDF. Does your customer need to edit your work summary for some odd reason?

[ahartmetz]

I remember looking into the spec of the... I think it was the DWARF debug info format, mostly just out of curiosity. Also out of curiosity, I checked the PDF metadata. Creator: Microsoft Word. Curious.

[graemep]

.odt mostly works fine. Its the standard for editable files on gov.uk and it goes entirely unnoticed by most people so MS Word users presumably are able to open them.

[nephihaha]

Linux is great for people that are on HN etc because they're techies, but in my experience most normies struggle to cope with Linux.

[jetin]

There is also a whole population category that isn’t capable of differentiating Windows from Linux. Just yesterday I was showing something on Zorin OS to my father and I had to explain to him that I was not using Windows 10 like he is at home. As long as the web browser is working and he can use his printer, a desktop is a desktop and icons are icons that can be clicked. Any other operation will be written on paper in a step by step well phrased manner. OS choice doesn’t matter for him, he will always struggle so making him switch to Linux won’t change a thing of his experience.

[adrian_b]

That's right.

My parents, being much over 80 years old, have been using for many years Linux, more precisely Gentoo Linux, but they have no idea what "Linux" is.

Obviously, I have installed all software on their computers and I have kept it up to date.

However, after that, they have just used the computers for reading and editing documents or e-mail messages, for browsing the Internet, for watching movies or listening music, much the same as they would have done with any other operating system. When they had a more unusual need, I had to search and install an appropriate program and teach them how to use it.

They had the advantage of having a "consultant" to solve any problem, but none of the problems that they have encountered were problems that they would not also encounter on Windows. Actually on Linux when you have a problem, you can be pretty certain that someone competent can find a solution, in the worst case by reading the source code, when other better documentation does not exist. On Windows, I have encountered far worse problems than on Linux, when whole IT support departments scratched their heads and could not understand what is happening, for weeks, and sometimes forever.

By far the main advantage of Windows over Linux in ease of use is that it comes preinstalled on most computers. I have installed Windows professionally and it frequently has been far more difficult than installing Linux on the same hardware, but normal people are shielded from such experiences.

Most modern Linux distributions have one great advantage in ease of use over Windows: the software package manager. Whenever you need some application, you just search an appropriate package and you install it quickly and freely. Such package managers for free software have existed many decades before app stores (e.g. FreeBSD already had one more than 30 years ago) and they remain better than any app store, by not requiring any invasive account for their use, or mandatory payments.

[skeeter2020]

>> They had the advantage of having a "consultant" to solve any problem, but none of the problems that they have encountered were problems that they would not also encounter on Windows.

I drew a hard "no family tech support" line decades ago, and the difference then is that they can at least find a Windows tech-support consultant. What happens if an octogenarian phones Geek Squad and says they're running Variant <X> of Linux?

[Telaneo]

> What happens if an octogenarian phones Geek Squad and says they're running Variant <X> of Linux?

Geek Squad: 'Sorry, we don't support that.'

Grandma: 'Well, what can you do to help me then?'

Geek Squad: 'We can set you up with a new computer. That'll be $Cost-of-new-computer plus $Cost-of-X-hours-of-setup.'

Grandma (possibility number 1): 'Alright, guess I don't have much choice, and you're the expert.'

Grandma (possibility number 2): 'No thanks. I'll use my phone instead.'

[hansvm]

> Geek Squad

Man, they've really screwed up all the settings. I've never seen Windows 11 look like this. A clean reinstall ought to fix it.

[zahlman]

IMX people often care more about which web browser is installed than which OS.

[nephihaha]

Yes, very true. Lost count of the number of people who moan about ads on YouTube but don't seem to know how they can get rid of them without paying for Premium.

I hate all the Google and Microsoft worship out there. They just have market dominance, they're not our friends.

[vander_elst]

> Any other operation will be written on paper in a step by step well phrased manner.

Same exact experience, I cannot get my parents to think about what they are doing, they just follow the steps; if an icon changes or if the button is in a different place the whole workflow stops until I help them. Any suggestions here on how to improve the approach?

[nephihaha]

Avoid jargon/technical language, show practical steps and tell them what to avoid doing on the new system. (Last bit is important. I like to play around with new things to get to know them, but you need to avoid anything which crashes the system, erases etc.)

[viraptor]

You'll see a number of stories where this is not the case. I moved my gf to Linux ~2 decades ago instead of upgrading a laptop. She never had issues I had to deal with after that.