[major505]

As I saw it, there are 4 things that lock people in the windows platform today.

- Gaming: a problem being tackled by Valve mainly, and I getting better day by day;

- Printing Services: a lot of manufacturers, specially of high end business printers only work on windows.

- Photoshop: I think many of these will eventually just fully migrate to mac.

- Excel: the rest of microsoft office is used because its in the package. But is not necessarly irreplaceable.MOst people already exchanged Outlook by the webmail (damn, outlook itself is just the webmail in a electron wrap in the new version). Word is a pain, but there are suitable open source and paid replacements. But Excel is the big one. Tons of small and big business runs on Excel, and there's simply no alternative in the market for it, with 100% compatibility. And considering the ammount of stuff running on obscure excel formulas, and excel macros, it will take a lot of time before one arrives.

Its the curse of the power user.

[adiabatichottub]

Don't forget general familiarity. I don't know about today, but Apple was once very big on giving large discounts to education specifically for the purpose of getting students familiar with their machines.

https://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/sj1.html#kids

My point is it's harder to switch from the system you know.

[inversepolymath]

This was the biggest blocker for me. I've only used a windows DE. I have managed various headless linux systems though. I decided to try cachyos (plasma) a few months ago by dual booting and a few weeks ago I backed up my W11 install and no longer run Windows. I've ran into various issues but overall it was less scary than I thought. The issues range from figuring out which package manager contains what software to flickering issues when using Citrix. Luckily LLMs make these issues fairly painless.

[tombert]

Excel is the biggest blocker for my dad, and why I keep losing the argument to get my parents to move to Linux or Mac.

Pretty much all their other stuff is stuff that either works fine on Linux or is just in the browser anyway, but the only thing that I don't really have a rebuttal to is when my dad points out that he uses the full-fat excel and a lot of the more modern features.

I would so rather they move to Linux, and just put Excel inside Winboat or something, but they won't have it. Annoying since I'm still expected to play tech support for them and Microsoft's recovery tools do not work, and as far as I can tell have literally never worked for anyone in human history, and I'm not entirely convinced that the people at Microsoft have ever tested them.

[bombcar]

What do they do with Excel for Windows that they can't do with Excel for Mac?

[major505]

This is exactly what I do with my personal computing. I would prefer to be on linux, but a lot of people still sends me data in excel spreadsheets for processing, and lets be honest: apple hardware is fucking awesome.

The feeling of being able to work away from my desk and dont care about battery, is so goooooooood.

And I have to admit. Even if I dont like macos, my macbook with m1 and 16gb ram is probably the fastest laptop I ever own.

[e12e]

Excel for Mac has gotten a lot better - but I'm not surprised if it is still its own thing - with edge cases in format, macros, visual basic, linking to databases and data sources etc. I imagine excel under wine is better than the port to Mac in some respects.

[tombert]

If you can even get Excel working under Wine. Older ones work fine, but AFAIK there's no way to get the modern Excel working on Wine.

[bombcar]

The edge cases are where it can break, but they're getting smaller and smaller as Excel slowly turns into a web-based app.

[joseda-hg]

I'd guess PowerPivot and PowerQuery

You'd think it's third party the way it locks up a file or makes it so you can't basic things like interacting with filters

[tombert]

I'm honestly not sure. I'm sure my dad Googled something to use it as an excuse to not change.

As I said in a sibling comment, I think they really just don't want to change and they are looking for excuses; I suspect even if I could prove that there's absolute feature parity between the two versions they'd just find another reason.

[hiciu]

> just put Excel inside Winboat or something, but they won't have it

Just curious, is it about different tools / workflow / the new thing to learn (and those are valid reasons!) or are there some technical issues with for example Winboat?

[tombert]

They've never used Winboat (or anything Linuxey really), so it's definitely not a fault with Winboat itself.

Honestly I think they really just don't want to change and they're trying to look for ways out because they know that "I don't want to!" isn't going to fly with me if I'm expected to be tech support.

[coole-wurst]

You can run Photoshop and small Excel (fine for 90%) on Mac without an issue.

The real problem is more specific industry software - Revit, Solidworks and probably a thousand smaller ones.

[fragmede]

It very depends on which part of the software is needed. SOLIDWORKS is usable on a windows VM via Parallels thanks to their GPU acceleration (it's totally unusable via Virtual Box/VMware on a Mac). Would love to hear the other thousand smaller ones. Davinci for professional video editing is a multi-platform. No idea about Mastercam.

[major505]

yeah, solidworks. forgot about it. A lot of people depend on that.

[gosukiwi]

Out of those I think Gaming might be the biggest, and some games like League of Legends (all Riot games) need Vanguard, their anti-cheat which only works on Windows. So it's not easy for Valve but hopefully it will get there sometime.

The biggest reason I don't just migrate is because gaming. Most steam games could work on Linux but then if you want to play one that doesn't you have a problem. I'd rather just use Windows and never have a problem, because the game was designed for my platform.

That being said, for work I use macOS.

[major505]

Gaming is a problem of chicken and Egg. Devs wont support Linux in anti-cheat if theres no larger enought installed base. With the Steam Deck and soon the steam desktopo, tI think this can fially change, as they will see linux pc like any other platform, like ps5 or Xbox.

Valorant runs on the ps5, that is pretty much a very customized FreeBSD. If they could bother to run it there, theres no reason it could not run on linux.

[major505]

Another thing that I consider hard tonreplace from microsoft is Active directory. This thing is universal. And after tring alternatives its easy to see why. Is its probably the most complete tool I used for humans and device managers. But linix and mac had done a good job adapting to it in the last decade.

[opan]

>Tons of small and big business runs on Excel, and there's simply no alternative in the market for it, with 100% compatibility. And considering the ammount of stuff running on obscure excel formulas, and excel macros, it will take a lot of time before one arrives.

I was thinking about this compatibility problem the other day. Usually someone moving between office suites (MSFT Office, Google Drive, LibreOffice) complains stuff broke, then they give up / drop it / work around it. I was imagining an ideal path would be to document these cases of incompatibility as bugs/issues in LibreOffice. Describe the difference and how it should work, then LibreOffice fixes their software to better match. I don't know if this already happens. Personally I avoid all office software like the plague and try to work with plain text files and vim. I just hear about these issues enough that I'm mildly invested in the situation by now.

I tried to tell a friend about WYGIWYM stuff like LaTeX, groff, and Typst the other day. He seemed more interested in "figuring out" why stuff broke when changing between office software. I tried to tell him that MSFT doesn't follow their own spec and everyone else has to reverse engineer it, resulting in implementation differences. Plus MSFT's own implementation being proprietary so it can't be easily copied. I'm not sure the weight of the situation got across to him.