This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I'm really glad during the pandemic, a bunch of departments in my company focused on getting everyone Linux laptops. That led to a widespread adoption companywide.
I doubt any department is going to get approval to move to Windows 11 and deal with Microsoft's fees.
What office do you use?
libre office is great
How long has windows 11 been out? Edit: Since October 2021.
Why do I use a “health” check to see if I can upgrade? (My PC can’t be upgraded, so I guess it’s unhealthy?)
I guess your options are:
Do hacky workarounds to install Win11. If you make an install disc with Rufus there's a checkbox to do this automatically. There's no guarantee MS won't bork your install at some point due to this, but so far it's worked well for people.
Install Linux.
Stay on Win10 and lose software support from MS and your installed programs. This is risky, and the longer you do it the more risky it'll get.
Send your PC to the landfill and buy a new one.
It's the cost of installing Linux. 🤷
That's not what this post is about.
I understand, and agree, with the sentiment that more people should switch to Linux, but please don't pretend the answer to every topic regarding Microsoft or Windows is "just switch to Linux". It is for some, but it derails and invalidates a necessary conversation about shitty behaviour by Microsoft.
I have a machine running linux at home, I'm not afraid of a package manager, but Linux is not the answer to everything. Not yet at lesst.
I can't refuse to use windows at work, and much as i would sometimes like to, I can't just go and quit over what OS our computers run. That would end poorly for my livelihood and family.
The purpose of this article is to highlight unfair behaviour by Microsoft, especially towards businesses, which is a topic that needs more attention. Microsoft is in every level of infrastructure in almost every big corporation, and no matter how attractive linux is, that doesn't make the dangers of centralised IT belonging to one company any less relevant.
We should all do more to lobby for more companies and corporations switching to Linux, but replying with "just switch to Linux smh" is not pushing that agenda.
Janette in finance is going to murder whoever tries to give her a FOSS alternative to Excel or forces her to fuck with a VM or web Excel.
We remember the last IT admin that tried to do a platform swap on her. RIP Patrick.
I think the most infuriating part about web Excel and desktop Excel is that they don't have feature parity.
There's stuff that works on desktop but not web and it's really frustrating.
Don't you know? Some calculations can only be done locally. They are too complicated to be performed over the cloud. It needs to be done on your i3/4GB RAM PC.
As someone who uses Excel on Windows and Calc on Linux, I can totally understand. There are some big differences so there’s a valid reason for sticking with Excel. Casual users won’t notice anything big, but advanced users will.
On the other hand, if you’re an advanced Excel user, it usually means you’re trying to make it do stuff that it isn’t very good at. If you want stuff that Calc can’t provide, it’s a clear sign you should have written that calculation in R or Python a long time ago.
The most frustrating aspect isn't that the Windows would stop updating, but that everything else stops supporting it as well. W10 gets retired - Chromium browsers stop updating - Websites detect your UA and puts a popup block suggesting you to download a new version rendering sites unusable. Shit's snowballing for the end user.
That's most likely going to take a long while though. Win 7 ended mainstream support in 2015 and extended in 2020, the last chrome version to run on it is 109 which was released in 2023.
$61 for most folks, $45 for people using Microsoft Intune or Windows Autopatch.
So.... not really expensive at all I guess
If that's per machine that's pretty huge.
It is. And the price of ESUs goes up each year that a product is EOL.
