Has anyone seen what MS is up to?

[LastDino]

Why? So that they can expand their monopoly by perpetuating their proprietary format? What really annoys me is that most people can do as well with Libreoffice but they help to perpetuate MS's incompatible formats by going out of their ways to get pirate MSO and then complain that LO does not have good enough compatibility. The only way to solve the compatibility problem is to move away from MS's closed formats. I have regularly get documents in xlsx or docx. There is absolutely no reason to do that, it is just out of habit or "convenience".

Believe me I've tried this, even went as far as converting documents in PDF so they can be viewed on Windows with how they are intended to be.

BUT

Then the receiver complained as to why it is not in editable word format for proof reading and corrections. This habit or convenience needs to be changed from the school/collage level, I was at least lucky that my Uni had Linux as default in provided hardware for student use but still had to do this LO>>MS things quite a lot. And again, good PDF editors are not free, at least not for everyday users who use Adobe mostly (We have adobe there playing the big guy)

As much as I would love still the problem exists and one simply can't take risk with things like Resume and Research papers..

[monkeybrain20122]

Believe me I've tried this, even went as far as converting documents in PDF so they can be viewed on Windows with how they are intended to be.

BUT

Then the receiver complained as to why it is not in editable word format for proof reading and corrections. This habit or convenience needs to be changed from the school/collage level, I was at least lucky that my Uni had Linux as default in provided hardware for student use but still had to do this LO>>MS things quite a lot. And again, good PDF editors are not free, at least not for everyday users who use Adobe mostly (We have adobe there playing the big guy)

As much as I would love still the problem exists and one simply can't take risk with things like Resume and Research papers..

I send out stuffs in odf. No one has complained so far. MSO is supposed to open these formats.

Resumes are not supposed to be editable so I think .pdf should be ok. Research papers in my field are all in Latex, using any Office suit would indeed be very unprofessional.

P.S I have actually converted one professor to LO. I was a TA for him. I sent him the grades in odt. He asked me what was that. I explained that I am not going to use MSO unless the university paid for it and the windows license. he tried out LO and thought that it was very cool that it was free. So he started using it himself.

[LastDino]

I send out stuffs in odf. No one has complained so far. MSO is supposed to open these formats.

Resumes are not supposed to be editable so I think .pdf should be ok. Research papers in my field are all in Latex, using any Office suit would indeed be very unprofessional.

P.S I have actually converted one professor to LO. I was a TA for him. I sent him the grades in odt. He asked me what was that. I explained that I am not going to use MSO unless the university paid for it and the windows license. he tried out LO and thought that it was very cool that it was free. So he started using it himself.

In my case Resumes went through Place-com of Uni and they strictly require it in editable format to make changes directly as per company requirement. I know its bit hard to digest but that is just how things were as both company required formats and Uni resume format would change here and there for almost every second company process (some 400 companies coming to campus in 3 months period). Not to mention they also needed it for doing all the corrections on badly made resumes of all the students.

Haven't used Odf, my lack of knowledge here came into play it seems, but this sounds like a good idea.

I've had success in converting my Companies view on Linux though, but driving force behind was mostly redundancy of natively installed CRM being replaced with Cloud based one, which had nothing to do with the OS of machines in question.

Slowly but surely, Linux does get to everyone

[sp40140]

I send out stuffs in odf. No one has complained so far. MSO is supposed to open these formats.

Resumes are not supposed to be editable so I think .pdf should be ok. Research papers in my field are all in Latex, using any Office suit would indeed be very unprofessional.

P.S I have actually converted one professor to LO. I was a TA for him. I sent him the grades in odt. He asked me what was that. I explained that I am not going to use MSO unless the university paid for it and the windows license. he tried out LO and thought that it was very cool that it was free. So he started using it himself.

What you do is exception and may be only possible in your field and position. You can not get away from MS Office in real life. nobody (comparatively) knows odf format. documents mess up formats. Excel has no competitor in open source world.
When people in higher positions demand MS docs, when clients ask for .docs. You don't have options.

Honestly it's the problem with the standards body. They have allowed .doc to be a standard. And their definitions are like "as done by MS Office 95" and such. When standard bodies become strict, open source will be able to comply. But when you allow such vague language in your standards, nobody has any chance.

[Dragonbite]

Why? So that they can expand their monopoly by perpetuating their proprietary format? What really annoys me is that most people can do as well with Libreoffice but they help to perpetuate MS's incompatible formats by going out of their ways to get pirate MSO and then complain that LO does not have good enough compatibility. The only way to solve the compatibility problem is to move away from MS's closed formats. I have regularly get documents in xlsx or docx. There is absolutely no reason to do that, it is just out of habit or "convenience".

Microsoft is not the monopoly it used to be.

Windows has been dropped from the #1 most browsed from platform. Android is #1 now. Android is strong in the mobile market, Windows is not. The destkop market isn't going to completely disappear, but it's relevance is going to dwindle. Microsoft and Canonical spent a lot of time, money and effort to "bridge the gap" between mobile (phones) that can convert to full desktops. Along comes Samsung and they have a real shot at making a go at it with Dex.

So Microsoft "monopoly" of the desktop is not what it used to be, and what it used to be is so far incompatible with the future.

Microsoft Office has more competition than it has in past years; Google Docs, LibreOffice & OpenOffice. Technical people, like us in this forum including those that say "I'm not technical..." (you're here, you have greater technical aptitude than a LOT of people), can work around with the alternatives, but if you have to deal with people not so technical (under no fault of their own) then you have to accommodate THEM. Maybe that's why the latest LibreOffice release is talking about improved compatibility with Microsoft Office?

Microsoft has for a few years offered their Office Online and OneDrive to be able to open and save documents in ODT format by default. When I shared my OneDrive between Windows, Linux and work (browser) I did this for compatibility purposes.

Microsoft SQL Server has moved to Linux why? To compete with Oracle. As far as I know, there hasn't been a big jump of people TO Oracle so that would lead me to believe it is because Oracle was bigger (in Enterprises) than MS SQL Server.

Most programming articles I run across that compare popular programming languages may include C# in the list, but not all of them put them near the top!

It's easy to say Microsoft has a monopoly, because at one point they did but those days are quickly slipping away. You found an alternative, didn't you?

[sp40140]

Microsoft is not the monopoly it used to be.

That is true.
But it still is a monopoly. Due to legacy reasons. Firms (their IT dept) don't have budget to train their users on new os. And frankly, if was running a firm, I wouldn't either. It's asking for big trouble.
People use what is familiar to them. They don't want to learn something new. And teaching something new to adults is not smart.
I was running a project to replace mainframe with windows thick client. The biggest hurdle was users and their familiarity with text based UI. They had been using the app for 20 years. They could do their job with eyes closed. Didn't use mouse. We couldn't teach them to use GUI with mouse.

Windows is same thing on bigger scale.
That's why what google is doing , getting into education sector, is great. As kids pick new things and won't have trouble in workplace if given different interfaces.
Until that happens, MS will have unfair advantage.

[henke54]

Microsoft has for a few years offered their Office Online and OneDrive to be able to open and save documents in ODT format by default.

some dirty tricks that Microsoft uses to break interoperability.

Differences between Writer and MS Word files

[again?]

they would want it yet, but will they get there? hardly. many apps that work in IE don't work in Edge. so you can scratch the Win10S from businesses. many home users let alone gamers would like to install whatever they wanted, so you can remove those as well. what you are left with is maybe students/limited browsing use, but there is chromebook for that which is what the 10S is really compeeting with here. that segment is not present in my country at all (i guess market is too small). Well at least google is not.

Windows had something similar with Win7 starter. in it you can't change the background, it only supports up to 2 GB ram, comes in 32bit only and has other limits. the Win7 starter users were offered a free upgrade to Win 10 home. an i have to say i was tempted, as the notebook i have can actualyl uprgade the ram from 2 to up to 8GB. but i decided to stay on 7 since i didn't know if 10 will work well (not even HP support was able to tell me that at the time), i didn't want to deal with constant upgrades and possible breakages. so 7 starter stayed (supported until 2019) and the other side of the disk has a 64 bit Kubuntu 14.04 also supported until 2019, when i will upgrade it.

windows now discovered stores and various other walled gardens and started promoting them heavilly. it backfired with Xbox vs. PS4 (where they had to do "some changes") and if they force it on general OS versions it will backfire terribly there as well. still some users might accept the policy, but they store should really be full of stuff (incl. and perhaps especially games/entertainment apps) like in Google play or Apple Store or whatever it's called. as it is now, mostly there are useless apps in the windows store.

Win7 starter was just a stripped down version of win7 to run on cheap netbooks. No real performance difference.
Win10s will be appealing to the large percentage of home users who mainly browse and email.
Being cheaper with the safeguard to upgrade to Windows 10 Pro for $49 and get access to desktop apps, if needed, would entice this segment to give it a go.

[vasa1]

Will Linux distro’s run on Windows 10 S?

[vasa1]

Will Linux distro’s run on Windows 10 S?

Linux distro store packages are an exotic type of app package that are published to the Windows Store by known partners. Users find and install distros , safely, quickly, and reliably via the Windows Store app.

Once installed, however, distro’s should be treated as command-line tools that run outside the UWP sandbox & secure runtime infrastructure. They run with the capabilities granted to the local user – in the same way as Cmd and PowerShell do.

This is why Linux distro’s don’t run on Windows 10 S: Even though they’re delivered via the Windows Store, and installed as standard UWP APPX’s, they run as non-UWP command-line tools and this can access more of a system than a UWP can.

So what should I use?

If you want to run all your dev tools, distros, shells, etc. on a machine running Windows 10 S – like the sweeet new Surface Laptop – then upgrade it to full Windows 10. You’ll then be able to run Linux distro’s, Cmd/PowerShell, install dev tools, debuggers, profilers, packet sniffers, etc.