I agree with Frank. Anyone who needs the depth of detail Laszlo refers to might just as well stay with Micro$oft Office. OTOH, that’s only a fraction of a percent of users. As Howard says, a computer is a tool and useful to the degree that its output meets one’s needs. For 99+% of users, Office workalikes are just fine, as long as they do the job.
And there’s the rub. Office and Windows and Apple frequently don’t do the job that the tool is meant to do. I use Linux because it’s reliable and LO because it’s reliable.
Windows and Office in particular tend to define ( in the users mind) the way the job is to be done. Then when that user moves to Linux it is hard for them to change their mindset and do things in a different Linux way.
But linux gui and libre office is the same … well almost.
Libreoffice writer is like word 6 used to look, i prefer that personally as i know where things are from past use, ms word i have to hunt for a command.
You mean the ribbon menu?
Phew, I hate that too…
But LibreOffice has on option to choose between the classic and the ribbon menu, Softmaker has it too.
None of them mandates the ribbon…
I’m not aware of any option in MS Office that would let choose a classical menu.
One more reason to use the alternative.
I agree with you 100% as I am also an Indian and live in India. Most of the general computer owners here, use pirated versions of every software. That is not their fault. The PC sellers, assembers, small AMC contractors, provoke them to use pirated software and you know, if you give people something for free, they always take it as granted and bad habits spread like epidemics. And now the scenario has reached to such a level that if those sellers and service providers don’t provide these non-specialized softwares for free, they will not get any customer/client. Even small to mid-sized business owners also use pirated Windows and MS-Office. But if they use Linux, then all will be legal and free. But there is a catch. Regarding store owners, they all use accounting softwares like Tally which are Windows based only and they have saved all their data inside those softwares in their native file formats. But these softwares also have options to export those data either in .xlsx or .csv format or both which can be fed into other accounting softwares. Now the main problem is, if they change their OS then how can they use these Windows based software, which they are conversant with, in Linux or in which softwares in Linux, they can feed their existing data if they export that in .xlsx or .csv format? You friends here, are much more experienced than me. If you can propose some softwares, free / paid, or some way they can use their existing softwares in Linux and I will experiment with those softwares. If that would be successful, then I may approach some people I know, to convert to Linux and once they get converted, then it will spread like a wildfire because nobody wants to spend more money or caught in a vicious cycle of monthly recurring expenses just to use the OS and merely one or two software(s).
There is win compatability software called wine which can run in Linux and which allows Windows software packages to run in Linux. It is not 100% successful , but reports I read say it works with a large number of windows packages.
I have not personally used wine but there are people here who have used it and you should get some feedback.
Wine should be available in the package system of most distros. Get it from there.
eg in Debian
apt search wine
apt install wine
There is also software that will run Android apps in Linux.
I use wine most days to make my ex windows tools work. But there are some things that just dont work or change the system. Generally its a great product. There is also a paid for version but never used it, also by the same company as wine.
Yes. Perfect decription of the current situation in India. Even our school used pirated windows. Like they used pirated windows on the 1.5-2lakh rupees touch screen smart boards
So to be frank I am myself shocked after seeing this data…
I think people have started to learn about linux now.
I think some goverment offices have started implementing it. One of my friend’s dad works at the labour court. The office PC has Ubuntu on it. He keeps asking me how to recover files permanently deleted from it .
I told him about photorec, but he says that his father has never tried it, and the cycle repeats again!
Except my friend’s father and my sanskrit teacher ( who I helped install linux on her old laptop ) , I have personally not seen anyone use linux here!
Though it is definitely a proud feeling for me that I live in a country where 16% of people using computers use linux! Approx 76% people have access to desktop/laptop, so according to calculations, 12.6% of total population uses linux! Which is approx 17 to 18 crore people!
Honestly, I don’t know and as of Sept. 2024, it stands at 17.25% as per the chart data here: Desktop Operating System Market Share India | Statcounter Global Stats. But if this be true (because both the sites didn’t show the source of their statistics), then also it is almost nothing compared to Windows (71.34% as per chart data on Sept. 2024). That means this 17.25% of the Indian users don’t represent the sector I mentioned and to attract that sector, Linux app developers, Linux distro developers, need to address the problems I have mentioned and if India embraces Linux, Windows a.k.a Microsoft and Adobe mainly will get a devastating blow because they will lose the biggest market on earth.
‘Pirated Windows’ means activated unlicensed copy of Windows. There are several method on how to activate Windows without any license. Nowadays these activation processes are so smart that even Microsoft’s servers (AI guarded?) also sees them as genuine copy and can be updated regularly without being deactivated. This proves that AI is still far behind from human intelligence.
Also, dont know why, but have heard from some people that microsoft themselves spread the pirated copy so that more people would use windows…till it became a standard
The pcs dont even have win10. And they dont wanna spend money to buy it. So they use unactivated windows or they use softwares which help to activate it without money through random keys. Its not related abt upgrading from win10 to win11!!
