I’ve been dual-booting Linux and Windows for a while, with Windows as the fall-back option in case I wanted to use Office for something. Now that they tried to trick me into paying a subscription for their AI slop machine, I’m finally, fully out. It was a pain to actually track down and back-up the stuff that was held for ransom in OneDrive, but now it is done.
At least they don’t make you pay for cancelling like Adobe does
What? How much is it? Surely that can’t be illegal?
You have to pay if you want to stop a year’s commitment early. Iirc you have to pay half of what you promised you would pay them over the year. So if you changed your mind it’s cheaper to cancel than to continue paying for the months you have left.
If you sign a contract agreeing to their terms (and receive a discount in exchange) you have to follow them. The same goes for any other contract where you have a year’s commitment like for an ISP. It’s all pretty standard.
Is it annoying? Yeah obviously but they make it pretty damn clear when ordering that it’s a year’s commitment and that you receive a discount. Any reasonable individual should be able to figure out why you get a discount.
Adobe signed me up for a “trial” over the phone, which they then ended up trying to charge me to get out of.
I ended up just blocking their payment and never heard anything else about it. Fuck Adobe, they are in contention for shittiest company in my eyes.
Ooh it’s an early termination fee. OP made it sound like there was a fee on top of the subscription cost. Which I guess still fits the definition.
Still scummy.
Sounds like having to pay a fee when you break a contract… So probably legal.
What stopped me initially from paying Adobe was the fact that they force you to use their Cloud app which served no purpose to me. A crack doesn’t come with Cloud or at least a disabled one… Now that I know you have to pay to cancel, I’m pretty happy that Adobe stuff is easy to crack.
Cracked software still enables their dominance over the market.
Obviously you have to pay to cancel a year’s commitment.
They give you a discount for your commitment to pay for a year and they make that pretty clear on their website when ordering. I can post screenshots of that but I really hope that won’t be needed, just check for yourself.
If you don’t want a year’s commitment you can just pay the higher price for a months commitment.
Pretty sure you have to pay half of what you promised to pay them had you kept paying for the whole year. I highly doubt that they legally have to even do that. I doubt that an ISP or utility company would let you cancel at all if you had a years commitment.
P.S it’s ridiculous that I have to say this but yeah I know that Adobe suck. Fuck em and all that. I’m just saying that this particular thing isn’t unusual or should be in any way unexpected when you sign up for a year’s commitment.
I’ve actually never even had office, just libreoffice
Libre office is better too. MS builds so much bloat in it hampers functionality hard. I only use MS for work.
Depends what you need. Many publishers require certain features from MS Word that are not available or are not as ‘compatible’ in LO Writer (not that its LO’s fault ;), but for most use case I would agree. Things are a bit more complicated in the case of Excel as far as I can understand what I read (edit: I don’t use much spreadsheets myself).
I’ve quit using MS Word a few years ago, fully switching to LO Writer. There are a few issues here and there but nothing that’s a deal breaker (and Word had its own issues too), and I must quite like many things in Writer—beside the app not spying on me, I mean ;)
Out of interest, what sort of features are you referring to that publishers require?
It can vary a lot depending the publisher, and some will not care at all while others will use, say, tracking features or work collaboratively (they can even be using OneDrive for that, which includes MS Office in its price), or they will require the author to use a specific Word template that they have devised for Word (with the person in charge of the final layout in whatever layout application, in order to streamline or the process and save time on that part of the job), when they aren’t that kind of publishers that simply do the final layout directly in Word before sending the final PDF to the printer. Also, as an author, if a publisher has asked you to use MS Word and some specific stylesheet and realize they tried to to be smarter than them… good luck with that, unless they’re already one of their best-selling author.
And that’s just what comes to my mind and that I have been witnessing first hand ;)
Depends on what you need from Excel. All the simple stuff and most of the medium complex stuff is available in Calc. However, there are still many Excel only features where Calc can’t compete. Not a big deal for most people since those tend to be slightly obscure features anyway. If Calc can’t get the job done, I suggest switching to R or GNU Octave. You’ll thank me later.
This true for most people, but Calc is limiting for certain use cases.
Bro I use windows for mostly gaming and it forced me to update to 24h2 which broke most games.
Same for me.
Unless you’re specifically referring to games with kernal-level anti-cheat, I’m curious as to what games you need Windows for.
Personally only use Windows on my work laptop and even that I am questioning it, might start using my Linux VM for day to day work
Could you clarify on this a bit? I’m genuinely curious what the update did to the games as many use windows for the same.
Some games just dont run at all basically, you get a black screen. I could roll it back with the recovery but it would suck bad if I could not. Disabled updates for now.
Do you know if this is all windows or specific versions/on specific hardware? That’s such a weird thing to have effecting potentially all windows versions. Very interesting though, thanks for clarifying.
I had this issue on NFSU2 (yes I still play it) and after changing the widescreen fix it seems to be resolved at the moment. But sucks that Windows provides breaking changes with updates.
Just cancelled my 365 the other day too. Been on Linux for half a year now and forgot I had it until the news of the copilot price increase came out and reminded me. I was happy I could cancel and be refunded the remainder of the term and get some money back in my pocket!
Yes, even though I did not have a subscription, watching them do stuff like this every 2 weeks for the last year or more is what finally pushed me off to Linux as well. I got my parents moved over as well though, and they did have a subscription previously.
Deleted my Microsoft account yesterday!
It’s good to see the KDE wallpaper in the background.
Have you tried running Office in a bottle?
Where Linux?
Their wallpaper is from KDE plasma
Cancelled mine too. Don’t particularly care about the AI. But I don’t need it and trying to justify increasing the price for it didn’t really work on me.
I’ve also gone all-in on Linux now. While I have a Mac, my gaming PC was left on Windows. Now it’s running Linux Mint and while gaming on Linux has a bit further to go, it’s night and day compared to 10 years ago. This time I feel like I can actually stick with it.
which distro though
Fedora KDE spin
What was it you would fallback to use Office for that you couldn’t do on Linux?
I suspect that you could use Linux, but people have muscle memory for certain things ig
It mostly has to do with formatting things: sometimes I’ll go to a conference, and they want the slides put on their computer, and powerpoint might display differently than on my Linux laptop, or collaborating on Word documents, where formatting can be somewhat fragile. In the past few conferences though, I got by fine with my laptop, making a PDF of the slides as a backup… So I was confident that things will turn out okay before I pulled the plug.
Are the webapps free or do you have to pay for them too? Could be a good option if collaborating with other people is important.
Just going to mention that if you’re okay with non-FOSS office software, I really like Softmaker’s suite (their buy-once non-subscription version).
What distro are you using, and how difficult was it for you to get started with it?
I’m currently making a list of distros and looking at each’s pros and cons, including:
- what did work out of the box?
- what required more work to fix / workaround?
The way to go about this is to just download Linux Mint and begin using it. No additional overthinking is necessary. You’ll be able to get Steam working pretty easy, if that’s your thing. Internet bowsers and a word processor are already installed and working out of the box.
my unsolicited 2c is to checkout mint
Mint easy to use and requires the least maintaining I kinda wanted kde tho at that time.
isn’t there a mint version with plasma?
It’s only with mate,xfce and Cinnamon but ngl I just installed another distro that supported kde or let’s you pick no desktop.
Fedora KDE is easy to use with good KDE defaults, and its up to date without being unstable.
This is a while ago btw when I wanted KDE but I also heard OpenSUSE KDE is good aswell
It is, but I found openSUSE a weird distro to install and maintain, and it used a bare Plasma install with all the off putting defaults KDE has. Maybe it’s better these days.
Agree, it was confusing getting the Nvidia drivers
Agreed, using Mint after dropping Windows. Haven’t turned back. Have a piece of work software that requires windows to some degree, so I’ve installed Bottles to assist with that and it’s been pretty good for me so far.
Personally, I’ve found the most supported software from Linux mint
I’ve heard PopOS/Linux Mint are great starters. I personally run ZorinOS which is based on Ubuntu. It’s beautiful, had built in customization, and has a free version (I paid for the pro version because I liked it so much and wanted to support it).
You’ll find occasional headaches in all Linux distros just because it’s not windows so compatibility can require work arounds depending what you wanna run. But it’s worth it. Feels so much faster and in your control which is nice. Also if you screw up the distro you can just boot another distro from the flashdrive you used to install in the first place (keep the ISO handy just in case ;) ).
I started trying out Linux a few years ago, on a few different computers. Well first, a really long time ago, but I was a Mac user for a long time, and then switched to Windows in 2018, so my modern Linux experience started in 2021 or so.
On my home PC I started with Mint, but because I was doing some programming, ran into problems because the compilers and CMake there were too old to compile a few things I needed to work on (CUDA was the problem for CMake, C++20 was the problem for the compilers). Switched to Tumbleweed, was happy with that for a while.
Meanwhile, on my laptop, I switched from Manjaro to Fedora KDE spin after some stability problems, and was so pleasantly surprised by how it was both solid and up-to-date, that I ended up moving everything to that.
Edit: biggest problem I had was when I tried to install Mint on an office PC that I built for myself. Mint didn’t support the on-board ethernet so I had no way of getting it online, and after getting lost in forum posts, gave up.
I used to recommend Mint a lot, but it’s falling too far behind hardware wise and in the front end. Lack of default Wayland support and so many unsupported hardware is not where you want to be sending new users today.
+1 for Fedora based distros at this point. I tend to push Nobara because it has a lot of hardware tweaks built in to give a better out of the box experience, but I can’t really say vanilla Fedora has had issues as long as I was on an AMD platform.
Mint is cool. But, that mint in other menu. LMDE bookworm based. Rock solid and no slugish
The same thing happened with me. This was probably going to be my last year anyway, but i noped out real quick after the increase. Only reason I still had it was because I had some stuff in OneDrive that I was slowly backing up elsewhere. That just gave me the motivation to take care of it finally.
