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.
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.
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!
What I’ve done is just bought a second hand key for Office 2014, and it works like a charm. Got it for like $10, and no money went to M$, and it has been working for several years without a problem.
For my personal desktop, at least. For my laptop rocking Linux I’ve been using LibreOffice without a problem.
MAS will also work for many office versions.
I recently moved my digital life away from google and microsoft. I previously had the following subscriptions:
- ExpressVPN
- Onedrive
- Bitwarden
- Office 365
And I had a gmail account, which I often used for SSO. I realized that, the total monthly cost of these subscriptions together was more expensive than a single Protonmail *family * subscription, so I cancelled them all, got the family subscription, and now my wife and her sister all have protonmail accounts as well as storage, a password manager, and VPN access. In the process of moving my logins to my protonmail account, so that I don’t have to keep my ancient Facebook account around for signing into things like spotify anymore. Coupled this with moving to the federated internet from reddit and instagram
I also dropped office for libreoffice. MS Office provides dubious value over the free competition, especially with a SAAS model.
Bitwarden
Do you mean Bitdefender (the antivirus)? Bitwarden is free.
Before anyone well ackhuallys me yes, there is a very cheap $0.80/mo plan if you want an authenticator.
I had a bitwarden premium family plan
I feel like Windows tries with every change to push it’s users to Linux.
I feel like Windows tries with every change to push it’s users to Linux.
Even their core applications move to being web based.
We’re already past that point, we’re now at “cram copilot into everything, even if it makes no sense.”
Secret good guy MS - get everyone onto Linux and tank their stock price 😂
I get how people need to use micro-shit for work but I don’t get how a any freedom enjoyer is willing to use spyware on their own hardware
Just make the adjustment, deny the parasite engagement and profit.
Paying micro-shit anything is funding your oppressor. This is a class war, act like it folks
Linux as your main OS with a Windows VM for work is a pretty decent arrangement. Windows works without activation so you don’t have to pay MS anything.
Fair. It it still pings NSA servers, sorry “microsoft”
They got me, installed Mint a couple of weeks ago
I purged the Windows partition yesterday, fellt like pouring bleach on a stain…
I killed my windows partition a week ago as well.
Let’s goooo
I can finally say that I’m making the move to Linux now, as I’m dual booting Fedora. I plan to try to do my regular browsing and activity on Fedora, while keeping my school work and what little gaming I do (laptop user) on Windows. Hell, once I get confident enough in my Linux skills, I’ll probably move the school stuff over to Fedora too.
I’m doing it mostly cause I’ve read the privacy horror stories, but also because I just hated Windows 11. Like there’s nothing about it that is worth staying for… The excessive resource use, random settings being changed that you have to dig to find, the shitty Co-Pilot ads, and the fact I won’t be able to use office once I graduate… Yeah no.
Good thing is I’m a cyber student, so guess I’m just getting a head start for a easier grade in my future Linux class lol.
At least they don’t make you pay for cancelling like Adobe does
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.
What? How much is it? Surely that can’t be illegal?
Sounds like having to pay a fee when you break a contract… So probably legal.
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.
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.
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.
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 ;)
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.
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 ;)
This true for most people, but Calc is limiting for certain use cases.
Same, Microsoft is about to force my laptop to update and I am about to own zero devices that run Windows.
There is no coming back either, which is what makes the schadenfeude of Microsoft (the dog) really actually catching the car this time so funny and satisfying.
I think it is going to make heads spin how fast the idea that Windows has unassailable hegemony in the desktop space becomes an antiquated idea. There is an asteroid in the sky, and the time of dinosaurs is over.
All the alarm bells should be going off at Microsoft hq and I know they probably feel like they are sitting pretty and feel nice and future proofed in their business plan, it is amazing and makes my heart sing.
Sorry not sorry you law breaking, monopoly chasing, morally bankrupt losers. You might be richer than I ever will be, but lets be honest, that is because I have standards about what I am willing to do for money.
They dgaf about us. Their Enterprise clients are their cash cows. But we are rid of their fleas nonetheless
Yeah I know that is how they see it but the generational wave they have been coasting on was the fact that computer nerdy kids would learn the ins and outs of Windows software long before even entering the workplace.
Microsoft has been taking advantage of the fact that kids like me would be so excited to learn computers that they would learn the basics of just poking around the desktop before they could read.
Nowadays that is gone, there is no playful connection and the sea of change will butterfly-effect into the future and cause a million symptoms of an issue we all know Microsoft will never actually value or address.
Microsoft has been functioning this entire time with a special unspoken in with nerdy kids who grow up to build important and valuable computer tools. Microsoft has steamrolled that, and on the scale of 10+ years I am not sure there will be anything Microsoft can actually do to mitigate the strategic defeat that is going to cause even if they are able to be honest and lucid about it at that late date.
More and more computer nerdy kids are going to learn the shit out of Linux because it is where they game and it feels welcoming to them (i.e. it doesn’t feel like sneaking into a suffocatingly boring office full of identical cubicles that gives periodic blaring notifications on a gambling casino nobody your parents know can afford called the Stock Market).
I can’t understate how much this will lead to Microsoft completely losing the plot because no one could ever suggest this as a danger in a Microsoft boardroom and be taken as seriously as they should.
gets popcorn I for one am going to enjoy the show
Really looking forward to see steamos on a workstation 😁❤️
deleted by creator
I have to wonder if anyone at Microsoft is paying attention. It’s like New Coke in the 80s. They quickly realized they fucked up and rebranded the original as Classic Coke. I’m wondering if there will be a Windows Classic coming out soon with no AI, no subscription, no forced cloud dependency bullshit. lol probably not but whatever.
Keeping with the soft drink analogy, I think Pepsi tried something similar in the 90s with Crystal Pepsi, which also failed miserably.
If “lime must go up” always, then they need to come up with a better way than product enshitification.
For the moment they don’t care about what the customer wants because their most important market is enterprise, not the customer. I’m not sure what would change that except hitting a critical mass of C-suite people who get fed up with it.
As long as companies are eating that they will be ok. BUT, like most tech companies, at some point they will pull a broadcom and then the alternatives will thrive.
New Coke was different in 2 important ways.
-
It was actually a way to hide the flavor change in the switch to Corn Syrup instead of Sugar, and never intended to be permanent.
-
Pepsi existed
There’s no real commercial competition for Microsoft. Linux is great, but there’s nobody for a business to call when shit fucks up. And Apple’s walled garden and high prices make it terrible for enterprise.
- People stopped consuming New Coke
As long as people do nothing other than complain and continue to use the product they have no reason to change.
There’s enterprise support for several Linux distributions like
https://www.suse.com/services/premium/ (and SEL is a thing) or
https://ubuntu.com/support
Whether those distros meet the demands is a different animal.The bill I paid for Suse support contact at an old company I worked for begs to differ. The problem is home or smb are a rounding error for MS. They already got your money from hp or Dell etc. When you bought your computer. Making you the product with the ad and the ai bullshit to swallow your data to train their models is all icing on the cake.
-
Deleted my Microsoft account yesterday!
I was thinking to myself that I need to cancel mine. Then yesterday I got charged $127 for the yearly renewal.
I thought I was SOL but you can cancel and get most of the money back. So it’s not too late to cancel and rid yourself of it.
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.
which distro though
Fedora KDE spin
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).
