vikaren

joined 2 years ago
[–] vikaren@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

Billionaires don't need AI to destroy humanity and our civilization, but they sure will it use that as well.

[–] vikaren@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago

Most of those "state-owned" enterprises are state-owned only in the sense that the majority shareholder is the state. They operate as private companies.

[–] vikaren@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

How is NextCloud a centralized walled garden?

[–] vikaren@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago

"leftwing".

While the principles here are important, calling these outlets leftwing is a stretch.

[–] vikaren@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

Better support, more focus on UX/UI and more features.

[–] vikaren@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

But why would a business use LibreOffice instead of Microsoft? From a productivity point of view Microsoft is superior.

There certainly are workplaces where they really need some feature of Excel and can't just switch without full compability with old documents, but for most innovative features or simply a better UI would be better.

For my work use, ranging from budgeting and simple statistical analysis to project planning and reports a tool like Grist seems like it could replace Excel. It might not be feature-complete, but the UI is much more appealing and seems geared to the kind of tasks I do.

[–] vikaren@lemmy.ml 9 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (5 children)

It works, but the UI is dated and cumbersome (especially Calc). And you need Collabra to work with others online.

My main gripe though is what it isn't. Remember how Firefox outcompeted Internet Explorer with a better user experience. An open source office suite should do the same. LibreOffices main focus seems to be an option for people switching to open source who wants to keep on working on their MS Office documents. There's nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't make people switch to open source software by itself.

 

If we want people to move away from proprietary platforms, we need to offer something better, not just something that's free.

I'm not happy with LibreOffice which seems to just playing catch-up with what Microsoft did 5 years ago. While there's quite a few alternatives to Word for most people's uses, the alternative to Excel has been LibreOffice Calc (or actual coding with CSV, Python or R).

So when I discovered Grist today, I was excited. A modern user interface, open source and formulas from Python instead of Excel's formulas which always seem to do create some weird error.

I'm just sharing in the hope that others will like it as well.

[–] vikaren@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

threads was one of the things I was missing from Element, why does it make it worse? We've been having threaded discussions since USENET, it's good feature.