itsraining

Amarok 1.4 from TDE

Reminds me of this: http://toastycode.com/besavers/buynow.html

OnlyOffice is indeed a good choice for the best MS compatibility. Also Google Docs is amazing for collaboration in teams (yes, I know it's not FOSS, but hey, it works). NextCloud is nice but it doesn't offer collaborative editing of Office documents AFAIK.

For presentations I have been lately preferring Inkscape. It has multi-page support since some versions ago and can export to PDF, clickable links and everything. I don't use animations or anything too fancy in my presentation and I like the flexibility that a vector editor can offer me, so Inkscape works well for my case.

I don't support Linux fanatics who insist that Linux is for everyone and anyone. It is vastly different (IMO in a good way) than your typical Windows OS but once you spend some time figuring it out, following "cumbersome" installation instructions might take no more than 5 minutes.

This article is on the other side of the spectrum. Presenting the Linux desktop as a "collective delusion" is, at least, disrespect to all the people who struggle to make it real.

I know people who switched to Linux as their main OS and claim to be more productive than they were on Windows because they can adapt the desktop experience to their workflow and there are no unnecessary distractions like popups and ads that Microsoft likes to overuse in their latest OS versions.

LibreOffice is just good enough for most paperwork with good MS-Office compatibility (neither I nor anybody I know ever had a single problem in years).

Of course there are drawbacks, but most of what the article mentions are purely over-generalisations, distribution-specific quirks or "I can't be bothered to spend 5 minutes to learn something new" type of arguments. In Linux, the time you spend learning something new is a good investment.

Finally, I myself am a computer geek who likes to meddle in programming. For me, using anything else than a *nix-based POSIX-compatible system (except, perhaps, for Haiku) would be a nightmare.

Linux is not a religion. It's a tool, and you should always pick a tool based on whether it can perform the needed tasks and whether you are comfortable with it, without fanaticism. And Linux is objectively better than Windows in some respects, and vice versa. So, if I were to follow the author's logic, the Windows desktop would be as much a collective delusion in my eyes.

I thought that MS Paint window was part of the joke 🤔

Not per se, but Thunderbird is supposedly collaborating with the K-9 team to make K-9 the mobile version of Thunderbird.

In Austria they have these nifty stickers that they sell to tourists: "Warning! No kangaroos in Austria"

I hope more manufacturers would adopt the Blackberry style of phones. Titan Pocket has proved that you can have Android running decently on such a device. So why not bring back QWERTY keyboards?

Thank you for answering. I can relate to manually updating my parents' systems once in a while but at this point I'm seriously considering unattended upgrades (updating over SSH is also a good idea).

Yes, probably because I stick with Arch and Slackware plus a lightweight environment. The only time I saw such a GUI was when I tried out Elementary just for fun.

What I consider a problem is that the user can simply dismiss or disregard the updates notification indefinitely. I know many non-tech-savvy people who do not understand the importance of updates, so they would be inclined to do exactly that. That is why unattended upgrades are probably a better option in such cases.

What do you mean, automatically? Arch is a rolling release and I have to explicitly run pacman with the correct flags to update. At the same time Debian, which is not a rolling release, has the unattended upgrades feature which installs updates automatically.

But indeed, many things depend on the distro. For example, user-centric distros such as Elementary and others provide an easy to use GUI for updating the system.

And yes, Windows Updates was (is still? not a Win user) a nightmare.

That would be true if:

1. A GUI software center is used (or if the said dad is comfortable with an interactive console application)
2. The said dad actually realizes the importance behind updates. From my experience, many people don't.

So, unless both of above are true, the dad will never (want to) update his system because "it works as is", sticking to old versions of software, never receiving bugfixes and neglecting security.