Alternitives to microsoft

briancarter

We are looking at this at work as we are fed up with Microsoft and Sage pushing us towards an annual contract. I have been using google docs for a while and it seems they can do most things that microsoft office do. Like somebody else has already mentioned this would requires a Chromebook.

I_have_spoken

OS/2! :beer:

bluesnake

I have used Mint a little bit and loved it. However... many apps do not have linux versions, and sometimes you can not get a real equivalent. And printer drivers, and phone transfer/sync/update/calender thingy. Diabetes, weight meters (scales), camera apps, scanners, and that little bit of software that decrypts your usb key, often will not work either.

briancarter, I can not fault your thinking. Keep paying for the same stuff over and over, with little extra effort or design. Office365 - £80 for one years word processor and excel etc. use, when a free one suites 95+% of people. Thought the rental market model went out of fashion with TVs in the 70's We are getting quite a few server installations that use linux - often RedHat, rather than the free o/s.

marleyboy

I bought an Apple as a result.
But then again we also have a Chromebook, Android tablet & netbook, Linux Mint and Ubuntu Desktop. This laptop is currently on Win7 Ultimate, but once this gives up the ghost I wont miss Microsoft.

ChiefGrasscutter

bluesnake wrote: »

Thought the rental market model went out of fashion with TVs in the 70's We are getting quite a few server installations that use linux - often RedHat, rather than the free o/s.

Rather the opposite
They are and will all move to a cloud based rental model - caused sadly by those people like me who buy the software once and never buy new versions so the companies don't make money.
It will be almost back to the days of dumb terminals running programs situated on mainframes from indeed the 1970's & 80's.

Adobe are going that way with their CC versions of the photoshop family of programs....the standalone version already does not have the same facilities as the CC version of the name edition number has.

I expect sometime in the future for upgrades to Win 10 or new facilities or something like it will require yearly licence payments. Hence MS's determination to make you all use it!

The first to sort of try with 'sunset clauses' in their data download capabilities of old versions and then pull out of the market when it didn't work out (in the UK anyway) was Intuit the makers of quicken personal finance who quit the UK in the early 2000's.

onomatopoeia99

I_have_spoken wrote: »

OS/2! :beer:

MINIX

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onomatopoeia99

Leaving aside my previous suggestion, which was not at all serious, Windows still wins for a desktop OS that doesn't require bespoke hardware (and IMO in useabiltiy terms beats OSX as well).

I'm a big fan of linux (debian, because apt), have a pair of boxen (VMs under ESXi) running as servers here and adminster several others for work, but wouldn't recommend it as a desktop OS.

aardvaak

Ant555 wrote: »

Purely out of interest, and the question is not intended to start a heated discussion, what behaviour?

If there is something specific that you don't like right now, it might be wise for us to make sure that the next os you opt for does not do the same.

Trying to force downloads onto me and not very easily being able to abort it - I didn't ask it to start just clicked maybe later

aardvaak

cookie365 wrote: »

Surely it's a lot less aggravation to simply unistall the upgrade KB update? Thousands of simple to follow guides on google.

And give into them - then they have got their own way!

Nagme

Could an excel spreadsheet work on Linux?