Bold to assume that I use Windows at all... (except when 100% mandatory at my job)

Though as time goes on I wonder how long Mac OSX will take to become more like it, as iOS has already long ago jumped the shark.

And if you believe that, then you'll believe anything... that is supported by hard evidence and deducted from those by sound logical principles.

I will let you decide how and whether this fits in here...

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Obligatory joke warning, incoming in 3... 2... 1...

Do you want to know something that can handle subscripts? And superscripts too? MSO!:-) That's why it's hard to replace - it just does so very much, it has solid foundationals, even if like you said every tiny little aspect of it can drive us nuts.

It depends where you go - e.g. the entire purpose of chapotraphouse is to dunk on people, and the users on that instance constantly crawl out from under their bridge and harass innocent passer-bys in other communities. But if you block a few notable places, which sometimes your instance does for you (I note that yours in particular does not though), then overall the Fediverse can be quite a pleasant place!:-)

Oh the actual UX is horrible, and ironically I confirm what your colleague said that it used to be better than now. It has suffered from the enshittification process the same as everything else these days in our terminal stages of capitalism. Imagine if there was actually competition! Instead, Microsoft went around purchasing any competing product, and rather than absorb the new features simply remove it from the market - bc one implementation of the evolutionary strategy of survival of the fittest is to be better than others, but a far cheaper move is to simply kill off everything else so that you are all that's left. In the authoritarian sense that "you'll take what we offer and like it", it works, bc people are unwilling or unable to put in the time & effort to do better, with FOSS.

Ironically for an unbloated editor for quick stuff, I use gVim, if I am on my own machine.:-) Wordpad would be good if you have to be on a generic Windows machine though - I think it can even do bulleted lists?

Furthermore, on a Mac the implementation of MSO is even less optimal, especially irt battery. So it's not even like I "like" it, it just seems the least horrible option available:-(.

Okay so all true but... genuinely, do you have an alternative to suggest? I have thought about switching to a more LaTeX layout style editing platform even not for mathematical formulas, since part of the issue is simply using WYSIWYG. PowerPoint at least has workarounds for most things - e.g. in the details panel (click click, click click click - it used to be a direct menu item but now it is quite buried, at least in my current version) you can input a numerical value for the x and y position relative to the slide's upper left corner i.e. its absolute position). That requires a significantly lower barrier to entry than editing source code but if the latter offers superior functionality with less hassle...

As for Word and Excel, the same thought applies: what else even comes close? I spent quite some time learning R and therefore hate it with a burning passion - especially the existing libraries like ggplot (granted I am several years out of date there so there's a slim possibility that literally everything about it has changed and it is awesome now?). There I believe a solid alternative would be Python libraries e.g. MatPlotLib (+SciPy + NumPy), but even that I would guess depends on what you want to do, like it would replace the plotting part, but if you still wanted that more visual exploration, or a "view" of the data to send to someone, the visual spreadsheet is kinda neat?

More than a decade of effort went into making MSO, and unfortunately even more would need to be done still in order to improve further as you pointed out, but at this point even if FOSS catches up to all of that, I am still going to respect MSO for having done it first to blaze the trail (even while I switch to the FOSS alternative for daily use:-).

There are different teams that work on different products. Devs != Marketing for one I guess. Anyway those are all legit achievements that we can recognize, and still know that the corporation is evil, or even if it was not that we don't want to rely on a for-profit corp for everything important that we need.:-)

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Fwiw, a lot of us were ready to leave it anyway. Reddit used to be a place for left-leaning people, though I would guess more of the progressive liberal-relative-to-center variety, due to it being started from within the USA (I joined it quite late so not totally sure).

Its downhill slide was long and convoluted and not evenly distributed across all subs. There were pockets of resistance, and probably some niche communities remain even now that are halfway tolerable. Anything worth doing takes real effort to build, and some people have put in those efforts and held on tenaciously. And, to be very clear, morally as well: e.g. places that try to reach the maximum audience possible to combat misinformation, or suicidal or similar behaviors - those places NEED to be on Reddit, yes and even Twitter/X, and 🤮 Facebook too, to achieve their aims of maximal outreach (at which point they could do dual duty to funnel people to the real places too:-).

For those of us that want deeper discourse, Reddit was not meeting that need, but Lemmy/Mbin very much does:-). Btw fascinating related article: https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb.

So that's one category of people, and another is the set of those who just needed to be awakened in order to realize what was going on. Maybe they were busy with children irl or some such and didn't notice Reddit's slide. I am glad that we can provide a home to them as well - it enriches us all to have more people here (mostly).

I HATE Microsoft, it is evil, and moreover it was evil long before Apple and Google etc. became thus (and before Facebook, Twitter/X, etc. existed).

But ngl, Office is solid. I've run Office products on any personal machine I've been on - Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux (Wine) - and every time I have tried to switch to an open-source version I keep going back.

If I had to do heavy math then I would invest the time to learn to use Beamer, but for everything else, PowerPoint does so much with ease.

It's okay - this isn't Reddit, we actually enjoy factual information here. Thanks for sharing:-).

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Or if that's too subtle:

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What?

What!?

Hey, Frank, remind me again what have we done?

PowerPoint is somewhat awesome though, yar.

Everything it does can be done better elsewhere, but it does so much that you can use one thing rather than learn several new tools separately.

You just have to get past and ignore the "Microsoft" part, to see that Office is a legit achievement bc of all the work they put into that.

Ofc it doesn't compare to Latex, but that's like a different class of tool entirely so it's okay:-).

I wonder if part of it is that climate change might mean the death of modern human civilization, so could the slim hope of life as a slave seem more preferable than the greater certainty of death as a free agent?

I cannot fathom that, but then again that's why I am on the Fediverse rather than on Reddit. :-P

Great synopsis. I may have found a twenty first definition if you want!?:-P

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Have you tried being born wealthy? :-D

Right, civilization might survive... maybe, possibly, hopefully, just like if we all were to play Russian Roulette. Still doesn't sound like a smart idea to me to mess with something known to be so dangerous.

At the absolute minimum the changes will be cruel, and hundreds of thousands of people are already dying from each of many individual events like hurricanes outside of their normal seasons, at intensities never before seen in a particular area.

So my thought: at the very least we could care? Except I was wrong - we can go lower, so much lower. We do have the satisfaction though that whatever comes, we brought it upon ourselves.

Yeah, the increasing likelihood of Russia or China using nukes to get their way was what I was thinking, especially with talk that the Western nations might be giving Ukraine the go-ahead to use those weapons to strike within Russia itself.

The plastic sperm issue actually doesn't sound so bad in comparison, bc fertilization treatments might work even if needing to extract outside of the body first. Overall, it still sounds less dangerous to me than e.g. a young woman living in Florida these days without access to money to leave the state for medical care.

I frankly have no idea what to expect about climate change at this point - we've blown far past all the targets and seem now to be in uncharted territory, according to what little I understand. I do notice far fewer birds, bees and other insect life, and I recall hearing how in the Antarctic a few months back there was a single day where the temperature spiked by +70 degrees F (~40°C). I can only imagine what that would do to e.g. Texas if it went from already 100 to then 170 degrees, even if only for a few hours. "Coral" is the least of the issue iirc, they were (by virtue of being sensitive) mainly indicators of the actual events, which we won't know until we see it, but scientists are saying that it's no bueno. Anyway, it seems like the changes could wipe out all mammalian life on the planet, but then again maybe not!?:-P i.e. it could be really bad, but it could be less so, we just don't know, and as you said, we mostly barely care ("we" meaning voters, so chiefly Boomers & evangelical Christians, as Trump and the Republican party's biggest bases).

And yet we seem to care a great deal about tHe EcOnOmY tHo - so it's a choice of prioritization to pick what "matters" to us.