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Yeah desktop apps era is back baby. Fuck you cloud.
Syncthing has been so helpful in making me move away from cloud based options. And to think only reason I found out about it and gave it a shot was because I was trying to figure out how to easily sync my non Steam game save files between my Desktop and my Steam Deck. It's been invaluable since then.
Donate if you regularly use Syncthing. Help close the causal loop.
LibreOffice too for that matter. Kick 'em a few bucks if you can spare it.
Syncthing
That is a very cool project that I'd never heard of. Thanks for sharing!
Welcome to the biggest rabbit hole of your life. Syncthing itself isn’t huge, but the capacity to divest from the big cloud providers is. I say it’s a rabbit hole because you’ll quickly be finding new ways to use it.
Woowoo! Cloud has its place and I love it but it's not for literally everything
I like my personal cloud.
I'm hoping to set one up later this year. I have an old laptop that has good enough specs to run it from my research - I just need to get everything off of it and swamp windows for Linux! Never did a Linux install so I'm excited.
I switched for the first time a few weeks ago!! I didn't realise until I booted my Windows partition earlier for work that I hadn't used it one single time since I did that because it was still open on the download page and forced a hundred updates on me 😅 it's really fun and freeing, I've tried a few and settled on Pop!_OS because I love the simplicity, the pretty desktop environment and the window tiling
So cool! So you basically kept windows in one part of your machine and ran pop os on the rest? Really cool idea!
It's a bit easier if you have a separate drive that Linux can own.
I was reading about this solution. My main laptop is a MacBook Air with M2 so I don't think I can run any version of Linux on it. I have an old windows laptop I'm thinking about trying it on.
Would Linux still run fine on an older laptop?
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I must be one of them. In the last couple of weeks I'm transitioning my apps and services to open source and EU based. I switched from Windows to CachyOS, switched my emails, switched browser, degoogled my phone, deleted FB and X and many more.
It feels so refreshing and free.
FOSS software will win eventually. It may take time, but if good FOSS software is being built by enthusiasts then a time will come where proprietary software fucks up. And when it does, FOSS is ready to take it's place. And as soon as FOSS has become a standard in some field, why would there ever be a need to go back to proprietary?
if good FOSS software is being built by enthusiasts
LibreOffice is forked long ago from the extremely corporate OpenOffice effort, which in turn originated from the non-open-source Star Office. Not all FOSS comes from enthusiasts.
Obligatory comment that endorses pirating software. We need to make sure this stereotype about Lemmy remains accurate.
I'm afraid to find out how many people are still downloading OpenOffice, thinking it's the same software they heard about back in 2010.
What happened to Openoffice?
Oracle happened to it
All the devs went to LibreOffice after that
Is it not the same software they heard about in 2010?
Oracle bought (and quickly killed) it. It’s not under active development, and anything that claims otherwise is likely malicious. LibreOffice is a lot of the original OpenOffice devs who got fed up with the way things were going, and jumped ship.
It was discontinued in 2011. Anything that is out there today is outdated at best, and malicious at worst.
.. so it is precisely the software they heard about in 2010
I managed to get my father in law to fully switch to libreoffice, which is in itself a great achievement, as he’s almost 70 and he used to be an msoffice user for most of his adult professional life.
Libreoffice is just great and Europe should start backing and using more open source, non greedy corporate backed projects.
Hi, I hope you don't mind me asking how you achieved this, my father is 79 and has Parkinsons with hearing problems, he's deaf in one ear and partially in other ear, so he has personality issues, really can be stubborn and difficult to deal with, been having trouble getting him away from Microsoft products like Windows or Office, any ideas or advice be really helpful and appreciated, ty :o)
I mean, I'm not the person you asked for tips, but I wanted to drop my two cents.
If he has many health issues, asking him to switch software at his age will be challenging, and requires a lot of patience. You could start wanting to show him with excitement, like, showing how cool it can be to try out something new. He might get easily overwhelmed if things work differently than what he's used to, so try to guide him in that.
but yeah, be very patient with him. I'm sure he's got a lot on his plate already.
Just keep making sure he's getting the medical treatment he needs.
I wish your family the best!
Well, I guess there is no universal answer and it obviously can’t be some generic method of achieving this,but what I did was to explain in detail how MsOffice is basically just a standard because people made it so out of convenience and lack of true alternatives and it’s not cheap, plus whatever is made freely available by a corporation means it’s actually you paying with your data for it.
It’s a process and you’d have to convince him to at least allow you to show them side by side or explain how it’s always up to date and you don’t have to throw money at it every x years just because it’s called MsOffice202x, because the benefits of upgrading are not worth the money.
It ain’t easy, I know… but I am also providing support myself when requested, which can become a headache fast, especially with “difficult” people.
Thanks for your reply, some very good advice which has given me some ideas, was thinking of combining this with either upgrades for his current computer or maybe a new system, hopefully I can get around his stubborn side, with is old phone I took it and replaced with a new one so he had no choice...lol....maybe is time to do something similar with his computer XD
His current computer is HP AIO, has Intel Pentium J3710 cpu, 4Gb of DDR3L-1600 ram and 1Tb eco/green Toshiba hdd, so became really sluggish with Windows, I got a bit more out of it recently but still slow, had to rip out Edge browser files/folders as it was pegging the hdd to 100%.....gah....I hate Windows, he doesn't use Edge or Outlook, always Firefox and Thunderbird, should make moving to Linux easier through :o)
European countries should adopt linux and these alternatives instead of paying for windows and Microsoft. Much more private too.
Does anyone know how to get endnote or a similar citation manager to work in Libre Office?
If you ever figure it out I'd love to know, too. I relied entirely on Libre Office as an undergrad but missed this feature of MS Word. I currently use a combination of Scribbr and Purdue Owl but would prefer an offline and open source solution.
Copying my response from above for u!
I've been using Zotero since I converted a few weeks back. It has some really useful plugins, so I would recommend adding this one first- it's like a store where you can easily browse and add them :))
I've using using it with Obsidian (there's a short guide you can find online), so while I'm writing an essay in Obsidian I can just hit a key shortcut and it lists every paper I've saved to Zotero. Then when I click one, it adds the citation!
Zotero has plugins for LibreOffice and other word processors: https://www.zotero.org/support/word_processor_integration
If you're a nerd, also check out Typst and LaTeX. Being able to format your documents with pure code is awesome, and you can also define functions for different things, import libraries to generate graphs, and write comments that don't show up in the document.
LaTeX is great for documents, mediocre for slides, questionable for spreadsheets, useless for mail and calendar.
Awesome, it does great at what it was designed to do. And it even does mediocre at things it was not designed to do. It even does incompetently things that aren't anywhere in its code? Amazing piece of tech.
LaTeX is great but it's not an office suite.
I've been using LibreOffice for years and it is fantastic -- although I have always had problems importing PowerPoints. Xcel and Word documents are fine, but PowerPoint is always a mess.
PowerPoints suffer from lack of smart objects, and in the case of using Linux, font conversion. But it's just that we've got to persevere with it. 😅
Nice. Maybe now Microsoft will respond by ~~offering non-subscription options~~ inventing a new proprietary industry-standard file format so their bloated ransomware remains mandatory.
Fortunately platforms like docs are providing sufficient competition that I don’t think they’d be able to lock it down as effectively as they once could.
They'll have to settle for "warning" the user if they detect a file that was made by libreoffice.
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this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2025
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