I have very limited experience with Apple, and it wasn't positive. Unless Linux emulators have gotten better about playing nicely with .docx, I'm stuck in M$ hell.
To be fair, Apple has long worked to improve the experience when major OS upgrades happen, but now they are so seamless that there are very few surprises (in my experience)
The stranglehold of the MSFT Office Formats in business is both impressive and depressing.
I too have tried all the open source programs that supposedly "support" the office document formats, but there are always glitches, and especially for Word, there are so many historical hacks from the distant past that the modern, non-Microsoft, renderers just barf gibberish on the screen.
Linux isn't as terrible for upgrades as it once was, but if you are on the LTS train, when the new LTS is released, you need to upgrade within 4-6 months, or the major version upgrade will fail miserably. Then you wipe and start from zero.
Microsoft is better at updates than they used to be, but there are still wrinkles. I hear from our internal IT team that the 2x/year major release leads to some nail biting, and a wave of desktop support calls (and far too many re-image incidents).
I expect that MSFT works pretty hard to keep its formats changing just enough that open-source competitors are always glitchy. And yeah, I learned that lesson about Linux the hard way ... a couple of times. So aggravating. M$ had trained me against being one of the first to update.
It's now so much that MSFT changes the format, it is just that the early days, there was a lot of very weird coding of the data, and the fact that computers and memory were so slow/expensive, the tricks they did back in the late 80's and 1990's make for binary formats that are hyper optimized to work well for low speed, limited resource PC's.
There is enough of that cruft around to this day that makes the reasonably well behaved OOXML formats (the crux of the Open Office ecosystem) and the translators that attempt to map the .docx files just struggle.
In short it is partly due to legacy tech, but it also is a bit of a "fuck you" from Bill Gates' era Microsoft.
Today, MSFT is far more on the open and interoperability side of the equation, but the legacy is what kills them. And Bill Gates? Fuck that guy.
Glad it was an easy transition for you.
I have very limited experience with Apple, and it wasn't positive. Unless Linux emulators have gotten better about playing nicely with .docx, I'm stuck in M$ hell.
To be fair, Apple has long worked to improve the experience when major OS upgrades happen, but now they are so seamless that there are very few surprises (in my experience)
The stranglehold of the MSFT Office Formats in business is both impressive and depressing.
I too have tried all the open source programs that supposedly "support" the office document formats, but there are always glitches, and especially for Word, there are so many historical hacks from the distant past that the modern, non-Microsoft, renderers just barf gibberish on the screen.
Linux isn't as terrible for upgrades as it once was, but if you are on the LTS train, when the new LTS is released, you need to upgrade within 4-6 months, or the major version upgrade will fail miserably. Then you wipe and start from zero.
Microsoft is better at updates than they used to be, but there are still wrinkles. I hear from our internal IT team that the 2x/year major release leads to some nail biting, and a wave of desktop support calls (and far too many re-image incidents).
I expect that MSFT works pretty hard to keep its formats changing just enough that open-source competitors are always glitchy. And yeah, I learned that lesson about Linux the hard way ... a couple of times. So aggravating. M$ had trained me against being one of the first to update.
It's now so much that MSFT changes the format, it is just that the early days, there was a lot of very weird coding of the data, and the fact that computers and memory were so slow/expensive, the tricks they did back in the late 80's and 1990's make for binary formats that are hyper optimized to work well for low speed, limited resource PC's.
There is enough of that cruft around to this day that makes the reasonably well behaved OOXML formats (the crux of the Open Office ecosystem) and the translators that attempt to map the .docx files just struggle.
In short it is partly due to legacy tech, but it also is a bit of a "fuck you" from Bill Gates' era Microsoft.
Today, MSFT is far more on the open and interoperability side of the equation, but the legacy is what kills them. And Bill Gates? Fuck that guy.
Ah, thanks for the explanation. That makes a lot of sense, frustrating as it is.
On a lighter note, are you familiar with Epic Rap Battles of History? Their Gates/Jobs take is among my favorites: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njos57IJf-0