Turns out the end of Windows 10 is good for something: The PC refresh cycle It transpires that Windows 11 is indeed good for at least one thing – driving PC upgrades, according to the latest figures from Gartner. The analyst today published figures showing worldwide PC shipments reached 69 million units in calendar Q3, up 8.2 percent year-on-year. These were devices sold to resellers and distributors …
LibreOffice is free and only good enough if requiring compatibility with Excel's older functions. And it still can't do box plots!
TFTFY
There remain a set of Excel functions that LibreOffice Calc does not yet support or interprets differently. Estimates from recent compatibility reports suggest that while Calc supports over 500 spreadsheet functions, Excel supports around 500–600 unique functions, meaning roughly 50 to 100 functions are partially or completely incompatible.
Common Areas of Incompatibility:
Newer Excel Functions: Functions introduced in Excel 365, such as dynamic array functions (e.g., FILTER, SORT, UNIQUE, SEQUENCE, LET, LAMBDA), are not yet implemented in LibreOffice Calc.
Statistical and Financial Functions: Some statistical, engineering, and complex financial functions behave differently or have different parameter defaults.
Macros & VBA: VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) macros are mostly incompatible; Calc uses its own LibreOffice Basic language.
Complex Table Operations: LibreOffice’s "Multiple Operations" feature only supports basic arithmetic, not more advanced Excel-style array or data table functions like SUMPRODUCT in multi-variable contexts.
«How many people use this missing functionality ?
you will always find differences but how much of that is important ?»
Very few people use that missing functionality. But it turns out those people are power users. At the employ of medium and large companies. Companies that will not be gallavantingly flying the Jolly Roger.
And companies Loooooove to standarize their fleet of Software, so that there are no compatibility problems cross-teams. So, is not like those companies will deploy LO to 95% of the employees, and give office to the other 5%. The 5% that prepare the machos for the other 95% use, and the ones using the advanced functions
JM2¢
YMMV
Please do not attack the human race by recommending proprietary software to people.
If you can't help but to hurt yourself and run proprietary software, please at least use an unauthorized copy so you don't give the enemies of humanity more money.
Regardless, you should just get the real thing and install libreoffice instead.
Looking, my proprietary senses are telling me that both nonfree office and the softmaker-nx version are proprietary versions of libreoffice or openoffice with a heavily modified GUI - but maybe this is the first time they're wrong.
The dependencies seems to be almost identical (hard to tell when libreoffice shoves everything into one binary now), plugins from libreoffice and openoffice are utilized (like hunspell) and similar functionality appears to be offered;
ldd presentations |grep -oE '.*.so.* =' |tr -d '=' |tr -d '\t' |tr -d ' '|tr '\n' ' '
libdl.so.2 libX11.so.6 libXmu.so.6 libXext.so.6 libm.so.6 libXrender.so.1 libXrandr.so.2 libstdc++.so.6 libpthread.so.0 libGL.so.1 libgobject-2.0.so.0 libgstreamer-1.0.so.0 libgstaudio-1.0.so.0 libgstvideo-1.0.so.0 libgstapp-1.0.so.0 libgcc_s.so.1 libc.so.6 libxcb.so.1 libXt.so.6 libGLdispatch.so.0 libGLX.so.0 libglib-2.0.so.0 libffi.so.8 libgmodule-2.0.so.0 libgsttag-1.0.so.0 libgstbase-1.0.so.0 liborc-0.4.so.0 libXau.so.6 libXdmcp.so.6 libSM.so.6 libICE.so.6 libpcre2-8.so.0 libz.so.1 libuuid.so.1
Also, every time I've looked into programs that have good support for microsoft formats that are not from microsoft, I've found that such programs reuse libreoffice's MOX support.
Much of libreoffice is available under certain versions of the MPL, which unfortunately are weak licenses, meaning that proprietary versions might be allowed provided that the license notice is retained and a few other conditions - but I can't find a relevant license notice?
Regardless, it's the case that nonfreeoffice infringes copyright, as it's a derivative work of several LGPLv2.1+ libraries and the LGPLv2.1 (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.en.html) quite clearly states;
"6. As an exception to the Sections above, you may also combine or link a "work that uses the Library" with the Library to produce a work containing portions of the Library, and distribute that work under terms of your choice, ***provided that the terms permit modification of the work for the customer's own use and reverse engineering for debugging such modifications***.", while nonfreeoffice has the following license;
...
YOU MAY NOT:
...
Reverse-engineer, decompile, disassemble, modify, translate, make any attempt to discover the source code of the Software, or create derivative works of the Software.
...
Think about why that would be there.
> libdl.so.2 libX11.so.6 libXmu.so.6 libXext.so.6 libm.so.6 libXrender.so.1 libXrandr.so.2 libstdc++.so.6 libpthread.so.0 libGL.so.1 libgobject-2.0.so.0 libgstreamer-1.0.so.0 libgstaudio-1.0.so.0 libgstvideo-1.0.so.0 libgstapp-1.0.so.0 libgcc_s.so.1 libc.so.6 libxcb.so.1 libXt.so.6 libGLdispatch.so.0 libGLX.so.0 libglib-2.0.so.0 libffi.so.8 libgmodule-2.0.so.0 libgsttag-1.0.so.0 libgstbase-1.0.so.0 liborc-0.4.so.0 libXau.so.6 libXdmcp.so.6 libSM.so.6 libICE.so.6 libpcre2-8.so.0 libz.so.1 libuuid.so.1
How about you learn what those libraries are and only bother posting (or at leat highlighting) non-trivial ones that might actually demonstrate something interesting. Looking at your list, immediately a whole bunch of "yes, and so what, those are used by damn near everyone" items leap out. Such as: X Windows (oh noes, it has a GUI), PCRE, zlib, threads (!), and - shock horror - the C++ runtime!
So - what was your point supposed to be?
>> Please do not attack the human race by recommending proprietary software to people.
If those pushing restrictive licenses are the enemies of the people, so is toe-jam eating mooch and defender of paedophilia Richard Stallman. For example, read why he had to resign from MIT (https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2019/09/18/mit-richard-stallman-resigns-epstein/).
That sort of stain doesn't come out in The laundry.
The GPL is way more restrictive than the BSD license. So the GPL according to your logic is also a crime against humanity.
There is nothing inherently wrong with proprietary software. A lot of software would never get created it people couldn't earn a living coding. Not everyone wants to live like a homeless bum sleeping in a computer lab with no bath or shower for weeks at a time (how do you think his toe jam accumulated? He has bad personal hygiene).
Most of the posters here paid their bills writing software - and most of that was proprietary. Obviously you never worked in the industry.
I really shouldn't reply, but it's really amazing the libel against Richard Stallman that people come up with - but I guess the whole idea is that if you carry out a character assassination, with accusations of anything related to "paedophilia", people let emotions cloud their judgement and don't check the facts.
He was defending his late friend Minsky (after all, dead people can't defend themselves) from what turned out to be false allegations; https://stallmansupport.org/debunking-false-accusations-against-richard-stallman.html
Despite the harm resulting and inability to discuss things in a logical manner, emotions clouding judgement can result in these irrational conclusions;
"Laws decide morality" (when in fact many laws are extremely immoral in certain cases).
"A {17,17.5,17.75,17.99,18,19} year old is a child".
"<Harmful act> was not rape or harmful if the victim was 18".
"<Commenting anything at all> in relation to individuals under age {18,19,20,21} years is 'paedophilia'" (Of course people don't even bother to check what that word means; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paedophilia?useskin=monobook)
I'll move on, as logic is lost on the irrational.
>The GPL is way more restrictive than the BSD license
There are many BSD licenses, but let us compare the BSD 3-clause and the GPLv3+.
The 3-clause BSD "restricts" you from distributing the software;
a) If redistributing source code, you must keep intact the copyright notices, the list of conditions and a disclaimer.
b) If redistributing binaries, you must keep intact the copyright notices, a list of conditions and a disclaimer in the documentation etc.
c) You may not endorse or promote products with the name of the copyright holder or contributors.
d) There is no patent license.
The GPLv3+ "restricts" you from distributing the software;
a) If redistributing source code, you must keep intact the copyright notices and license text.
b) If redistributing binaries, you must keep intact the copyright notices and license text.
c) You may not restrict the software by making it proprietary - for any object code distributed, you must include or make available via a written offer, the complete corresponding source code and installation information (just like how that was provided to you), to those provided the object code (or in the case of a written offer, anyone with the written offer).
d) You have a patent license, which remains in force unless patent aggression is undergone.
As can be seen - neither license contain any restrictions (the government is the one restricting the software - a free license rather undoes such restrictions) - but both do have several requirements.
Businesses may complain about the requirements of the BSD 3-clause (after all, it's inconvenient to include the license notice in all needed places) and may complain about the requirements of the GPLv3+ (after all, it's inconvenient to tarball up the source code and compilation+installation scripts), but when given the option to take it under the terms or leave it - most accept either set of terms in the end.
>So the GPL according to your logic is also a crime against humanity.
It could be argued that releasing software under a weak license, knowing with certainty that it would be restricted to become proprietary software would be a minor crime against humanity - but that is not certain and BSD 3-clause software with source code, that is not rendered proprietary by a patent, is free software after all.
>There is nothing inherently wrong with proprietary software.
Proprietary software is inherently wrong as it infringes on at least one of the four freedoms (most infringes on all 4).
In any case where the users are restricted from running the software when they wish, and/or restricted from studying how the program works and changing it as they wish and/or restricted from sharing unmodified or modified versions is a case when something wrong has happened.
Anyone who has ever cooked from a recipe would likely agree that it would be wrong to infringe on these 4 freedoms when it comes to food recipes (you should be free to cook the recipes, read and understand the recipes and/or share unmodified or modified recipes) - but magically software is something completely different and it's okay to restrict it.
>A lot of software would never get created it people couldn't earn a living coding.
The assumption that software needs to be proprietary for it to be possible to earn a profit is false (and also the assumption that software being proprietary guarantees profit is false too).
It would be better for software to not exist than for it to be proprietary - so as long as proprietary software was eradicated, it wouldn't be a bad thing for less software to be written and for people to not be able to earn a living coding (after all, they can do something else, like programming) - but that's a false dichotomy.
The world doesn't particularly need another calculator, or other word processor, or another kernel etc etc etc, but what it certainly doesn't need is more proprietary software.
Most software is custom software, which is free software as long as the customer has the wit to require that the source code is provided and also to not sign away their copyright for proprietary terms, for the software they paid to have written.
Regardless, generally the money is not in writing the software - the money is in support, warranty, hosting and custom modifications - all of which is working quite well with free software in many cases.
Only a small number of companies and a handful of individuals are able to make a profit from selling copies of proprietary software (or even merely subscriptions to it) - as generally those companies and individuals do their best to prevent competing software from being written, as they do not like even imagining of any interference to their monopolies.
>Not everyone wants to live like a homeless bum sleeping in a computer lab
If anyone wishes to have a life where they hack to their hearts content and then choose any flat surface in the computer lab to collapse exhausted and sleep - they should be free to do so - as such sort do tend to achieve something for humanity, unlike most people.
Richard Stallman last worked in a computer lab 26+ years ago and he in fact did not sleep in the computer lab - he slept in a normal bed and would shower before returning to work.
>with no bath or shower for weeks at a time (how do you think his toe jam accumulated? He has bad personal hygiene).
The most egregious lie in your post is that Richard Stallman has bad hygiene - while people assume he has bad hygiene, he in fact has good hygiene to their shock.
The reason why he was able to take a sample and seconds of his foot skin when taking about the dangers of patents, was because his foot was clean.
I would love to do nothing better than to hold a question and answer session on free software and at a key moment whip my feet out and sample some carefully cultivated foot cheese (too bad I don't have any - maybe it only starts growing when you finish writing the substantial free software package).
>Most of the posters here paid their bills writing software - and most of that was proprietary. Obviously you never worked in the industry.
Most of the posters here appear to be sysadmins - which consists of maintaining computer systems - not writing software.
You've clearly never worked in the industry if you think most of is writing proprietary software (how there is now an equal amount or more free software than currently available proprietary software products disproves such claim).
«Why kick a can down a road?»
Because many things can change in a year. Your favourite distro may die (Bazzite almost dies a few months ago), a new distro may become better, MS may relent and offer a second year of ESU for free, a truck may wipe you out (i'll be undergoing surgery tomorrow, it shows).
My situation is similar. My MacMini 2018 will be out of support on (boreal) Auttum 2027, and my synology went out of support in (boreal) summer 2025. I'll kick both cans down the roand until 2028. Why? Because I can (pun intended)
It always strikes me as amazing (being maybe a little sarcastic here) that, as soon as the next version of an OS or application is launched (or at least once "support" for its predecessor ceases), that predecessor suddenly becomes lethal. The reality of course is that [a] it's always been lethal and [b] its successor is also lethal (needing constant repairs for its entire operational life). I think it's safe to assert that there's never been an OS or mainstream application to date that has been fully fixed before it went obsolete, because software development is still crap in engineering terms.
I only run Linux now for my main usage of an OS, and there are a few blips here and there, where maybe a repository has not been updated and there is a skipped package update, or the lock screen did not work. All this is done using peoples time for free. Outstanding situation for the benefit of everyone.
For Windows, a paid for OS, and for Microsoft an organisation which makes vast profits in the billions, yet still regularly fucks things up for everyone, then that as a situation is quite preposterous.
Microsoft is treating its customers like trash, and still, people pay for it.
«I only run Linux now for my main usage of an OS [...] All this is done using peoples time for free.»
Ja ja ja ja. C'mon man. The mith of the hobbyist volunteering for FOSS on their free time is over. Look at the most important/influential/large FOSS projects. The Linux Kernel, FreeBSD, Wayland, Apache...
Look at who contributes the most relevant code and you'll see somethign interesting: most if not all of the most relevant contributors are on the employ of large corporations, if not foundations.
¿And guess what is their day job? Submit code to said FOSS project.
Also, Take a look at those projects and foundations, ¿who contributes the most ammount of hardware for testing, datacenter time, and cold hard cash? Big corporations. That's who.
Nintendo and Sony pour money and code towards (Free)BSD.
PurpleHat and Suse do so for many of the most important Linux stacks.
Even microsoft works super hard in both sides of the demark so that Linux runs great on Azure/Hyper-V. At some time they were the biggest code contributor to Linux.
"People's time for free"
Yeah, right.
The era of the hobbyist coder has been over for a few lustres now.
"People's time for free"
And therein lies yet another myth. FOSS people's time is donated but it is CERTAINLY not free. These people take time out of their lives - from spending time with family and friends, to doing another hobby beyond computing, to exercising, to cooking, to doing just about anything else - to take up someone else's project or work on their own, but for no monetary compensation for their skills. If, as noted, they do it as part of their paid day job then it isn't "FOSS"; if they do it on their own time that time has a personal cost, measured by each individual, that they are willing to donate.
You people are so pathetic. Here you are, denying that if something is done that you are getting paid for (working on community-based code on your day job) it's still "free", because that will hurt your snowflake nature because you must, therefore, question that word's relevance, "free".
Your adherence to dogma is just as good as a MAGAit's. Congratulations.
> Microsoft is treating its customers like trash, and still, people pay for it.
I have never paid for Windows, not even as included in a PC purchase.
None the less I am so fucked off with Microsoft that I am already replacing Windows with Linux. I loved Windows up to 7, tolerated 10, but their shit with 11 has pushed me beyond breaking point.
"Making Alternatives Great Again"
The PC industry has been in a more-or-less steady-state for a decade or more. In the developed world, everyone that needs or wants a personal computer has one. In the third-world, folks are getting on very well with end-of-life cast offs and increasingly, smartphones.
The PC industry and all of the hangers-on have financed and sustained themselves via boom boom boom cycles driven by OS and Office suite 'upgrades'. Those upgrades have been driven by (mostly) UI changes that did little to add real world functionality while requiring more and more compute resources to function.
The contemporary compute and computer paradigms are proving to be anything but eco friendly and those nice non-polluting white buildings / bit barns are blasting the hell out of any energy conservation / reasonable use / social responsibility agreements and targets that have been set.
It is so very easy to find multiple arguments against the current and next few generations of changes to compute infrastructure (including AI) and any positives often require financial, mental, and ethnical gymnastics that only the most jaded and narcissistic advocates can bring forward.
Agreed.
The hardware for the past ten years at least is more than capable enough to ensure Internet browsing, email and video.
One of these days, Redmond et al will have to recognize that the latest and greatest is just a pipe dream. 90% of users already have what they need.
Gamers and video makers will always be an exception, but you don't make revenue out of them - they're a percentile of the market.
One of these days, Redmond et al will have to recognize that the latest and greatest is just a pipe dream. 90% of users already have what they need.
Which is why AI (needing new hardware) is being pushed.
This being written on 13 year old hardware running Debian Linux.
Well, software bloat is driving hardware sales since forever. Now we are at a point were, for the first (and rest assured not the last) time software has been artificially and maliciously crippled to drive an even faster and bigger hardware replacement. And it will happen again in less than 8 years, rest assured. The next windows will require some new AI bullshit coprocessor. Once a new way of extracting money from the customers has been found, there is no way back.
And if you think it's about security, as MS said, I can sell you a big tower in Paris for scrap metal.
Sort of. It's the other way around, really but historically Microsoft's main sales agents have been H/W vendors. I still wouldn't be surprised to find them being thrown under a bus if they don't do their job. How? A new, non-TPM2 version of W11 only available as a new sale, not as a free upgrade.
There is honest profit to be made in selling PCs due to basic churn.
EOLing and stipulating higher specs is as ethical as starting a pandemic to sell novel drugs.
We need a replacement PC OS, Office package and browser that works on any generic kit, uses compatible interfaces and file formats, and will keep doing so for the next two decades. You'd like to think that there is at least one person who has got rich from tech willing to fund that.
Both Windows and Linux are bloated monsters with endless upgrade cycles.
> You'd like to think that there is at least one person who has got rich from tech willing to fund that.
Sure, all you have to do is find the person who got rich from tech that *didn't* (and doesn't) expect the user to keep buying new versions/models/upgrades/subscriptions and actually has real liquid money to use, not purely "on paper value, if we can find anyone daft enough to buy these stocks/options/massive debts".
Mint* used to run fast on my decades-old maxed out at 2Gb W7-era N2600 processor netbook. Latest Devuan is a bit slower now. It's now only about twice as fast loading a browser as the I7 laptop on W10.
* Doesn't seem to like the Imagine graphics. Maybe I should try LDME but I always thinkk why LDME rather than just straight Debina?
So now the PC manufactures are happy because Windows 10 EOL has made their sales line go up, MS is happy as that means more Windows license sold. So im sure it wont be long before Windows 12 will be coming out as yet another forced upgrade. Probably requiring you have the latest NPU 2.0 because AI which will only be in the most shiny shiny of new PC.
Great... and many computers that are more than capable for most people's general pc use end up as e-waste... but "Line Goes UP."
I have a Thinkpad T450s : i7-2600U 512GB SSD and 20GB DDR3 , from 2015 (10yrs old) I am running Mint on it and it is fantastic just surfing web, working with documents / emails.. watching YouTube videos.. No reason the machine should be junked at this point, would make a perfectly usable daily laptop for many people despite being a decade old. That said the batteries really should be replaced.. but it still holds a charge and can be used unplugged for a while... just not a long while.
Funny how quickly all the net zero / e-waste reduction concerns vanish when there is a chance to make "Line Go Up".
The only Win machine I have at home is a laptop (in name only) with an Intel Core i7-7700HQ, 16GB of RAM, 2xSSDs and a Nvidia 1050 card. Bought it 8 or 9 years ago.
I've changed the battery 2 times (the last one a couple of months ago). It works. Mostly for games, not my main driver nowadays, but why would I change it?
I'll change the OS when the time comes, and it certainly won´t be W11.
I recently rebuilt a HP Elitebook 840 G2. i5-5200U, 16GB DDR3 and a 500GB SSD plus a new battery off iFixit. Running MX Linux KDE it feels just as snappy if not faster than my work-issued 2021 Dell Latitude, despite the Dell having double the RAM and a 11th gen i7....certainly it keeps up with the Dell for every work task I could think of. Not bad for £40 spares or repair on eBay.
Equally reluctant to give up the workbench PC I inherited when changing jobs at my employer, a 4th gen i7 HP workstation that is still blazingly fast for its 11 years, a replacement wouldn't be justifiable under our new budget regime as everyone is expected to use their laptops.
The workstation would easily be good for another five years or more if it wasn't for W10 going EOL...there's a fair temptation to request it to be designated as a dev machine to allow Ubuntu on it.
Net zero and all that fake-green bullshit is good only for PR or when you can somehow make money out of it. As soon as it's something that makes you lose money (or just make less money) down the drain it goes.
Renewable energy? Fine when you can make money ou of it. Now you try to make money out of AI and you need more energy? FIRE UP THAT COAL PLANTS NOW!
E-waste reduction? Sure, until you have to sell more hardware, and then it's time to throw away every old PC in the world because of "windows 11 is more secure" (LOL).
No one cares about pollution, climate, or whatever. They care about THEIR MONEY.
Single core CPU performance hasn't significantly increased in years.
Some apps (even modern ones) e.g. games and graphics processing software, are only capable of using a single core, due to an inability to process data in parallel.
The real world single core CPU performance ratio between my 2013 i5-4670k and a 2025 AMD 9800X3D is only about 2.5 times.
Single core performance is reaching a plateau and cannot really increase anymore unless some radically new technology is invented. Something that defies current limits in thermal dissipation at least. Then there is the issue with stray capacitance and inductance in the lines. We are already running on hardware that walks on the tight rope of how fast we can go and still be able to read the signals, distorted as they are by the fact that the transmission lines are too long and the frequency is too high.
Multi core as you said is good for multiple programs to run at the same time, but the vast majority of programs are mono-thread by design. And others are mono-thread because no one wants to spend time making them multi-thread. Or by licensing restrictions, too.
PC sales will almost certainly fall back down in the next few years. 2025 is an anomaly thanks to Windows 11's odd choice of required specifications and Microsoft's heavy-handed push to get users to abandon Windows 10. From all I've seen, W11 brings almost nothing worthwhile to the table and in fact makes most tasks downright annoying to do, even simple things like right-click context menus. I purposefully disabled TPM 2.0 in my BIOS a couple years ago to prevent a forced "upgrade" to W11 on my personal computer. Though the Extended Security Updates for W10 will only last until next year unless I move to LTSC, so I might be forced to deal with updating to W11 only to have to find ways to debloat and revert the UI back to W10 or W7 as much as possible.
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