There are plenty of Windows progs I cannot do without, but it is because of their market dominance, not because of an intrinsic lack on Linux. I've been a professional writer, editor and proofreader for 10 years* (and a Linux user for 25) and as an editor I have never received an ODT file from a client. I saw them a few times working in academia, but they are functionally invisible in (my part of) the industry. I have used LO in my own time, but not stretched it capabilities.

Logically, we should no more criticise LO for not being 100% compat with MS Office than the other way around, but in practice I need 100% MS Office compatibility to make a living. I need the tools like PerfectIt (https://intelligentediting.com/home/) and so on because I need clients. So in that sense there is no Linux equivalent, but if Microsoft did not play games with its file architectures, there probably would be, so that's not Linux's 'fault'. Word is horribly buggy, they keep adding functions without making sure the existing ones work well. I hate it, and I cannot avoid it.

Much as I hate Acrobat, it's another one. We do a lot of PDF markup using Acrobat, and my clients send me files marked up in Acrobat using its commenting tools, and I've yet to find a 100% compatible Linux tool for that. Happy to learn of one. I use a Windows version of Evince to read and view PDFs, but I have to fire up Acrobat for the annotating and editing.

I've never done layout, for which our designers use InDesign, and my PhotoShop and Illustrator skills are rudimentary at best, so I cannot comment on how much Inkscape, Gimp, Scribus (Openshot, etc) are replacements. The question is, if LO and these tools were the 800 lb gorillas, with all the 3rd-party support that that would generate, would we be lacking functionality?

* Don't pick apart my gramma or spelling in this post. I'm off the clock and I don't grammar good unless paid to.

Cos everyone loves a chance to express an opinion.

This goes beyond and before Trump, though he is the worst.

US still does more great science than any other country. Sad to think how it could have broken free of oil politics decades ago if it wanted to. What we're seeing is the damage that the lack of real independence of governments (not just US) from big corporations does. US could.d have been energy independent decades ago for a fraction of the cost of its military ventures and accommodating legacy industry.

Goes back through lots of administrations.

Trump has created a crisis and, almost as bad, now he's going to waste it.

Most of the gibberish is coming from the attempt to explain a magnon and a spinwave to a wide audience in a few words.

Apologies if this is already familiar, but... magnetic materials are magnetic because the atoms in them have unpaired electron spins, such that the atoms can be thought of as (crudely) like little bar magnets. You get a ferromagnetic material when all these atom magnets line up the same way -- that's iron. Now, if you imagine having a row of these magnets standing in a line, like pickets in a fence. If you try to tip one of the pickets over, it'll pull on the surrounding ones and you'll get a region in which the spin direction is no longer vertical, that is, a region where there is a spin deviation. These spin deviations follow a wave form, and that is a spinwave. A magnon is the quantum of excitation in a spinwave. That is, the discrete amount of energy that the spin structure absorbs when the spin wave energy increases. Just like atoms absorb discrete amounts of energy when you have electronic transitions.

For comparison, a photon is a quantum of excitation of an electromagnetic wave.

Spin waves, which are bosons, are very different from electrons, which are fermions. They do not have a net charge, and they can be antiferromagnetic, which makes them on the whole less susceptible to magnetic fields than you might think. Probably quite a few years away from mainstream tech usage (the article reads a bit like justification for some pretty basic research), but so was quantum computing not that long ago.

It's actually not gibberish. It's solid state physics. The same field of science that have you the transistor.

But only as a USB floppy drive, because the USB ZIP drives could also read floppies.

Yes, but you never sleep.

70 years old and at #13.

... if Mozilla gets there first! Quick! People are getting used to the interface. Change something!

$ edlin word.txt
word.txt: New file.
*i
  : Until Werd is fully modal, it'll never have a great interface.
  : .
*rWerd,Word
1: Until Word is fully modal, it'll never have a great interface.
*a
  : You know, like EDLIN
  : .
*w
word.txt: 2 lines written
*

Whether it works or not, or partially works, or blows up, these moves are interesting because part of a very belated attempt by governments to regulate the unregulatable. Groomers, cyberbullying, all kinds of stuff is known to be harmful, especially to kids but to others as well. So is too-early exposure to pr0n, violence and so on. (In fact, the 'this is how democracy dies' flamebait at the top of this screen is interesting in itself; would the poster speak like that to a room full of parents who are struggling to get by and are trying to protect their kids from online crap while they both work all day? or would codebase7 only say it in the safety and distance of a forum like this? Is that comment a very mild example of one of the main problems with so much online communication -- a basic lack of respect?)

The very fact that governments are finally having a go at this is the interesting thing.

If toy companies were as unregulated as the 'net, kids would be finding MDMA tabs packaged with their Hot Wheels cars, to encourage them to go back for more.

It needed to happen 30 years ago, at the beginning of the internet, to set different expectations. The big techs have been created in an environment when they can essentially be parasites on society, and they don't like having to contribute, and they don't like anything that clamps down on their freedoms. And, given that their business is making money, you cannot blame them for being pricks. It works.

Government is a lot more like a friend than the bastards out there using chat to groom kids. There are some lessons we don't want our kids to learn through personal experience.

Predatory adults don't in general use phone calls to groom their child victims.

I like Excel. It pretty much works. Sure, a lot of people use it for things it wasn't designed for, but you cannot blame Excel for that. Personally, the Solver is a favourite of mine. I'm sure I use it in all kinds of statistically indefensible ways.

Pound for pound, the best component of MS office, and has been for decades.

I bet the EU is watching closely.

This is tackling a complex problem with a hammer. There are workarounds, there will be collateral damage. Sure. But businesses are there to make money, not look after people and societies. We know they'll happily do any amount of social, environmental and personal harm in the interests of profit. So governments have to protect their citizens, however imperfectly that turns out to be. If a government / regulatory system is any good, you don't allow a pesticide factory to be built beside a school, but you do allow the factory to be built somewhere.

So, I think it's also completely reasonable. Governments have got to do something, and this is a starting point. The idea that you can come up with a perfect solution to a complex problem is childish. So is the idea that because of this you don't even try. You have a go and refine and keep chasing a moving target, and it's never all that good but it's better than doing nothing.

It all has to start with recognising that something needs to be done, and with not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. (Or is not good, better.)

Or is it that Microsoft is notorious for not following published standards, even when they say they have, and that heaps of people have devoted a lot of time to try to get Win stuff to run on Linux despite Microsoft's unhelpful attitude? I think a lot of Linux users and devs would be more than happy to piss of MS, but the pissing off is usually running the other way. If MS was ready to collaborate on making its stuff runnable on wine (Linux), the problem would be solved. The problem is Microsoft, not Linux.

I use Windows as much as I use Linux. WSL lets Linux run well in Windows because Linux is openly documented. Windows apps do not run well in Linux because they are a closed shop.