Key takeaways:
Microsoft and its leadership refrained from endorsing Donald Trump during the 2024 campaign, unlike some other major tech companies.
However, European governments and enterprises are increasingly breaking ties with Microsoft products in favor of open-source alternatives.
Experts say such a transition can be largely attributed to Trump’s hostile policy towards Europe, which sparked digital sovereignty efforts.
Microsoft has reiterated its digital commitments, but it is yet to be seen if that’s enough to assuage concerns over dependency on US tech.
Good, it’s time this parasitic company hit its comeuppance and countries started taking responsibility for themselves.
On that note, it’s also time open source does a v2 on office software.
LibreOffice is frankly not a good piece of software. I tried it this week. The interface is laggy on an incredibly beefy machine, it’s confusing (e.g. with the first thing you see is a pop of with 5 different UI configuration options to choose from), and doesn’t scale well to high DPI displays.
Just like how GIMP took a decade before the community acknowledged it was not a viable UI despite being packed with good features, LibreOffice needs a refresh for modern and low power computing
the alternatives to gimp aren’t great either… I tried krita and went back to gimp
Krita and Gimp have very different uses.
It’s refreshing to see a more critical take on open source software. The ideals of it are admirable but many projects suffer from a lack of direction due to many slightly differently aligned contributors.
I’m coming from almost 20 years of macOS, where I’ve seen Cocoa thrive and be slaughtered like a fattened pig and the death of human interface guidelines.
I’m loving Linux, but spend 90% of time in my terminal and Firefox.
I wonder whether Java has something to do with it or not. I remember seeing it’s in Java, and that got me thinking whether that’s a good stack here.
It is a Java stack, I feel like the Java ecosystem is mostly dead after the Oracle acquisition.
There’s openJDK, but Java was the defacto language for business for a long time.
I know it’s a somewhat myth (or a thing of the past) that Java virtual machine is inefficient. But I was pretty disappointed to learn that Libre Office is written in Java. I mean, I don’t expect to see Rust (however, why not?), but not Java either.
Java did make sense when swing was coming out, and for a product like LibreOffice write one run anywhere is a big factor.
I don’t know what the state of cross platform UI is these days outside of Tauri/electron, or if GTK works.
I agree that JVM isn’t horribly inefficient, but I think Java’s design patterns are.
Tauri uses system WebView, which on linux is webkit2-gtk. It’s crap.
I think they’re investigating bundling similar to electron, or using servo. Not sure if any progress has been made over the last year