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It was Office that did it.
One of the things I am famous(ish) for is a conversion of the original 1984 edition of Twilight: 2000 to GURPS.
First in 3e, then 3e(r) then 4e.
I was happily banging it out in MS Word format and using the rest of Office too.
Then one day I tried to email someone a copy of the conversion and saw how big it had become.
I didn't know how to pare it down, but I discovered why it was so large.
Every single change is hidden in there. Every change EVER. It adds up.
I am fortunate that I didn't work from a template or starting with another document in a similar format where someone could back up those changes and see earlier versions of the document.
FuzzyGeff suggested Open Office to replace it.
Once I'd done that I started replacing other MS products. Thunderbird replaced Outlook. Firefox replaced Internet Explorer.
And I kept these products when I moved to OSX.
I used Safari for a while, but changed to Chrome and Firefox depending on what was working and what wasn't as web pages changed.
Neo Office replaced Open Office on the Mac Pro as well. I still use it there.
Thunderbird and Firefox run on Ubuntu. LibreOffice replaces Neo and Open Offices and documents done in one are compatible with the other two!
The down side is there's a few things I needed to bug a couple of friends to walk me through from the terminal to get working the way I wanted, but nothing terrifyingly hard.
VLC has been running on all my machines for quite a while, it plays movies way better than iTunes for Windows and provides an excellent DVD player for Windows as well.
So far I've yet to see an open source product not do what it said and say what it does. They also seem more resistant to the idea of feature creep than shit from Apple and MS.
It's also very nice that all of the open source programs I've adopted have been platform independent. I am not married to a single OS.
I got 110% fed up with Adobe PDF when they ceased supporting all old versions under Windows 10 trying to force everyone to DC. Had to use DC last year I was working for "the big truck factory" and hated it as there was interminable lag when trying to work with it.
ReplyDeleteNow using this neat cheap one time and you own it equivalent called Cute PDF Professional. It is fantastic and has yet to let me down.
Also like you have gone to FF, Thunderbird and Duck Duck Go for most everything. And if Windoze keeps screwing with things, going to jump over to the Ubuntu or similar (already have a machine set up for it). The dominant players are basically dumping the "small user" and going solely after the corporate world, eff em.
I don't even use the Adobe pdf reader anymore.
DeleteI'd been happy enough with my MS Word '97 for a long time, until suddenly it started not saving changes I made in my MSS. I'm now on LibreOffice, but am not completely content with that, either. I want to get a version of MS OFfice that I don't have to pay for yearly; with my constant money problems, I don't like committing to a subscription.
ReplyDeleteThere will never, again, be a copy of Office that you own; so get comfortable with LibreOffice.
DeleteThere's literally nothing that Office does that it doesn't, even if you currently don't know how to do it. There's many how-to guides out there to learn Open/Neo/LibreOffice from the perspective of a Word/Excel victim.
This... I got there by a different path, but I agree with everything said.
ReplyDeleteI use LibreOffice on Ubuntu primarily. It's a derivative of Open Office, as is Neo Office I believe. One thing that LibreOffice does dramatically better than most Microsoft products is saving in PDF. MS's PDF output tends to be bloated by all sorts of weird goobery junk. LibreOffice's PDF output is surprisingly clean and small.
My T2KtoGURPS output is now in pdf thanks to the free Offices being painless and retaining the formatting I put on the page rather than being "helpful" and rearranging things for me.
DeleteThe open source word processors have been excellent at being what you see is what you get on the page in both their native format and pdf.
The local computer repair wizards install LibreOffice on everything that comes in that uses MSOffice. I have found that I prefer LibreO because nothing changes for the worse when it gets updated.
ReplyDeleteDone being a Microserf. And I'd use Firefox if it wasn't such a kludgy pile of dogsqueeze. MS Edge puts less garbage on my system than Firefox does.