I’ve been dual-booting Linux and Windows for a while, with Windows as the fall-back option in case I wanted to use Office for something. Now that they tried to trick me into paying a subscription for their AI slop machine, I’m finally, fully out. It was a pain to actually track down and back-up the stuff that was held for ransom in OneDrive, but now it is done.
At least they don’t make you pay for cancelling like Adobe does
What stopped me initially from paying Adobe was the fact that they force you to use their Cloud app which served no purpose to me. A crack doesn’t come with Cloud or at least a disabled one… Now that I know you have to pay to cancel, I’m pretty happy that Adobe stuff is easy to crack.
Cracked software still enables their dominance over the market.
What? How much is it? Surely that can’t be illegal?
You have to pay if you want to stop a year’s commitment early. Iirc you have to pay half of what you promised you would pay them over the year. So if you changed your mind it’s cheaper to cancel than to continue paying for the months you have left.
If you sign a contract agreeing to their terms (and receive a discount in exchange) you have to follow them. The same goes for any other contract where you have a year’s commitment like for an ISP. It’s all pretty standard.
Is it annoying? Yeah obviously but they make it pretty damn clear when ordering that it’s a year’s commitment and that you receive a discount. Any reasonable individual should be able to figure out why you get a discount.
Ooh it’s an early termination fee. OP made it sound like there was a fee on top of the subscription cost. Which I guess still fits the definition.
Still scummy.
Adobe signed me up for a “trial” over the phone, which they then ended up trying to charge me to get out of.
I ended up just blocking their payment and never heard anything else about it. Fuck Adobe, they are in contention for shittiest company in my eyes.
Sounds like having to pay a fee when you break a contract… So probably legal.
Obviously you have to pay to cancel a year’s commitment.
They give you a discount for your commitment to pay for a year and they make that pretty clear on their website when ordering. I can post screenshots of that but I really hope that won’t be needed, just check for yourself.
If you don’t want a year’s commitment you can just pay the higher price for a months commitment.
Pretty sure you have to pay half of what you promised to pay them had you kept paying for the whole year. I highly doubt that they legally have to even do that. I doubt that an ISP or utility company would let you cancel at all if you had a years commitment.
P.S it’s ridiculous that I have to say this but yeah I know that Adobe suck. Fuck em and all that. I’m just saying that this particular thing isn’t unusual or should be in any way unexpected when you sign up for a year’s commitment.
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Depends what you need. Many publishers require certain features from MS Word that are not available or are not as ‘compatible’ in LO Writer (not that its LO’s fault ;), but for most use case I would agree. Things are a bit more complicated in the case of Excel as far as I can understand what I read (edit: I don’t use much spreadsheets myself).
I’ve quit using MS Word a few years ago, fully switching to LO Writer. There are a few issues here and there but nothing that’s a deal breaker (and Word had its own issues too), and I must quite like many things in Writer—beside the app not spying on me, I mean ;)
Depends on what you need from Excel. All the simple stuff and most of the medium complex stuff is available in Calc. However, there are still many Excel only features where Calc can’t compete. Not a big deal for most people since those tend to be slightly obscure features anyway. If Calc can’t get the job done, I suggest switching to R or GNU Octave. You’ll thank me later.
Out of interest, what sort of features are you referring to that publishers require?
It can vary a lot depending the publisher, and some will not care at all while others will use, say, tracking features or work collaboratively (they can even be using OneDrive for that, which includes MS Office in its price), or they will require the author to use a specific Word template that they have devised for Word (with the person in charge of the final layout in whatever layout application, in order to streamline or the process and save time on that part of the job), when they aren’t that kind of publishers that simply do the final layout directly in Word before sending the final PDF to the printer. Also, as an author, if a publisher has asked you to use MS Word and some specific stylesheet and realize they tried to to be smarter than them… good luck with that, unless they’re already one of their best-selling author.
And that’s just what comes to my mind and that I have been witnessing first hand ;)
This true for most people, but Calc is limiting for certain use cases.
Just cancelled my 365 the other day too. Been on Linux for half a year now and forgot I had it until the news of the copilot price increase came out and reminded me. I was happy I could cancel and be refunded the remainder of the term and get some money back in my pocket!
Welcome! Been like a year and a half for me, and I can’t even imagine ever going back to Windows. Just using it for work is already too much.
I can feel the bloat when I use it now. Like you need to get from point a to b in a hallway. It’s just you…and windows inflatable boat they fully inflated in the hallway between a and b. And you have to squeeze through to go to point b.
Yeah, Linux feels like what using a personal computer was always supposed to be.
The same thing happened with me. This was probably going to be my last year anyway, but i noped out real quick after the increase. Only reason I still had it was because I had some stuff in OneDrive that I was slowly backing up elsewhere. That just gave me the motivation to take care of it finally.
I can finally say that I’m making the move to Linux now, as I’m dual booting Fedora. I plan to try to do my regular browsing and activity on Fedora, while keeping my school work and what little gaming I do (laptop user) on Windows. Hell, once I get confident enough in my Linux skills, I’ll probably move the school stuff over to Fedora too.
I’m doing it mostly cause I’ve read the privacy horror stories, but also because I just hated Windows 11. Like there’s nothing about it that is worth staying for… The excessive resource use, random settings being changed that you have to dig to find, the shitty Co-Pilot ads, and the fact I won’t be able to use office once I graduate… Yeah no.
Good thing is I’m a cyber student, so guess I’m just getting a head start for a easier grade in my future Linux class lol.
Deleted my Microsoft account yesterday!
I feel like Windows tries with every change to push it’s users to Linux.
I was thinking to myself that I need to cancel mine. Then yesterday I got charged $127 for the yearly renewal.
I thought I was SOL but you can cancel and get most of the money back. So it’s not too late to cancel and rid yourself of it.
Same across the board.
I stopped buying Skype credit once subscriptions were forced.
Same, Microsoft is about to force my laptop to update and I am about to own zero devices that run Windows.
There is no coming back either, which is what makes the schadenfeude of Microsoft (the dog) really actually catching the car this time so funny and satisfying.
I think it is going to make heads spin how fast the idea that Windows has unassailable hegemony in the desktop space becomes an antiquated idea. There is an asteroid in the sky, and the time of dinosaurs is over.
All the alarm bells should be going off at Microsoft hq and I know they probably feel like they are sitting pretty and feel nice and future proofed in their business plan, it is amazing and makes my heart sing.
Sorry not sorry you law breaking, monopoly chasing, morally bankrupt losers. You might be richer than I ever will be, but lets be honest, that is because I have standards about what I am willing to do for money.
What distro are you using, and how difficult was it for you to get started with it?
I’m currently making a list of distros and looking at each’s pros and cons, including:
- what did work out of the box?
- what required more work to fix / workaround?
my unsolicited 2c is to checkout mint
Mint easy to use and requires the least maintaining I kinda wanted kde tho at that time.
isn’t there a mint version with plasma?
It’s only with mate,xfce and Cinnamon but ngl I just installed another distro that supported kde or let’s you pick no desktop.
I started trying out Linux a few years ago, on a few different computers. Well first, a really long time ago, but I was a Mac user for a long time, and then switched to Windows in 2018, so my modern Linux experience started in 2021 or so.
On my home PC I started with Mint, but because I was doing some programming, ran into problems because the compilers and CMake there were too old to compile a few things I needed to work on (CUDA was the problem for CMake, C++20 was the problem for the compilers). Switched to Tumbleweed, was happy with that for a while.
Meanwhile, on my laptop, I switched from Manjaro to Fedora KDE spin after some stability problems, and was so pleasantly surprised by how it was both solid and up-to-date, that I ended up moving everything to that.
Edit: biggest problem I had was when I tried to install Mint on an office PC that I built for myself. Mint didn’t support the on-board ethernet so I had no way of getting it online, and after getting lost in forum posts, gave up.
Personally, I’ve found the most supported software from Linux mint
I’ve heard PopOS/Linux Mint are great starters. I personally run ZorinOS which is based on Ubuntu. It’s beautiful, had built in customization, and has a free version (I paid for the pro version because I liked it so much and wanted to support it).
You’ll find occasional headaches in all Linux distros just because it’s not windows so compatibility can require work arounds depending what you wanna run. But it’s worth it. Feels so much faster and in your control which is nice. Also if you screw up the distro you can just boot another distro from the flashdrive you used to install in the first place (keep the ISO handy just in case ;) ).
Yes, even though I did not have a subscription, watching them do stuff like this every 2 weeks for the last year or more is what finally pushed me off to Linux as well. I got my parents moved over as well though, and they did have a subscription previously.
What was painful about getting the stuff out of OneDrive?
When I did this it was straight forward.
- Sync to local
- Move all to new directory (his triggers a mass deletion on OneDrive)
- Sync to seafile (in my case)
mainly it was because I was trying it from my linux desktop, and if you try to download a large collection of files from the onedrive web interface it’s 50/50 if it fails half-way through
Ah yes. I’ve had the same issue. The web download is hit and miss. Totally understand, and a warranted description of that experience.
Just going to mention that if you’re okay with non-FOSS office software, I really like Softmaker’s suite (their buy-once non-subscription version).
