From what I could infer from some community talks, podcasts and so, I would assert that nowadays they have the problem new hires have been educated in UNIX like OSes and Web.
Thus Windows team gets lots of folks that never coded anything for Windows, and management instead of having proper trainings in place, just goes with Webview2 and Electron all over the place.
I might be wrong, this is more my perception than anything else.
I would say the web took over as the primary application platform and Unix-likes provided convenient low cost license-free foundations to build them on.
No excuse for not having trainings in place for Windows native development, for those new hires.
You don't see Apple and Google doing the same Webviews all over the place on their OSes, with exception of ChromeOS, which appears to be on the death row to be replaced with Android anyway.
In fact, at WWDC 2025 Apple executives even spoke publicly on the matter against that approach.
How's that different from Red Hat Linux? I mean, Linux is all about corporate takeover by IBM, Google and the like. The mainstream of Linux GUI is Android for crying out loud and X and Wayland are rounding errors compared to that.
It's a story in Germany all the time that some open source zealots get a town government to switch to an off-brand office suite which is so bad that the government worker's union goes on strike to get Microsoft Office back.
We have OnlyOffice as an alternative today. Personally I find the UI quite pleasing. But lately I haven't had any need to use office suite at home so I don't really use it so I have yet to find anything to complain (meanwhile, LibreOffice was horrible, while Office 365 was bearable until you stuff too many things in the equation editor).
Its really not that bad. I used to use it at work all the time. I did word processing, spreadsheets and presentations all the time with it. Maybe not as powerful as Excel, but I was never really a power user. But then again I never saw any spreadsheets that anybody used that were particularly complex.
LibreOffice is catastrophically bad. It is slow, buggy, and everything it does is either pointlessly emulating a bad product, or pointlessly going against expectations.
It exists for one reason only, which is OSS fervor. Great, but that doesn’t lead to great design.
I'm with wolvoleo. I'm forced to use MS Office at work but install only LO on my personal machines. It may lack features or pizzazz but as a reliable, unfussy authoring tool, it serves my needs very well.
> pointlessly going against expectations
If you're referring to the ribbon, I'm not sold on its superiority. The vast majority of other software still uses the familiar menu structure, which is what LO uses too.
Granted, well meaning educational programs expose students to MS Office and its paradigm, from an early age. For their sake, I eagerly await a coding assistant AI powerful enough to reskin LibreOffice to look just MS Office, ribbon and all.
I started my wife on LibreOffice, putting it on her Mac when her 365 subscription lapsed. She loves it. Her needs aren't fancy, though, and she can create her own or open others' documents and spreadsheets just fine.
I don't agree, I use it all the time. I never use the 'real' office at home, though I do at work. And I'm really happy with it. It works fine, it's pretty light and it runs on every OS without me having to use a substandard web version.
I understand their copying the MS Office look and feel because that muscle memory is key to converting users. I like the way they didn't go all-in on those ribbons which have always been pretty terrible.
In that sense I think the biggest issues with the product is that it's taking so many cues from MS Office which on its own is pretty terrible but has grown to be abundant.
I think the whole office workflow is grossly outdated anyway. Excel is mostly misused as a pisspoor database which it deeply sucks at because it doesn't offer any way to safeguard data integrity. What MS should do is overhaul Access completely to make users grok it better. But they don't care.
Word docs are still full of weird template issues, PowerPoint still uses the old overhead projector transparent slide paradigm.
What it really needs is someone to look at this without any of the 1980s baggage and come up with tools for workflow problems from this century with techniques that fit this century. Adding an AI clippy like MS has done does not cut it at all.
But it does mean having to chip away at the entrenched market position of office, that's the problem. Microsoft stops innovating when they've cornered the market, just like they did with internet explorer. Someone has to do a chrome on office, but it will need someone with a big bag of money. Not an open source project run on a shoestring.
So yeah I think LibreOffice is not great but the not great bits are copied from MS Office because they simply have no alternative.
I recently began using markdown readers/writers like Typora and they’ve blown me away— what LibreOffice Writer could have been. Competing directly with MS Word was a trap.
You have to consider the origins, going back to Star Office in the days where most people were on really slow Dialup if they had internet at all. And even a lot of businesses were almost worse, sharing a single dialup or ISDN connection.
Contrast that to the Linux desktop which "just doesn't work" and my M4 Mac Mini that amazed me with how fast it was when I bought it and a year later it is beachball... beachball... beachball... reboot. beachball... beachball... beachball... Doesn't help that they vandalized the UI by adding meaningless transparency effects which don't actually look cool but rather look like they added anti-antialiasing to the edges of everything for now reason.
Some are more tech savy than others here, but I guess almost anyone can do the following trick successfully:
step 1. visit https://endeavouros.com/
step 2. download iso
step 3. flash iso on medium
step 4. boot medium, installation window shows
step 5. you choose KDE, yes: KDE. Do more mouse clicks.
step 6. system tells you it's done, and offers you to reboot.
almost everyone knows the formula for olvine and quartz, too, of course
theres probably less than 10 people in my entire company that know half of the words you wrote there. whats an "iso"? what is "flashing" the "iso"? how do i "boot medium"? what is "KDE" and why do i want to say yes?
(i know what these are, and maybe most people browsing a tech-focused forum with "hacker" in the name, but the vast majority of people do not)
You are right, I somehow forgot the word "here" after "anyone". I don't expect the average laymen be able to follow these steps, but I have those expectations from the people here.
Over and over Microsoft kills products with mis-marketing.
One scenario is the product is good (OneNote) but they put three icons on the taskbar for it and spam the rest of Windows for ads for it that just make people scream "take it away!"
Another scenario is that the product is bad (OneDrive) and they push you into having a traumatic experience (Microsoft Office uses it as the default save location and when it is down you can't save your work!) that makes sure you'll never use it again -- even though now OneDrive seems to be basically reliable.
Today is it the dominant playbook for marketing of AI experiences. Mostly people are sick and tired of hearing about it, the master Unique Selling Point of 2026 is products that don't interrupt you when you are trying to get work done.
Recently had to download actual Adobe Reader for the first time in at least a decade and... christ. Requires most of an H100 in resources and you can't do what you actually want to do because of multiple AI related popups and attempt to get you to subscribe to some Adobe cloud nonsense.
I knew it would be bad but I couldn't believe the state of it, just utter garbage
I think the plain ordinary chatbot behind the Copilot on the desktop is fine, it seems like a skin around ChatGPT-5 in the "Smart" mode and in the "Search" mode it compares to Google's AI mode.
When it comes to anything multimodal it is an absolute disaster. Show it a photo of a plant for a plant id? Forget about it, just take a picture of the screen on your phone with Google Lens. If you ask it to draw something or make a Microsoft Word document you'll regret it.
For advice about how to do things on the command line or how bootstrap works or how to get out of a pickle you got yourself in Git it is great. It writes little scripts as well as anybody but you can't trust it to get string escaping right for filenames in bash scripts which is one reason I'd want help. For real coding I use Junie because I'm a Jetbrains enthusiast but other people seem to swear by Claude Code.
I do dread the day though when Microsoft decides to kill Copilot because I will miss it.
The 10mg THC drinks give a whiff of cannabis when you open one and produce an intoxication similar to smoking with an experience similar to drinking an alcoholic drink. It's more expensive than the cheapest beer, but similar to a reasonably priced wine or drink in a bar. Unfortunately these will be gone in most places by the end of 2026.
THC does not evaporate into the air in appreciable quantities. What you smell is terpenes, flavor compounds, or carbonation carrying aroma, not psychoactive THC...
Agreed. I will say that the 5 mg THC/10 mg CBD drinks don't have the same smell and I don't know if that is just the terpenes that ride along naturally or if they add flavoring to make the stronger drink stronger smelling. I'd say the 5/10 drink is really not worth the bother.
If you smoke weed regularly I'm not sure any of the 5/10mg edibles are particularly useful outside of diabetes. Health Canada puts a 10mg limit on THC extract for edible ingestion and personally I find it weird, people are consuming insane amounts of sugar eating gummies to get stoned due to tolerances. If you happened to be in Canada, there are a few companies that have snuck fully decarboxylated thc into the resin syringes you can get as "resin for smoking", BOXHOT Disty Dabber and Ellevia RSO can both be consumed edible out of the box and are considerably better than any other edible on the market, careful tho, a little goes a long way.
Isn't this the disease that this article is warning about?
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