notepad doesn’t have spellcheck and if you don’t use a third party firewall to block its network activity it will transmit information about what you put on it to microsoft and the advertising companies its partnered with.
“No one’s paying for Microsoft Word, that thing that used to be free so… We gotta kill this so people too fucking stupid to use Libre Office get on board.”
Yeah, it’s kind of point. It shouldn’t have to be but just like Apple, make the non-payed version unnecessarily shit, artificially limited and constrained so people pay for the premium tier.
It was lighter than word or libre and had formatting, unlike simple word editors like notepad++. Bummer to see it go but surely there is (or will be) an alternative
I provide support for a Windows-only application that has to do automated document conversion. Some customers refuse to pay for an additional Office license and the only other option is WordPad. Going back to work on Tuesday is going to suck.
Actually no, from what I understand. You can install it, just most businesses don’t allow it because they offer no support for it. There are other companies that partner with LibreOffice to offer enterprise solutions though.
Slightly annoyed about this, as I do use Wordpad (it’s lightweight and useful for quick notes that I want to mark up with bold and italic). I don’t always want to watch Word or Libreoffice load for twenty to thirty seconds.
I recently noticed notepad now displays line numbers, so there has been some improvement… But it still shits the bed if you try to open a file that’s more than a few megs…
Yeah, when I want to just jot some words down quick in Windows, Wordpad has always been my go-to, but main thing for me is opening .txt files. Maybe I’m dumb and there’s some Notepad default layout thing I never bothered figuring out, but I don’t want to have to scroll right to read long lines of text.
Same boat. I have been using WordPad and .rtf format for all my notes for maybe 15 years.
I’ve been meaning to jump to a markdown editor for a long time, and after this news I’ve already started using MarkText. I probably should have jumped ship a long time ago, but at least I’m on the path now.
I will have to figure out a neat way to convert my .rtf notes to .md. Update: I’ve found Pandoc, it’s a command line tool for which I’ve made a script for converting my .rtf files to .md.
It’s the free (as in beer) program that comes with windows to open doc and rtf files and put together fine enough documents. Dropping it is Microsoft telling users unwilling to pay for word without the technical knowhow to get LibreOffice or Abiword going to get fucked. Its anti consumer no matter which way you slice it.
It’s have to actually launch it to be sure, but I’m pretty sure you can open them in Edge these days, along with all the other office documents.
As for creating documents, your average social media comment editor has more features than Wordpad. Given that Chrome is still the most popular browser on Windows by some way, I think the average Windows user can download programs just fine. OpenOffice is even on the MS Store for those stuck on Windows S edition.
My in laws are very technologically illiterate. I bet they have never opened word pad except accidentally… but I guarantee they know what “Word” is and think “word pad” is just some nerdy tech person word for the software they know.
I bet the number of people who both rely on word pad and who don’t know about any other free alternatives is so very low.
That’s like saying “Driving cars is a pain? Then fly an aeroplane! - You won’t do it because you’re comfortable in the car and know how it works? Well, don’t complain about the cost of fuel and the road-speed limits and animals on the roads”
My app isn’t showing me the message of mine you responded to - but I think it’s something I said about using a plane instead of a car?
I guess what I was getting at was that to me, I’ve tried Linux… a few different options of Linux… each time I’ve gone back to windows as it’s familiar and is something I know how to use inside and out…
It’d be like if I were to learn to fly a plane (Linux)… sure, I’d be able to go further and have more fun than driving a car - but it’s so complicated, and I’m comfortable in my car (windows).
Someone (You? My app isn’t showing me context) said something about losing the right to complain about windows ads and changes if they wouldn’t move to linux… I felt that to be unfair. We should be able to use windows if we want. It shouldn’t be expected to get worse. They should be listening to their user base… Sure, the complaints fall on deaf ears, but ‘victim blaming’ the users of windows for complaining and not wanting to use linux felt shitty…
My go-to terminal text editor is micro. It’s intuitive, has sensible controls (looking at you, ESC:qa!), and supports plugins for expanding functionality. It’s the only terminal text editor I’ve used that does what I expect and I regularly use it instead of vscode. Nano is my backup and Vim is my enemy.
I don’t like Apple but they ship their devices with everything a basic user needs and if a high quality, completely for free. When you get a MacBook you don’t need to worry about finding and downloading an external app for almost anything - from viewing any kind of file, to basic photo and video editing, to document processing, etc. And they don’t track every minute thing you do and act like malware to try to make you use their products.
While that’s true, most windows laptops of similar build quality and form factor are around the same price. Windows also advertises to you and installs unwanted apps on your computer without modifications. Of course, you could always install Linux.
That’s nowhere near as true as it once was. Most of your big well-supoorted distros run flawlessly on most big brand machines.
Where you’ll run into problems is in using more obscure distros that require a lot of tweaking and customization, but something like Ubuntu should run beautifully out of the box and if it does have a problem it will be very well-known and heavily documented with easy to follow step by step instructions on fixing it. Linux just isn’t the pain in the ass it used to be. Or at least it doesn’t have to be.
Big brands like Lenovo, Dell, Intel work with Ubuntu pretty fine, there are compatibility tests for distros. I blind installed openSuse (after running Ubuntu beside W11) on my Lenovo Yoga from 2020 without issue aside from fingerprint scanner. All my NUCs have been great on Linux.
None that offer similar quality across the board in display, speakers, input devices, performance, battery life. Trust me I’ve looked. Alternative laptops aren’t really any cheaper any more unless you get something of significantly lesser quality, in which case there’s nothing surprising about that - something worse is cheaper.
Isn’t apple consistently removing ports on their newer products? I thought that was a common complaint.
It’s genuinely been ages since i’ve heard anyone try to defend the pricing of apple products for anything other than luxury purchases or rich people products. They’re vastly overpriced and underpowered, and they’re locked into the apple ecosystem. If you aren’t buying apple products for everything, suddenly a lot of shit doesn’t “just work” anymore lmao
eh I use Linux on my desktop but macOS is a nicely polished UNIX operating system. It’s only locked down for average users, you can usually get away with a quick sudo or worst-case going into single user mode and disabling some system protections.
I definitely prefer using *nix operating systems, and macOS gives me that for portable computing. I’m still more productive on Linux, but it’s not too far apart.
They weren’t investigated for antitrust for baking stuff into the OS - it was for monopolizing various sectors and strong arming users and competitors. They’re allowed to have their own browser preinstalled, they just have to let you switch easily and remove it etc.
They are literally in the process of needing to unbundle Teams from office in Europe.
Regardless of the reasoning, MS has had eyes on it since the 90s and need to be incredibly careful what they do and don’t bundle together or preinstall. Whereas Apple can do whatever they want. That is why Apple comes with a bunch of shitty office products that only one person at any given company uses and Windows comes with a link to download them.
What’s the MacBook equivalent of MS Paint? Open it, paste from clipboard, and then do a simple crop/edit? I was looking to do this the other day and nothing seemed to work.
I don’t think Macs are as batteries included as some people think.
Gotta disagree. MS Paint is so blisteringly straightforward for how to use it. Google pointed me towards Preview but there was no menu option to create a new image from the clipboard contents. And then for editing, there was no easy to use tooltray that gives you everything you need right from the start. You could crop and such by going to through menu but you could feel the app hating you for trying to use it that way.
Except that businesses always find a way to lock themselves (and you) with Office, so regardless of all the chimes and stuff that come standard with your Mac you will still have to install Word because some exec somewhere might want to make some comments in your document in the form of highlighted, inline text instead of actual side comments.
You sure about that? I just bought my mom a new iPad Air yesterday and the setup process was maddeningly privacy invading. Name, address, and phone number just to install anything from the Apple store. Both me and my mom, who’s not tech savvy at all, thought it was crazy the amount of info we had to put in just to get a usable device.
and act like malware to try to make you use their products.
There was also so many preloaded garbage apps installed by default. Why are apps like Measure there? Yes when I want to measure something…I reach for an iPad…instead of…you know…a tape measure… Just because they’re first party apps doesn’t make this okay. Also, Apple’s ecosystem is famous for vendor lock-in.
They may not be as blatant about it as Google is, but they’re every bit as bad tbh.
Am completely expecting this to be due to falling office sales or fear that people will realize they don’t need expensive Office every few years when WordPad has 90% of functionality for daily use.
I expect this will make a lot of people very angry since I know many users of WordPad.
I am one of those users. I use wordpad for prepping my DnD games. MS Office is beyond bloated and slows my pc to a crawl when it’s open. Same with Open Office and LibreOffice if I’m honest. Both hog too many resources.
I personally like the look and feel of FreeOffice better. Fairly enough, I haven’t used Libre in many years, but it always felt kind of clunky and when I tried Free it was very comfortable and familiar to use, as a lifetime Word-er.
They changed their licensing and specifically for robot users so I suspect it’s to funnel those users into licenses which is a lot more than consumers.
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