sanskritical

> Stop the vendor lockin and leave Microsoft today

This post explicitly details one practical reason why I, alongside every physical office on earth, cannot leave Microsoft today. I would bet a lot that this is not the only reason, it's just the lowest hanging one that I can see.

> So a clone cannot make it look like Microsoft Office.

If this problem is intractable then we're never getting rid of MS Office. But I suspect that it is not, and that someone likely can reverse engineer the secret rendering sauce, especially in the age of AI.

Alternatively, people need to lobby the label producers for templates that work with free software alternatives.

I send a fair amount of physical mailings. This requires me to do a mail merge from a spreadsheet to adhesive labels. I will buy whatever brand of inkjet paper filled with adhesive labels is the cheapest at that given time. The manufacturer gives a template for the labels. Every year or so I will check the feasibility of switching to LibreOffice or OnlyOffice or whatever the thing people say is the open source future of office software is. I will try to do this same exact action, which every office in the world likely does a significant number of times per year. Every year, once I figure out how to mail merge (sometimes, a drastically different process in the interface, whereas Microsoft has kept this relatively intuitive throughout the ages) I end up with misaligned labels on a sheet of ruined label paper, despite the alleged format compatibility of the open source alternatives.

I hate Microsoft. I hate having to use Windows. But nobody in the free software community has ever made this not a nightmare. I suppose I might take a picture of the fucked up product and ask Claude if it can fix my fucking labels. That might actually work.

There's actually a solution, it's NostrGit, decentralized git. No single point of failure, and your identity is a public key. You can also just host your git via http on a Tor onion or i2p eepsite to get a public key identity namespace that is also resilient to the operator of your namespace registrar trying to sabotage or subvert you.

Nostr is like a decentralized message queue/key-value store with cryptographic identities. It has been funded by Jack Dorsey. Its most common usages are a decentralized Twitter clone, a tailscale clone without any registration needed called NostrVPN, and diVine, a revival of the classic Vine service. But there's also very interesting stuff like this, a completely decentralized git that uses public relays and cryptographic identities to control ownership.

> Now we need an alternative that works well and is de-centralized from the get go.

It's called Nostr. I post on it every day.

nntp was built on horribly naive assumptions that do not carry to the present day internet. nostr is a better option.

> same performances in the same form factor with the same OS (but more upgradability) for less

This also remains true for Apple! I don't care about performance. At all. I write text in a terminal! I only care about the hardware working as expected, out of the box, without having to tinker with bullshit. And Steam provides a platform that fulfills this, every time!

I want a simple UNIX workstation that "just works". Apple broke this promise to me with Tahoe, where horrific design decisions compounded the bugs on essential peripherals (Tahoe began spinning up and down my external raid array to sleep constantly, for no reason, making extremely loud noises as the drives repeatedly if it's idle, forcing me to constantly touch files in a while loop over dozens of partitions -- also I have a few petabyte of storage and it now takes ages to mount every reboot, as now with Tahoe Spotlight indexing is done as part of the mounting process and I can't opt out of this behavior and I'm in a warzone where power outages necessitating shutdowns are frequent). I have since used a docked Steam Deck as my daily driver and everything I want just works! It's now my UNIX desktop OS of choice. I've been on the Mac since OS X but Tahoe was so bad that now I consider an operating system designed for wasting time gaming a more serious and less disruptive option to my daily workflow. Heck of a job you're doing, Tim Apple!

Nostr is like a decentralized message queue/database with cryptographic identities. It has been funded by Jack Dorsey. Its most common usages are a decentralized Twitter clone, a tailscale clone without any registration needed called NostrVPN, and diVine, a revival of the classic Vine service. But there's also very interesting stuff like this, a completely decentralized git that uses public relays and cryptographic identities to control ownership.

I don't know. I think people would notice if Google were being MITM'd on Tor.

Presumably these are lightning invoices, which can resolve in milliseconds.