this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
430 points (95.9% liked)

Asklemmy

43988 readers
785 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy ๐Ÿ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 64 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

If you're using git to track document changes then you're almost certainly in the tech industry and are quite familiar with the inner workings of your computer.

For 90% of people using computers right now, asking them to use git to do version management on their day to day work flow would be like asking me to fly a rocket ship to work.

I agree with the OP here, for what it does office is leaps and bounds ahead of any of the other software I've used to try to replace it and I always end up landing back on it.

[โ€“] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

There are many non-technical people in the world of mathematics and they manage to use LaTeX just fine. Overleaf offers synchronization without needing to touch Git.

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Not only mathematics, pretty much everyone in the world of science/academia uses LaTeX. For git, I've seen some stuff, but most researchers that program a decent amount are reasonably familiar with git as well.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's still a far higher degree of technical competence than is possessed by the target audience for PowerPoint, Google Slides, or LibreOffice present. Also, claiming someone isn't technical just because they're not a computer programmer is a little odd. Most programmers I know don't go anywhere near LaTeX because it's so confusing and the spec is so complicated. They use powerpoint, Miro, or markdown slides when they want to present something.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

This guys reply to me was literally "git isn't too technical, mathematicians use this extremely complicated program for generating highly technical documents all the time so obviously grandma could too!"

I agree 100% with you, I tried to use LaTeX ONE time in college and nearly chucked my computer out the window, and I'm a software developer. I was using it for a math class and couldn't get my head around any of it.

It certainly isn't a good replacement for MSWord or PowerPoint for the VAST majority of people who don't need to put mathematical notation into their presentations and just need words on a screen