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Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows after 28 years (www.bleepingcomputer.com)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 136 points 3 years ago (3 children)

I get where you're coming from but I think you're overstating the impact in this day and age. If this had been 1995 it'd be a big deal. Now it's rediculously easy to install any alternative you like for free.

Libre Office is an entire free fully features office suite.

I'm less bothered about removing WordPad than I am about Microsoft advertising and pre-installing it's products in Windows - they force Edge on people, they push OneDrive and preinstall a preview of Office. That's the real problem - not losing WordPad.

At one point Anti-Trust / Anti-monopoly regulators globally punished Microsoft for pushing Internet Explorer to consumers and for a long time in Europe had to offer a choice of Browsers to download on new Windows installs. Now it's allowed to get away with abusing it's dominant position to force it's products on consumers.

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  • [–] 27 points 3 years ago (5 children)

    Does liber office make .docx files and export to pdf?

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  • [–] 37 points 3 years ago* (3 children)

    Does liber office make .docx files and export to pdf?

    It does. It's fine as a replacement for Word, but no one has an answer for Excel. LibreOffice Calc is fine for a basic spreadsheet, but Excel is in a completely different universe than Calc with anything beyond that.

    To be fair though, Excel is in a completely different universe than literally any other competing product.

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  • [–] 11 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I think calc is fine for a lot of use cases. I use it all the time. It is different though.

    For advanced stuff I’d rather use Python anyway to be honest.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Do you know how both of those compare with Google Sheets?

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  • [–] 11 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    Sheets is capable enough for the average person but a business is always going to want to use Excel because it's the industry standard.

    I can't remember the last time I actually needed a spreadsheet for anything other than looking at a bunch of tabular data, but I'm a programmer so I'm not the standard spreadsheet user.

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  • [+] 4 points 3 years ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)
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  • [–] 18 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I built a new PC two months ago and it's the first time I didn't get Office. Libre Office has everything I need and it's free.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    I've wondered about free suites like these - how do they make money, do you know?

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  • [–] 29 points 3 years ago*

    They don’t. Libre Office is maintained by a non-profit called The Document Foundation. They’re funded entirely by donations. I think they make enough to have some full time employees.

    A lot of open source software is created by individuals or non-profits. The Mozilla foundation makes Firefox, for instance. They make money through donations and also Google pays them a ton of money to be the default search engine.

    There are for profit companies that make or contribute to open source software. Such as Red Hat. They tend to make money by selling support for the software.

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  • [–] 18 points 3 years ago*

    I don't think they make money. It's an open source project where people donate their time as far as I know.

    EDIT: I forgot to mention you can donate to the project. Something has to pay for web hosting, I guess.

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  • [–] -3 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Or you know, google docs is a thing which is free and imo works better than word

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  • [–] 11 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    A web browser is not a word processor no matter how much they tart it up. If the thing isn’t saving a file to my local drive that is in a common format It’s not worth putting your effort into.

    So many kids are going to grow up not having the concept where data lives and what the failure modes are.

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