What Is Microsoft Up To?

This is the 4th time since September that Microsoft has had outages. 3 in the USA that I am aware of. The company I work at switched over to Office 365 last year and our email is on Microsoft servers. The biggest complaint is the slowness of getting mail, losing contacts, not able to log in, the extra step to authenticate when you check email outside the company domain.

Office 365 down: Microsoft not working leaving people without email and other crucial internet services
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/office-365-down-microsoft-not-170800054.html

There is a simple way out of the extortion...

For M$, sure. Linux OSs work fine, and are becoming more and more compatible with everything. Free office suites need improvement, and Steam is adding linux-ability to a lot of their library. BUT, most of the big office/industrial/productivity software is stuck with Windows. And many of the new subscription programs don't have a freeware version that's anything close to the original. GIMP is good, but not nearly as expansive as Photoshop. I don't even know of any good video editing freeware. I just downloaded Blender, so we'll see how it compares to AutoCAD/Vectorworks. Libre/Open Office work, but they're not very good at cross-compatibility with M$ Office. Which is fine for home or schoolwork, but not in a professional corporate setting. And this doesn't even get into more custom or specialized software that's pretty common across the world. There's a reason so many companies refuse Win10 and are still running XP - amazingly expensive/complex software that has no equivalent that can run on 8 or 10 or Mac or Linux.

I absolutely agree, While some of the programs are not quite fully developed yet I think the more Linux becomes popular these small flaws will get fixed to be comparable and eventually better.

But this all comes with increased population of users and demand. But I have got to say, for a “normal” home user they have finally met the challenge. And in many ways it has some great features and security that are superior.

I truly think that when it comes down to a choice between Win 10 and Linux, for a normal average user the Linux is absolutely the way to go. There are a whole lot of folks out there who are going to have to make this choice pretty soon.

I am just very happy that there actually is a very competitive option besides Win 10 because I wasn’t going there. My PC days would be over, I’m not kissing Microsoft’s rear anymore.

I just downloaded Blender too, Cant wait to play with it. Did you find and add the Gimp extra feature pack? I found it in Synaptic.

As for commercial ware for linux, You might be surprised what is available, run a search on it. :)

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