Word documents will be saved to the cloud automatically on Windows going forward

I moved over to Linux about a year or so ago when Microsoft announced they were going to start pushing their AI shit on every Windows system. I created a small partition intending to just give it a shot but ended up never moving back since 99.9% of everything I tried just works. It's really quite amazing how far Linux has come in the past decade alone and right now the only reason I keep Windows on my work machine is because there's still specific dev pipelines I can only do on Windows.

And one has to wonder, will M/S used these cloud documents for their AI push ? Even if the Word Docs are encrypted, I fully believe Microsoft can read the text in those documents.

People should realize everything you do in Excel and Word is being spied on by Microsoft, this cloud push is making that process easier and faster for M/S.

At the very least, go to Libreoffice. But better yet, as you just did, people need to abandon Microsoft and Apple for Linux or a BSD.

> It's really quite amazing how far Linux has come in the past decade alone

There's no meaningful difference in the desktop Linux ecosystem right now and a decade ago, you're just more open to it as the alternative got worse.

No, this is definitely not true. I dabbled with Linux back when I was in college (hence, a decade ago) both because the computer labs had Linux installed and because it was interesting to me at the time.

There were a bunch of issues with compatibility if you wanted to do any sort of gaming and driver support was pretty bad from what I remember. Flatpaks were barely starting to become a thing, desktop environments were very unrefined and applications like LibreOffice still had a way to go.

If you look at what's happened in the Linux ecosystem in the past decade there are in fact significant improvements and refinements thanks to the hard work of thousands of contributors making it easier and easier to use.

We're cutting it close with a decade here but out of the box driver support is absolutely better, especially if you're dealing with AMD GPUs, to the point where I find a fresh install of almost any Linux distro less annoying in terms of support than Windows.

Just out of curiosity, what distro did you go with? I last gave Linux desktop a try about a decade ago (Ubuntu IIRC) and found it still not quite there, but I'm willing to give it another shot so I'd be curious what you had success with.

Unfortunately, that's simply not true. Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (in 2016 as the name implies) with gnome 2 and Unity was peak and Ubuntu has regressed since beyond recovery: snap or other desktop containers with unsolved/unsolvable permission problems, systemd, wayland, and any number of other zero sum changes behind the scene devs like to drool over yet not. a. single. user advance or new desktop app. Even the relative "progress" in browser-based collab tools we enjoyed since about 2017 is at risk as FF is left behind by the likes of MS Teams.

If you try again, at least go Mint over Ubuntu

Same here. Work requires I use Windows or Mac, but I've switched most of my home systems over to Mint Linux. The final nail in the coffin for Microsoft for me was when I upgraded my CPU in my desktop, the MS Office liscense I paid for stopped working and they wanted me to pay another few hundred dollars for another liscence. I mainly only used Office for Outlook as I have 30 years of emails in Outlook, but I switched over to Firebird on Linux and have not looked back. The AI stuff going on with Windows is definitely a big part of me wanting to switch too. I do not want what Microsoft is selling anymore.

I will second Mint Linux as a recent ex-Windows user. It's been working well for about a year now and I have no desire to go back.

I used to use Ubuntu but abandoned it when they moved to "snap". I'm not the most proficient user of Linux, but it was quickly clear that something was really wrong with new versions of Ubuntu. Mint Linux has been working well for me.

I ended up going with Nobara which is a Fedora-based distro focused around gaming, so it automates and deals with the typical driver issues and proton setup. Ended up being perfect for everything I need.

People should realize that everything they do in Windows is being spied on. There's no point in fighting against a user-hostile OS where every setting you use to try to protect yourself can be removed or toggled with the next forced update.

I don't think the Snap authors ever used Snap packages. The barrage of update notifications, to close my software constantly... that was super frustrating. All I had installed for snaps was Firefox and Discord. Imagine having a 20+ snap applications installed. What a notification nightmare.

Anyone successfully running Solidworks on Linux these days? That's one of the reasons holding me back. Might need to get an extra GPU and passthrough to a Win VM?