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

I grew pretty frustrated with WYSIWYG word processors about a decade ago, and moved to a Pandoc->LaTeX->PDF system for everything until about six months ago, when I finally learned Typst and use that for everything now. I just prefer Markdown (or Markdown-adjacent in the case of Typst) and I hate formatting sneaking in with invisible characters.

However, I realize that I'm weird, and I certainly don't blame most people for preferring the Word style of editing, since most people aren't nerdy software engineers.

While a part of me hopes this works as a push for people to use FOSS like LibreOffice, I'm not really holding my breath. I tried getting my parents to switch years ago after they were complaining about having to pay for a subscription to Office, and they were wholly unmoved and didn't like LibreOffice.

In fairness, LibreOffice didn't really do what my parents wanted; the equation editor for LibreOffice is decidedly harder to use than Microsoft's (even compared to the old Mathtype version), and the syntax for their spreadsheet stuff is different enough from Excel that it can lead to a fairly steep learning curve.

I don't think you're weird. I also have some tiers when it comes to typesetting.

Normal documents, 99.999% of the time, are written in Markdown, and stored like that or rendered to PDF, if required.

Everything serious go through LaTeX. I don't care about Typst, I'm happy with LaTeX syntax (I've written my Ph.D. with it, so I don't care if it fights you).

For some Office stuff I need to use office tools. LibreOffice if the other party accepts it or Microsoft Office for the picky documents and people.

A lot of personal calculations are done in Notion databases now, but I can wrangle Calc/Excel/Numbers enough to have them on file, if they are sensitive or need to be detached from Notion.

I'm an old school people. I don't migrate from tool to tool much.

I do use LaTeX sometimes; I don't like Typst's equation syntax as much so if I know I'm going to need more advanced or a lot of math formatting I still do Pandoc or even pure LaTeX sometimes.

I think that LaTeX is mostly fine enough but there are a few bits of bullshit that I find infuriating, e.g. having to remember to do `` for beginning quotes, which apparently I will never remember to do until I look at the rendered document. Also, the errors when compiling are pretty opaque and hard to parse; I've done it enough now to where I can usually figure it out but they're certainly pretty weird to a beginner.

I think we're both kind of weird :). Weird doesn't mean "bad", certainly, I'm just saying that I don't think it's reasonable to ask a random non-techy person to learn LaTeX or how to render with Pandoc. I did my entire undergrad work in Pandoc->LaTeX->PDF, and my entire masters work in Typst; I didn't finish my PhD but all the work I did for that was in vanilla LaTeX.

Importantly, though, I get to do it all using Neovim + tmux, so I can keep using my normal "IDE" at all times.

For spreadsheets, I usually just use Calc for anything that requires privacy, and Google Sheets for anything where privacy doesn't matter. They're both good enough for what I'm doing.

No,no. I also concur on the meaning of "weird", and I totally own it.

LaTeX has its own quirks and doesn't talk kindly to a newcomer, but I know a lot of people (nerd or otherwise) like it for what it is. For some of the users, it's an acquired taste though.

I have written my B.Sc. and M.Sc. stuff in Open/LibreOffice. Then I said never, and migrated to LaTeX for Ph.D. and did everything in 5x speed with 10x less fuss. I have a tendency to learn markup and programming languages fast, so I never felt off while working with it.

I'm more of a screen guy, for tmux works, too. I also still use Eclipse as my serious IDE. VSCode can play over there, heh.

I used to use Google Docs, but Notion's "personal wiki" structure won me for non-technical things. All technical things stay in Obsidian, which is also opened as a public digital garden.