sbird

Oops yeah that is a good point! Amended the comment.

You’re confusing OpenOffice (dead project pretty much, hasn’t seen updates in ages) with OnlyOffice (the Russian one with the licensing shenanigans and “AI first” stuff, UI is M365-like and very similar to the LibreOffice “Tabbed” UI)

I haven’t used any of them in ages, I know Collabora is focused on their online suite. Looking at OnlyOffice’s website, they are positioning themselves as an “AI-first” office suite (the LLM tools have been changed to be optional and installed separately since a recent update, but still a bad look)

And WPS Office was always owned by a Chinese company and continues to be closed-source, so no changes there. Again, the same sort of “AI-first” stuff on their homepage, yikes

LibreOffice, not OpenOffice. I believe LibreOffice was forked from OpenOffice, and the latter hasn’t had any updates in ages.

I imagine that the UI you selected was the one of the “compact” or “single toolbar” options? It is a little confusing that some of the one functions disappear with those, it would be helpful if it was listed which ones were missing

It’s never that MS Office files don’t work on LibreOffice (formatting is a little different but almost never broken), it’s always files exported from LibreOffice that MS Office misreads (because Microsoft can’t be bothered to follow standards)

Apparently it looks identical to MS Office, so it isn’t “better” than MS Office or LibreOffice in a functional sense (arguably less so since it’s probably very buggy code)

I wouldn’t say it’s people (normal people would be using MS Office or LibreOffice most likely) excited that it’s LLM generated, though some AI Bros probably are, I imagine some outlets are promoting this to sell whatever the new model is these days. And when there is a lot of news around a topic, it’s covered by more and more people (something about all press is good press here)

LibreOffice is an awesome piece of kit! On setup, they let you select the “tabbed” UI if you prefer something closer to MS office.

Collabora Office is another one that seems neat, have not used it before though. OnlyOffice has weird Russian ties and GPL incompatible licensing shenanigans, I would avoid them for the most part. WPS Office has the best compatibility with MS Office files on Linux I think, but it’s closed-source so not great either. There’s always running a VM / dual booting if you must use MS Office.

Honestly, MS office files have worked fine on LibreOffice, the only big issue I’ve found is that translucent images are a little broken when going from Impress to PowerPoint (all images share the same opacity for some reason?)

Double negatives are fun! It’s a little weird how, depending on the context and language, they can either be positive or extra-negative. “I don’t see nothing!” is often used to mean you can’t see anything, the double negatives reinforce each other rather than cancel out into a positive meaning. Similar for “I don’t have no …” or “we don’t need no …”

If you didn’t know, CoMaps has a desktop Linux and macOS version! I believe GNOME Maps (also on Linux) recently got better offline maps support too

So I’m doubly wrong! That’s kind of neat

That’s actually pretty cool, I’ll be making an XMPP account then. Adding to my collection of chat apps!

Oh whoops, I didn’t know that! That’s kind of neat, didn’t know had encryption. I will amend my comment

Also, please don’t use LLMs for simple questions. Aside from the ethical, legal, and environmental concerns of LLMs, they also tend to be wrong more often than not, and when they are right, there is lots of word soup because the chatbot needs to act like it’s a smartass, to put it bluntly, because its job is to market itself and push you towards subscriptions. Try to avoid LLMs wherever you can, it’s almost always better to search it yourself. Don’t offload thinking to a chatbot, it’s not very good at it!

The only usecase where LLMs could have an application is translation. I have a friend who doesn’t understand English very well, so they use a chatbot to translate things into their native language, and it’s really helpful for that. Of course, it can get stuff wrong, but for non-critical stuff, it’s kind of neat! That avoids the question of the insane water and power usage involved in training these models, as well as the disregard of the rights of artists and creators by companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. I believe my friend uses a local model, so there’s that.

I personally don’t use LLMs, they’re more trouble than anything in my opinion.

Have you ever had any experience with Scratch? It’s an awesome tool to learn basic programming concepts like loops, conditions, etc. I played around with it in my early years, but even if you’re older, it’s still fun to mess around with the blocks to make weird programs. I particularly loved the “remix” functionality, it lets you see the structure of other people’s projects and you can tweak them (and thus learn about how it works!)

After my years of doing Scratch, I moved on to Python, and it is probably the easiest programming language to learn (depending on how you define that, e.g. HTML), code is very human readable and unfamiliar symbols are avoided for the most part

W3Schools has a lot of good Python guides, and there are SO MANY good programming tutorials online. Back in my day, I learnt Python by reading a good book (and it was an awesome book), but resources to learn programming have never been more plentiful!

My advice is to work on a simple project, could be a small game (with or without PyGame), or maybe a useful tool that you want to make, lay out what you want it to do, and along the way when you don’t know something, search it up online (W3Schools, forums, video guides, docs, whatever) and figure out how to do it. Practice doesn’t make you perfect, but more practice does. Does that make sense? Not really, but definitely try your best!

Well, there’s also IRC and XMPP. Could those work better for older devices? Dunno, but neither are encrypted, so don’t use them for anything sensitive. Signal is good if you want security, they’ve been audited a lot, but they are based in the U.S. which isn’t great.

I’ve also heard of Stoat (formerly Revolt) and Fluxer, both are relatively new, but I would prefer Matrix over both since it’s more easily self-hostable (+ all those different clients to choose from!)

I have tried it before, it’s neat, but notifications are not reliable since it is peer to peer (both devices need to be online for a connection), a bit like Briar if you’ve used that before. I don’t think it uses the Tor network, so it might be faster than Briar (but also less anonymous?)

I don’t have experience with the jami daemon though, so can’t comment if that solves the peer to peer issue.

I personally like Matrix the best, since you have federation, options for encrypted chats, self-host able with Continuwuity (or Synapse), lots of alternative clients for nearly every OS (even mobile Linux, you have Fractal! FluffyChat also works but it’s definitely oriented towards Android devices)