Have you had that "Upcoming price change for your Microsoft 365 subscription" email yet? They want to charge you an extra 50%ish for AI features, and they do *not* make it easy to find the way to turn it off. It took me minutes of searching - this is a particularly evil dark pattern.
"Switch plan" just lets you pick between annual and monthly billing. You want "Turn off recurring billing" and then "Current subscription without AI".
You're welcome. Please boost for others.
@timixretroplays
Yes, ought to be illegal.
Proposal I saw, iirc from a US politician, was to require all renewals to be opt-in, to require cancelling a service to be as easy and hassle free on all platforms as signing up was, and to require all changes to the terms or fees to be opt-in (cancelling the subscription set as default).
I now see that as a base requirement to even slow down enshittification of everything.
This is not a cry for help, I'm aware LibreOffice and other alternatives exist and suggesting them to me does not help anyone fix this
Edit: this was a foolishly optimistic thing to bother saying
@hyc @ghost_shit @timixretroplays my clients are in critical infrastructure so they have other dependencies on these tools too. So it'd require dozens of companies jumping ship to tools not optimised for real time collaboration at scale at once, which would be a disaster.
I love FOSS but it is quite literally impossible for some of us to avoid office/other proprietary suites
@machinesbleedtoo @hyc @ghost_shit @timixretroplays Yikes, that is a nasty network lock on effect.
And I feel it myself, I strongly avoid having a Google account but have to use one for doc collaboration with fellow cycling advocates.
Just like Samba deveopers (pretty much) have to use GitLab.com to submit patches, and most of the rest of the world has to use GitHub.
This is going to remain very difficult to avoid :-(
@timixretroplays I wish I'd seen this last month when I was in Perth and could have changed my parent's subscription. I looked and couldn't find it, and was somewhat time constrained so breaking it wasn't an option.
My father once thought his keyboard was broken because he wasn't reading the "this document is read only because the licence key for Word has expired" message (they'd been on holiday and not used the computer for some months). So despite his many other skills I am wary of doing anything that might leave his tech in a non-working state. (Also I suck at doing tech support for my parents. I have very little patience because THEY JUST WON'T LISTEN ARGH)
>and forcing you to upgrade your hardware due to it's lack of optimization
i have a hypothesis, why they want to enforce you to buy new hardware now (and not in a year or later)...
my hypothesis is that they do this now avoid publicity for already having completely bricked most PCs by now which but comes into effect in 2026. if most people buy new ones now this is a very less concern for microsofts PR.
but what if secureboot is good in theory?
currently secureboot is only(!) good in theory. practically it does not protect you or anyone from anything because an attacker or you can simply (offline) install a buggy but signed bootloader and boot whatever he wishes besides secureboot activated.
i find it amusing that the tonload of bugs microsoft has put into their products backfires this way:
and also secureboot is broken just because it was not introduced with security in mindset:
https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/07/secure-boot-is-completely-compromised-on-200-models-from-5-big-device-makers/
@timixretroplays
This is fascinating. Perhaps different territories have different options/plans. I'm in UK and our "Business Standard" package is currently without CoPilot as a sneaky add-on. I will keep a close eye on this tho.
Thank you for posting about this.
@electron_greg @timixretroplays @clare_hooley @paulb
Afaik this is because EU (an UK) law so far doesn’t allow this kind of AI because of its insane Privacy and Personal Rights Infringements. Hence also no Apple Intelligence so far for example.
Those companies have to adapt their AI first.
So far I am very happy to not have any forced corporate AI in my life…
Your private, free office suite
LibreOffice is a private, free and open source office suite – the successor project to OpenOffice.
It's compatible with Microsoft Office/365 files (.doc, .docx, .xls, .xlsx, .ppt, .pptx) and is backed by a non-profit organization.
@vet_ingenting @timixretroplays
There's a reason people aren't using Libre Office. Lots of reasons actually, but one really big one in that it lags so slowly even on high end machines that it's actually painful to use.
That has not been my experience with Libre Office, and my machine is hardly high end.
@vet_ingenting @timixretroplays
I thought it was just me as well on the basis of "surely it can't be this way for everyone". But on reflection it's worth bringing up, because otherwise it would be getting a lot more uptake. So obviously *something* is going on, and I'm probably not the only person who tried it and got a bad impression.
How long ago did you try it?
@vet_ingenting @timixretroplays
The last time I tried it was early last year, so around ~April 2024 I think.
Did you download it from the official site?
Do you know what version it was?
I'm using version 7.4.7.2.
@vet_ingenting @timixretroplays
I normally set up a machine with ninite.com, so I used that. I'm not really interested in getting into the Linux debate, as there's no prize for me even if I spend my time on it. The reason Linux isn't taking off is because it has a general lack of polish and bug-testing, which used to be the major strength of Windows up until a few years ago.
That's why I have big hopes that Valve can make the "year of Linux" happen.
Have you tried the Windows version?
@wyliecoyoteuk @vet_ingenting @timixretroplays
I think a word processor that wants to beat out Microsoft Word should work well in Windows and Linux.
@wyliecoyoteuk @vet_ingenting @timixretroplays
I'm confident it's not the machine, as it doesn't have any problems otherwise. From what I remember, and this was a while ago, my main issue was that that some (but not most) clicks didn't register the first time among other things. Which doesn't make it unusable, but does make it incredibly annoying very quickly.
For comparison on the day to day I use Microsoft Office 2007, which seems to respond instantly.
Now did I use OpenOffice or LibreOffice, now I can't recall? I should try LibreOffice just to be 100% certain.
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