[kwlug-disc] "Microsoft's SQL Server Next for Linux, Windows"

[Andrew Kohlsmith (mailing lists account)]

> On Dec 3, 2016, at 12:45 AM, B.S. <bs27975.2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/02/2016 08:02 PM, Andrew Kohlsmith (mailing lists account) wrote:
>> 
>> I actually would look forward to Office for Linux, so long as it came
>> with Access and Visio. I’ve been waiting for a decent office suite
>> for Linux since the mid-90s and have tried quite a few of them. I
>> dislike MS Office but it really is the best of the bunch, by a long
>> shot.
> 
> I ruminated about something like this to myself not long ago.
> 
> In a sense, what you say baffles me. And what I mean by that is, what occurred to me was, in this day of Google Drive / Apps / Docs / {whatever} office suite, it's a wonder LibreOffice hasn't also had a morphed offering.
> 
> Then (thinking) vis a vis MS and local / web 'office' 'suite', is LO not now 'far behind the times'?
> 
> Take in your note now, too, and ... whither LibreOffice?
> 
> LO has since gained some Visio like features - mind you Visio is now quite the ecosystem in its own right. LO has an 'Access' equivalent, sort of, but with the goofy native DB ... well, I can appreciate what you say.

Indeed. I am a big fan of OSS and OSHW and try to utilize them whenever possible, but at the end of the day I need to get my work done. I’m willing to accept a certain amount of faffing about to use my preferred tools, but I need to be able to get the work done.

LO word processor wasn’t bad, but I often struggled with formatting, and let’s face it, you need to be able to *seamlessly* work with MS documents. I’m not saying I don’t struggle with MS Word formatting, but the particular “brand” of struggle is something I’m more comfortable/familiar with with Word, so I stick with it.

LO spreadsheet is similar; I often dump huge CSV data sets into Excel to massage and graph the data. LO absolutely dies with large (>32k) rows. Now you can argue that I should be using something like gnuplot and while I *do* like it, it’s pretty easy to do this kind of work in Excel, but with LO it’s a non-starter.

Access is nice for form generation; that’s really all it has on the number of alternatives for quick and dirty GUI ODBC database access.

Visio… I’ve played with a few different packages but nothing works as well as Visio. It pains me to say that, but between Word, Excel, Access and Visio… MS has a killer application suite for a lot of business work, particularly if you throw in Outlook (which I hate with a passion).

Another (non-OSS) example: I do electronic design for a living. Have been for over 25 years now. (“Holy sh*t!” he says as he stops to think about the time that has passed.) I started out with OrCAD PCB/SDT386+ on DOS (this is well before Linux) and I loved it. Then I moved to Cadsoft Eagle after OrCAD went to Windows and crapped everything up in the transition. I stayed with Eagle for 20 years because it was multiplatform. It was *not* an easy package to love, but it worked sufficiently well and the fact that I could run it natively in Linux and later OSX was a big, big, big bonus. I learned to love its idiotic scripting language, library management and it’s very… German… way of thinking about things. I even lived with shitty support.

Eventually its warts became too much to bear. Cadsoft seemed to be insistent on ignoring important feature requests and the deltas between paid updates (at USD$700 a pop) became smaller and smaller, so I started looking for alternatives. KiCAD is becoming a very serious contender, and as a HUGE bonus it is OSS. Their development model is “who needs to use this? Developers don’t care for point releases, so everything’s an alpha!” I gave it a serious try, but unfortunately its warts are just too big to manage for me at this time. I’m currently using an expensive package called Altium (the MS Office of the EDA world). It’s not perfect, but holy crap is it easier than Eagle. My very first project in Altium would have been impossible to manage with Eagle, yet it was entirely doable for an Altium newb like me. Colour me impressed.

I will keep my eye on KiCAD because that’s the end goal: open source, professional-grade, won’t *ever* screw with my workflow once I switch to it. Commercial/closed source (and to broaden the rant, cloud) tools inevitably stop and you have to adjust, which is pain.

To that same extent, I do keep my eye on LO. I’m waiting, but it’s not ready (for me) yet. Google’s cloud office suite is nice, but you won’t ever catch me marrying to a cloud service, much less one from Google, the very King of “endless beta and then one day it’s gone without warning."

-A.