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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • The problem is the Gnome team doesn’t give a flying rat’s ass about maintaining a stable api. I’ve never bothered with extensions because even the most basic stuff only works for one or two versions. The neovim team is pretty committed to backwards compatibility and following standards for interoperability like LSP these days, so it’s much easier for third parties to maintain a large set of extended functionality at this point. If they acted like the gnome team, your status bar plugin would break every other update.




  • Yes the PowerPoint ui is much better. It takes more space but it’s much easier to find features you might not use as frequently.

    I haven’t done much switching between calc and excel. Formatting issues come up when making or editing a document in libreoffice and opening it in MS office. Especially with impress, the position and sizes of objects will be very different between the two programs. This makes opening a presentation from impress with PowerPoint on a different computer impractical.


  • I think it comes down to 2 main reasons, and some members of the libreoffice suite definitely do a better job than others.

    1. Comparability with MS Office, it’s really difficult to use these programs when you can’t reliably collaborate with people using the de-facto standard office software. Impress is exceptionally bad at this.

    2. User interface clunkines, the ribbon ui Microsoft uses in modern office versions is really nice, and makes finding the actions you need really easy. This is coming from someone who used office 03 and 07, it’s not just a learning thing, it’s a better design.

    These issues are definitely a bigger deal on some parts of the suite than others. I’ve found Calc to be a solid replacement for Excel, but when I’m making spreadsheets I’m not fiddling with complex formatting at all. Impress is on the opposite end of the spectrum. It has horrible comparability with PowerPoint, and I need to get things looking just right when I make a presentation. It’s difficult to find even basic formatting options. I could probably solve the usability issues by reading a few tutorials, but the comparability issues hold me back from putting the time in, since I have no idea how a presentation will look when someone loads it in PowerPoint anyway.



  • I don’t really think it’s any of those things in particular. I think the problem is there are quite a few programmers who use OOP, especially in Java circles, who think they’re writing good code because they can name all the design patterns they’re using. It turns out patterns like Factory, Model View Controller, Dependency Injection etc., are actually really niche, rarely useful, and generally overcomplicate an application, but there is a subset of programmers who shoehorn them everywhere. I’d expect the same would be said about functional programming if it were the dominant paradigm, but barely anyone writes large applications in functional languages and thus sane programmers don’t usually come in contact with design pattern fetishists in that space.