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So you thought you bought some software
At the heart of the computer industry are some very big lies, and some of them are especially iniquitous. One is about commercial software.
[...] Anyone who chooses to use free and open source software on their desktop regularly gets asked why. Why bother? Isn't it more work? Isn't the pro-grade gear commercial? Isn't it worth buying the good stuff? Windows is the industry standard, isn't it simply less work to go with the flow?
[...] The practical upshot of which is that most of the time, the commercial stuff isn't significantly better. No, it isn't less hassle. Mostly, it's more hassle, but if you're used to the nuisances you don't notice them. If the free software experience was really worse, most of us wouldn't do it.
[...] Anyone who chooses to use free and open source software on their desktop regularly gets asked why. Why bother? Isn't it more work? Isn't the pro-grade gear commercial? Isn't it worth buying the good stuff? Windows is the industry standard, isn't it simply less work to go with the flow?
[...] The reason that it's not better to buy software is simple, but it's a lie. A lie at the heart of the entire computer industry, but nonetheless a lie that's very hard to see – "for the same reason that people in Trafalgar Square can't see England," to quote a good book.
It isn't better to buy commercial software because you can't buy software.
It is not possible for you to own paid-for, commercial software. You can't buy it. You probably think that you have bought lots, but you haven't. All you really bought is a lie.
[...] All you can buy is licenses. Serial numbers or activation keys or maybe even hardware dongles. Strange abstract entities that only really exist in lawyers' minds, which claim to permit you to use someone else's software.
As someone who started installing gcc in the 80's, I use more open source packages than closed source. The only "bugs" they have tend to be compatibility issues. As in, $GiantCorp releases a new version of $PopularProgram and suddenly the Open Source version can't open the new save files.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Reziac on Friday October 07 2022, @02:33AM
Oh, LO does even more interesting things with RTF documents...
-- When Track Changes encounters one of the RTF tag nesting bugs (as can happen if italics comes to the very end of a line and includes the punctuation), it proceeds to mis-nest the whole rest of the document so you get 500 pages of italics, or strikeout, or both, and you can't fix it from inside LO; if you try you just wind up with all subsequent text hidden. You have to fix it in a text editor, assuming you know how to find the overlapped tags and delete them. (I have become proficient at this.)
-- When Track Changes encounters an image used as a scene spacer, sometimes it proceeds to insert ~550MB (yes, megabytes) of invisible UUEncoded garbage. (It's not even document data, it's just junk, possibly grabbed from RAM.) Same fix, if you can find an editor to handle it. If you copypasta around the point of error, it'll lose the tracked changes, having somewhere in the mess dropped the close tag for something upstream.
These problems don't occur in DOCX or ODT files... but if you trust either as your save format, you have a death wish. I have a client who lost a whole finished novel to header corruption in the ZIP file those formats are on disk (unfortunately by the time it was discovered, it had propagated across her backups too... Nope, the ZIP wouldn't rebuild either.)
" I have seen horribly garbled text formatting on single character changes (like removing a new-line) "
That's probably a tag nesting bug -- it's not properly preserving formatting tags when you delete visible text, so they wind up miswhacked, and formatting gets mangled.
BTW this is exactly why Internet Explorer ignored missing tags, back in the early days -- because until the XP release, when this was fixed, Frontpage had a tag deleting bug that had the same effect. (Backspace over the WYSIWYG text, and it took out any tags in its way too, as if it was editing raw text.)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.