I’ve used LibreOffice (or OpenOffice as it was known before), and a problem with this approach is that your family will still constantly ask you to install Office and crack it for them. And those who don’t know any better will ask your help to open the PowerPoint their friends keep sending them.
Not to mention that LibreOffice doesn’t have an easy to integrate backup solution, nor an easy way to share big photo folders, let alone a decent mail client.
LibreOffice is a good thing at what it wants to be. But it’s not comparable to what MS is offering in the form of a subscription though.
You don’t just switch and only replace the word and excel alternative…
There are perfectly good open source solutions for all those things. Admittedly, that is going to take more work than just paying the Redmond tax. But you can’t have digital sovereignty without putting in some effort.
All true, but making 4 other people do this who will also continue to ask on how they can use Office because they need it for work/school is way more work.
That’s a great opportunity to get people to take more responsibility for their own digital life. And I know that’s an uphill battle but it’s also possible to say no.
I don’t disagree agree that that’s technically true. But in practice it’s simply not going to happen. My 70 year old mother just wants to use outlook to mail her friends and I’ve setup het phone to save the pictures she takes of her grandkids (my nieces and nephews) on OneDrive so she can share them easily with the rest of the family. Same thing for my brother and my SiL. For 80 euros a year I get a full groupware experience with no extra work. Is it perfect? Of course not. But even with a higher budget there’s no feature for feature alternative.
Hell, the chances of getting my work to switch to OSS cloud subscriptions is higher than getting my family to do it.
Time for your own Nextcloud instance. I’m really not trying to be dick here (perhaps unsuccessfully? Sorry.) But If I was the tech support for the family it would be my house, my rules.
99% of home users would do just fine even with Wordpad. But everyone was hooked on MS Office. Even myself. But I was just annoyed chasing new versions and looking for cracks for them. That was years ago when I migrated to EasyOffice which was free alternative. Then came OpenOffice and LibreOffice. Now I’m using OpenOffice because it’s less bloated than LibreOffice and just has 3 basic tools, Writer, Spreadsheets and Presentation and that’s that. LibreOffice installs bunch of stuff I don’t need and there is no way to adjust that during install.
I’ve used LibreOffice (or OpenOffice as it was known before), and a problem with this approach is that your family will still constantly ask you to install Office and crack it for them. And those who don’t know any better will ask your help to open the PowerPoint their friends keep sending them.
Not to mention that LibreOffice doesn’t have an easy to integrate backup solution, nor an easy way to share big photo folders, let alone a decent mail client.
LibreOffice is a good thing at what it wants to be. But it’s not comparable to what MS is offering in the form of a subscription though. You don’t just switch and only replace the word and excel alternative…
There are perfectly good open source solutions for all those things. Admittedly, that is going to take more work than just paying the Redmond tax. But you can’t have digital sovereignty without putting in some effort.
All true, but making 4 other people do this who will also continue to ask on how they can use Office because they need it for work/school is way more work.
That’s a great opportunity to get people to take more responsibility for their own digital life. And I know that’s an uphill battle but it’s also possible to say no.
I don’t disagree agree that that’s technically true. But in practice it’s simply not going to happen. My 70 year old mother just wants to use outlook to mail her friends and I’ve setup het phone to save the pictures she takes of her grandkids (my nieces and nephews) on OneDrive so she can share them easily with the rest of the family. Same thing for my brother and my SiL. For 80 euros a year I get a full groupware experience with no extra work. Is it perfect? Of course not. But even with a higher budget there’s no feature for feature alternative.
Hell, the chances of getting my work to switch to OSS cloud subscriptions is higher than getting my family to do it.
Time for your own Nextcloud instance. I’m really not trying to be dick here (perhaps unsuccessfully? Sorry.) But If I was the tech support for the family it would be my house, my rules.
99% of home users would do just fine even with Wordpad. But everyone was hooked on MS Office. Even myself. But I was just annoyed chasing new versions and looking for cracks for them. That was years ago when I migrated to EasyOffice which was free alternative. Then came OpenOffice and LibreOffice. Now I’m using OpenOffice because it’s less bloated than LibreOffice and just has 3 basic tools, Writer, Spreadsheets and Presentation and that’s that. LibreOffice installs bunch of stuff I don’t need and there is no way to adjust that during install.
But none of what you mentioned has a mail server/client nor cloud storage. Do you run your own groupware environment for yourself?