• nialv7@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      I have a bunch of smart devices - light bulbs, wall plugs, etc. They all connect to Home Assistant running on my own server and I don’t need to pay any subscriptions.

      IoT is not the problem, corporate greed is.

      • barcaxavi@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        I do agree that it’s pretty cool that HA can be used for free, but if you like something and use it regularly please find ways to contribute.

          • barcaxavi@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            That’s one way. Or you can contribute code, help others in the forum, file bug reports… OR if you’re the lazy one like me you can actually give them money.

            Don’t like subscriptions? Ok by me, but please don’t think that complete teams will be working on great and secure software for free. That’s not something that can be maintained for a long time.

            If you like something, contribute to it.

    • schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business
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      4 months ago

      Hell, maybe not since 1997!

      Office 2000 was peak office: it had the definitive version of Clippit, and every actually useful feature you’ll probably ever need to type and edit any sort of document.

      …I will say, though, that Excel has improved for the weirdos that want 100,000 row spreadsheets since then, but I mean, that’s a small group of people who need serious help.

      This has nothing to do with anything, but whatever.

      • Pzulu@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        100k rows is a small data set for a lot of what I look at, but that is at work.

        Let me split it down.

        For work use, 100% has to be Excel. For personal use, either of the FOSS is more than enough.

        • EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com
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          4 months ago

          I think that’s where the divide is, and why my employer pays for everyone to have Microsoft Office but I use a free office suite. I simply don’t need the extra capabilities for my own personal use.

      • Uninvited Guest@lemmy.ca
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        4 months ago

        I don’t know exactly when the features arrived, but things like xlookup, power query, live data connections, etc have been welcome improvements in Excel.

        Heck, even textbefore is a great QOL improvement.

    • ContrarianTrail@lemm.ee
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      4 months ago

      My subscribtions are Protonmail, Mullvad VPN and ChatGPT. On top of that I’m paying a voluntary monthy donation to a podcast.

      That’s it. If I had to guess, YouTube premium will be the next one but so far adblocking still seems to work.

    • EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com
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      4 months ago

      Microsoft expects me to pay for Office 365? No, fuck you, I’ve got LibreOffice and your older Office software still works as good. Your word processing program, Word, hasn’t really changed that much since 2007 or even 2003. Hell, maybe not since 1997!

      Yeah, it’s a word processor. I don’t need a newer with more features that I will never use. Some of these might make sense for a business with collaborative projects and such, but your average home user doesn’t need it.

    • Tux@lemmy.worldOP
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      4 months ago

      Adobe expect me to pay for Premire Pro? No, fuck you, i’ve got Kdenlive and it feels like premium-quality app

    • deadlyduplicate@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      In theory open source can help you escape subscription hell but Gimp and LibreOffice do not have feature parity with Photoshop and MS Office and have significantly inferior UX. Maybe for word processing, LibreOffice or an older version of Office is fine, but that is not true at all for spreadsheets. So much the case that I would rather use Python Dataframes + Juypter notebooks than LibreOffice Calc.

      This is also the case for Indesign vs Scribus, Illustrator vs Inkscape, Autocad vs Freecad. Audacity is fairly powerful but again horrible UX. That list goes on I am sure.