Yeah, I’ve observed exactly the same things that you have in my interactions, such as they are, with Indian developers and QA testers. I’ve always hated dealing with the results of their work.

I will say that not every Russian DEV is all that great either. A few years ago I was working for a big bank in their Finance department as one of their techie wonks working to setup the risk calculator configuration interface for everyone else to use. The Russian DEV team changed personnel a bit and the new guy who came in was nowhere near as good as the previous one. The result was a new UI tool that was full of bugs and had major functionality issues. I was able to get the Russkies to fix most of them, but it took a lot of time and effort and the results still weren’t that great.

Even so, it was still a less painful effort than dealing with Indians for the same thing – because with the Russians, at least, they actually tried really hard to understand what we needed from them.

After an office update, I spent – no lie – 15 minutes trying to figure out how to add a header/footer in excel. I’ve done it thousands of times. I had to google it.

Yeah. Been in the same situation many times. Not anymore, thank God – for the last few years I’ve primarily been using LibreOffice and I’ve had to use Apple’s iWork software too. (Which I hated – I wrote about it a while back).

I’ve played with Azure for our software, to use as a training environment. I found that a VM with specs that matched our requirements had a lot of latency. And if I were to boost it, the cost would triple or more.

Sounds similar to my experiences as well. I would LOVE to know why people opt for Azure rather than Amazon AWS or Google Cloud Platform. I suspect even Oracle’s Cloud is probably better.

LITERALLY EVERYTHING ELSE, except for corporate environments. Thunderbird has evolved by leaps and bounds, but it’s still not nearly as good as MS LookOut – it’s about 85% there, but the full integration that Outlook offers is still unmatched for corporate environments and for setting up meetings, calls, and so on. And while LibreOffice Writer is better, in my opinion, than MS Word, NOTHING out there beats Excel for spreadsheet geeks (like me).

That being said – with everything moving onto “the Mighty Cloud” (*eyerolls*), the need to use Windows qua Windows just to access those online tools is shrinking by the day.

I do really like Linux Mint – been using it since, I think, 2013 or so. Before that I used Ubuntu for about 4-5 years. I liked Ubuntu a lot until they introduced that stupid Unity screen manager with the weird dock system.

Canonical has also changed the package management system in the background, which removes control from the user and allows packages to send data to Ubuntu’s app store without you knowing about it. Linux Mint’s DEV team has flatly refused to follow that route and continues to use the Debian APT package manager, which is much more transparent.

If you have older hardware, both modern Ubuntu and Mint (and most Linux distros) will be too heavy for them. A better alternative is probably Puppy Linux, which is so small and compact that you can run it in memory from a USB drive, and has a tiny footprint. The interesting thing about Puppy Linux is that it’s not one single distribution – it’s a collection of highly modified distros like Ubuntu, Slackware, and Raspbian with an emphasis on simplicity and lightness.

I was actually looking at Mint, as my ubuntu distros are CD loaders for 15+ year old systems I use as ‘loaners’and display units (I could give a crap if some jerk at my booth steals a ‘computer’ that cost me less than 5 bucks from Deseret)

I will assume that this is a bit of an endorsement.

Honestly, if it weren’t for Kindle Unlimited’s jacked-up online reader and Epic Games I would have ditched windows in favor of Ubuntu a decade ago (I already did for my laptops)

There are problems with Ubuntu these days too. I strongly dislike their current desktop manager, which is why I switched over to the Ubuntu-derived Linux Mint. Other good alternatives include zorinOS and Elementary OS, which are also heavily Ubuntu-based but have very slick-looking window managers.

But MS has gotten so unbelievably awful I even briefly considered grabbing one of those Chinese OS’s.. thankfully I came to my senses.

The best way to really screw Microsoft over these days is to download and install Windows 10 and never pay for the software license. You can run everything on that installation without problems – it even updates on its own, as far as I can tell.

But yeah, WinDOZE these days is really only good for games – and not even great for that either, anymore.

The other issue was the user interfaces. Ugly, clunky, no idea how to make the app ergonomic so that it worked physically with a human.

Epic Line – “all of the old-school users absolutely hated it because nothing was where they needed it anymore” I HATE HATE HATE this shit! After an office update, I spent – no lie – 15 minutes trying to figure out how to add a header/footer in excel. I’ve done it thousands of times. I had to google it.

I’ve played with Azure for our software, to use as a training environment. I found that a VM with specs that matched our requirements had a lot of latency. And if I were to boost it, the cost would triple or more.

Honestly, if it weren’t for Kindle Unlimited’s jacked-up online reader and Epic Games I would have ditched windows in favor of Ubuntu a decade ago (I already did for my laptops)

I am by no means a power user or a core compiler (Thus Ubuntu instead of a less user-friendly but more powerful distro) in fact I cannot code at all… I was a COBOL guy for the three years leading up to Y2k, and the experience burned me out so badly I re-upped and never wanted to ouch ANY kind of code again (except html and spreadsheets and a little python, weirdly)

But MS has gotten so unbelievably awful I even briefly considered grabbing one of those Chinese OS’s.. thankfully I came to my senses.