Quoting: ExpandingMan

Quoting: ArehandoroIntegration with Microsoft 365 products, from Teams to Outlook

Yes, I know from experience that corporate IT departments care a lot about this and that their attitude is that this somehow necessitates either mac or windows, but it's yet another really stupid consideration on their part. For one, you can use MS office on the browser these days, which is more than sufficient for email (this is how I access my work email). Same goes for teams, which I believe has a native linux version anyway.

Beyond that, I'll resist going on a rant about how ridiculous MS office is and the violence I'd like to perpetrate on anyone who tries to give me an excel spreadsheet, but suffice it to say, if you absolutely *MUST* use MS office crap, you're probably going to have a hard time convincing me why libreoffice is not adequate for that task. Indeed, whenever I do have the misfortune of being forced to look at an excel spreadsheet, I just use libreoffice, in which the first thing I do is export it to a non-ridiculous format. Furthermore, just about every programming language these days has some package for reading excel files into some dataframe format... and if the amount of effort collectively represented by those packages doesn't give some indication of the amount of human suffering caused by excel, I don't know what does.

It is not the IT departments the ones that decide on using MS365, but it's up to IT departments to support certain tools and applications, along with configuration and deployment, of said tools.

One can use many things in the browser, but that doesn't mean it works in the same way that the native clients. By the way, Teams for Linux lacks MANY functionalities and is buggy as hell. Similarly with OneDrive, you'd need a 3rd party app to integrate seamlessly with Linux, and you'd need to write an Ansible playbook to have all deployed to a new device, but that would not work until the user has logged in, or unless you impersonate the user when setting it up and then changing the password again, to run the playbook... And like this, a ton of other things.

However, with macOS/Windows, they get the device, log in, MFA prompts to be set up, all the policies and configurations download and by the time the user start using the laptop all software and security policies are there. As much as I hate macOS/Windows, to me, at work, that is priceless.

Now, regarding the libreoffice comparison. Most finance departments use Excel because it is what they're used to. In some cases they'll have bespoke connectors that don't exist in libreoffice. Others will use some proprietary settings in Microsoft, or simply don't know/want to switch, because, let's face it, people are scared of changes when things "work" and because MS uses a big marketing campaign, or fear of open source... Of course, I'd prefer if they did use libreoffice, but I cannot force people to change how they work. Companies would lose millions on re-educating their staff.

As for email, let's face it, the functionalities and UX that Outlook offers, thanks to Exchange, not for me but for most executives, are also superior to what the competition does. Not even AWS with their mail service get near enough to Exchange. Yes, everything Exchange does can be done with a mix of other tools and providers, but then again, you'd need someone to know about it, someone to install, configure, maintain and support. There's a reason why people like turnkey solutions (usually money and simplicity)

Just for the record: I was the only one using a Linux distro at work until recently in my company, and I hate spreadsheets. Whether Calc or Excel ;)

Every programming language can read spreadsheets... but not everyone that deals with spreadsheets knows a programming language. We, as in most tech people, fail to understand and see, in most cases, a couple of things:

1. Most people, in 2023, struggle to do anything on a computer that is not opening a browser and check the internet.
2. Even if they're more tech-savvy, for them a computer, or software, is just a tool to do their work, and don't care the loops you need to go through to make it work, or the sweat it was to set it up in time record for a new starter, or your political views on why open source is better... They just want to come in at 9, leave at 17, and forget about it.

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Quoting: FifteenthPenIt really does seem like most voters ignored the categories, or have very... interesting ideas about what they meant.

To be fair, within each category, Steam already had selected a few to vote for. In most cases, I'm pretty sure a lot of people voted for the few titles they knew, or had seen in other platforms, without knowing all the options.

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35W base TDP with a max of 106W for the i7-13700T is pretty exciting :)

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Quoting: ExpandingManThis is very surprising to me, even though of course I personally really can't understand why anyone would choose mac over linux these days. It also seems pretty ridiculous that corporate IT departments which are probably constantly being asked not to waste money waste tons of money on macs which are both much more expensive and a lot harder to maintain (at least for the IT department itself, I'm sure apple makes all sorts of promises to counteract this).

Where I work I'm seemingly the only one who uses linux, and frankly if they told me I couldn't anymore I'd probably immediately quit. Life is too short to spend 8 hours a day dealing with apple's shit.

Aside of what @serge has said, there are other things that are also important as to why choosing macOS over Linux. Integration with Microsoft 365 products, from Teams to Outlook, integration with company's directory, including the ability to wipe the device if lost/stolen, deployment of GPO's via Endpoint, integration of SSO... Granted, all this might be different if the company I'm at didn't use M365 or Azure AD.

However, not related to the above, for me there is also another point to not allow people to use Windows, mac AND Linux... and it's basically because IT would need to support them all. Reducing differences in hardware and software makes IT departments run smoother.

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QuoteThe battery life being the biggest gripe people seem to talk about would hopefully get wiped off the table. Having it a bit lighter somehow would be another great bit to focus on, to prevent that hand / wrist strain from longer sessions.

Battery mileage really depends on the games. I got over 6h playing Pentiment. Of course, it would be great to have that on God of War too, but we can't ask the apple tree to give us chestnuts

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Quoting: Trias

Quoting: ArehandoroThis is mine, very casual compared to most...

"This account's replay is not shared".

Seems like you forgot to switch your link to public. It's private by default.

I did, indeed! It should be visible now :)

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If you have time, I can't recommend Pentiment enough. What a beautifully done game, its narrative display, historical accuracy, as well as plot and gameplay, are in my top 3 games this year for sure.

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This is mine, very casual compared to most...

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Quoting: cookiEoverdose:)
We still need the obligatory 2023 predictions and wish-list!

Something that it would be a lot of fun is to have GOL's community game of the year edition. Something like voting for the best RPG, adventure, platforming, best for Steam Deck, open source, etc Linux native games of the year, so Liam could create some content based on the top three of each category or something like that.

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Thanks to Liam for all the effort he puts in every day of the year to make this site my number 1 go-to for Gaming/Linux related news, and thanks to the rest for making these forums and comments' site a pleasant and fun experience.

Happy festive season for everyone!

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