I agree. I hate it with a passion and usually regret loading the page within about 10s of doing so.
But it’s the default for recruiters, and it’s thus unavoidable to support necessary communication with them.
I’ve been thinking recently it’s surprising that they never carved off a communication and calendar/meeting function – ideally in a separate app. But this would probably hit some product manager’s metrics, and LinkedIn is so far down the enshittification hole, it’s also understandable that they didn’t.
On the one hand, yes - and (to be reductive) enshittification is basically making decisions according to incentives that aren't aligned with your users, so it fits.
On the other hand, MS have Outlook email/calendar and Teams for video calling - so it could have been an opportunity to benefit different parts of their broader ecosystem. You could also build in limited access to Word for CV creation/editing (with Copilot support, of course) - and then bundle it and charge users for features, and charge recruiters even more for a 'premium' offering.
Except those two divisions were at others ends of the hall, in between was the gauntlet of enterprise deference, with obstacles such as Service Now approvals and meetings about meetings about how to have good meetings… it’s an MBA’s wet dream.
Not to sound snarky, but now please get it to run Microsoft Office. I'd argue that this is the last barrier to many, many people being able to use Linux full-time for business purposes.
If you really / actually want Linux and Linux Gaming to really take off, contribute with whatever helps to get Office 365 running in Linux without a VM.
Like it or not, the business world runs on Office.
I have quite a few machines under my direction, and I would drop Windows on every single one of them for employees that have never used Linux in their lives if I could be assured that they had Office and Teams.
I'm not an heavy o365 user but i'm almost happy on Debian KDE with thunderbird 148[0] (email only), teams-for-linux[1] (chat/calendar/whatever), Onedrive[2] and webdav (sharepoint)[3]. Libreoffice/Onlyoffice for documents.
[3] Store the SP cookie via konqueror visiting the SP site, then open it in dolphin via "webdavs://CORP.sharepoint.com/sites/SITE/Shared Documents/" (sometimes the cookie is very short-lived)
I tried very hard to make something similar work for a couple of months - Mint, teams-for-linux (which is great, actually!), web-apps for everything else.
The main problem is Word - for the documents I regularly work with professionally (large, complex, collaboratively-edited) the web-app is just not feature complete and sometimes struggles to cope.
Also, FWIW, the web Powerpoint is an awful experience.
After a brief flirtation with a virtual machine for Windows and Office (nah) I had to take a step back from Linux and use a Mac again.
I'd consider using it as Windows replacement. Exclusively Windows, as I don't care for the Linux applications, or anything Linux, at all. I don't enjoy being an admin, and the system is more stable without package management. Linux is a fossil from the age of the admin, best used today to emulate Windows, just like it runs under Android, as a HAL. If so, 2026 could be the year of the Linux desktop!
ReactOS is always almost there.. except it doesn't quite get there; same goes for Wine, as they have a lot in common?
I don't know if it is. Most businesses seem to use the web-based Office365 interface now, rather than native Office.
I expect the biggest reasons businesses use Windows these days are momentum, and lower support costs (Linux is still less reliably than Windows on real laptop hardware).
I work in an area where large heavy collaborative Word documents are very commonplace.
I've tried very much to make this work on Linux with the web apps, but they're just not good enough - not feature complete, and quite slow and clunky compared to the native equivalent.
I don’t think so. Windows is very easy to administer compared to both, Linux and Mac. There is also a compliance part that MS makes easier, though it’s a bit beyond what I really know.
The ‘cost of living crisis’ that most people refer to is about food, clothing, fuel, electricity, gas. Much of this is driven by feudal corporate lords, and their gouging business choices. Some is driven by geopolitics.
Issues with the affordability of for-profit healthcare is mostly an issue in the US, as far as first-world countries go. And the root cause there is decades of allowing money and big business to directly influence politics, rendering meaningful change close to impossible without a Bernie Sanders-esque president who’s strongly motivated to tear the whole system down.
The current pricing crises with food, fuel, electricity, and gas are currently being driven 100% by America's Caligula and his party of elected senatorial horses. And specifically his tariffs, but more generally his inability to comprehend anything beyond self-gratification.
There's been a 'cost of living crisis' discussed in many countries --not just the US-- since roughly the end of the pandemic. For obvious reasons, there are other factors responsible for this - not just Trump.
Trump's recent foray into Iran has indeed hit fuel/gas prices, the supply chain of some regional goods, and will have a knock-on impact on other goods subsequently due to rising fuel costs. The impact of tariffs on consumers is largely confined to the US.
Respectfully disagree. Food, clothing, fuel, electricity are too expensive, but they are comparatively much less of an issue compared to rent and healthcare costs.
Rent and healthcare are the 1A and 1B issues of our time.
As far as healthcare goes, the entire system is a mess. We already tried the Affordable Care Act to get more people covered, which only skyrocketed costs. The only way out is to increase the competition in the market, AKA supply side. Bernie Sanders is only familiar with demand-side solutions, which do not work. Sanders himself seems completely oblivious to the housing crisis in his own state of Vermont, which is being mitigated everywhere else through supply-side solutions.
I was mostly trying to make the point that the cost of living crisis is global, affecting many countries, and that your US-centric view doesn't scale. Healthcare costs hitting consumers directly isn't global as most countries have totally different systems.
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That said, your suggestion that the answer to rampant capitalism making healthcare unaffordable is more rampant capitalism (which you call competition) is... interesting.
And I wasn't advocating for Sanders personally or his policies specifically, just using him as an example of a conviction politician who might have had the chutzpah to take on and dismantle the business-lobbying-politics establishment.
Ah ok sorry missed that you were talking globally instead of just US.
In the US, our problems stem from a lack of "capitalism," or healthy markets, or whatever anyone wants to label it. Bottom line, it's very much a supply side problem.
In housing, for example, NIMBY laws have for decades restricted all kinds of new housing being built. In capitalism, developers would be allowed to build. So we've very much had the opposite of capitalism.
Cities that are waking up to this and allowing new houses to be built are seeing rents fall across the board.
> In the US, our problems stem from a lack of "capitalism," or healthy markets, or whatever anyone wants to label it. Bottom line, it's very much a supply side problem.
I'd challenge whether for complex topics like healthcare, there truly ever could/would be a market that would deliver the savings you envisage.
When someone is diagnosed with cancer, you'd expect them to do everything in their power to give the best outcome, right? Wrong. Most people just go to their local hospital, and sadly the quality of physicians, surgeons, treatments offered, and overall care varies tremendously. There are various data to suggest that joining a clinical trial may offer improved outcomes (and of course, in extremis, clinical trial participation is the only way to access experimental treatments) and yet a very small percentage of patients ever do. Anecdotal experience suggests that many patients can barely understand the details of their disease and treatments (which are becoming more technical with time).
My point? For reasons that require further exploration, healthcare "customers" typically aren't sufficiently informed, discerning, engaged, or mobile in the way that would be necessary for a genuine competitive market composed of for-profit providers to function effectively to drive down prices and improve outcomes.
(I seem to be cast in the role of FreeCAD advocate on HN these days, but here goes!)
For years I agreed with you - I tried FreeCAD multiple times, different versions, always sucked.
Then I watched this video [0] and discovered that v1.1 is different - and that it's good enough for solid reliable hobby usage. It's still a touch frustrating in a few areas (text, for example) but I've now switched over to it completely.
I've forced myself to git gud with FreeCAD. It's better. Way better than it used to be. It's also still a very complex and user unfriendly application with a long road ahead of it.
You can make it work. You can also save yourself a lot of headache by using other CAD tools. Personally I value "Freedom" so I will continue to use it despite the difficulties but that may not be the right path for others.
I agree. freeCAD has become a tool that I just use without thinking about it. Earlier versions always made me question my choice and try out other software.
I really, really want that to be true, but my experience trying to adopt it has been really painful.
Even selecting things in the UI has sucked. I went in and increased the selection radius or whatever, that helped. But really, should I need to do this as a new user?
Getting the constraints to behave is like pulling teeth.
It also kind of sucks that you have to have really sparse sketches that only contain one closed figure. I gather you can create a "master sketch" and selectively project geometry into other sketches. But the last few times I've tried the app, I haven't gotten far enough into my sketches before rage quitting to validate the technique.
Right now I am back F360 with their hobby license wanting to escape their regular messing with the terms and conditions.
> Even selecting things in the UI has sucked. I went in and increased the selection radius or whatever, that helped. But really, should I need to do this as a new user?
Agree - selection isn’t broken, but it’s definitely sometimes frustrating and as it’s such a common function, absolutely should be as close to perfect as possible. I think it’s partly that the visual indication of what you’re hovering over and would be selected is too subtle, and also I’ve found (on Mac; I’ve not confirmed on other OSs) that it’s not selecting what’s at the exact tip of the pointer, but is rather selecting a couple of pixels away.
> Getting the constraints to behave is like pulling teeth.
Huh, once I’ve actually selected correctly, I find the constraints are fine - say, 95% as good as Solidworks.
> It also kind of sucks that you have to have really sparse sketches that only contain one closed figure.
Can you explain what you mean by this? Do you mean you can’t have a sketch with (to take a very simple example) a circle inside a circle, or two unrelated circles, or something else?
There are situations I can think of where selection does seem broken by design. It's fairly easy to get into a situation in the 3d view where you want to select a vertex but because of the draw order it's very hard to find an orientation of the model that lets you put it "in front". So you spend ages selecting the lines around it, spinning the model, trying again from all sorts of angles. Heaven help you if you're trying to select a bunch of points that have this problem, it's frustrating as hell. The second is in sketches, where the constraint icons aren't selectable when they're grouped but will block the selection of a component underneath them anyway. That's just obnoxious. I think in both cases the UI is working as designed, but it makes for an unusable outcome.
Oh, and if the selection point isn't at the pointer point? That's just a bug, and needs to be fixed. I can't see any defending that.
> the macOS ecosystem seems to be a little hostile towards pCloud and it seems to be fighting a never ending battle in order to the get the remote drive functioning reliably there
pCloud seems to have been having a few wobbles in the past few months, and it's unclear to me whether the root cause is external or internal. Two different Windows machines both needed manual removal and reinstallation, and the Mac installation needed manually updating to a later version due to (apparently) an SSL certificate renewal. FWIW the current version on my Mac (on Sequoia) seems solid outside of rarely needing to select 'Enable Drive' from the menu.
It’s still randomly really slow (like, individual controls drawing one by one slow) on my recently-refreshed corporate laptop; and opening Teams was the last action before the entire Windows installation my personal laptop was nuked… but yes, it’s basically usable and reliable for video calls and team chat these days.
Fundamentally, I'd argue that very little should ever be unreasonable or out of bounds to make jokes about; what is important is that it's good humour.
> Fundamentally, I'd argue that very little should ever be unreasonable or out of bounds to make jokes about; what is important is that it's good humour.
On a personal level, I couldn't agree more. I do hope that culturally we get to that point at some time :-)
I mean, jokes are made to uplift, intent in joking is important and punching up is preferable to punching down, this being said this didn't apply to chuck Norris that would have already got to the punchline without throwing a single fist.
It's probably pertinent to mention that the Python installation ecosystem is a hot mess, with multiple ways of installing Python (e.g. standard Python installer, multiple different packages managers on different OSes, Conda, and myriad package managers which can also install Python. And of course, these can all be in different locations, and may have different approaches to installing libraries.
Which is to say, I don't blame the author for wanting a single installation that his app can manage and rely on, even though I wish it was different.
The app is vibecoded. The author isn't making decisions about these tradeoffs and possibly wasn't aware of the implications of these decisions at all. The robot they used tried to fulfill its given prompts at the expense of everything else, which is why it's looking in bad directories and trying to install Docker environments in the build script.
I suspect that some of the author's comments in this thread are vibe-written, also. They are LLM-flavored and contrast strongly vs. their regular commenting.
> The app is vibecoded. The author isn't making decisions about these tradeoffs and possibly wasn't aware of the implications of these decisions at all. The
I agree, but to be fair this is how I would code it, too. I would have probably bundled the Python interpreter and only downloaded the FFmpeg binary (because of its license), but that's a relatively minor difference.
Not all people do. Also it may be a different version that doesn't support the command line arguments that you use, or it may not have been compiled with the flags that you want. It's just less headache to vendor it.
But it’s the default for recruiters, and it’s thus unavoidable to support necessary communication with them.
I’ve been thinking recently it’s surprising that they never carved off a communication and calendar/meeting function – ideally in a separate app. But this would probably hit some product manager’s metrics, and LinkedIn is so far down the enshittification hole, it’s also understandable that they didn’t.
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