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I have moved four businesses to free software and only gotten great feedback. I honestly have no idea why anyone would pay for a Microsoft product when Foss alternatives are better in every way.
Name them, I dare you.
Two optical shops, a rehab clinic, and a grant funding service. No specifics on the internet.
I think they meant the FOSS alternatives
Open or libre office, NAPS2, local send, proton, helpwire, inkscape, firefox with addons, and a local server if they need a lot of “cloud” storage, which people think they need more of than they do.
Seriously, the rehab was convinced they needed several TB to store their records, when every invoice and exam note they had for the ~12 years they’d been digital amounted to about 8GB, ignoring the fact that they only needed to hold on to records for 7 years, or 10 for Medicare, which wasn’t terribly common.
The optical that needed access to very large (16k) retinal photos, really only needed access from 2 locations, so a couple of local servers on automatic backup with a UPS powering the routers meant unless power went out in the whole state, the images and documents were always accessible somewhere.
The grant service needed encrypted emails and wanted personalized URLs, so proton business worked for them and came with storage. Not free, but that was their choice.
For some reason most businesses I’ve worked with seem to think running everything on laptops or all in one computers is the way to go, and get frustrated when everything inevitably gets slow as shit.
So I switch them to mini PCs running my scrubbed ultra light windows image mounted to the back of monitors, and now they can replace parts when necessary, and I can gut the old computers for harddrives for a local server. The HDDs might be crap, but 20 of them make for a hell of a backup RAID.
Helpwire as a hidden startup app allows access from anywhere for files, and I can run tech support from anywhere if necessary.
Thanks for the list. Hadn’t seen Helpwire before.
Seriously, the rehab was convinced they needed several TB to store their records
Maybe someone wants to store their Linux isos to share around work 😂
The 4 businesses or the free alternative to onedrive?
Is there anything that offers the same amount of storage as Onedrive? I pay about £80 a year and get 6 TB across 6 email addresses. One is mine and the others are for family.
To add to that, they all get the Office suite included too, which is 100% compatible with whatever random office files other normies send them.
For that much storage, you’d be better to self host. The initial cost would probably be around 3 months of your current bill, and open office is free.
Friendly reminder that OpenOffice is barely maintained and has no community left. LibreOffice is where the community moved to over a decade ago 🙂
You know, I was waiting for this comment as soon as I listed open office. I sometimes use libre, but I like open better for no real reason. I’ve never run into anything it can’t do, except of course for whatever reason I can’t remember that caused me to get libre in the first place.
Fair enough, it’s just worth noting that Apache has been very neglectful of security flaws. But you do you!
6 TB for $20? Man I haven’t looked at hardware prices in a while.
?
They said there current bill was 80 /Year. 3 months would be 80/4. 20, though I realize they didnt say dollars now. But still really cheap
True, but then I’d have no offsite storage. I know that Onedrive isn’t the best option, but it’s better than nothing
6 TB for $20? Man I haven’t looked at hardware prices in a while.
And then you have my company that now shut down our nextcloud instance because “it is insecure” and moved all files to OneDrive.
Ouch, the Nextcloud I’m usually stuck with only has an 8mb per second transfer rate which is annoying but at least we have it.
I’ve been gradually de-googling and de-microsofting, but it’s a slow process. OneDrive was one of the only ways to get my files out of Google takeout because they’re so huge. The direct downloads are rate limited, and have a high error rate, making it almost impossible to download massive Google takeout files before they expire.
I’m assuming something like nextcloud and only office? It’s what I’m doing right now as well
Interleaved in the actual file listing too for maximum accidental clicking likelihood. Fuck you Microshaft
This isn’t mildly infuriating, it’s fucking enraging! Fuck the robber barons!
Hahaha hahahahahahahaha, how dare they? Really, who do they think they are? Bought and paid for product, but you still get inline ads disguised as a file? Couldn’t be more obvious how much they hate their customer and their time.
Spotify put a location targeted ad on a podcast I was listening to. Both beginning and end.
They’re all cunts.
This is infuriating, but not mildly
Paying for a product does not prevent enshitification
Amazing catch.
Normally I’m skeptical of this. If it’s a popup saying “signup for Microsoft 365” or whatever, I don’t consider that the same type of thing, and a lot of complaints about ads in Microsoft environments have been of this nature. Those don’t necessarily have the implication of exposure to a 3rd party ad market and tracking and so on.
But this is a pretty clear smoking gun, regular old ad.
Microsoft has no shame about this kind of thing. They’ve been full steam ahead on the enshittification train for at least ten years now
I feel like some of the hate for Microsoft products is disproportionate, like people are looking for things to dislike and ignoring the weak aspects of rival products or equivalent FOSS software, but this really is indefensibly egregious and greedy.
Google’s shitty practices with Google Photos was my last straw. I self host now with a cloud backup for a small fee.
Fuck all this. No one should charge this much for these kinds of services.
I guess I don’t use photos enough, what did they do?
Gmail, Drive, and Photos used to be three services that aggressively pushed you to put all your data into them, gave you 10gb each, and in the case of photos offered a nice featured viewer.
Then, they decided to consolidate account storage. Now these services all share a pool of 10gb, and every high quality photo or heavy email from your 10 year old inbox is adding up.
And then, having enshittified it, they start selling you Google backup.
This isn’t working
Google One. Still not that popular…
Okay now let’s have constant nags across all three services, persistently, that warn you you are running out after like 60 or 70 percent full.
I was done when I heard them almost get my girlfriend at the time, as well as my parents with this dark pattern bullshit. I backed up their data immediate and cleared their devices, setup syncthing and started working on hosting an alternative. I hadn’t even learned about immich yet.
Hmm, I just checked and have photos going back to 2011 on there. Most are pictures of pets and ceiling fans. I think I’m realizing I just don’t take photos anymore that aren’t for short term use. I guess if I ever have kids I’d change that. Do you just host it locally? Not familiar with syncthing. Is it something I can spin up a Debian/red hat/whatever choice server and run from there, or is it cloud based on someone else’s hardware
I host a bunch of services now, but Plex, Syncthing and the *arr apps have been my standouts for a while.
Syncthing is a NAT-hopping file sync that uses relays to establish communication over firewalls. Windows/Linux. Think of the relays like a FPS matchmaking server to setup your file transfer. It’s secure and quite nice. I use it to keep my photos backedup no matter what kind of connection I have. And to sync things like game saves and save states between multiple devices/locations.
Syncthing is great because at the time I didn’t have a NAS or anything like immich running for a more complex solution. Syncthing is just folder syncing. So I synced /photos on my phone and C:\photos on my desktop. The first sync will dump the entire camera folder onto my desktop via syncthing (and anything on the desktop onto my phone, if the folder wasn’t empty). Then on the desktop side when the phone is starting to fill up, I just move the files from C:\photos into C:\photoarchive for example. Syncthing sees that the files are gone, and tells my phone to remove them to stay in sync, so it does, and I get back tons of space.
If nothing else I recommend at least setting up syncthing backup for preserving your data and not paying google a dime. Then if you go down the self-hosted rabbit hole a bit further, learn how to manage docker and setup an immich instance. At that point you can either us a VPN and access it that way via VPN making it “local” or register a domain and point it at your machine and all that. If you’ve never self-hosted a website or page before this can be challenging, and the VPN solution is quite simple, and more secure.
All that said, syncthing is not intuitive at first in my opinion. If you make a synced folder entry in the app, the name of that entry doesn’t have to match the folder, or between devices. At all.
So on your desktop you might name or rename this link to “receive photos” links it to “C:\photos” but on your phone it’s called “sync photos” and links it to “/emulated/0/DCIM/Camera”. See what I mean? They look totally unrelated. But if you look closely they both have a matching ID number from when the folder was shared first.
That sounds nice, because then you can just run a backup service or a raid setup on the shared sync’d folder on the computer and everything should be backed up for all the photo locations.
Thanks for the info!
No problem. Check out the selfhosted subs here and on reddit for some advice if you want to go that direction.
You don’t even need much space or power to start off you’re limiting it to photos and docker services mostly. The vast majority of my data use is my entire family’s collective media vault. A RaspberryPi 4 with an external 2tb is great for lightweight services and networking.
Same here, but I built an inexpensive home server. Immich is an amazing option
Immich, obsidian, ollama, Plex…
Barely scratching the surface but yea, I host everything.
Does this work? Do people click on it? Maybe by accident, but I can’t imagine looking for pictures of my cat and thinking, “Thanks microsoft. I do need to wash my hands more”.
Snug fit for an ad 🥰
Crap. Have to use this for work. Fucking criminals - sick of the enshitification.
One of these things is not like the others…
I guess they figured if it works for Windows why not try it in other paid products?
Is this the iOS app? My app looks nothing like that and I’ve never seen an ad on either account while using it.
It’s Microsoft 365 on Android. I only saw this and one other ad so far.
