Yes, quite a bit. Not so much as a replacement for trackpad/keyboard/mouse, but mostly to write down notes with a stylus, or do some quick sketches. I don't do that often enough to justify carrying another device like a tablet, but regularly enough to feel limited by the absence of touchscreens.

I actually quite like the UI of MS Office, but nevertheless I don't understand why so many competitors try to make clones. Say what you want, but MS has a huge head start here and everyone else is just making worse looking copies of the way MS Office looked years ago.

And of course, is this really the final form of office applications? Is it maybe time to just go back to the drawing board, think about workflows, the current state of technology, future trends, and build a UI that works maybe even better, looks cleaner, fits on more screens?

If your software can look and work pretty similar to what Microsoft Office does but be cheaper or even free at the same time - there’s a market for this type of stuff

The problem being, one of the biggest hurdles for any office suite that isn't Google's or Microsoft's is adoption, and one way to mitigate that is making a clone

The nerds will send you a PDF generated from a LATEX file, but most office workers in the world don't care enough to figure out why the shortcuts they memorized 20 years ago don't work in 'weird word' or their formulas break on 'weird excel'

This is it. I daily drive Linux at my current job but worked with Excel for a decade at my precious jobs and it's incredibly annoying to have to stop my workflow and figure out where LibreOffice hid the menu option for things I have hotkey memory for in Excel. Yes I know they're not the same, but I honestly don't care, I just want to create a table and sort by a column so I can move on to my DevOPS tasks.

That’s actually what I like about Apple Numbers… it’s not trying to be Excel.

>the current state of technology, future trends

An AI office suite startup has taken long enough to appear.

What an absolute load of bullshit.

His text contains hardly any new insights about Germany, and I suspect that this was the real reason for the rejection.

I am also out of the loop here, how would namespaces have helped?

Newer Coworking places generally seem to have some Starbucks-vibes, but AFAIK they are not doing to well.

Maybe the price of a coffee is exactly what people are willing to pay for a seat, a small table, and wifi for some hours.

I haven't seen a coworking place that isn't insanely overpriced compared to a coffee shop so it's no surprise they're not doing well.

In my experience price isn't the only issue. One of the (smaller) coworking spaces I can have access to locally, closes at 6pm while a coffee shop at around 9-10PM and it's also open on weekends.

But then again, I find working in coffee shops too distracting, so work from home and randomly popping into a coworking space now and then.

Little overpriced but I've found Loop Earplugs to help working in coffee shops, etc. Muffles out most of the sound but not everything, enough to focus but not fly off your seat if someone taps your shoulder.

What's the purpose of doing this over working at home where this problem doesn't exist?

I work at home 99% of the time but occasionally it's nice to get out of the house and see the world of the living.

For many you really want a distinction between “work area” and “home” - one way is to have a separate office at home to do work in, but you can also leave the house and go somewhere.

If you work on the kitchen table and that’s where you play, also, the mind and body have hard times disengaging from work.

Yeah, but isn't the question whether the co-working place is overpriced or if the coffee shop is underpriced or maybe both?

I tried wework. The seats were unbelievably uncomfortable. For the low-low price of $500 usd to get a hot seat, it's just much worse than coffeeshops.

Coworking spaces need to colocate with services. Starbucks, Fedex Kinkos, massage chairs....

Imagine if a little critical thinking like this had been allowed to enter the minds of WeWork investors.

Companies pay more than coffee prices for offices

The article implies that tabs, bookmarks, passwords can only be synchronised between Firefox installations and not with Zen or Libre (I assume this refers to LibreWolf?), but at least Zen can be connected to the Mozilla account and synchronises everything with the other connected Firefox, Firefox for Android, ... installations.

I'm eagerly awaiting Zen to enable tab groups/folders. I've been watching feat:9355, but its gotten bogged down in a debate about the whether tab folders in the tab bar should be the same as bookmarks, ala Arc. I personally did not like that Arc considered tabs and bookmarks to be the same because it made management and syncing a pita. Having to use a third script to export your bookmarks is not a good look.

I haven't used tab groups, is it like the indenting done in tree style tabs? I find workspaces and vertical tabs in Zen sufficient for my needs in organizing tabs, but I'm a complete amateur when it comes to the fine art of loading extreme numbers of multiple tabs from what I've seen of others.

> Zen can be connected to the Mozilla account and synchronises everything with the other connected Firefox, Firefox for Android, ... installations.

They made this work? I remember testing it out some months ago and it didn't work because of some reason.

Yeah, it works as of ~3 months ago until now. t. user

LibreWolf also connects and syncs seamlessly to Firefox Accounts.

Same for Waterfox.

I much prefer installing it myself, with the required version for my project and at a known and common location.

That's fair enough. It may be less of an issue for experienced developers, but for those looking to learn the craft, it's one more barrier.

Is this even true? I am strongly opposed to ads and tracking in my OS for other reasons, but surely the performance impact is barely measurable.

HN is social media. Messenger apps are almost certainly social media. GitHub or similar platforms might be social media. There might be some people out there without any social media accounts, but they wouldn't be able to post about it on the internet.

Other than that, your example of using temporary accounts for some secondary platform functionality is yet another reason why this policy is terrible.