BU is a good bet, sticker price is expensive but the financial aid is pretty decent if you can take advantage. I’d definitely recommend them picking a school somewhere they’d probably want to live after college, as getting employment in the same area you’re going to school is much easier.

The problem is the Gnome team doesn’t give a flying rat’s ass about maintaining a stable api. I’ve never bothered with extensions because even the most basic stuff only works for one or two versions. The neovim team is pretty committed to backwards compatibility and following standards for interoperability like LSP these days, so it’s much easier for third parties to maintain a large set of extended functionality at this point. If they acted like the gnome team, your status bar plugin would break every other update.

Finding new ways webshits fuck up the most basic development principles boggles my mind. It’s like they intentionally stay ignorant.

Will you need your own account for the proprietary ones? Mozilla paying for these feels like it couldn’t be sustainable long term, which is worrying.

Windows only PWA’s 😮‍💨

Nothing that isn’t subjective, but the comparability issues are a complete dealbreaker, because interoperability is so necessary. This is definitely something that can be fixed since Google Slides is no where near as bad about this.

Yes the PowerPoint ui is much better. It takes more space but it’s much easier to find features you might not use as frequently.

I haven’t done much switching between calc and excel. Formatting issues come up when making or editing a document in libreoffice and opening it in MS office. Especially with impress, the position and sizes of objects will be very different between the two programs. This makes opening a presentation from impress with PowerPoint on a different computer impractical.

I think it comes down to 2 main reasons, and some members of the libreoffice suite definitely do a better job than others.

1. Comparability with MS Office, it’s really difficult to use these programs when you can’t reliably collaborate with people using the de-facto standard office software. Impress is exceptionally bad at this.

2. User interface clunkines, the ribbon ui Microsoft uses in modern office versions is really nice, and makes finding the actions you need really easy. This is coming from someone who used office 03 and 07, it’s not just a learning thing, it’s a better design.

These issues are definitely a bigger deal on some parts of the suite than others. I’ve found Calc to be a solid replacement for Excel, but when I’m making spreadsheets I’m not fiddling with complex formatting at all. Impress is on the opposite end of the spectrum. It has horrible comparability with PowerPoint, and I need to get things looking just right when I make a presentation. It’s difficult to find even basic formatting options. I could probably solve the usability issues by reading a few tutorials, but the comparability issues hold me back from putting the time in, since I have no idea how a presentation will look when someone loads it in PowerPoint anyway.

Gitlab’s AGPL so I don’t think there’s anything stopping you from moving to a self managed instance.

Are there any companies making discrete laptop graphics that don’t have proprietary drivers? I don’t think I’ve ever seen an AMD powered laptop unless it used an APU. I shudder to think of what proprietary Linux drivers from a company less resourced than Nvidia are like.