5 ms·

MS Office

raverbashing 11y ago
Run a Windows VM on Linux (Windows 7 runs great), problem solved Install, back up the VM image, a lot less problems than having it as your main OS
- gelasio 11y ago
  Or, if you want a great desktop experience that is really stable and has stood the test of time - run Windows as the host and Linux as guest.
eru 11y ago
MS Office is a good point. But: MS Office is available even for Android these days. Otherwise Wine should work, and ain't there some cloud MS Office these days?
- frozenport 11y ago
  Except it doesn't. Office 2007 is over eight years old and runs with significant bugs. The cloud versions are incomplete and don't work with plugins like Endnote. The cloud version of PowerPoint struggle with movies and large resources.
DanBC 11y ago
The vast majority of people using MS Office would do fine with Libre Office or gnumeric and Abiword.
- peteretep 11y ago
  Not if they need to swap documents with other Office users.
  - Silhouette 11y ago
    This is, unfortunately, very true. Try collecting some accounting records in LibreOffice Calc and then finding your accountant uses Excel. Time lost fixing the mess is probably worth more than the cost of MS Office for a single incident. If you need this kind of interoperability more than very occasionally, that alone could be a deal-breaker. Also, LibreOffice 5 on Windows 7 appears to be a disaster. We installed it for the first time a few weeks ago, on one new PC at work just to try it out, and it's exhibited numerous very obvious graphical glitches, crashes and performance problems so far even just doing basic spreadsheet work. It also seems to have arbitrarily changed a bunch of things from earlier versions, such as the default colours available for colouring or highlighting cells in Calc. Maybe the stability is better on Linux, but even then the changes from LO4 are presumably still the same and just as frustrating.
    - chris_wot 11y ago
      Can you be more specific? In regards to changing defaults, that's often the case. Microsoft do the same thing, possibly worse.
      - Silhouette 11y ago
        Sure. The first example we noticed was that we loaded one of our most important spreadsheets into Calc, and found that most of the colours we use to code different cells don't seem to match the default palette any more. Where we used to just click a couple of times on the toolbar, now it seems we have to manually configure the exact colour or use format painting. Someone in our organisation has to update this particular spreadsheet very often, and that kind of change is going to be horribly frustrating for them (or would be, I suppose, since presumably we're not going to actually migrate any existing systems to LO5 in its current state).
        chris_wot 11y ago
        Is this just in the one spreadsheet, or is it across the whole app? Can you change the default colour palette? Choose Tools - Options - Charts - Default Colors https://help.libreoffice.org/Common/Default_colors https://help.libreoffice.org/Common/Default_colors
- BogusIKnow 11y ago
  Not if you have to teach every new intern how to use LibreOffice when they know to do stats and calculations in Excel.
blue1 11y ago
that, and the Adobe Creative Suite.

MS Office

Run a Windows VM on Linux (Windows 7 runs great), problem solved Install, back up the VM image, a lot less problems than having it as your main OS

gelasio 11y ago
Or, if you want a great desktop experience that is really stable and has stood the test of time - run Windows as the host and Linux as guest.

eru 11y ago

MS Office is a good point. But: MS Office is available even for Android these days. Otherwise Wine should work, and ain't there some cloud MS Office these days?

frozenport 11y ago
Except it doesn't. Office 2007 is over eight years old and runs with significant bugs. The cloud versions are incomplete and don't work with plugins like Endnote. The cloud version of PowerPoint struggle with movies and large resources.

DanBC 11y ago

The vast majority of people using MS Office would do fine with Libre Office or gnumeric and Abiword.

peteretep 11y ago
Not if they need to swap documents with other Office users.
- Silhouette 11y ago
  This is, unfortunately, very true. Try collecting some accounting records in LibreOffice Calc and then finding your accountant uses Excel. Time lost fixing the mess is probably worth more than the cost of MS Office for a single incident. If you need this kind of interoperability more than very occasionally, that alone could be a deal-breaker. Also, LibreOffice 5 on Windows 7 appears to be a disaster. We installed it for the first time a few weeks ago, on one new PC at work just to try it out, and it's exhibited numerous very obvious graphical glitches, crashes and performance problems so far even just doing basic spreadsheet work. It also seems to have arbitrarily changed a bunch of things from earlier versions, such as the default colours available for colouring or highlighting cells in Calc. Maybe the stability is better on Linux, but even then the changes from LO4 are presumably still the same and just as frustrating.
  - chris_wot 11y ago
    Can you be more specific? In regards to changing defaults, that's often the case. Microsoft do the same thing, possibly worse.
    - Silhouette 11y ago
      Sure. The first example we noticed was that we loaded one of our most important spreadsheets into Calc, and found that most of the colours we use to code different cells don't seem to match the default palette any more. Where we used to just click a couple of times on the toolbar, now it seems we have to manually configure the exact colour or use format painting. Someone in our organisation has to update this particular spreadsheet very often, and that kind of change is going to be horribly frustrating for them (or would be, I suppose, since presumably we're not going to actually migrate any existing systems to LO5 in its current state).
      - chris_wot 11y ago
        Is this just in the one spreadsheet, or is it across the whole app? Can you change the default colour palette? Choose Tools - Options - Charts - Default Colors https://help.libreoffice.org/Common/Default_colors https://help.libreoffice.org/Common/Default_colors
BogusIKnow 11y ago
Not if you have to teach every new intern how to use LibreOffice when they know to do stats and calculations in Excel.

blue1 11y ago

that, and the Adobe Creative Suite.