Some might, but goodness knows I've never run into one. The corporate America I have interacted with so far (30 year career, so not trivial) is Office all the way down, and deeply enmeshed with Exchange calendaring. (I mean, as an MSFT-hater from the 90s, it pains me to admit this, but Exchange calendaring is materially better than anything else. Sometimes, Redmond does things well.)

Heck, I regularly manage to run into people that have managed to convince themselves that nobody actually runs Linux servers or that Java is the only programming language that has any traction...

The truth is that real-world tech adoption is actually extremely heterogeneous and we would all do well to remind ourselves of that from time to time.

It’s fine as a replacement for Word (I guess? I’m not much of a Word user). But Excel is so far ahead. And the ergonomics of working in a real application vs a web app is a significant difference.

Google Docs is to Word what Google Sheets is to Excel in terms of functionality. As long as what you're doing is simple, it's fine, and if what you're doing requires collaboration, it's great. But when you want to do something remotely complex, Docs and Sheets largely get their asses handed to them by Apple's free iWork apps, let alone Microsoft Office.

- Regex support in find & replace and regexextract(). - FX rates as a formula instead of as a data type. IIRC Excel requires 2 columns to display a FX rate (one to specify the pair, one to print the number); Google Sheets specifies the pair inside the formula.

I think the big transition at PWC was 5 years or so ago I think, but to this day every document I get from them is Excel / Word. Despite how much work went into those accounts - these are not complex spreadsheets either!

Example: How do you enter a cell to edit in Excel? On the desktop (I'm a mac user), it's ctrl-u (yep - ctrl). On the web I can't find any shortcut. I have to double click the cell like an animal.

Example: How do you select all the text inside a cell. On the mac it's cmd-a as you'd expect, on the web it's ctrl-a. Sigh.

The seamless collaboration of Google's apps is a joy, though as you've indicated, you give up a lot of features and power.

I'm an Excel fan as well but in our case it simply would not work due to the fact the team is spread across so many locations.

** Google Docs encountered an error. Please try reloading this page, or coming back to it in a few minutes.

To learn more about the Google Docs editors, please visit our help centre.

We're sorry for the inconvenience. - The Google Docs Team **

... It went away 10 minutes later, but I can't have that in the middle of a working day.

Sorry, the file you have requested does not exist.

Make sure that you have the correct URL and that the file exists.

Get stuff done with Google Drive

Apps in Google Drive make it easy to create, store and share online documents, spreadsheets, presentations and more.

Learn more at drive.google.com/start/apps.

....

The above is actually an error produced by me just trying to create a new blank page.

Sorry, I won't be going near Sheets for anything I care about. I'll try again in a year. The above annoyed the hell out of me.

I realize the parent question was more focused on how people find success with Google Docs, but if that success is primarily due to collaboration, and collaboration in O365 is now decent, I wonder if some of the justifications for using Google Docs still hold up.

I haven’t had many issues over the last 6-12 months, though, and as far as I can tell, they continue to improve.

Don’t get me wrong - I’m not a fan of MS products and as I said, I think Google still has the edge in collaboration. But they’ve come far, and it wasn’t that long ago that those collaboration features were unusable or non-existent.

I do a big charity bike ride every year, and track my donors in Excel (largely because the initial dump of donation data came from the org in that format).

I try to be smart about my appeals, and I rapidly ran into limitations on pulling certain sets of email addresses out of Excel easily/simply/etc., and my next-step turned out to be Jupyter. It's GREAT for that, and I can still keep my data in Excel as a source and just query against it.

But I can't imagine trying to do the whole thing in Jupyter.

Excel is an amazing piece of software esp for a power gui. But so is Python. For my work I'm either dealing with about 1k rows max... or I'm dealing with millions of rows or more, things that break excel. Or multi terra, stuff that likes a cluster.

If you've never programmed, "just use SQL" is super daunting. OTOH, Excel gives you access to that kind of data query power without writing code, and the people who are good at it can do pretty amazing things with it. It's a different way of solving that problem.

It's a powerful tool, and it's a well-built one (again, it pains me to say, bc I grew up hating MSFT). If you're on a platform that has access to a native app, exploring it can actually be fun.

It's not something most people would choose their operating system for.

Just because the average HN poster doesn't interact with these people from their tech silo doesn't mean they don't exist.

And yeah, there's a real history in computing of spreadsheets literally driving platform adoption.

In my world, Office is only used when you are consulting to companies where most data is for monthly meetings made of people that don't really care.

Googles suite of tools have been first class citizens at almost every company I've been at.

Excel is so far ahead of Google's offering - or anything else in that space -- that it's ubiquitous. It's insanely powerful, and its power is accessible to nontechnical people. That's an enormous thing.

Remember, spreadsheets were the original "killer app" that got PCs into the biz world. They're still a huge part of everyday life for vast numbers of workers -- and not just in the midwest as you sneeringly suggest.

> it's ubiquitous

it isn't - as I stated elsewhere I've never worked at a company where MS Office tools were a first class citizen, while almost every company I've worked at uses google docs/sheets frequently.

> It's insanely powerful

maybe? I mean I think if you need powerful tools excel/sheets is never the solution - they are really good at solving simple problems easily - there are better fits for problems that need "insane power"

> its power is accessible to nontechnical people

very fair point - the on ramp gets nontechnical people to become technical, but it is _not_ easier to do complex things in excel/sheets than in a general purpose programming language. It's just more accessible.

> as you sneeringly suggest.

starting and ending with a point to make the parent sounds malicious when no malice needed to be interpreted.

I think I will go back and downvote now. It's simply not a conversation that warrants much of any emotional response. We're talking about boring tools here.

2. There's no "maybe" about Excel's accessible power. You have a bias to coding, which is predictable here, but "just learn to code" is not the answer for most people who just want to ask questions of the dataset. Excel does this for them. So yes, if you need powerful tools, spreadsheets absolutely ARE VERY OFTEN THE SOLUTION.

3. The power available to someone who learned to code at 12 is one thing, but that power is fundamentally alien and totally unapproachable to the average MBA in finance. And consequently it's entirely irrelevant. OTOH, Excel with its host of data science add-ins is HIGHLY available and will allow the user to get answers without having to learn to code. This is power.

My comment re: "as you sneeringly suggest" was 100% directed at pknomad, who snarked that the only people using something as tragically unhip as spreadsheets were in the midwest -- i.e., out of step with the mainstream and tied to ways of the past.

I stand by that comment without reservation, but it wasn't directed at YOU given that it was a reply to someone else.

My observation is based on the fact that most companies in mid-west (even Chicago yes) use Office generally because they're migrating from on-premise Microsoft solutions. I'm not passing any judgements.

Cargill, Old Republic Insurance company, et al all use Office365 or Microsoft solution.

Excel is indeed ahead of G suite offering but my post never made any indication otherwise.

Sure, if you're a software company GSuite is good enough.

Our o365 was down for about half the trial period. We chose google....

And by "legacy" I presume you mean, "Have been around at least 30 years." Sorry to tell you, but the Walmarts of the world aren't so much legacy as established.

https://www.businessinsider.com/google-g-suite-gmail-2-billi...

Regarding you experience with GSuite, assuming that you have used MS Office previously, do you find it sufficient for your needs?

I worked with MS Office before. My use of Word was the same and google docs, actually, I think is better due to a lack of fancy features. I just use basic text formatting in outline format and attached pictures.

I didn't use excel before.

So yeah I prefer gsuite to office. I had to do a document with word and track changes over email a few months back. It was brutal. Gsuite destroys that workflow.

Did those 3 companies have more than 1000 employees? 100?

I confirm, my pathway to linux started with using alternative shells & apps on windows to improve on the existing ones, bblean, xoblite, aston shell... good times

Why is this a negative? This is actually one of the largest pain points for me in switching from Windows/Mac to Linux.

You can also use WSL2, which has fast file I/O. Unless you're trying to write to files in /mnt/c, at which point the comparison makes less sense, and a more accurate comparison would be trying to write to files on a remote Windows machine from Linux (also slow).

> compared to the real thing

Um, it is the "real thing". It's running in a hypervisor, on the real CPU core.

What glitches have you seen (so I'm prepared when I meet them)?

1) XFCE is the pinnacle of desktop environments: https://xfce.org/

It's extremely stable, looks good, works fast and is customizable. It works equally well on old underpowered devices, modern ones, as well as servers (should you ever need that sort of thing for whatever reason). It also has plenty of widgets without any of the modern bloat.

2) LibreOffice is great open source office software: https://www.libreoffice.org/

It started out as a fork of OpenOffice and has since become the mainstay under GNU/Linux distributions. It does word processing. It does spreadsheets. You can make drawings and visualizations in it. It does presentations. There's even a simple database offering in there, a la MS Access.

It also supports MS Office formats for the most part and can convert them to open ones with very few issues! The performance is also better than any web based offering. Plus, it's cross platform!

3) Thunderbird is perhaps the best mail client, regardless of platform: https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/

It's stable, reliable and has its origins in Mozilla. It does everything i'd expect a mail client to do and i've had no problems with it to date. Plus, it's cross platform!

As for mail servers, i think that mail servers are a horrible mess for the most part, regardless of which platform you need them on. I think that your best bet in that regard is just using a Docker container that packages all of the components that you'd need: https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver

4) This is absolutely true, but then again, you can say the same about any piece of unpopular hardware.

Linux on mobile phones is a mess. Then again, even FreeBSD on certain pieces of desktop hardware oftentimes fails to work as well. Many years have passed, but this can still be problematic, given that perhaps we treat drivers wrong as an industry.

My cheap Chinese netbook (i'm not too well off financially) had the mouse not work on Fedora and some other distros. Sometimes the audio wouldn't work. Now, sometimes the mouse gets stuck in a state where it acts as a scroll wheel. In Windows, function keys worked as they should (after pressing the Fn key you could access them), but in Linux distros it was flipped and i found myself having to press Fn to use the F1-F12 keys, with no option in BIOS to flip this. The fingerprint scanner just doesn't work and isn't even detected. The Wi-Fi drivers didn't work and i had to compile them from some random GitHub repository that i found online. The distro didn't have GCC and the netbook doesn't have an ethernet port so i had to suffer through doing an air gapped install, which was problematic because of the dependencies. I got it working for the most part, but it was a pain.

Things really should be better. But that can probably only be achieved by either open drivers and open standards for most of the hardware out there, or by killing off about 75% of the hardware vendors out there, which in practice simply means that you only have to buy hardware that works well (e.g. Thinkpads).

5) The choices that i find myself making are rather easy - either i use open source software, or i do less.

However i agree for the most part with the observations about Linux not being an awfully popular platform for porting applications. I do think that this has three main causes: packaging being somewhat difficult to get started with (as well as needing to support a variety of distros), the GUI frameworks across Windows/Linux/Mac being a total mess and there being no "good" options out there, and then there also really not being a large commercial effort to make the struggle of porting something over worthwhile.

Interestingly, the GUI framework situation isn't such a large issue if you go with something like Lazarus, JavaFX or even Swing for your software, but those can be ugly, so people don't. Still, i'd argue that either of those have the potential to be better choices than Electron apps.

In WSL1, access to files on the Windows host is far quicker than WSL2 and symlinks work everywhere.

To try to counteract this, I opted in to the insiders dev channel recently to try the upcoming X11 support, i.e. run IDEA inside WSL. While the performance is quite good, it's broken, e.g. try using find in project, the window disappears immediately 9 times out of 10.

In many ways, I found WSL1 more useable as I could use one shell for both the Windows and WSL filesystems with reasonable performance. I now use cygwin if I want to use gnu linux type tools on Windows.

Once the X11 support matures it will be a pretty good experience overall if people are willing to install things like IDEA in WSL, I'm looking forward to that.

I find this pretty annoying, as I need to access Windows files from WSL more often than the opposite (e.g. get stuff from my Windows Downloads folder, or use bash to quickly interact with a Windows folder). Do you know if access to Docker volumes is faster or slower on WSL2 by the way? I wouldn't switch back to WSL1 since some nix/cabal stuff didn't work on WSL1 at all but I am curious as that's the other point where my windows/wsl filesystems touch in ways I've never looked into.

If your files are stored within the VM itself, WSL2's access to them is effectively native. However accessing the files from Windows requires going through the \\wsl$ (P9) network share. This presents problems as Windows isn't going to receive file notification events if you do something like `git checkout`. Additionally, if your project utilizes symlinks, Windows only sees them as an empty file.

Users of VS Code largely will not encounter these problems as running `code` from within the WSL layer will start a remote server, it's seamless, that's genuinely very cool. However, if you use anything else, I've found it to be problematic.

The "best" solution I arrived at (other than dual-booting Linux, which is totally worth it!) is to install `xorg-server` from cygwin, install my IDE of choice in WSL2 (IDEA) and use X11 forwarding. This way the IDE has a relatively real-time view of the filesystem, receives notification events, symlinks work, chmod is preserved if using safe-writes etc.

If you need to use bash (and other tools not provided by Git Bash), cygwin is a useful addition. You can also use `mklink` from cmd/powershell to create a directory hardlink to the \\wsl$ folder if you need to copy things into WSL (although it's easier to access /mnt/drive from WSL2). Either way, I've found any direction of crossing Host/VM filesystem boundaries to be slower than WSL1's approach.

Why don't ya'll just use Linux?

This just sounds so much more difficult than using the real thing.

Real desktop linux has been, and is, a thing. I've been using Linux as my primary business desktop for more than 20 years. Yes, really.

Now, in the industry I'm in, I am forced into a windows 10 environment. Which I do the best I can to push out of the way, so I can have a real machine. MobaXterm to provide a single root X window. XFCE4 for windowing, Plank for a dock. WSL2 (unfortunately) underneath, running an older RHEL (not my choice). Looks/feels mostly like a linux box.

I use it for dev/testing/analytics/data science. File access is still as slow as sin, network performance is terrible. Windows apps are unstable, and will take down the machine from time to time.

I am pushing for a linux laptop/desktop as I am far more productive in that desktop environment. Since most of our work is linux based, this makes sense.

If you need anything Windows-related (e.g. to use a specific game or software) using WSL on top is actually really nice (I do all my real work from there fine when not on my Linux machine currently) and less hassle than dual-booting. If I decide not to use anything Windows related or do GPU-based ML (which I assume is worse on WSl) outside of the cloud I'll install Linux on another drive on this machine and go back to it fully. I honestly never expected to stick to Windows with just WSL on this machine when I put it on for trying some games.

That’s why I put up with WSL2. I hate dealing with bootloaders.

It's easier now to just maintain a single installation of Windows than setup a dual boot and continuously switch between whenever you want to edit an image in Photoshop or play a commercial game.

And nevermind doing GPU accelerated tasks unless I want to faff around doing KVM stuff.

Easier to just use Windows directly and WSL2 when I need it.

You're not sacrificing any resources, in both cases you're running a full Linux and a full Windows.

As far as GPU acceleration it's just as much of a pain inside of WSL2 than in a regular VM.

Fwiw I only use Windows for Genshin Impact now. Photoshop works well enough usig Wine, the installer won't run but that's not an issue.

Not really. For one, you are mostly fine running Linux terminal-only so it's really light and you are using less resources with Windows+WSL than Linux + full VM Windows.

Second, if you need both Linux and Windows you typically need Windows for something heavy - e.g. a Game, Photoshop, whatever, so having Windows in the VM is typically more limiting.

Also you really miss a lot of Linux if you're running it terminal only without a GPU. Being unable to use the Jetbrains IDEs on Linux is the biggest one for a developer that's universal to any field.

Also if you have to do something heavy, it's almost universally better to do it on Linux, ie, higher speed and better reliability.

What do you need it for in WSL2? Perhaps machine learning/crypto stuff?

> Photoshop works well enough usig Wine, the installer won't run but that's not an issue

If you were using Windows it would work better than 'well enough' and the installer would run.

GPU acceleration in WSL2 is useful for ML, but also accelerated video encode/decode, and some simulations I had to work on. It's also very useful for anything using a GUI, as all the major UI toolkits in Linux use native GPU acceleration.

Big no go for anyone who also want to test software in other VMs