Trapping user's data in their roach motel formats (the data goes in, but can never leave with full fidelity) is the longest running objection I have to using any Microsoft software.

This is also why they fought so hard against the XML standardization of docs formats, and still to this day docs created by their own apps don't even validate against the schemas they created.

The weird thing is that to a significant extent that battle is really just about the words "Microsoft Office". LibreOffice has some awkwardness and annoyances, but it's quite adequate for probably 90% of mundane office tasks people need to do (and MS Office has its own pain points). A major barrier is just a specific insistence that Word be used, without any reference to functional requirements of the actual document.

People always say this but the 90% doesn’t count. The 90% is easy. It’s the other bit that people hit and compatibility issues mean any non standard approach whether it’s fair or not will always, always get the blame.

Plus I dispute that libreoffice has even close to 90% of what excel can do.

Let's not compare the advanced options of Excel or how Excel bugs annoy me. There are loads of them.

Let's just compare what people do when they need a tool like Excel. That's when the 90 or maybe more % of people will do. That is what I do. Everything I do in Excel can be done on LibreCalc.

So it is true that LibreCalc can replace 90% or more, because not everybody needs those advanced topics.

Same for the other LibreOffice apps, Writer is good for almost everybody. As LibreDraw and others.

I’ve never met a document an office document that wouldn’t have been better as a wiki (if it is intended to be impermanent), or as a something like a LaTeX document (if it is not).

Doesn’t matter what you think (or I). The real world runs on MS Office.

I've found that OnlyOffice has much better Microsoft Office compatibility. I just install it via flatpak, remove the network permission, and go about my business perfectly. While LibreOffice -> LibreOffice works perfectly fine, whenever it opens a .docx file it always wants to save it as a .odf which is a nonstarter. Not because I don't want to support open document formats but because everyone expects a .docx back if they send you one. It also struggles consistently for any type of advanced formatting (as a .docx).

Remove the network permission by what mechanism? I only know firejail or this (iirc)

install via flatpak (which uses bubblewrap iirc for sandboxing) and use flatseal to remove the network permission. You can also manually edit this through .local/share/flatpak/overrides.

Maybe it depends on what you work on, but i havent seen powerpoint or .docx file in like a decade. Everyone i know uses google docs.

I'm sure there are users with specialized needs who need something more complex, but i dont think microsoft office is quite the moat it used to be.

Trade one devil for another?

I’ve never looked to see the compatibility of Office to Gsuite.

So unless it is 110% perfect it is a non-starter. The second we have a supplier send an excel with some goofball formula in it and we don’t see some data or can’t open it - it’s over.

This isn’t even getting to the next devil… Adobe.

My employer blocks access to Google Docs as part of our confidential information protection policy. They're certainly not the only ones. I'd hesitate to call on-premises file management "specialized needs" - rather, it's (still) the default, particularly if you take a peek outside of the software bubble.

I suspect that that is more an anti-shadow IT measure than an anti-google docs measure.

Please consider checking LibreOffice periodically, every 4 - 6 months Ms compatibility increases at steady pace, it may have solved that issue that was keeping you back from using it (25 years using linux and staroffice)

Functionality is pretty good but the UI is from the 1990s.

That's a good thing. UI design peaked around that era and has been going downhill ever since.

These days you can choose between different UIs, some of which will have the "ribbon" style. I do agree though that it feels a bit dated if you're used to MS' office, but you get used to it quite quickly.

GP probably wanted to say that LibreOffice’s UI is 90s era Linux quality, rather than the beauty of Office 97 and such. Mismatched, not native, terrible stock icons, clunky and frankly ugly.

You haven't checked in a lon time ;)

Libre office has some annoyances though. I cannot for the life of me disable the document recovery model that always pops up on every launch regardless if a document needs to be recovered or not. Also I cant seem to get printing to default to 8 1/2x11 formatting.

The recovery dialog annoys me too.

Google Office docs are pretty acceptable these days unless you need really specific Excel functionality.

Don't want anyone to use that but that is good to prove that almost everybody can use a spreedsheat that is not Excel. Including LibreCalc. And many others.

The same situation is for email. Who needs Outlook? Nobody! You can do almost everything with Thunderbird. So does Outlook have some "special" things? Maybe, never used it!

I even had my email on clawsmail and it was amazing.

Would the Office 365 in browser work for you?

I've used it for very simple things but I don't thing it even has 1% of the installed Excel program does. It is too simple and buggy.

Few days ago wife opened an excel file on the browser and something was right away wrong, she noticed, can't remember what it was. Had to download and execute local.

I wouldn’t call it simple. It does have Python scripting. Obviously not the functionality she needed, but that’s fairly advanced in the Excel world.

And that’s the issue with every alternative, it lacks 1:1 features/bugs so what’s usable for one isn’t for another.

And games.

Gaming has actually seen the biggest improvement on Linux in the last couple of years, check out https://www.protondb.com/ for just how many titles are playable.

I figured that one is mostly solved now between Steam, Bazzite or even just VM Windows ( if you really have to go that route ).

It definitely isn't solved.

Hmm. I might be speaking from a perspective of a more.. restrained gamer ( my last bigger indulgence was BG3 and, while there were issues after updates, drivers tended to solve those eventually ). Any particular titles you have a problem with?

If you are thinking of permanently online games that effectively put malware on your system, I am ok with that not being solved ( but even for those there are ways to go around those restrictions -- which should not be surprise given the nature of cat and mouse game ).

Battlefield 2024 (and the upcoming 6) and all recent Call of Duty games are the obvious ones. And if you're interested in sim racing then device compatibility is a major problem even before you get to launch the game.

> I am ok with that not being solved

Great, good for you? You can't claim a problem is solved and then say "well I don't care" when shown it's not solved.

<< You can't claim a problem is solved and then say "well I don't care" when shown it's not solved.

It is a fair point in that sense so you get full points for argument counter. That said, I personally think gamers, as a demographic, has some responsibility to say.. 'yeah, no. stop being dicks'.

It is not that I don't care exactly. It is that I care too much to allow this crap on my computer.

> I personally think gamers, as a demographic, has some responsibility to say.. 'yeah, no. stop being dicks'

Well you don't play online games. Personally I care a great deal more about cheaters than I do about whether a company (who I already trust to install stuff on my computer) installs stuff on my computer. Cheaters absolutely ruin games.

Hmm. What solution would you propose if you were in a position to do that ( change linux in a way that allows you to play online games like new Battlefield )?

I don't know enough to understand what prevents it I guess. I thought it was a matter of game or anti cheat developers not writing software that will cooperate properly. It's a chicken and egg problem, has been for decades.

Believe me I would love to drop Windows.

That's fair. I don't want to sound too cynical with a reflexive 'money' response. As you note, some of it is indeed a question of software not playing nice together. I have zero solutions for this.

Tbh, it sounds like you may be forced to use a Windows VM ( if you want try 'dropping' windows that way ). Last time I was looking at it, VMs were still fair game, but were starting to be identified as a way to bypass some of the restrictions ( mostly because they were only doing a couple of checks for whether OS is in a VM ). That said, few friends were recently sharing pics suggesting those checks were getting more invasive.

<< Believe me I would love to drop Windows.

Just in case it helps, I went through a major system issue at some point with Windows 7 and once it was clear that CPU/GPU passthrough works surprisingly well ( before nvidia started messing with it after 3060 ), I got a way to ease myself in with better fallback position should my linux install fail somehow. This approach ( OS engaged for a specific purpose ) worked better than dual boot, which in practice was never used. There is some learning curve, but nothing excessive or something that is not well covered online.