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Comment by noonespecial | Hacker News Reader

I managed a similar transition about 2 years ago. I expected failure like the many times I'd tried before. It went off without a hitch.

The difference wasn't really the linux desktop itself. There never was a "year of the linux desktop". It seems to be everything else. The webification of everything slew the desktop native app and the ubiquity of a gazillion different smartphones primed people to accept new UI experiences.

The business world is finally coming out of the place where everything it does has to be rammed through the Office/Excel/Powerpoint/Exchange funnel no matter how it distorts the outcome.

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> The difference wasn't really the linux desktop itself. There never was a "year of the linux desktop". It seems to be everything else. The webification of everything slew the desktop native app and the ubiquity of a gazillion different smartphones primed people to accept new UI experiences.

Yes, I think the situation has changed now. I'm looking forward to good Linux-friendly ARM boxes being available for $100-$150, preinstalled with Ubuntu or Elementary OS. It won't be long until something like that would be satisfactory for most casual users. There are lots of people currently who are using XP or Vista, or old hardware which has worked fine up to now, but which periodically falls off the wagon. They have screens and keyboards, don't need perfect Office compatibility, mostly use the web, and don't particularly want to spend a lot of money for a replacement.

> The business world is finally coming out of the place where everything it does has to be rammed through the Office/Excel/Powerpoint/Exchange funnel no matter how it distorts the outcome.

I am curious about the long term effects of this. We still exist in a world where many people believe the most efficient way to work with numbers is through an excel (no matter the form of the numbers).

One company I worked at 3 or 4 years did payroll for about 35,000 people in an excel spreadsheet. It mail merged and spat out checks in a process that handled about 1,000 an hour. A few times Excel hung and paychecks were late. They simply didn't know or want to accept that any of the plethora of open source databases could be made to do similar but finish payroll in an ten minutes (sans printing) instead of day and half.

And then of course obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1667/

Parts of me think there's a huge market out there for people specialized in extracting business logic from Excel to an actual application, and that I would do well to get into it.

From what I've heard of other Office products, I think the hard part would be keeping my sanity.

I've done transformations of complex pricing spreadsheets to code for providing dynamic quoting on websites. It was amazing how complex the logic gets sometimes with even what seems like a simple spreadsheet.

I like the idea, but Excel is too damn good and flexible at what it is designed for. It can make many complex things simple, and to match what just one Excel professional can do, you'd have do keep an entire development department.

I know this because we tried it, and it was complete pain in the ass to continuously adapt our "Excel replacing" applications to rapidly changing business/analytics/reporting requirements.

Exactly. I've been using Linux almost exclusively on the desktop since 2002. At first, I dual booted for gaming, photoshop and office. I quickly found that I hated booting into Windows. Sure, I could use a real word processor, but I hated not having my files, my music/videos, my browser bookmarks (this was before bookmark syncing) etc... I ended up just accepting the fact that to use Linux, I had to be ok with some inferior desktop software. Since then, things have really improved with apps like Dropbox, Steam, Sublime and Chrome meeting my basic needs, but it's really the web that's solved this problem. Plex, Netflix, Evernote, Google's webapps etc.. mean my Desktop OS doesn't matter, I just need a modern web browser. Would I prefer a native Evernote app on Linux over the webapp? Sure, but it's a compromise I'm willing to make to use Linux.

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