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Comment by bArray | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly one of the main reasons why I switched to Linux, it doesn't do anything unless I let it or ask it to - with few exceptions.

My anecdote: I was about to have an important meeting and needed to print off some sheets from my Windows-based netbook. The power was low (<3%), so I plugged in the charger and resumed it from hibernation. It had been offline for a little while up until then because of traveling. Seeing the power was plugged in and I was shutting the machine down going into the meeting, Windows presumed that right then was a perfect moment to perform a Windows update. That night I wiped it and put Ubuntu on there.

FYI the Linux experience has been mostly great. There's been maybe a problem once a year, with some driver or package issue - but most of the time it runs great. I can safely run anything on it overnight knowing that it won't decide to do anything on it's own accord.

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I switched to linux in 1998, it was much harder back then now its arguably easier to install ubuntu than to upgrade windows 10.

"The OS which you have to constantly hack upon with weird commands, just to retain basic functionality" - yeah, that's Windows nowadays.

I shifted to Linux full time this year from MacOS. The only thing I desperately need is a replacement for is MS Office. Any ideas? I'm a power user, which Google word is simply not good for.

LaTeX[0] might work for you.

[0]: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX

And if you're willing to consider LaTeX, I'd definitely recommend LyX.

Neither latex nor LyX is a replacement for Office.

That depends on what you use Office for - which is why I qualified my statement. I wouldn't recommend them as general replacements, but they exceed my documentation needs.

LibreOffice, ms office under wine or in a vm

May I suggest LibreOffice? Either via your Linux distribution's package manager, or as a Flatpak from https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.libreoffice.LibreOffice

It should be able to handle most use cases

I'd recommend AppImages over flatpak. They're generally more stable

Libre office is simply not good enough, tbh. The first thing I tried.

https://www.openoffice.org

OpenOffice development has been virtually stagnant for several years: LibreOffice is the actively developed version (and the one that Linux distributions support).

I know everyone is suggesting Libreoffice (and it has honestly gotten a lot better recently) but I remember once when my laptop died and all I had was a shitty old Centrino someone lent me, I ended up using the Microsoft online powerpoint tool to make a presentation that was due.

The web versions of MS Office tools are actually pretty well build and feel pretty close to their desktop counterparts.

The web version of word lacks an equation editor (someone told me this is partly due to MS loosing the source code for the one in word.)

If you have to write papers with a lot of math in them libreoffice's equation editor is way better anyway. It rarely crashes and uses it's own simple markup language instead of the finicky WYSIWYG editor in word.

The killer features missing for me

1. Word - track changes 2. PowerPoint - equation editor

Libre office is not even 10% MS Office. Don't know why people recommend it. It messes up my word formatting.

Current versions are pretty good - and while MS Office is a veritable power tool (I know no real equivalent to MS Access), most users use ~10% of the functionality; sufficient for many, esp. at the price.

As for the formatting - yeah, MS doesn't seem to follow its own document formatting standards, even for the newer documents. That puts other suites in a hard spot: a) follow standards and present imperfect documents, or b) invest immense resources into bug-for-bug compatibility?

Joel Spolsky is obviously not neutral having been an Excel manager but he wrote that while everyone uses less than 20% of Excel, not everyone uses the same 20% of Excel.

I don't know Excel but I know there are people running entire departments on Excel spreadsheets.

Indeed. I do not see a contradiction between that and what I have written.

(Having seen many Excel spreadsheets, 80% of the work is done by rudimentary means: pivot tables are Advanced Magic in this regard)

May I suggest org-mode? It can act as a pretty good replacement for Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and even FrontPage. You can even use latex inside org-mode documents and it has an integration with gnuplot.

can you drag'n'drop images graphically and position them in a visual canvas with org mode and add sounds and gifs and videos and center text by pressing a button ? if not it's not a replacement for powerpoint.

This comment is a living example of Poe's Law as applied to Linux fans.

A perfect reflection of why Linux is a failure on desktop. If org-mode and latex are sane replacements for office for average users, may the kernel gods save us all.And this is from someone who knows how to use both.

The obvious suggestion would be LibreOffice, but if that doesn't cut it for you, there's also SoftMaker Office[1], which has better compatibility with Office documents.

1 - https://www.softmaker.com/en/softmaker-office

I'd recommend onlyoffice. Has a similar GUI to MS office and it uses the doc/ppt(x) formats internally, so it's pretty compatible. I also run MS Office in Wine for certain things.

Pandoc is definitely my favorite way to do word processing.

You can edit the markdown in vim which IMO is mentally easier to write prose in because you're not distracted with all the formatting and spelling. You use aspell for spell check and pandoc/pdflatex for typsetting.

If you're not opposed to non-free software and like quality products, I highly recommend you check out Crossover[0]. It allows you to run Microsoft Office on your linux machine.

[0](https://www.codeweavers.com/products/)

I am totally fine with non-free software. I'll check this out.

If you have licensed Windows, install Virtualbox on Ubuntu and install Windows in that. Share a drive between them and you should be able to maintain Office documents that way.

Interesting. I have a Windows partitioned. Can I use that license for a virtual installation?

I once had to leave to catch a plane and shut down my Windows desktop machine that I wanted to move somewhere first. I think this was as far back as XP days. It started doing updates on shutdown and I was concerned I’d lose data or break something if I powered it off (it did say not to!) so I was stuck waiting for updates but needing to catch a plane.

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