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Comment by excalibur | Hacker News Reader

My nitpick is about some of the inconsistencies. You said that you got them accustomed to Firefox and LibreOffice, and then you turned around and installed Chrome and MS Office in Wine. Does that mean they didn't take well to the new apps, and your user training method wasn't entirely successful?

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They use firefox as main browser, but for using DRM content I found Chrome to be the easier solution.

They worked their way to LibreOffice, but regarding spell- and grammar-checking LibreOffice really sucks. As my dad does professional writing it was just not enough.

(disclaimer I never used Chrome) What's the problem with Firefox and Netflix? I never had an issue?

I don't remember details but I also had major problems there, must have been two years ago, in the summer. Updating the needed plugins stopped working for some reason. Can't comment on current state as I haven't used Netflix on Linux for quite a while.

One thing to keep in mind about running Office on Wine (especially a version as old as 2007) is that the software has a number of known vulnerabilities, and the Wine installation breaks Microsoft's patching system(s). All patches have to be installed manually (unless there's a good script for this that I'm not aware of). Fortunately, most of the exploits will be designed to attack a Windows system, but it's still dangerous to leave it unpatched.

The author explicitly states why they did this.

Chrome for Netflix and Spotify only, and Office 2007 because it's better than LibreOffice for their parents.

They work in Firefox if you check the “Play DRM content” checkbox in the preferences.

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