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Comment by Scuds | Hacker News Reader

> Office for Linux would be easy, but that’s not going to happen. They're rewriting Office in React Native so Windows, OSX, and mobile ports will have a lot more in common.

But "Desktop Linux" will always be a million support headaches for no market share; which begs the question "Dear Lord, why?"

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And the only way to build market share is through cannibalization of windows licenses. Not in microsoft's interest. If you hae a proper office for windows, I bet many companies would consider seriously switching to Linux.

Office has been available for Mac for well over two decades. There are so many more reasons for companies preferring Windows on the desktop than just Office.

I think there were so may more reasons. But what I see is all internal apps moving to be web based. 5 more years and Office is really going to be the last thing tying up corporates to Windows.

Linux as it exists today on the desktop is still a headache. If anything, if office were ported to Chrome OS, that would be a real alternative.

Office already runs on Chromebooks via Google Play within the Android container [0]. Is it then worth MS' time and energy to port the browser interface as a Chrome OS 'native' app?

[0] https://support.office.com/en-us/article/how-to-install-and-...

o365's web interface is pretty much what you're asking for. It's a rent based model, but so are the desktop apps at this point (mostly). It wouldn't really surprise me to see an electron wrapper around o365 UI for a future release to unify the applications more.

The only part of "Office" I really even use though is Outlook (at work), and it's pretty good at the job it does.

Call me when Linux has anything that works as well as AD.

It does; it's called AD. :)

The actual problem is the lack of Group Policy support (or even a viable equivalent - preferably one that's cross-platform).

You just need a server running AD. Third party and browser SSO with AD is a solved problem.

FreeIPA?!

Why would companies just switch to Linux?

Enterprises don't just use free OSS software like that. They'll use Redhat or some other corporate-backed variant, and in the end the license cost will be the same but most software and drivers don't work, users will need to be retrained, and support costs will rise dramatically. They can't even use .NET to build any internal desktop apps either.

It's a terrible deal.

I'd switch to Linux on day one if they'd port Office.However, windows licensing costs are negligible in most companies,compared to the overall spending on software.

>They're rewriting Office in React Native?

I tried some googling but the results seems to be all speculation. Is this really happening?

This seems to be the main source: https://twitter.com/TheLarkInn/status/1006746626617008128

I thought they published an article that explicitly mentions RN but I can't find it at the moment. MS has also been heavily working on RN for Windows including a C++ bridge that significantly increases the performance of the JS to native bridge.

That's really insane, although it makes more sense than, say, writing a code editor in Javascript.

Does it? VSCode is refreshingly quick while Word is (already) brutally slow.

Just switch Word to draft (nee Normal) render mode. It was never meant to be performant in print layout mode.

But that’s how everybody uses it. That’s the default mode when you start a new document. Who even knows that the other mode exists?

Surely they could make it performant in the default mode that everybody uses now that it’s 2019 and we have megahertz to spare? There is no excuse for Word’s atrocious performance.

Draft/normal was the default in Word 2003. Most people have used it.

The problem with page layout mode is that any non-trivial format change, insertion, or deletion requires repagination and the UI freezes until that is completed. Draft mode repaginates asynchronously so that it remains responsive. Comparing a WYSIWYG editor to a plain text editor is no contest as the former performs much more work to layout the text.

I use Word a lot on documents of varying complexity and size range from one to about 500 pages and, other than doing something like a TOC update on a giant and complex document, I've never seen Word be painfully slow, even in Print layout.

Painfully (and randomly shifting) inaccurate in print layout on documents that involve more than just text, sure, I see that every day.

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