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Comment by esotericn | Hacker News Reader

Well, no, it's not the Linux of 2000, it's worse than that, because it's closed source.

The GNU/Linux (e.g. the ecosystem) of 2019 is really fantastic. It keeps on getting better, and better, and better.

There may be a few missteps, maybe you don't like GNOME 3, but you can still use Xfce, or KDE, or LXDE, or i3 or whatever else if you want, no-one is stopping you.

By contrast, if Apple or Microsoft update the OS and make it wanky in some way you're SOL.

It honestly boggles my mind that professional software developers tolerate that kind of stuff. I guess if you're a web dev or you're 20 years deep into a career in a specific stack the benefits outweigh the costs.

I'm probably coming up on 15 years of *nix now. I do look back sometimes. It's universally terrible.

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Earlier this year I purchased a fairly pricey Asus laptop. A few months in the wireless card appeared to commit seppuku so I reinstalled the drivers, no dice, reinstalled windows, no dice and now my touchpad was broken. Every driver failed to affect any device, so I installed the latest Ubuntu and it all 'just worked', including the keyboard backlight.

When I explained this to ASUS support they said the hardware must be faulty and my only option is to send the laptop in. That is ostensibly not true as Ubuntu can't magically repair hardware failures.

Meanwhile my other Windows box restarts every night, but fails to apply updates, so every time I use it I am greeted with that failure and no insight or path to success.

I had this happen to my Dell XPS 15 about 2 years back. It was a year old at the time so still under warranty. Dell said it was a hardware failure and I had to return it. IT issued me a new Precision 5520 that has worked really well since.

"Ostensibly" doesn't mean what you think it means here.

As somebody on a 2015 15" MBP looking to make the switch, how do you deal with things like Word/Excel documents or updating the firmware of IOT things (not mine but those of relatives) that only offer proprietary Windows and Mac updaters/installers? Do you just spin up a KVM and pass through USB, or use a separate computer?

These edge cases (and the uneasy feeling that there are many others that I won't discover until I make the switch) are the main reasons holding me back at the moment. The lack of interoperability because Linux is not an established consumer OS (yet).

I run all Linux at home (and LineageOS on my phone). For things like this I keep an old Windows laptop (Core2Duo) in the closet. For IOT/app-based stuff (none are mine - they all belong to my parents/relatives), I have my brother's old screen-shattered iPhone.

For documents I just use LibreOffice and suffer; if I absolutely need Office I suppose I could use my old discs and install it on the Windows machine, but have not had any need to in the past 3 years since I switched. When I send documents to people I just export as PDF and they're none the wiser.

Save for extracting BIOS updates from custom .exe files (thanks HP and Dell) I never use either of them.

Im my case, I use Crossover and a VM. They work well for my use cases.

> Word/Excel documents

I run Office 2010 in Crossover, which works very well. (I have a copy of 2016 as well, but it is slower.) You can also try WPS office, which does a decent job of handling Office documents.

> updating the firmware of IOT things

I have a Windows VM and I use USB passthrough for things like iTunes. I usually use it less than once a month.

59 EUR for a year of non-commercial usage [1] is steep IMO.

[1] https://www.codeweavers.com/store

I've never liked how much Crossover costs to stay on the latest version. I only pay for an upgrade when if it breaks. (You can use the last version you payed for indefinitely.) They also will occasionally have discounts.

Prior to having CrossOver, I used PlayOnLinux. When I last used it, Office 2010 worked, but had some issues such as fonts not being embedded in exported PDF files.

It may also be possible to install Office through Steam, which has the Proton compatibility layer based on Crossover. There is some information on using Proton for non-steam games here: https://streamable.com/pukwz

Of course, Crossover is just an enterprise supported version of Wine, so you could probably get Office working in plain Wine, but the automated setup support a tool like Crossover or PlayOnLinux provides makes it significantly easier to get things working without unusual and difficult to troubleshoot issues.

Libreoffice for the former. Honestly, I deal with that stuff so rarely nowadays that I could probably get away with like, going to the library for it even if LO didn't exist.

I don't deal with proprietary IoT things. If I did I probably would KVM it, yeah.

I generally just don't care about things that aren't supported. Probably not the answer you're looking for, but there it is.

I write for my day job so I spend a lot of time in "office" software.

I used to deal with a lot of MS Office documents, less so now. Most forms and web docs are PDFs and there's a growing crowd of people happy to send Open formatted docs. I've used Libre/Open Office for about 5 years as my main office suit and had no issues. It does feel less polished, and I do miss the "styles" thing you can do with MS Word but for copy I find it perfectly adequate.

If I need professional typesetting, or really anything more than Libre Office can handle, I use LaTeX. It's actually very quick.

You can also use MS Office online; their web editor is very good. I use it when I need to preserve an MS Word themed document's formatting.

I can't speak for everyone but I have a Windows 7 VM just for things like this. But I can say I don't think I've ever needed to use it. I run photoshop (cs5) in wine, although I could program get by with gimp I rarely do anything other than crop or rotate a photo. For Office I just use Google Docs or LibreOffice depending on the situation. I'd say 90% the former 10% the latter.

I open word an Excel documents in LibreOffice. Should work for documents without macros. I've had less luck with PP, but it's been years since I've tried that.

Word and Excel have online versions that are free and work well.

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