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Comment by tracker1 | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't say they'd never do an Office on Linux... If you look at how they've been leveraging web tech and Electron for VS Code and MS Teams, I'd be very surprised if we didn't see an Electron based version of Office in a couple years. Electron has an amazing cross platform appeal for developers and MS has taken advantage of that. Not to mention managing to write applications under Electron that don't suck (though memory usage is high). And despite high memory usage, Office has never been that nimble in terms of ram use anyway.

As for AD, Azure's hosted services for this may well see more inroads into Linux, and I know a LOT of people/companies that would be beyond happy to use MS account management with a cleaner Linux integration.

I won't be using these things at home any time soon, but in a corporate space, MS would be a welcome and cost saving change compared to what is out there on Linux currently.

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The market share for Linux on the desktop is tiny - I can't ever see Office for Linux.

Not sure about your memory claim either - I don't recall high memory usage in Office ever being an issue.

I can't see an Electron based Excel appearing. Excel is pretty much the best spreadsheet application that exists in terms of performance. Using Electron would likely kill that to the point that no one would use it. The browser based versions of Office applications fall short when you start pushing them hard already - they're fine for light editing, but I wouldn't use them for anything substantial.

I can very much imagine a Goole Stadia but for real apps rather than games, where you are interacting with a video stream rather than the app itself.

That already exists. Citrix was doing this a decade ago - VMware too. I think Office was even one of the apps Citrix used to demo its thin client plan when Chromebooks first launched. Honestly, containerize it (for easy spinups), and if you have the bandwidth, a lot of apps would probably be really great run fully remote.

Microsoft released Windows Virtual Desktop earlier this year that is basically a cloud version of Windows 10 (or 7) or Office, that’s designed to be used like Stadia.

Disclosure: I work at Microsoft but not on any of these projects

Do you know if they run in a browser on Linux?

If you're asking if WVD desktops can be delivered to a Linux browser, yes - there's a HTML5 client that renders desktops. In addition, a Linux toolkit was announced for thin clients in the recent Ignite conference.

https://myignite.techcommunity.microsoft.com/sessions/81670?...

I’m 90% teams doesn’t work on Linux and have been using the web app for a long time now. I sorely miss the slack desktop app and would to be corrected if this is possible now.

Yeah, teams was pretty badly broken even a few months ago... There's an "unofficial" client in Flathub, that's what I've been using and it mostly works now... the only broken feature I'm aware of that I haven't re-tried is the desktop sharing... but the A/V chat and webcam now work.

Well, if the buzz I've heard recently (and the article below) are correct. A native Linux "Microsoft Teams" client is coming (pretty sure I heard mid-December)

https://www.windowscentral.com/its-official-microsoft-teams-...

EDIT: Yup, the link referenced by the article (https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su...) says:

"We’re pleased to confirm the Teams client for Linux will be available in preview by the end of this calendar year, enabling people who use Linux client at work or in educational institutions to collaborate with others on Teams. Users will be able to install native Linux packages in .deb and .rpm formats."

It used to work fine in the browser if you spoofed your user agent to Edge. They shut that down somehow. The standalone client still works with a little wrapper (see teams-for-linux).

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