Hacker News Reader

Comment by marcodiego | Hacker News Reader

Hi Microsoft!

Please show your love for linux by doing the same with Microsoft Office!

Not shilling, but found WPS Office to be the best Linux office, followed by OnlyOffice. WPS Office even gets the look of MS Office pretty close, which makes the switch much easier.

Yuck! They copied the ribbon!

IME OnlyOffice has better compatibility with OOXML than LibreOffice. On the other hand, LibreOffice is faster for bigger docs and has more features.

Hell no. At least on Linux machines we are not forced to use Outlook by our corporate handlers.

Yeah, we're forced to use Outlook 365...

It’s a bit less bad. At least it’s not a locally installed executable.

How is that better?

It doesn’t soil the filesystem with its binaries.

I still don't see how that makes up for all the drawbacks.

Web-apps are terrible. You can't find them in your task bar, you often close them by mistake with your browser, they're a factor 10 slower and more resource hungry than they could be, they have terrible response times and they often lack major features of the native version.

The discomfort of having to have some binary outside of the package manager in /opt/bin is pretty low in my list of priorities compared to that.

An I think outlook is the best email client I have used.

Mail in 10.6 was the best mail client, period. No cruft, not ugly and a few customization options. There is nothing that comes close even now.

Evolution with its EWS plug-in works reasonably well with O365. I sometimes still use the web version but only for operations that aren't exposed through Evolution.

I'd be happy if they put forth some development into WINE or some kind of compatibility layer. Bundle it into a container/pak

Wine runs MS Office great and if you're going to pay for Office, might want to pay Codeweavers to get commercial support for running it as well.

Interesting, I've always thought that I will work on Linux, because I love Linux tools, but I will miss some Windows specific tools. And this is how I was rolling last 4 years.

But what I really needed was Windows system with WSL and good integration of GUI apps (Still on W10 tho) where I can use my beloved tools for programming, and still have access to games, apps like Office (here only Excel that I care about) and some other Windows/macOS only.

With Edge I switched a few months ago for testing. It's great to be honest. Especially because of support Chrome extensions - and here I need WASM development plugin. Firefox does not offer such ability yet. I decided to opt out from Google as much as I can. The only missing part in Edge is the tabs and history management. It's hard to name, but Firefox is somehow smarter in searching in my history of visited pages when I type on the search bar. OK, there is another one. If I type a page that I have already opened, then in Firefox, It automatically switches to that already opened page. In Edge the default choice is to open duplicated page.

Sssh, you’re saying the quiet part loud!

>The only missing part in Edge is the tabs and history management

What's missing for tabs? Vertical tabs with tab groups are just great: https://www.houkconsulting.com/2021/09/tab-groups-vertical-t...

I recently bought my wife a new laptop. After 10 minutes of arguing with a fresh install of Windows 10 I had to rage quit for my own mental health:

0. There were a thousand different prompts nagging me to allow their tracking and ads (and some options amounted to either “yes to everything” or “yes to most things” with no “don’t fucking track me” option in sight.

1. Followed by Microsoft forcing my to tie my local user account to my Microsoft account. Then forcing me to enter the 30 character password that I usually just paste from my password manager for online accounts.

2. Then being greater by spamware that had an X button which literally did Jack shit.

3. And a chaotic task menu with 13 different control panels.

I handed the machine to my wife and told her I can’t be her desktop support guy for this thing because there was a high risk of me throwing the laptop out the window in a rage (maybe that’s why it’s called “Windows”?)

I honestly think the only reason people think they like Windows is down to Stockholm syndrome.

I don't think most people like windows. It is simply the only thing they are used to.

> 30 character password

Why didn't you set up a Windows Hello PIN?

You still need to login once before you can do that. By which time I was already completely fed up with the Windows on boarding process.

Isn't that what Office365 is for or is that much of a downgrade from the desktop experience?

Its terrible and Teams on Linux is a trash fire on top of a dumpster fire on top of a landfill fire.

That sounds pretty close to my Teams experience on Mac

Try the unofficial client: https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux

Teams on Linux is still Teams, but it works just fine for me. It can't do background blur, but is otherwise feature complete enough for me to attend stand-up on it daily.

Currently Teams will not work with my Mic. Half the time it doesn't recognize its there, the other half its there but not picking up anything. Every other app I tested worked fine with the mic except for Teams.

I've had to switch to using CHIME of all apps because that actually worked 95%+ time.

to be fair, that's just the Teams experience in general. if i leave it open for more than 4 hours, somehow it's chewing ~4GB RAM. i use the web client but, if i'm honest, i miss the notifications from that and miss meeting reminders :D

Who still honestly uses Office in their personal lives? Some people use excel for work but you don't buy that for yourself. Most young people I know just use google docs and never used MS Office so it doesn't even have the name branding for them to call the others bootleg versions. The ribbon was so disgusting and annoying that I never used it again and only used 2003 after trying 2007.

People who need a level of compatibility with MSO that LibreOffice and OnlyOffice still can't offer.

Is that docx or did they make something worst? I never swapped to docx and just used .doc, although it supports docx as well. Not much use for me anyway, most people I know just use google docs.

It is somewhat common to see commits on LO git that says things like: "OOXML specify X, but MSO does Y."

Good compatibility with OOXML is extremely difficult. The specification is enormous, hard to understand and, even if you implement the specification, you have no guarantee that you'll get good compatibility with MSO documents.

I honestly just saved LO in .doc and never had an issue when I needed office docs, is this something end users have an issue with or is it more backend?

The issue most people have are formatting problems when opening OOXML docs in LO.

Considering that .doc is an older, simpler and had been frozen for a long time, maybe its compatibility is better. I'll try asking people that send me OOXML to convert it .doc the next time to see how better it is compatibility-wise.

Yeah I saw no reason to switch to docx, it was just slightly smaller, at the core its a lock in that zipped document files (I don't care about being a few kb smaller) and caused more problems (some people didn't have office 2007 even years after it had been out) when sharing so I never saw a point to using it. It benefitted nobody and caused more pain.

It did benefit microsoft. Once the format became an ISO standard, many governments were free to use it. Also, by being "open", they had less chance of being threatened of abusing their monopoly position.

This whole problem is irritating to me because I feel like:

1. Half of the time people use a word processor, they don't actually need one (plain text would be find)

2. When people really need to format something for print, word processors do a shitty job anyway

I was forced back into it after years of using GSuite and....it's just as clunky as I remember. You get a different feature-set depending on whether you're using the native app or browser version (but it's not obvious at first). There is some locking and checking-out required to modify shared files with the native apps - also not always obvious when this is required.

It was really annoying since office's database was also a required dependency and I couldn't use an older office I had even though I never used this feature another program insisted was essential. The only good part of office is onenote. Its very nice.

People like me who live in Excel and use the many things the web apps can’t do (or gotta go fast). I still have a mixed relationship with the Ribbon but use it mainly to crib all the keyboard shortcuts or just type commands in the search box.

You never had enough issues to abandon it? I always see and hear people with frozen laptops while using excel to edit their database.

It's magical to get a handle on things, if it's something huge or for production I can port it to not-Excel. I can do some stats on a table and get my answer by time I could've set up a new poetry env and started Jupyter.

Oh yeah for querying it’s great and more so with power query now built in.

I finally caved and got myself a copy, because the spreadsheet capabilities of Excel are still unrivaled compared to free alternatives. If you watch the classic "You suck at Excel" video, you'll see that there are numerous actions the presenter does that do not have analogs in LibreOffice nor Google Sheets. The table feature is probably the one I miss the most; in fact, I really like how in the Mac program Numbers, all sheets are multi-table by default. It makes it much easier to group parts of the sheet into logical sections, and to extend one table without affecting the others.

Thats interesting, many people I know hate excel since its so slow, its clunky and switched to python for data since their computers overheat, freeze and crash when they work with large data sets on excel.

Maybe that's it, I'm not working with large data sets. My use case is more like "track all of my salary, dividend, and capital gains, and estimate how much extra I need to pay in taxes." :)

You might be better suited with jupiter notebook.

It's often much easier to do grouping and charts in Excel with a few clicks, even for someone who already knows Python in a data science context.

Excel is incredibly powerful. Watch an accountant or financial expert in a mid to large company use it. They'll use functions you've never heard of...and don't require writing Python.

Or watch this video and level-up your Excel! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNuC6ayrNKQ

Note: Joel Spolsky (co-founder of Stack Overflow, Trello, FogBugz, more) was a program manager for Excel in 90's.

For most things, Google Docs suffices for me. I rarely do complex formatting, and the most advanced thing I do in Sheets/Excel is vlookups, and even that I haven't done in months.

However, for my writing (fanfiction), desktop Office is a necessity. I used to think the "web layout" in Word was weird, but I live by it now. It's a much more efficient use of screen real estate than "print layout" (I have a 4k monitor and like to maximize the window), and Google Docs has no equivalent.

But ignoring the page layout, let's consider something more concrete: loading times.

I loaded a 106 page document in Google Docs on my desktop (AMD R7-1700, 64 GB RAM, NVME SSD, symmetric gigabit internet - a pretty good system overall). It took 27.72 seconds to load, and a couple more after that until I could type without it hitching. According to Chrome's task manager, the tab is already consuming 418 MB of RAM.

On my laptop (Intel i5-6300U, 8 GB RAM, SSD, same internet, Office 365 build 2109), I loaded two Word documents at the same time. Combined, they total 764 pages in print layout. It took 9.71 seconds to load both and for me to be able to type in the 527 page document without any noticeable lag. Word is currently sipping just 250 MB of RAM (and I have never seen it go >500 MB before except when exiting...meanwhile, a single Chrome tab hitting >1 GB is not exactly unusual if my desktop has been running for more than a week).

This doesn't even consider the experience of writing a document this long. Google Docs is already noticeably slower than Word with just a 106 page document, and it gets worse with longer ones. And the grammar checking in Word is miles ahead of what Google has.

Word certainly isn't perfect (I have plenty of complaints about it, and have found bugs which only turn up in long documents), but it remains my tool of choice because Google Docs really can't compete for this use-case. And I know I'm not the only writer in this situation.

Is there a reason you use office to write in? It’s not good writing software. Ever tried writing software like this? http://www.theologeek.ch/manuskript/

I've never looked into it except some paid application which I didn't feel was worth what they wanted at the time. I might try that when I finish my current story.

https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview was it this one? Its the gold standard for me I love it.

Yeah, that was it. Back when I heard about it, I was writing one-offs and couldn't see the potential usefulness (much less justify spending money).

It is a very nice app if it fits your workflow, give it a try, it changes the way you write. You can make tons of short stories, but I am going to try manuskript instead since I have linux, its got a very nice interface.

If only ヾ(≧▽≦*)o

They'll just point you to Office Online

tbh i think i prefer the web based versions

Reply on news.ycombinator.com