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Comment by gilrain | Hacker News Reader

This is how I wound up becoming so annoyed that I finally switched to Linux. It’s been great. I haven’t even missed out on gaming.

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I might get downvoted, but I like windows as an OS. I used it for years and it was pretty stable and easy to modify. Now that they are going the way of Google they really have nothing to keep me. Linux has been my main OS for years anyway. Windows I used for office, adobe products, and games. I guess I'll just keep a network gapped VM around for those on my linux and buy some extra memory to handle the VM.

Most of my work life has been focused on Microsoft products, so I've been using Windows for a long time as my primary OS. I upgraded to Windows 11 as soon as I could and despite me creating a local account initially, I then linked it to a Microsoft Account which has caused me no end of pain. There have been lots of other niggly issues with Windows 11 that I've been living with, e.g. I prefer having my taskbar on the right-hand side of the screen but that feature went away with Windows 11; and the start menu search has been playing up recently where I couldn't just start typing after the menu coming up - although it seems to be better at the moment.

I switched my laptop over to PopOS a while back and have really been enjoying that, although I miss not having the Office desktop apps available. I also purchased a OneDrive sync app for Linux which works very well.

You might want to try WinApps or something similar to run your MS Office in Linux. I haven't try it myself, but it seems a nice way to run Windows apps in Linux.

Thanks for the tip about WinApps. Looks like it might work for me but will try it out to confirm.

Technically speaking it is nice. I like NT as an OS too. The user experience is being eroded by marketing.

I keep hoping Microsoft will go one step too far and everyone will be forced to switch. Hasn't happened yet.

Linux really doesn't have good alternatives for most of the tools I use, and none of it runs in Wine and similar, so I hope not.

It’s hard to beat windows native office. MacOS version stinks and the web version is pretty slow on complicated stuff. That’s why I use windows on my work PC ans WSL for the dev stuff.

It's not everyone's favorite answer, but LibreOffice works fine for me. I've set a number of documents with it (including my own resume) and it works perfectly fine. It's not the most intuitive program ever made, but it's nothing if not comprehensive.

You're not going to convince hardcore Office users (like me) that LibreOffice is good enough. I try it occasionally on my Linux laptop, and I have nothing good to say about it.

That's interesting, I have the opposite perspective. I'm not a power user in the sense that I use it to write documents, but at work we generate docx files from code (not a good idea) and a significant amount of the time we have perfectly fine files that render as we expect on LibreOffice but break unexpectedly on Word. Sometimes it even renders fine on the web version, but still incorrectly in Word itself.

Edit: I should clarify that I don't mean to contradict you. Just thought it would be an interesting perspective to read about.

Personally I deal with word templates and decades old xlsx files. OG office is my only go to and honestly it’s great. I don’t buy office for home so for kids projects it’s great. But not for payday stuff.

> MacOS version stinks

I have not tried it yet but was thinking I could need it one day; what particularly stinks about it?

They are two different animals. My old job had office documents to complex that windows vm with office performed better than native macOS.

What are you missing out the most on Linux? For me, it's really just the Office apps, everything else I've found works just as well on Linux.

Pretty much everything. I've used both Linux and Windows extensively over the last decade plus and am very familiar with the available alternatives and find those that exist for what I use lacking. Trying to list them off just invites people to pick suggestions off whatever list they have ready without regard for the needs of the person they're suggesting at, and it gets tiresome.

Frog boiling is an art.

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