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Comment by farseer | Hacker News Reader

Adobe CC, Microsoft Office and Visual Studios prevent an all out shift to linux for the majority. LibreOffice, VSCode, Gimp/Inkscape and everything JetBrains has to offer just doesn't make the cut yet. But we are getting close by each passing year.

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> Adobe CC, Microsoft Office and Visual Studios prevent an all out shift to linux for the majority

How do you figure? Most people don't do any real photo editing or real asset creation. Microsoft Office isn't required for anything except Excel and that's fairly specific to a certain type of office worker. Visual Studio has many replacements, especially if you aren't using an MS stack top to bottom.

Heck, when I was in business school (majored in Finance) the profs told us to use Google Docs over MS Office for basically everything except our Excel-specific assignments... Like we'd hand in assignments simply by sharing a Google Doc. So much easier than dealing with Word compatibility nonsense.

A typical business org uses microsoft office for documents, and they employ programmers writing plugins to their microsoft office products using visual studio which also integrates into their internal .NET business services. I doubt migration would be easy, as everything ties into each other.

Yes, I know. In my last corporate gig I was given a laptop with a bunch of MS crap on it. It was far, far worse than my normal setup (Ubuntu + OSS stuff + Google Docs). MS Teams specifically would consume so much memory that eventually other programs wouldn't open without a reboot (the laptop was kinda shit too).

I know what you describe is a thing. That doesn't make it a good thing.

Edit - should add, Office 365 file synching is also absolute shit. Drove me insane.

Heh, MS Teams... I wonder if the UX team is the same as for SharePoint. They both suck in a similar way - fortunatelly I can mostly avoid them both.

I've been working in companies that use office 365 for the last 4 or 5 years and I had no problem working with office documents either using the office 365 web apps or libreoffice on linux.

> LibreOffice, VSCode, Gimp/Inkscape and everything JetBrains has to offer just doesn't make the cut yet. But we are getting close by each passing year.

I've been reading effectively this sentence for well over a decade and I know I'll still be hearing it from someone long after everyone else has left them behind.

In my experience, I feel it's getting better in some regards, worse in others.

I used to be Visual Studio only but nowadays I refuse to install that VS in any capacity if I can help it: the installer is broken, the app takes forever to launch and it's always an unpleasant experience against other IDEs like Jetbrains.

I don't use MS Office and I have fond memories of some powerful features but unless you need to actively use it I think the web versions are fine?

..Gimp/Krita/Inkscape are nowhere near acceptable for graphics work and while they have been making leaps the proprietary apps haven't stood still and I think they are more than keeping the pace. I am a super avid user of Affinity Photo/Designer and they are the my main blocking issue for moving out of Windows currently. Wine support for these two apps is non-existent ( https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio... )

EDIT: Forgot to say, LibreOffice is unusable IMO, the UI has plenty of issues (honestly whoever is in charge should watch Tantacrul's video on MuseScore as I find a lot of parallels) and it's quite unreliable. We used to maintain a software manual at my previous place of work and LibreOffice would crash so often when trying to edit it, to the point we gave up having a manual!

LibreOffice is nowhere near Office or even Google Docs levels of quality, ease of use, or features, and the gap only widens each year.

I greatly prefer Google docs to Microsoft Office. Their online versions feel like afterthoughts.

I don't know that the people concerned about Microsoft to the point that they will suffer the pain of breaking all their habits to break free, are going to rush to Google...

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