Hacker News Reader

Comment by naiveai | Hacker News Reader

Until and unless Microsoft Office products are on Linux natively and are supported by Microsoft, Linux will never be a mainstream operating system. And that's never going to happen.

View on HN

The web based Office 365 my university gives us seems to work as well on Linux as any other platform AFAIK (unfortunately that's still not perfect). It did claim to need Edge for some things, but that's relatively minor.

This is becoming less and less true every day. Both online office 360 and gsuite are popular in offices these days with no ms office installed on the device. Outside of specific business roles, I haven't seen it in a long while. I've even run into a medical clinic running on libreoffice.

My Android phone runs native Microsoft Office apps, so we are half-way there.

I am just waiting for Microsoft to give up on Windows-on-Arm and instead create a Microsoft-branded Linux distribution that has an actual Windows subsystem for Linux (that is, a compatibility / emulation layer similar to Wine or Proton to run legacy Windows software).

Decades of backward compatibility makes Windows a resource hog. I do not think it can make the jump to Arm or RISC-V easily.

Huh? The move from x86 is hampered by making binaries compiled for x86 work on ARM, it has nothing to do with performance.

Every business I've ever been part of in my entire adult life has used Google docs or libreoffice. I genuinely haven't seen MS office since high school.

I worked for a fortune 500, and they used a custom Unix type OS with libreoffice. We ended up using mostly Google docs though.

There isn't any more a "native" office. Now it's a web app -> Office 365

Ironically enough I've found that O365 works far better on Firefox and Chrome on Linux than it does on those browsers on Windows, and Microsoft O365's support team warn against even attempting to use Windows 10 and Edge.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com