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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

We are 100% truly in the time of "desktop linux". It has never been better. Unless you have a video game that 100% must run on Windows, or a specific application, there is really no reason to be there. If you want a desktop environment that looks and feels like Windows, I would suggest KDE. Out of the box it is pretty close, but it is one of the most customizable DE's out there and can truly be made to look and feel just like Windows.

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I wish that was true. But the corporate world runs on MS Office. The alternatives to that just cannot keep up :(

what does this matter anymore with office 365?

The browser version is lacking several features compared to the Windows and Mac versions.

The web version of Office apps still is not the same as the full-featured fat desktop version, which only runs on Windows and Mac OS.

You can't use the web version offline, they are not a PWA, for instance.

The full featured version doesn't even run on Mac OS. Excel, PowerPoint and Word for Mac are all pale imitations of their Windows counterparts.

The irony is that Excel started out as a Mac app.

Office 365's web version is pretty dreadful.

The web version of Word is a bad joke. I couldn’t even use it for editing a story the last time I tried it because it either didn’t have change tracking or it didn’t work correctly. At least the iOS app is useable.

Don’t get me started on Excel.

Web apps in general are a bad joke. They never, ever work as well as a real desktop app. At best they are a port in a storm because you can't use the real version of the application for whatever reason, but they aren't viable as a replacement and likely never will be.

No COM integration, no VBA and no Active Directory support.

Business and engineering software uses Windows APIs to integrate with MS Office and Active Directory. The APIs are not portable and hard to replicate on emulation layers. The software is old so expect a huge pile of examples of Hyrum's law. So you need bug-for-bug API layer implementation to run those software elsewhere.

Migrating companies off from that software is actually harder than creating a clone of Windows.

perhaps at some point Proton will fill that use-case

Office is a webapp at this point, businesses use msft for AD

Not for everything. Microsoft still don't have a working set of Rules for the web version of Outlook, so if you have anybody who uses rules to organise their inbox into different folders they are stuck with the desktop version of Outlook.

You can create server-side rules via “Settings → Mail → Rules” in Outlook Web. While more limited than Outlook for Windows client-side rules, they're fine for simple "move emails from x to folder y"-type rules, and are particularly useful for people like me who rarely use Outlook at all.

You can also create server-side rules in the Exchange admin center if you have access.

I've never seen anybody using the Web version of Office 365, outside the Outlook web client. All the companies I've worked at in the last 10 years are still using the installable versions of Word/Excel/PowerPoint etc. The web versions are not even comparable.

Lucky you, I got forced upgraded last year

I get by great in the corp world with Libreoffice. It even handles some really antique VBA-based spreadsheets.

WRT gaming its mostly just some anti cheat that is standing in the way, like Ars [1] so gently put it:

> As detailed in the r/macgaming subreddit and at r/SteamDeck, many players who successfully got Marvel Rivals working would receive a "Penalty Issued" notice, with a violation "detected" and bans issued until 2124. Should such a ban stand, players risked entirely missing the much-prophesied Year of the Linux Desktop or Mainstream Mac Gaming, almost certain to happen at some point in that span.

For non-gaming, things are not moving fast enough. Microsoft Office and Adobe CS is still complicated to get running, if possible at all with recent versions.

1: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/01/marvel-rivals-lifts-1...

For me, when I switched to Linux, I had to start thinking out of the box. Microsoft's OS and Adobe's Cloud are hostile environments that are designed to lock you into a ecosystem that isn't in your best interest. As people start figuring this out, and have had enough, like I finally did one day, more and more people are going to look to alternatives.

I dropped Adobe and Windows[0] because of this. I can do this because I am tech savvy, but as more technically inclined people do this, it creates incentives to make it easier for the rest.

[0]: https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/publication-transi...

Also I had to finally come to the conclusion that if I wanted control over my own house, I'm going to have to make sacrifices. Like Games with anti-cheat that don't work on Linux right now. More and more games with anti-cheat are starting to see the benefits of Linux. So I started letting go of products that don't let me use them the way I want to. It took some discipline, but my life is more stress free now. Now some of the games that require anti-cheat that were not playable on Linux 2 years ago have migrated their anti-cheat to steam's implementation.

I agree with you and also don't use either of these apps. (for context I use LibreOffice and some Gimp, and I have been running Linux on my desktop for more than half of my life fwiw).

I also don't play online games so I personally don't care for anti-cheat games.

My point was about the resistance for moving to Linux in the first place.

With out-of-the-box support for the mentioned apps, we could see much more organizations/companies consider moving over to Linux.

Not having Microsoft Office is a show-stopper for many organizations and companies.

Anti-cheat is a show-stopper for many tech savy individuals who already tried making the jump.

Unless we get a stable ecosystem for closed source apps and drivers it is not going to happen. Android is the very example of that. A closed source software friendly OS with the backing of a tech giant. It also has to provide an almost complete translation layer. Wine is fine for simpler programs using contained APIs like games. It is far behind for any business app.

The polishing required for the masses requires people with huge talent and years of experience to work on the software. That talent doesn't want to work for scraps. So unless a tech giant decides to hedge tens of billions against Apple and Microsoft and give it away for free like Google did with Android, we are not going to get an OS that has good OOTB experience and a thriving business grade software.

I don't think so. Linux still hasn't figured out how to install programs smoothly. In fact, installing a Windows program on Linux is easier than installing a Linux native program. Anything released in AppImage format requires you to write your own config file to get a shortcut and icon? Seriously? Until they figure that out the average person is going to quickly give up on it.

Who's still distributing with AppImage? Most desktop distros these days are based on flatpak or snap, which are as one-click-easy as any other app store, and certainly don't require writing any config files. When you do need to configure the packaging, e.g. to access different directories, there's a standard GUI for that purpose (buried deep in settings, but most people won't be using it).

While this is an issue for some smaller programs, for the vast majority of stuff installing and updating programs is just so much easier on Linux than Windows. I don't have to go searching for a download link, I just open up my distro's package manager and search for what I want. One of the major things that has helped Linux is that a lot more things are just web apps now.

What I really think is the unacceptable thing that will hold people from using Linux permanently is the abysmal power management for laptops. I cannot get my Framework 13 to reliably last more than 24 hours with the lid closed when Windows easily lasts multiple days.

I just have a folder in my home dir called "applications" and I put manual app images there. Double click them to launch.

As for other stuff, the flatpak store is quite good and integrates well with KDE.

On my deb 12 machine running kde, I can do system updates and app installs from a single area. (KDE Discover app)

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