Gosh. Is Linux now ready for the desktop?
If you would ask if LibreOffice is ready, I would say: yes and no. The UX of LO is worse than MS Office. LO is more feature rich in certain areas but it lacks the UX if you want to get a well-looking document with a minimum amount of work. Case in point: lack of acceptable Impress templates (they look from the year 1994), lack of document themes in Writer, lack of quick table style in Calc.
The UX/UI is in dire need for attention.
I definitely agree LO and particularly its terribly dated UI is a greater barrier to desktop Linux adoption than the desktop environment itself.
There is no reasonable substitute or replacement for Excel.
There should be, but there isn’t.
Personally, I stick with LibreOffice. The biggest win? It doesn’t aggressively mangle my data by assuming everything is a U.S. date that needs “fixing.”
And don’t get me started on how Excel insists that, just because my employer gave me a Norwegian-language Mac, every formula should now be written in some half-baked, poorly documented pseudo-Norwegian formula language.
The one tool I do miss? Outlook.
There's probably some similar system setting for the date format
That might work - assuming IT policies don’t block it - but it could easily break a bunch of other things on my machine.
> There's probably a similar system setting for the date format
Maybe. But I’ve been a power user for 30 years (counting from my first full Windows restore), and I taught my first IT course in the late ’90s - so if there is an easy fix, I’m honestly kind of impressed with my own ability to miss it.
But you gated your comment to those that work all day in Excel, and of course for those users, they're going to be needing Excel.
As those are not available in macOS Excel without 3rd party hacks, LO would actually beat MSO at something :)
But what has really happened in the last 2-4 years to make it miles ahead of Windows?
Even when you import a template in Impress, you will find some weird bugs, like a slide insisting that it won't show the slide number. I found such random weird behavior that I wouldn't even know how to file a bug report for it, because they are impossible to reproduce.
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I know the stuff is built on top of some very ancient code. Sometimes I wish they would throw it all away and start from scratch in a modern managed, type safe language. It would be feasible if you forego backwards compatibility as I suppose a lot of the bugs have to do with trying to support the MS Office bugs. A consistent finding is that LO supports older office documents better than MS office itself.
Then any office product is horrible. I'm using emacs with markdown, and convert them to tex, pdf, blog posts automatically.
Tables look better. Images look better. Everything's looks better. And it's 10x easier to work with.
I am sure your latex or custom pipeline produces better quality indeed. There has always been a gap between word processors and typesetting applications like Scribus and Indesign.
But also, office suites are becoming anachronistic very quickly. Every time you use one nowadays, it's a symptom of some organization failure. (Ok, there are a few reasonable use cases for spreadsheets.) So the entire question is kinda of moot.
I hope you did not mean online offerings as an alternative?
In the tech world we are used to compile documents from plain text. But outside I don't see that. I see legal deeply entrenched into Word, with a bunch of macros. It looks masochistic to me, but I guess that is a matter of being entrenched.
If legal is deeply entrenched into Word, it means your company has a problem with legal. Complex rich text is really not an adequate format for legal documents, they should really be generating HTML through some system.
(When legal is deep into Word, there is almost always somebody that takes their results and turn them into HTML or PDF. The later group has 2 problems.)
Wayland is also in quite a good place compared to just a few years ago. Stuff like HDR, VRR, High-Refresh Rates, DisplayPort 2.1 and so on just works.
Flatpak is also great and works really well with many apps when they support XDG Portals properly.
The problem with Linux is the software ecosystem around it, esp security software, office suits, and tons of various specialised software that often target only windows, or at best also macos. But there has been a lot of improvement to that direction last years. I really hope linux takes over work desktop environments, the degree of slop that MS puts into windows is getting more and more over the years. In linux it is infinitely easier to get a machine do what you want once you get to understand some basics wrt how to configure stuff (and now with llms is much less steep curve to get relevant info). In windows you have to constantly dance around whatever horrible UX each version brings upon you.