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Comment by trenchpilgrim | Hacker News Reader

Honestly for desktop computers, the mainstream Linux distros are pretty great these dyas. (Laptops are a mixed bag depending on the hardware, and there's no direct replacement for Office so you probably still need a Windows VM or WINE.)

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For educational purposes, libreoffice should be a full replacement for office. You don't need to worry about compatibility if you just decide that students and teachers will use it. Kids aren't using whatever advanced features of Excel that F500 accountants need. They just need to learn the basics of spreadsheets and e.g. what $ does when referencing a cell (something I had to teach one of my gen-z colleagues the other day anyway). They don't need VB to sync with ADP or whatever.

Similarly Linux with KDE and productivity software should be fine for schools. You don't need games or the latest commercial CAD or Adobe stuff or whatever other DRM filled software unless you are in a university course for that.

While I agree with the other comments regarding LibreOffice, for a more Microsoft experience, I cannot recommend ONLYOFFICE enough. It is very interoperable and familiar, and I find it a lot more pleasant to use over LibreOffice at the moment.

LibreOffice works just fine.

It even has ribbons if you want that sort of thing.

It's not really fine. It just doesn't look very slick, at least in my experience, and I am a user of it. I can imagine most people just being unimpressed with the superficial issues with it and uninstalling it.

Having an ugly UI is not a good argument for paying obscene quantities of money for spyware that doesn't even support all OSes.

> Having an ugly UI is not a good argument

Especially when you look at Windows 11, Android or iOS. _That_ is ugliness.

That's not what the users of Office are doing. They're just using the thing that came with their laptop and they don't care about other OSes. They aren't trying to use software for its own sake. They're trying to write a report using a tool that doesn't look terrible.

LibreOffice is fine if your org is all in on it. It is not a drop in replacement for existing use of Office, especially Excel; it's analogous to suggesting replacing existing Python scripts with Matlab or Visual Basic.

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