Hacker News Reader

Comment by kombine | Hacker News Reader

Actually, it's the exact opposite. There is really no alternative to PowerPoint on Linux, unfortunately. I'm saying this as someone who's used Linux for 20 years now.

View on HN

I haven’t seen power point used professionally for over a decade. All google (though I’ve made the odd prezi)

Are you just hanging around California startups? I work in big consulting and am inside hundreds of the largest companies in the US, everyone of which is fully Microsoft and only ever seen PowerPoint. I’m in dozens of teams meetings a week across as many organizations and have been in 2 Google meets meeting in the last decade, both of which were California fintech startups.

Yes, most people use MS where I live, too. But most of them only scratch the surface. To this thread's point, 99% of PowerPoint presentations I've seen are just walls of text on a bunch of slides, with the occasional illegible graph.

Now I'm not saying I actually know my way around PPT or that I'm some presentation whiz, but this can probably be done with the browser version. Just like the "new" Outlook is simply a new Edge skin.

I work for a company that has drunk the MS Kool-Aid and then went back for a refill, yet I've never had any issue using the web version of the suite ever since it came out. I don't even run Windows on my work laptop. Teams is the only app that seems marginally better in its heavy version (heh), since it supports separate windows for the calls.

I've been out of the powerpoint loop myself for almost 20 years too; does it actually have any valuable functionality that you can't get on the free alternatives?

European startups mostly.

Every single morning on the train to work, I watch people put finishing touches on PowerPoint presentations.

I've worked in academia for years (in computer vision labs) and I can confidently say that PowerPoint is the best tool to prepare research presentations.

At least in my field, 90% of presentations are Beamer. PowerPoint is bad at equations just like Word. Besides easily integrating video/animations I can't think of why it would be better.

Could you go into details about why you think this?

I haven't used PowerPoint in years as I think my needs are pretty simple but I wonder what I'm missing.

I can see that the Microsoft ecosystem gives control on who can view files and provides collaboration and control. Both of which would be useful in the corporate world.

Is there's somethnig other than that or is it just ease of use?

For the most part I see people using MS Office tools because it's what they are familar with. They're familar with it because it's the only thing their IT department will allow them to use.

I continue to be impressed as to how much of a bubble HN people reside in. A very small bubble.

Perhaps! I’m not in the US for what it’s worth

I'm actually constantly surprised by the diversity of experiences I'm seeing here. It's very much not a small bubble, at least not in comparison to any other social network/activity in my life.

Probably just a matter of time, it’s possible the friction will create opportunities. Something in the spirit of iaPresenter, md first would be awesome.

At the moment i have long html page with key event for next and previous, tiny script to check on specif markup for autoscroll.

Huh? There's a ton of PowerPoint alternatives that work on Linux. LibreOffice, OnlyOffice, Collabora Office, Calligra Stage, Google Slides, the online version of PowerPoint, more techy things like LaTeX Beamer or Reveal.js. Maybe these don't have perfect PowerPoint compatibility, or some niche PowerPoint feature you need but there's plenty of slide deck making options that work on Linux.

I tried LibreOffice (Impress) for something simple and it was not good - in fact it would just freeze. Although it did have a feature on MacOS that PowerPoint for Mac didn't, so I ended up using Impress for the first little bit and then PowerPoint for the rest.

And then Canva, Prezi, etc. I can't understand the idea that there's no alternative to PowerPoint on Linux either.

Presentation has been a solved problem for more than 2 decades already.

Whenever we are talking migration out of the windows world, there is always a group of MS fanboys that pretend that you can't replace a software with another one if it doesn't even have the exact same set of features down to the smallest details while totally ignoring the interesting features the replacement can have.

The reality is there are never 1:1 replacement and Microsoft would have never had any sort of success in the office area to begin with that sort of nitpicking.

I'd think the only Office part difficult to replace is Excel. It has a lot of functionality, provides a lot of value and is the workhorse of most business processes I see. Now how do you replace THAT?

Libre Office Impress does all the things that PowerPoint is used for at my workplace.

I'm guessing it's not compatible with Teams and that MS make sure it doesn't work properly with LO produced PPT files.

If there’s no alternative to PowerPoint, that should be treated as a plus, not as a problem.

There are decent alternatives on all operating systems, including Linux.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com