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Comment by wasd | Hacker News Reader

> Microsoft will also update the Mac suite at some point, meaning that by the end of 2013, there will be a version of Microsoft Office available for every major computing platform on earth. Just as with Multiplan in 1982.

Could someone elaborate what the sort of work it would take for MS support Linux? I'm really excited that there is going to be web version because I'm sick of LibreOffice.

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But which Linux? Linux is relatively small in general, but then when you start looking at the fragmentation within Linux it gets even nastier.

For example, Mint Linux, RedHat, Ubuntu, etc? Valve has only decided to release Steam on Ubuntu and support that.

and all of them collectively only make a couple of percent of desktop share. Given this why bother with Linux at all? There is a web version that can be used on almost any platform

Yes, they packaged it for Ubuntu and it's been repackaged and worked in majority of distributions in a matter of minutes. Literally - around 30min after the announcement I wanted to start looking at a way to get it running under Arch, but there was already a 6th version of the packaging script available online.

I'm not sure what do you mean by fragmentation exactly - sure all distributions look a bit different and have some specific approach to packages/configuration, but apart from that it's all almost exactly the same. If something works under ubuntu, there's no good reason it wouldn't work under other distributions.

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