MS Office is hardly "niche professional software." I hate it, and recognize that I can use the online services, but the reality is that I have to send, receive, and work in this application and I can't easily do it on Linux.
If you're working in a corporate environment, this may not be viable. LibreOffice is great software, but it's not 100% compatible. Things may look slightly different, get lost or otherwise cause problems. I've really tried, but at the end of the day I occasionally do need to use actual Microsoft Office.
Yep. And then there is Visio which gets used a lot where I work. LibreOffice Draw doesn't come anywhere near it. It saves a lot of grief just to give our Linux users a Windows VM with Office on it if they need to do any significant docs or drawings.
I used Word to write a reasonably complicated document that necessarily used tables. It was one of the most frustrating, bug inducing experiences of my life. I had to open the document and edit it in LibreOffice to get any sort of stability.
How do I join a live editing session of an Excel file with several people using regular Excel with LibreOffice?
I can't.
Or the same with PowerPoint.
I can't.
In a modern workspace it's not just local software running solely on just your local machine emailing around files or clobbering changes in some corporate file share.
I don’t do corporate work on my home computer? I don’t know who’s suggesting corporate IT departments should convert everyone to Linux. “Work computer” and “home computer” are entirely separate use cases.
(Also a ton of MS Office work is being done through the web interfaces now anyway. I find the web versions pretty terrible but people seem to put up with them.)
I am also forced to use "productivity" software from MS, but I make do with the web versions on Linux at work. I hate it all, but it's okay. I am playing the long term game of trying to get my whole org to Linux. It helps that I can influence technical decisions, slow but steady process.
My behavioral economics pricing idea for storage unit is to charge $1 for the first month but then double every month (or something like that). You shouldn't put stuff in storage long term and you're getting ripped off.
No libre office suite will ever be on par with Microsoft proprietary options. It's a constant race of keeping up with features, using mostly unpaid volunteer developers.
I've used Linux for 25+ years and my reaction is always to do my best with the options I have, but in those cases when it's not enough I just say "I'm sorry but I can't edit this document" or "sorry but some of the formatting was lost when I saved this in libreoffice".
The thing is that I'm a senior Linux specialist so people accept my excuses because they generally need my work.
> It's a constant race of keeping up with features, using mostly unpaid volunteer developers.
What new features are Microsoft bringing out that are that critical for LibreOffice et al to catch up with?
I can’t think of much which I use that wasn’t already available in Office 95 which was released 30 years ago.
Aside from OOXML (which isn’t nearly as open as the name suggests) and the ribbon bar (which i personally hate), there hasn’t really been any big innovations.
The only features I can think of are:
- better security model for marcos. But that was only needed because MS Office was insecure to begin with so not really relevant here either
- Unicode support
- more rows in excel (though generally once you start reaching that point, the memory footprint of Excel becomes too great to make working on that spreadsheet practical)
The real issue with LibreOffice isn’t new features. It’s the subtle rending and parsing quirks when working on OOXML documents. But that’s likely Microsoft’s fault and thus OOXML working as intended.
I don’t doubt there’s been plenty of new features. But are they significant enough that users on older versions or non-MS suites are left longing for the latest version of Excel?
I just don’t think there is much innovation left. Or at least not without changing the UX and/or paradigm significantly. Neither of which have happened.
Unless you need precise formatting because you will send someone nontrivial slides to present, libreoffice should be fine.
Excel really depends - if you're using it as a glorified document with a table, then libreoffice will do fine. If you need compatibility and more advanced features, or your whole company runs on excel like a financial corp - there's no alternative. VM in that case.
As far as compatibility goes, OnlyOffice is fairly good at it, more geared towards MS-compatibility than LibreOffice, which is more of its own thing (and pretty good at that).
This never lasts long, in my experience. It’s a nice idea, but it’s a huge pain. At some point, I always end up sticking with the OS that has what I need, which is never Linux. Linux is what I install when feeling idealistic, but it doesn’t allow me to do anything I can’t do on a mainstream OS that is mission critical to my life.
I’d say commit. Force yourself to find new tools and workflows on the new OS of choice. If that isn’t possible, it seems like a waste of time and effort.
...and even if they suck it into onedrive, good luck finding it! Is it in my work onedrive, personal onedrive, a "teams" folder, or did they relabel it to a sharepoint folder? No idea! Everything is now saved on my downloads folder because my file system is so whacked with all these other virtual folder overlays....
Man, I wanted to like Teams folder mounts.. what a mess.
Aside: WTF isn't the Teams wiki using markdown files you can edit and sync locally? I mean if this has changed since I last tried, cool... but that's the single biggest thing I wanted from this. Now, I just put a _docs directory into my projects and have markdown files in there sync'd to the git repo... I've given up on files in teams for the most part.
Also with teams, splitting up chats and meating chats is a pain... the "activity" indicator doesn't tell you WTF subtab for chat something is in now. I used to at least halfway like teams if you avoided (over)using features, now it's just a craptastic mess.
We own a towing business focused on heavy recovery. It is true that a huge number of drivers are from eastern europe, and fraud is HEAVY! We take a picture of license, credit card, and the guy with the bill because they all try and scam out of it.
From the comments on the article, it sounds like regulators have been largely neutralized, and there are lots of shady semi fictitious brokers out there.
> As of this morning:
> 1,164,093 motor carriers are listed as “Authorized for Hire.”
> 107,757 freight brokers are “Authorized for Hire.”
> And right now, 206 of them list 30 N Gould Street, Sheridan WY 82801 as their primary address.
And I think it is actually one of the reasons that linux adoption is slow. No real way to run Excel natively. I would switch today but my life in finance is all Excel and Powerpoint.
As Steam/Proton is teaching us, running natively isn't a big deal; there are several games which do have native versions but where the Windows version works better on Linux than the Linux version does.
Mag7 surely is self insured. They have an amazing risk pool of young people. Probably biggest cost is babies. So in this way employer sponsored health insurance screws the rest of the market, as it "hordes" the best risks. The insurance companies then wail about the cost of the risker pool of those of us stuck in the smaller plans...
There should only be one risk pool which is the whole country. Unfortunately the republicans want to go the other way and push sick people into high risk pools which will be unaffordable for a lot of people
Or how about the excel copilot which can't do anything inside a cell???? You can't call it in a formula either.
Or how about outlook copilot, which can't do the unbelievably simple task of figuring out when someone asks for a meeting at 1pm tomorrow and you press make invite to actually pre-fill 1pm tomorrow as the meeting time????? ARGH!
And we are worried about fast takeoff and the singularity? Give me a break.
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