Switching to Linux, saying goodbye to Apple and Microsoft

Motif?

Is Office available for linux yet? 'For some reason no one is amused if you convert their docx or xlsx to OpenOffice files.

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I had to go look it up. It was driving me nuts. It was Enlightenment! And probably one of the very first releases of it, since I see that it first released in 1997.

I believe you can edit and save .docx and .xlsx files in LibreOffice… But I don’t think it’s 100% certain that you’ll maintain all the formatting correctly.

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I somewhat disagree.

GNOME Shell with Dash To Dock and a few more extensions to make it more friendly to my old OS X workflow, and Arc because it has the kind of spit and polish I’d expect from a commercial offering. My wife and kids like it just fine. And yes, you see Chrome apps on the dock. Sometimes my desktop machine is a very overpowered Chrome OS machine. :wink:

I feel like Linux is always at least one step behind, and part of it is the stubborn determination that distributions and package managers are the right way to handle software. I use Arch (not recommended for, say, a dimwitted racist uncle) and feel like it’s a symptom rather than a solution; sure, I used the AUR to install stuff like Steam and Chrome, but should I have to rely on some rando building a script to munge and install the Ubuntu version? Wouldn’t it be nice if there was, oh, I don’t know, just a Steam package for Linux?

Windows and OS X have similar solutions to dependency hell: bundle the libraries, and to a certain extent that’s how Valve is handling Linux. In the future, if anyone can ever agree on a secure way of doing it, Linux may do this as well. There have been attempts in the past, but they’ve always been subpar. Having just built a Docker container for a proprietary app that didn’t run well on anything other than Ubuntu, I sure as hell hope that Docker is not the future of desktop Linux software.

But maybe it doesn’t matter whether it’s ever ready for the mainstream. People like Cory all the way down to people like me like Linux just fine. Linux doesn’t need market share, it’s already taken over the world, and since it’s not a company it doesn’t have to dominate.

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Right, it’s that “opening an Office Doc not-in-office” problem. Collaborators hate having their formatting munged whenever you review/update their document.

Yes, I know that there are better ways… (I personally use markdown and pandoc), but non-programmers are married to office.

Also, everything that isn’t Excel is hard to use in comparison… I guess my brain is stuck in excelscript.

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Why would it be? Microsoft has no interest in shipping consumer software on Linux.

I tend to run window managers on my machines instead of desktops (especially when I spin up a virtual machine), and I run Enlightenment (E17) on some machines, and it’s actually currently a nice WM.

https://www.enlightenment.org/

Yes, issues with Linux are almost always resolvable with web searches or forum posts. Whenever I have Windows problems, they are almost always mysterious, and web searches or posts in forums for help are usually useless.

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Really, OS issues for both workstation and server are usually pretty easy to find a fix for online. I have only had to have vendors called in when software A was not playing with software B or the OS isn’t playing nice with the software.

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