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Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

MS Office for Linux. That's all I need, that's all I would miss in my current work environment (in the browser is just not cutting it atm).

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CrossOver Office was running Word and Excel perfectly last time I used it (admittedly, a few years ago), it likely still is.

> MS Office for Linux

Until they make this (and a native AD client), all the rhetoric around "Microsoft LOVES Linux" is empty marketing. (I understand it would be difficult to port. That's beside my point.)

I mean, they ported it to osx. It can't be _that_ hard.

Have you tried PLAY ON LINUX ?? MS Office works great in ubuntu.

Writers in our company were not very fond of Libre Office.

I'm running opensuse so I have my office 365 in a browser, :(

As an aside, opensuse is a great linux for laptops. IMHO, it has better hardware support then Ubuntu and it's a more consistent experience moving between the console and different GUI's.

> more consistent experience moving between the console and different GUI's

What do you mean?

And Skype. We need a Skype alternative that works on Linux and it's not an electron app. Hangouts/appear.in and web.skype.com simply don't work the same way and don't have the same quality.

I hope Skype dies (though I also still depend in it). I'm currently trying to get our project on Teams which works much nicer (it's MS' Slack clone). Wouldn't hurt to have that on Linux as well indeed although Slack work perfectly on Linux.

If Skype dies we basically have no alternative. Sure, you got Slack, Hangouts, Teams (as you mention), the new Atlassian thing etc. but that's mainly for group efforts or for a company setting. Skype isn't used just by businesses. I mainly use Skype for videocalls with friends and family, usually one-on-one, and for that we have zero replacements.

Slack is just not a thing for this use case, same for all the other collaborative tools. Hangouts delivers subpar video quality and decent audio quality (if we ignore the fact that it hasn't been working on Firefox for a while). Appear.in glitches and lags a lot, sometimes to the point that is not usable. Signal would be great, video and audio quality are amazing on mobile, but there's no desktop client (apart from a Chrome extension that can't really be called a desktop client). WhatsApp video quality is very poor while audio tends to be decent, but once again, no desktop client (there's an in-browser web app with no support for video calls). Skype too, is fine on desktop, but it's a huge resource hogger and consequently battery drainer on mobile (the only non-game app that manages to warm the back case of my Android phone).

So yeah, future doesn't look great. I am hoping in GNU/Ring, but who knows...

Discord is coming out with video chat, it looks promising.

Isn't Skype pretty much Snapchat these days?

In addition to trying CrossOver, as was suggested, I heard SoftMaker Office having great compatibility with office documents[1], but I can't personally vouch for that.

1 - http://www.softmaker.com/en/softmaker-office-linux

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