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Comment by quietbritishjim | Hacker News Reader

One problem: MS Office.

I know that there's LibreOffice but MS Office definitely beats it in reality.

Yes, I know there's Wine, but I worry (possibly unfounded) that it won't work, or will stop working with some future Office update.

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I've worked for a non-profit that is officially Microsoft Office based, and our policy manual say all field staff (who provide their own laptops/computer hardware) need to be able to interact with MS Office file formats. I and an number of colleagues I know have used LibreOffice for years without ever having incompatibility issues with MS Office; for me its been at least 10 years since I've had MS Office on any of my machines... I run Debian or an old ThinkPad, and Mac OS X with MacPorts.

Solution: Office 365. Since it runs in the browser Office 365 will work for the average home user of MS Office on Linux. No it's not the full fat versions of office, but for most home users it's fine.

How many home users need something in MS Office that doesn't exist in Libre?

Libre would be fine for most people but brand recognition and file compatibility are the big things that Office 365 has going for it.

A lot of them. Have you tried to fill out forms (for stuff like homeowner taxes, personal income tax, etc) prepared by the government office in MS Word using LibreOffice Writer? It doesn't work at all, and if it at least opens, the document as well as output is completely fucked.

Anything a tiny bit smarter than your usual document (with scripts and/or macros) won't work too.

I mean, in the past 3 years I've sold a home, rented a place, and bought a home, and filled out my taxes and other forms from .gov websites and haven't had an issue to be honest.

Thank the US government, they're pretty good with the digital things. The EU governments are much worse with computers - Word documents and Excel tables that don't work in LibreOffice are usual here.

Yep. I fixed it with Latex

How did you get VBA working in Latex? I really don't want to do the dozens of tax calculations by hand.

If you're OK with web version of o365, you're probably fine with libre office.

I've always found a mixture of google docs and libreoffice to suffice for me, but I'm not a particularly heavy MS office user.

There's definitely pieces of software that aren't available for linux, and if you require that to do your job, it probably isn't the best solution for you. For me, and my partner (who is a classic browser + office software user, as I suspect 90%+ of computer users are), it's never been a problem (and office software has never been an issue for me personally).

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