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Comment by aleph_minus_one | Hacker News Reader

> And yet, users don't convert to Linux. So there must be other reasons, and performance benefits don't seem to work so far.

For enterprise desktop purposes:

One central reason is that there is no Excel for GNU/Linux. Accept it or not: the workflows of lots of departments are deeply intertwined with Excel (and it would take an insane amount of work to replace Excel by some other spreadsheet application). Another important reason is that GNU/Linux is not some singular operating system, but a proliferation of various different distributions - this is not something that enterprise customers like.

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We run thousands of Linux desktop workstations from low-end workstations for developers to dual-socket machines with >1TB of memory at work. That's primarily because productivity for our use cases is so much higher with a Linux/Unix environment than Windows that it's not even remotely funny. However, almost all users still have either the standard corporate-issue Windows laptop, or a Windows VM on their workstation. Practically exclusively for Desktop Excel-based administrative tasks.

Generally speaking, the vast majority of our userbase likes their Linux workstations far better than their Windows machines, and that's after experiencing the significant downgrade to Gnome desktops due to Red Hat removing KDE.

As a dev, wish I worked there, IBM was the only other place I worked where many devs and even a few thousand ordinary users like marketing, ran Linux. Also, I wasn't aware RedHat removed KDE, what an odd and crappy move. KDE rocks. Gnome not. RPM based distros sooner or later corrupt themselves, I run and recommend Ubuntu or Kubuntu (for KDE people), with Snap disabled with a small apt preferences file.

Would it? I exclusively use Office365 on the browser for all my Excel needs. It works perfectly, even if it's a bit sluggish.

But I admit, Excel is a side hustle for me.

I rarely, if ever, use Excel. But I find that Outlook in the browser wipes the floor with local Outlook, be it "OG" or "new" Outlook. Everything is much smoother, there are no window widgets crapping up (right now, the min / max / close and window title of my new outlook are black on a dark grey background - I'm using the windows dark theme). This holds even in Firefox on Linux – it's how I mostly interact with MS Office.

What's also fun to me is that the other day, I tried "opening in word" a .docx attachment I received in my locally-installed "new" outlook. It didn't even try to open my locally installed word on ask me anything. It uploaded the file to onedrive without asking and proceeded to launch word online to read it.

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