Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

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I mean, unless you work in software or extremely high-budget movies, Linux is a pretty tough sell.

A lot of the "mainstream" apps simply do not exist on Linux. LibreOffice isn't so bad, but most people simply want Microsoft Office. Lightworks is decent software, but most people want Adobe Premiere. Gimp is alright but most people want Photoshop, etc.

This isn't to say that Linux software "worse", I actually like Lightworks more than Premiere, and there are some applications that are competitive with the "brand name" applications like Krita, but "having good software available" is only half the battle. People get used to certain workflows, and if Linux doesn't support that workflow most people aren't going to think it's worth it to switch over.

I do work in software, and I run NixOS, and I like it a lot, since programming tools on Linux are generally very good (especially if you work in server-land like I do). I'm just saying that I don't really blame people who don't want to switch over.

LibreOffice is pretty bad. It doesn't tend to hold up past very basic use, and that use case has long since been taken by Google Docs. For serious work - e.g. legal services word processing, or many accounting workflows - LibreOffice doesn't hold a candle to Excel and Word.

The problem with desktop Linux software is that it generally doesn't have the demands put on it that would push it to develop competitively, so it tends to get stuck spinning in circles for decades. LibreOffice Writer isn't really a competitor to MS Word - it's more of a bloated Wordpad. Ditto The Gimp, etc. It's just not there.

Well at least Google Docs works just fine on Linux, I use it all the time, so I don't think that alone would be a deterrent to switch to Linux.

I don't work in law or accounting, and I can only speak to my own experiences, but I have generally thought that LibreOffice Writer is fine. Even back when it was OpenOffice, I edited and formatted a weekly newsletter in high school with it, and it never really bothered me. I admittedly don't use it a lot now, I'm one of those irritating LaTeX people. I've heard that OnlyOffice is better, but I haven't used it yet.

I definitely agree that LibreOffice Calc is considerably worse than Excel though. It works ok most of the time, but even the free online version of Excel is generally better.

I think that Krita is pretty competitive though. I don't work in art but I've talked to people who do and they've said Krita is pretty ok, and at least one person uses it for paid work. There's also Blender, which is (I think) being used for "real" movies now?

I'm curious, do you maybe have an example for each of the "legal services work processing" and "accounting workflows" that LibreOffice can't handle?

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