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Comment by kalap_ur | Hacker News Reader

Well, Linux reached ~5% market share in 2025. Imagine the incremental market share they have. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1lpepvq/linux_breaks...

My only issue is that i am not a developer, I am heavily reliant on Excel, i know it inside and out and just not sure whether OpenOffice supports excel files. In the past it barely did.

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LibreOffice does fine, though you’ll probably be unhappy. What is more important to you? Freedom, privacy, consent, or spreadsheet features?

VMs are an option to partition your life as well.

There are many features of Excel that LibreOffice Calc doesn't support. Most importantly: structured references, VBA, PowerQuery. Not to mention its UI is very laggy even on powerful machines.

For real financial/business work, Calc is just not a serious player.

I even had to switch my reading list spreadsheet over from LibreOffice to Excel when the former started seriously lagging with about 250 rows total

I have a spreadsheet I've been using since 2017 to track all my spending and savings accounts on a weekly basis, plus some trend analytics, plus some simple graphs on multiple sheets. A few hundred rows and columns, both entered and calculated values (simple formulas, nothing fancy). Haven't noticed any slowness. When I have some data to look at (like .csv or even .xlsx), I always use Calc. I work with Excel at work all the time, it might be faster on larger data sets, but Libre's Calc is more than enough for many use cases.

I think there is a recent performance regression but hopefully will be fixed soon. Hasn't affected me. Learn Python, much better than VB.

Fedora + Google's Office Suite is the best way.

Don't bother with Libreoffice. Its trash. I'm convinced that Microsoft is deliberately sabotaging the project.

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