Okay I know this sounds like click bait but trust me switching over to linux requires you to first master the open source software that you will be replacing your windows/mac counterparts with. Doing it in an unfamiliar OS with no fallback to rely on is tough, frustrating and will turn you off of trying linux. DISCLAIMER: I know that some people cannot switch to linux because open source / Linux software is not good enough yet. But I urge you to keep track of them and when so you can know when they are good enough.
The Solution
So I suggest you keep using windows, switch all your apps to open or closed source software that is available on linux. Learn them, use them and if you are in a pinch and need to use your windows only software it will still be there. Once you are at a point where you never use the windows only software you can then think of switching over to linux.
The Alternatives
So to help you out I’ll list my favorites for each use case.
MS Office -> Only Office
- Not for folks who use obscure macros and are deep into MS Office
- Has Collaboration and integration with almost all popular cloud services…
- Has a MS Office like UI and the best compatibility with MS Office.
Adobe Premiere -> Da Vinci Resolve
- It is closed source but available on linux
- Great UI, competitive features and a free version
Outlook -> Thunderbird
- Recently went through massive updates and now has a modern design.
- Templates, multi account management, content based filters, html signatures, it is all there.
Epic Games, GOG, PRIME -> Heroic
- Easy to use, 1 click install, no hassel
- Beautiful UI
- Automatically imports all the games you have bought
PDF Editor -> LibreOffice Draw
- Suprisingly good for text manipulation, moving around images and alot more.
- There might be slight incompatibilities (I haven’t noticed anything huge)
- But hey, it’s free
How do I pick a distro there are so many! NO
So finally after switching all the apps you think you are ready? Do not fall into the rabbit hole of changing your entire OS every two days, you will be in a toxic relationship with it.
I hate updates and my hardware is not that new
- Mint - UI looks a bit dated but it is rock solid
- Ubuntu - Yes, I know snaps are bad, but you can just ignore them
I have new hardware but I want sane updates
- Fedora
- Open Suse Tumbleweed
I live on the bleeding edge baby, both hardware and software
- Arch … btw
Anyways what is more important is the DE than the distro for a beginner, trust me. Gnome, KDE, Cinnamon, etc. you can try them all in a VM and see which one you like.
SO TLDR: Don’t switch to linux! Switch to linux apps.
Stop recommending OnlyOffice.
How come? I’ve been out of the open source loop recently
Onlyoffice ain’t bad yes its built by a company but it’s open source and feels like something that’s used in a professional environment + libreoffice ui is pretty dated
What’s bad about it? It has better compatibility from my experience, and the UI doesn’t look ass. I’m a big fan of LibreOffice, but unless you’re only editing OpenDocument Format files it doesn’t work that well most of the time (and even if you are… I have tried, but god, does the OpenDocument Foundation need some money funneled into it. I never get .ods to work the way I want to)
The solution that solves ODF compatibility issues is to not allow applications that do not adhere to the standard. In other words, to explicitly disallow the use of Microsoft products. It’s not by accident that MS Office products are slightly fucking up documents, it’s by design.
Since many companies use MS Office, when they do a pilot to see if they can use ODF, it ends up “causing problems”. If anyone tries to use it in a mostly Office based workspace, it’ll also “causes problems”.
MS only has very good reason to always be just subtly off, and everything to lose if they aren’t.
@okamiueru @glaber , well it is an issue to fuck up by design. There are third party plugins for ODF for MSO that work better than its own implementation.
I am forced to use MSO for work, but it’s LO for everything else of mine.
Edit: One should also see what they can do to make Microsoft improve/fix their ODF implementation since it is an ISO standard. There has to be something to get that ball rolling.
The answer to this should be the same as when some standard S is implemented in software X, Y, Z. If Z doesn’t follow the standard, blacklist it until it does. That’s the whole point of having a format standard, that it shouldn’t matter what software you use.
If people, companies, institutions and governments have this stance and attitude, MS will need to compete on actual user experience, and not degrading the UX of the competition.
They’d get their shit together mighty fast. I’d expect them to lose too. Software to edit documents isn’t complicated. If we can have things like blender, which I’d say is about 3-4 orders of magnitude a greater endeavour, for which use case has the inverse potential user base, it’s pretty obvious that the only reason that MS Office is a thing (i.e. in raking in billions in license fees… 49 billion USD in 2022), is shady business practices.
It still pisses me off that in my country, when they had a group of experts make the evaluation of which document standard to follow, all experts agreed on ODF. But, because of shady MS money being thrown around, they ignored the recommendation, and went with DOCX.
Write me a function to generate a Pivot Table with all of the features from Excel, from scratch
If you read what I wrote, in context. I’m sure you can get a better idea of what I meant, than what you’re implying here.
My point is you are grossly oversimplifying software and how hard it is to actually write something like an office clone
I’m not. You implied that my point was that it was easy to write OpenOffice, or the equivalent. From the context, it should have been obvious that this wasn’t my point, and I’m not interested in entertaining such straw man arguments, and my responses tend to be rude. Apologies.
I don’t feel like paraphrasing myself either, but in the spirit of good intentions: I made the comparison that document productivity software is orders of magnitude simpler than something like Blender. If you disagree on this, that’s fine. Inferring that this means productivity software is easy, that’s all on you.
I get that, but even my .ods files get slightly fucked up when I only ever edit them with LibreOffice. That being said, I’m a staunch supporter and I will always send my text files as .odt and my slideshows as .odp, and I keep donating money in hopes it’ll improve in the future (and for fuck’s sake, the UI shouldn’t be that important, but it is. It might as well be one of the biggest barriers of entry for normies, it’s not a good thing that FOSS always looks either outdated or overcomplicated)