What is it with Microsoft Word that makes you prefer it to others?
LibreOffice and OnlyOffice are pretty much the only free software office suites that really hold a candle to Microsoft Office’s functionality. LibreOffice defaults to the Toolbar interface but changing it to Tabbed will make it look like Microsoft Office. It takes some getting used to and isn’t as smooth but once you start using it for a few weeks you will get used to it.
WPS Office is a Microsoft Office clone that works fine on Linux. It’s a pretty common Microsoft Office substitute and is nearly identical in most aspects of its interface. It’s made by Kingsoft, a Chinese company. The software is closed-source and there is a free version that contains advertisements.
Microsoft Office Online is available through your browser free of charge at portal.office.com. It contains Word, PowerPoint, and Excel but only has basic functionalities. Collaborative editing is still supported on it which you might care about.
Microsoft Office can be installed using WINE but in my experience, it is usually not stable enough for daily use. I would not bother with it. You should not install things manually using WINE. It’s highly recommended that you use some wrapper software like Bottles, PlayOnLinux, or Lutris (common for games).
For me, I use the office suite at work, and one of the simplest things that makes me wish i could use it at home is that damn search bar in the top.
After that, I appreciate that libreoffice introduced the ribbon UI. I grew up with word 2003, so i know what it was like, but after they introduced the ribbon ui, it immediately felt more easy to use. Especially the style picker.
@JustEnoughDucks@NateNate60 I'm sure about the first two features: Yes. I don't know about a picture of your manual signature, unless you talk about simply embedding it in a document: That's for sure possible.
Where doed WPS office source it’s ads? I mean, if you run it in a (more or less) sandbox (well, you might want to have access to the files you’re editing), and without access to internet, how does the ad interface behave?
I actually don’t remember seeing adverts on the Linux version when I tried it out a few years ago. Maybe that’s changed, or maybe they just don’t run adverts on the Linux version.
Have you tried languagetool? There is an integration for Libre Office, Obsidian, MS Word and others. It offers spell checking, rephrasing and is superior to the build in checker in my experience. You could compare it to DeepL versus Azure Translate.
As someone with dyslexia, the superior spell and grammar check is what I miss most in libreOffice. I usually have to use an external tool for spell check like grammarly.
I would say you are already secure enough if you are using software from official/trusted repositories and updating them on a regular basis.
That said, if you want extra security. Drop all software that cannot run on Wayland and go even further by isolating all desktop applications with the Flatpak sandbox. This is made extremely easy with Flatseal. Maximum points if you setup secure boot.
As @BCsven mentioned, the talk about stable distributions is not right at all.
Also, the commands you gave in “secure directories and dotfiles” are not doing anything. sudo chmod 755 ~/.bashrc doesn’t change the ownership of the file: it’s still owned by you. So setting the permissions 755 just makes it writeable by…you. You will still be able to modify it without sudo.
If you want to make your dotfile require root access to change, you would need to augment the chmod with a sudo chown root ~/.bashrc
I have a T480 and the battery will last me 2 days on a charge for my typical use. Since it has two batteries, I can swap the external one without having to plug in or shut down. There are lots of parts available and you can find used or refurbished laptops at a reasonable price.
The downside with the T480 is a lack of PCIe lanes. The thunderbolt only has 2 lanes, which is not so good for an external GPU. The NVMe SSD is also only 2 lanes, but I still get around 1.5GB/s, which is plenty fast for me.
You are only talking about backbone capacity - the consumer usually still has shitty Internet because our politicians wanted it so. This has more to do with strategic errors and enabling that extremely large corporation with a T in its name to exploit the shit out of copper.
Hahahahaha Tell that my neighbourhood where at prime time the internet becomes unusable because of latency and bandwidth.
Internet is OK in rich kid parts of the city where there are one-family homes. In poorer parts where there are lots of little apartments on poor old copper cables with vectoring you’d rather drive to the library than to try downloading the book (at least at times where people are at home). You are faster that way
Lul cable doesnt always work in my house (old Cooper vdsl with waaaaaay to many Appartements connected to waaaaaay to few bandwidth - works fine at 00:00 a clock in the night but close to not at all at 20:00 when people are firing up their evening entertainment.
And mobile is fking expensive to pay on top of internet at home and too often I have only e, which makes being productive online a pain in the a$$. I have 1gb per month, this isn’t enough anyway
For clarification: I can certainly use online office at home at most parts of the day, but as a student “most” is not enough and “at home” is not enough. This, plus the limited functionality of online, plus some products like publisher are not available at all, plus the lost privacy of having everything you write on a commercial cloud… It just outweighed the added privacy of using linux
DSL doesn’t do bandwidth sharing, so unless your provider’s backbone is over capacity, the amount of users is not relevant to you. Certainly not the ones in your apartment complex.
Mobile reception is hit or miss depending on your provider. Where I live, I have essentially no reception whatsoever on my work phone which has a Vodafone sim. My private one with a Telefonica sim is better but still bad with the phone usually getting 4g but with a bad signal, so Internet is decent but calls aren’t too good when I’m not on my WiFi. My wife’s Telekom sim on the other hand works perfectly, so maybe just try different providers? My wife’s using congstar (Telekom’s no frills brand) because she doesn’t need 5g. We generally pay between 15 and 20 bucks per month for our contracts, which all have more bandwidth than we need (20gb for me), which I think is manageable and not unreasonable at all. How much do you pay?
Thats why i talked about vdsl (vectoring) which is very common in germany as our Cooper cables are Quite shitty.
Fact is: every evening the internet goes bad (latency up, bandwidth down). at work times or at night it works fine. This is not only true for me but for all neighbours.
I don’t know every technical detail of why this happens, the technician from the Telekom said it is because of interferences in overused and bad in shape cables due to vectoring not having enough failsaves/checksums/something like that.
That on the topic.
On a personal level: This is a discussion about alternatives to word. I would like to transition to linux, because i value the moral/ethical aspects of Foss software. I state here reasons which keep me from transitioning (as always its a tradeoff between security and convenience). One of this arguments is “the internet where I live is not good enough for online office, so it can’t be proclaimed as an solution for every situation” You telling me “the amount of users is not relevant for you” implying “your internet is not bad, you are hallucinating this” is not really helpful or appropriate.
P.s. I am a student with limited money so I have an 1gb 4g contract for 3,99. In my part of the city you only get 3g though. Also university is a metal building where mobile works unreliable AF, most days campus WiFi works fine, but enough days it doestn. I can’t afford not being able to write texts in those situations.
Sure if you get 5g and have money to pay for lots of data volume on your phone its not that bad, but this is not viable for everyone.
I wasn’t trying to be condescending. If a technician has looked into it then I guess there isn’t much you can do. The issue usually not coming from copper cables was just supposed to maybe give you other ideas on where to look for an error. Like, maybe your router sharing its WiFi frequency with too many neighbours or something.
Also, I’m not saying you should spend more money on mobile. I just don’t think the pricing is as bad as it was ten years or so ago… Getting mobile broadband for 20 bucks is cheaper than most landlines and if the reception is decent it might be an alternative. If it isn’t for you that’s fair, too.
If LibreOffice isn’t an alternative then maybe try to run your office in wine? For things that aren’t games the setup is usually manageable. If that doesn’t work then maybe a VM might be a solution? I think most modern VMs offer modes where they keep the boot process of the guest OS hidden and just show you a single window. Like, you get an office icon on your desktop in Linux and if you click it the system boots a windows wm that directly launches an office window but only shows you this window once it’s there, which should seamlessly integrate into your Linux desktop. If you’re a student I think there are cheap or free ways for you to get a windows license to try this, but it’s been some time since I studied so don’t take my word on this.
Yeah, but it’s still pretty much as good as it gets with the original. Like, this is ms office. It opens ms office files. Even if it doesn’t do it as it did twenty years ago it can be pretty much considered the way it just looks now.
This. I just started playing with Linux desktop in a VM and I’m not sure if it’s because it’s virtualized but I’ve had to kill plasma and relaunch or reboot several times because KDE is playing silly buggers.
You could try booting KDE neon Unstable in a VM on the same machine. If you can still reproduce it I’m sure the KDE devs would appreciate a bug report.
In fairness to KDE, yes, VMs absolutely can cause issues, and it’s likely you’d experience fewer of them if you ran it on real hardware.
But yeah, Plasma is relatively buggy. This is improving at a rapid rate, though - Plasma 4 and early Plasma 5 were straight up unusable, hence distros flocking to Gnome (KDE actually used to be the standard!)
The difference in stability between Plasma 5.27 and versions before about 5.16 is night and day. And Plasma 6 has been repeatedly pushed back so that it can be stable from the get-go.
I’ll check the version later. I wonder if Debian is using an old version and it’s worth enabling back ports for plasma. Ultimately I’m after stability, hence picking Debian.
Debian doesn’t ship bugfix releases of our software. If you want a stable experience in the actual meaning of the word instead of just something that doesn’t change, almost every other distro will be a better choice
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