I’m liking the recent posts about switching to Linux. Some of my home machines run Linux, and I ran it on my main laptop for years (currently on Win10, preparing to return to Linux again).

That’s all fine and dandy but at work I am forced to use Windows, Office, Teams, and all that. Not just because of corpo policies but also because of the apps we need to use.

Even if it weren’t for those applications, or those policies, or if Wine was a serious option, I would still need to work with hundreds of other people in a Windows world, live-sharing Excel and so on.

I’m guessing that most people here just accept it. We use what we want at home, and use what the bossman wants at work. Or we’re lucky to work in a shop that allows Linux. Right?

  • pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip
    34·
    2 days ago

    Office 365 and teams work fine on Linux in Chrome or Firefox, including voice calls, video calls and screen sharing, and notifications with pop-ups and sounds.

    Excel, in particular, is 100% inside Office365 in the browser when I have to interact with it. In the past, I have created Excel files in LibreOfffice and uploaded them to Office365 to convert. Though I haven’t been tempted to do so in a few years.

    Most of my coworkers are not aware that I run Linux at work. My boss knows and doesn’t care. My peers are just surprised when I mention it, because I use the same tools without issue.

    Zoom works great on Linux, as well, both in bowers and as the native app. Many corporate VPNs are compiant with open standards, and so don’t even require any additional install. Cisco’s isn’t made right, but they provide a Linux client that works fine.

    Slack works fine in browser, including full first class notifications. I haven’t sought out a dedicated client app, but I recall having some options.

    DropBox and Google have particularly decent Linux client applications, and of course, fully functional web tools.

    There’s also some excellent ways to run Android apps nearly seemlessly inside an Android emulator of Linux. In theory, I could resort to those, but I haven’t because everything I need works in a web browser now.

    I’ve heard that the two glaring exceptions are AutoCad and Adobe Creative Suite. I understand that neither works on Linux or in a browser (per other threads on Lemmy).

    Oh yeah, and Linux has more and better ways to produce nice PDFs than Windows does, and of course reads them without issue

    Oh, and yes, mandatory compliance stuff like antivirus tools and CrowdStrike also have compliant options for Linux. Some of the really shitty spyware level invasive stuff probably hasn’t been ported to Linux, but the “keep me virus free” stuff seems pretty available - because they want to sell copies for Linux servers.

    Edit: If this seems needlessly thorough, it is because I worked to independently verify all of these details before my upgrade. I figure my notes might help someone making the case to switch, or just researching whether they need to not switch.

      • pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip
        1·
        2 hours ago

        Fair enough!

        Conversion

        First, I haven’t yet encountered a pre-existing document on Linux that didn’t turn into a nice PDF when fed into “Print - Save as PDF”, which I have found to be present by default on Gnome and KDE (the two most popular desktop environments). So for the majority of distros, Print to PDF is pre-installed and available.

        For advanced use cases, there’s Pandoc. Pandoc can convert most document formats to many other formats, and gives fine grained control over every step.

        Authoring PDFs

        For authoring a quick PDF, there’s LibreOffice and OpenOffice.

        And of course there’s GnuImp, Krita, and so many more options for editing some images to add in.

        Most distros ship with LibreOfffice or OpenOffice, and at least one image editor.

        But I do recommend investigating some free and open image editors. There’s many use cases and twice as many options. If the default isn’t for you, what you need may be one (free) Software search away.

        But can I just use plain text? (Yes)

        For control freaks like me, there’s also a whole ecosystem of tools that work well with Markdown, ASCIIDoc, LaTex, and ReStructuredText.

        For the curious, start by trying VSCodium with a Markdown extension.

        You can tune your extensions here, but I think I recall “Markdown All-In-One” getting me all the way from raw text to nice enough looking PDFs in one command. Maybe it was two, using the built in “Print to PDF” dialog.

        Once again, PanDoc is the powerhouse of this use case, and many excellent tools are available.