Just recently got arch on my laptop and I’m liking it quite a lot. A breath of fresh air for old hardware and with tlp some substantially better battery life as well.
My big problem is that I use MS office quite heavily for work, including OneNote and OneDrive.
I found onedriver which is an excellent OneDrive on-demand solution.
But I’m at a loss in regards to office. I tried wps, only office, LibreOffice, MS office online. But they all have at least one document of the ones I’m working on right now that doesn’t get rendered properly. Can’t believe how poor Microsoft’s online solution is tbh. I have a pretty big word document that gets completely butchered.
Anyway, what are my options? Is it worth trying something like cassowary? Setting up a VM is probably just going to ruin my battery life and negate any performance advantage I gained by ditching Windows.
Thoughts?
Btw, if this is the wrong community for this kind of question I apologize.
Microsoft doing it’s best that Office won’t work on any other OS properly. The best option imo (but also the most painful) is to switch completely to unix based solutions. Regarding energy consumption i think that TeX is very economical (and can be painful too)
Did you try Wine? I think it should run on Arch. But not everything is working.
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=37735
From the research I did a couple years ago, Office 2010 is the newest version that works out-of-the-box on Wine and the later versions have problems related to Windows Update functionality. Codeweaver’s CrossOver seems like it can run Office 2012 and later, but its paid software with their own patches to Wine.
For me, I’ve had a copy of Office 2007 on my system since 2021 and it seems to have all the important features of modern MS Office, so I wouldn’t stress about running the latest version if you have an older version on hand, unless it is older than Office 2007, because those only support the older Office file formats.
Thanks for the suggestion! I’ll give it a go
The year office 365 is released will be the year of the Linux desktop. Unfortunately I guess that year won’t come.
Have you tried the online version of Office? 365 I think. I haven’t tried it myself, but I’ve heard that it works well.
As far as Onedrive goes, there’s a client that can be set up for real time syncing, like the Windows client. It’s also called onedrive, and it’s available here:
https://github.com/abraunegg/onedrive
There’s a GUI extension by bpozdena that’s very good too, and it’s linked from the github page 👍
EDIT: Sorry, after I posted I saw where you said you’ve tried the online version of Office >.<
Unfortunately I did try. Even before I gave arch a spin. We use it at work to collaborate, it’s of course smarter to send a link than a file that you need to version track manually. Even word itself eggs you on to do so. But honestly, it’s insane how something simple like a header won’t be rendered unless you view the document in a View only mode ?!
If I could I would move everyone and everything to Google docs/sheets but it would take ages to import everything and check for formatting.
