Are there good Microsoft word alternatives that support Linux (I don’t mind closed source)? Libreoffice is meh and only office is quite good, but are there any better ones? Also, is there a way to install word on Linux using wine? When I do that my laptop just overheats and loses internet connection.
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).
Not op, but what drives me back to word (and other ms office like pp and publisher and win is:
90%: Far Superior spell and grammar and style check
10%:
Easy integration of a good tts to read my own texts to me as well as lecture for university.
Easy citavi integration
Auto complete sentences (at least in English)
superior layout presets (on click and OK and modern enough style to submit without even thinking about it) (Far superior for publisher)
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.
For libreoffice, does it support change tracking and digitally signed documents with digital signature + photo of physical signature?
@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.
Disabling WPS’s Internet access will remove the advertisements. Strangely enough, the WPS blog gives instructions on how to do this in Windows.
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.
Your use case matters here. Perhaps there are other specialized tools for what you want to achieve.
Why is LibreOffice “meh”? I have used it for the last 10 years and would like to know what it is you find off with it.
Not OP, but my personal (mild) meh with Libre is it’s visual style. But to be fair, I use it rarely and for those few occasions I’ve been too lazy to check if there are design alternatives (which most definitely exist, we’re on Linux after all).
Try the other UI layouts, like the notebook bar. LO can look pretty close to MS office if you change the settings some.
It’s all programmer UI, really.
Even the tabbed view was hard to use for me, especially the impossible to use “styles” box that scrolls a narrow view. I use it all the time on MS Word, and much prefer how they handle it.
Also, no CSD, so the title bar kinda just chills there, meanwhile it’s used in Microsoft Word.
These are 90s problems. Just open word files in o365 in chromium or Firefox.
These are 90s problems. Just open word files in o365 in chromium or Firefox.
Compatibility with legacy files is still limited. Microsoft never achieved full compatibility between their various ports.
You got any way to to this offline? Else you overestimate the state if Internet in countrys like Germany
Lol. What the hell are you talking about? Internet could be better in some parts, but it’s certainly fine for Web apps.
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
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
AFAIK that doesn’t have the same functionality as the offline version. Last time I checked even basic stuff like styles, bibliographies, citations, automatic tables of content were missing.
People often underestimate how much functionality office stuff has. Especially excel. 99% of people who claim to be experts in Excel are examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Have you tried the different interfaces that libreoffice has? Try switching to their ribbon-like ui and see if it matches what you are looking for.
What exactly are you missing?
What’s your goal? Markdown / latex may work better for your use case than word. https://typora.io/ https://obsidian.md/ https://logseq.com/ https://github.com/marktext/marktext
Dear God, anyone who doesn’t already use LaTeX should not be told to use LaTeX. It’s really a great departure from traditional word processors and I firmly believe that people really need to discover it on their own, or else they will just be confused and think it’s an arcane, dated, and useless piece of software.
