I think the biggest hurdle against transitioning away from Windows to Linux for most government offices isn’t the OS itself - but rather the MS Office suite!
You’d honestly be surprised how pervasive Excel is amongst white collar workers; and I think the biggest hurdle is the uncertainty of compatibility (of formulas, macros, workbook links etc.) from Excel to Open/Libre Office alternatives.
My understanding is that Libre Office is the closest to actually being a good replacement to Excel. Having used Libre Office’s Excel equivalent, it does not feel good to use (then again, neither did Excel).
I’m not sure if we’ll ever be able to replace the Microsoft office suite - Microsoft owns the rights to those softwares’ workflow paradigms IIRC, and people who have been taught those workflows are not going to abandon them. I mean, we’ve not even managed to move away from the staggered qwerty layout that was established for typewriters in the 1870’s. I think the only options are for schools to either adopt new paradigms (using opensource software as teaching tools) over mass adoption in industry.
I tried dworak for awhile and just like switching from windows it is a bit rough sometimes. Every game you play have to change keybindings as a person who play a lot of different games it became too much. But writing was so good. So much easier and intuitive. Only took like a week or something to get into it.
It is still a mystery to me why no one ever created software that can automatically pull videogame input config files and rebind for other layouts. I guess it is somewhat niche. At the same time, input config files are all pretty similar and it sounds fairly straightforward as a project.
The main issue with Excel is that it is not multithreading in all operations.
But for a lot of things it is the only software that can fit the bill.
Libre office feels a lot worse in to work in up to 8 hours a day compared to Excel and it is probably still missing some features like powerquery among others.
I do need to test it again, it has been a while.
Then again I work as accountant so I am probably in minority of Excel users.
I’ll give Libre Office a crack over the weekend, if/when I get my Bazzite installation going and will see how it goes; I wonder just how much support it has for the newer functions that have outputs that overfill into adjacent cells (e.g. UNIQUE)?
I think the biggest hurdle against transitioning away from Windows to Linux for most government offices isn’t the OS itself - but rather the MS Office suite!
You’d honestly be surprised how pervasive Excel is amongst white collar workers; and I think the biggest hurdle is the uncertainty of compatibility (of formulas, macros, workbook links etc.) from Excel to Open/Libre Office alternatives.
My understanding is that Libre Office is the closest to actually being a good replacement to Excel. Having used Libre Office’s Excel equivalent, it does not feel good to use (then again, neither did Excel).
I’m not sure if we’ll ever be able to replace the Microsoft office suite - Microsoft owns the rights to those softwares’ workflow paradigms IIRC, and people who have been taught those workflows are not going to abandon them. I mean, we’ve not even managed to move away from the staggered qwerty layout that was established for typewriters in the 1870’s. I think the only options are for schools to either adopt new paradigms (using opensource software as teaching tools) over mass adoption in industry.
I tried dworak for awhile and just like switching from windows it is a bit rough sometimes. Every game you play have to change keybindings as a person who play a lot of different games it became too much. But writing was so good. So much easier and intuitive. Only took like a week or something to get into it.
It is still a mystery to me why no one ever created software that can automatically pull videogame input config files and rebind for other layouts. I guess it is somewhat niche. At the same time, input config files are all pretty similar and it sounds fairly straightforward as a project.
The main issue with Excel is that it is not multithreading in all operations. But for a lot of things it is the only software that can fit the bill.
Libre office feels a lot worse in to work in up to 8 hours a day compared to Excel and it is probably still missing some features like powerquery among others. I do need to test it again, it has been a while.
Then again I work as accountant so I am probably in minority of Excel users.
I’ll give Libre Office a crack over the weekend, if/when I get my Bazzite installation going and will see how it goes; I wonder just how much support it has for the newer functions that have outputs that overfill into adjacent cells (e.g. UNIQUE)?