this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
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Micro***t Word on Linux and alternatives (lemm.ee)
submitted 9 months ago by GregorTacTac@lemm.ee to c/linux@lemmy.ml
48 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

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[–] NateNate60@lemmy.world 31 points 9 months ago (4 children)

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).
[–] Jean_le_Flambeur@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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)

[–] PrimalHero@kbin.social 5 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] WhiteHotaru@feddit.de 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Jean_le_Flambeur@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 9 months ago

This looks quite interesting tbh. I will habe a look, thanks for suggesting

[–] Kyyrypyy@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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?

[–] NateNate60@lemmy.world 13 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

For libreoffice, does it support change tracking and digitally signed documents with digital signature + photo of physical signature?

[–] mupan@digitalcourage.social 1 points 9 months ago

@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.

[–] semperverus@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] mwalimu@baraza.africa 20 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] germanatlas@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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).

[–] moomoomoo309@programming.dev 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Try the other UI layouts, like the notebook bar. LO can look pretty close to MS office if you change the settings some.

[–] isVeryLoud@lemmy.ca 3 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] vzq@lemmy.blahaj.zone 17 points 9 months ago (2 children)

These are 90s problems. Just open word files in o365 in chromium or Firefox.

[–] woelkchen@lemmy.world 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Opafi@feddit.de 7 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] Jean_le_Flambeur@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 9 months ago (2 children)

You got any way to to this offline? Else you overestimate the state if Internet in countrys like Germany

[–] Opafi@feddit.de 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Lol. What the hell are you talking about? Internet could be better in some parts, but it's certainly fine for Web apps.

[–] Jean_le_Flambeur@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

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

[–] vzq@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 9 months ago

I have sold houses for less.

[–] Opafi@feddit.de 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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?

[–] Jean_le_Flambeur@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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.

[–] vzq@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Germany has great internet. We provide about half of it.

[–] dumdum666@kbin.social 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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.

[–] Kazumara@feddit.de 1 points 9 months ago

How much is your 10Gb/s plan?

[–] Jean_le_Flambeur@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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

[–] christophski@feddit.uk 9 points 9 months ago

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?

[–] GravitySpoiled@lemmy.ml 9 points 9 months ago (2 children)

https://www.onlyoffice.com/

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

[–] NateNate60@lemmy.world 10 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] GravitySpoiled@lemmy.ml 2 points 9 months ago

come on :D I provided ressources to markdown, not latex. markdown is easier than word.

[–] Hominine@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago

Now do VIM.

[–] Diplomjodler@feddit.de 2 points 9 months ago

Found the "I use Arch, BTW" guy.

[–] undrwater@lemmy.world 8 points 9 months ago

Your question is likely too general for a good answer.

What do you need specifically? What makes the solutions you've tried 'meh'? What would make an office suite 'better'?

There used to be a wine-based project specifically for Microsoft office. It was called crossover office. Not sure if it's still maintained.

Good luck!

[–] ChiefSinner@lemm.ee 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

If libre/open office isn't your thing, there's always cloud based ones like office365 and google docs.

I also found this. Never heard of some of these things, so I can't really recommend them.

https://itsfoss.com/libreoffice-alternatives-linux/

You can also use ms word in wine if you're writing. However; if you're opening docs from the internet, I wouldn't recommend opening them up in anything running in wine. Remember, wine is a windows emulator based on windows 2000.

[–] c10l@lemmy.world 22 points 9 months ago

Wine is not a Windows emulator. The name literally means “Wine Is Not an Emulator”.

It’s also not based on Windows 2000. In fact, it started out translating syscalls from Windows 3.1.

The syscalls themselves are pretty stable between Windows versions, which is why you can run a Windows XP application on Windows 11 without recompiling it, as long as it’s for the same architecture.

[–] LeFantome@programming.dev 6 points 9 months ago

As a long-time Linux user, I feel like it says something about the maturity of desktop Linux that it is good enough now for the kinds of users that find LibreOffice insufficient.

[–] glennglog22@kbin.social 6 points 9 months ago

Micro***t 🤮

[–] LemmyIsFantastic@lemmy.world 6 points 9 months ago

You can just use the browser version of word.

[–] Helix@feddit.de 5 points 9 months ago

Use the online version of Word if you want Word. If you want the desktop version use an older one, the Office 365 ones don't really work on Linux.

Why is LibreOffice 'meh'?

[–] lal309@lemmy.world 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

OnlyOffice is the only one that I’ve used that has a good looking UI, works out of the box and very good compatibility (across Microsoft and other document standards). Install is just one flatpak away. Highly recommend.

[–] irmoz@reddthat.com 1 points 9 months ago

I second this. I use it for university. Good software.

[–] westyvw@lemm.ee 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Really trying to understand what "meh" means in terms of office software.

They all are kinda meh. I dont get overly excited with office stuff do you?

Over the years I have used both Libre and ms office. Some use cases were so much better with Libre. Now days it's kind of a wash really. You write words or you calculate cells. If you are calculating any large amount of cells do your self a favor and get it into a database.

And if it's a presentation, reveal.js is miles better than PowerPoint.

[–] MOUCHE_A_MERDE@jlai.lu 1 points 9 months ago

has i undestand meh is better that fuu but less good that okay

[–] Goldmaster@lemmy.ml 2 points 9 months ago

I did a look into this. softmaker is best when it comes to compatibility of displaying files. Wps office is ok, but some text would be on top of others. I did find that there is a free version of softmaker, which should be ok.

[–] efscher@lemmy.nyc.what.if.ua 1 points 9 months ago

WPS Office and FreeOffice. Each with their own caveats, but one just might work for you.

[–] skilltheamps@feddit.de 1 points 9 months ago

There's softmaker office, it's from a german company: https://www.softmaker.com/en/products/softmaker-office