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One thing I would love for Linux to do is to be able to port over the latest and greatest version of Microsoft Office. While I give Microsoft a hard time on a lot of stuff, their office program is one of the best ones out there in my opinion. Never have had any luck running it with WINE. That is really the only thing that would stop me from using Linux full time. A lot of stuff I use can be used on Linux, even some of that stuff runs better on Linux than Windows.
Location: Mableton, GA USA (NW Atlanta suburb, 4 miles OTP)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by skinsguy37
One thing I would love for Linux to do is to be able to port over the latest and greatest version of Microsoft Office. While I give Microsoft a hard time on a lot of stuff, their office program is one of the best ones out there in my opinion. Never have had any luck running it with WINE. That is really the only thing that would stop me from using Linux full time. A lot of stuff I use can be used on Linux, even some of that stuff runs better on Linux than Windows.
I use LibreOffice to play with docs from MS Office (including viewing Visio docs), and it seems to work just fine, but we aren't using the latest and greatest MS Office at work. 2007, I think.
Mint is good, and the reason I say this, is that I installed it on a friend's computer, and it's still working after about a year. A year may not seem much, but for him, it's a long time for it to run for. He did have windows 10, but messed that right up, (or maybe it was his teenage son, on dodgy sites), and then couldn't remember his own password for me to get in and even try to put it right. So, Mint it was, and is still running fine, even with the children playing games on it.
Just a note about Linux; I've run the system monitor on loads of versions, and there is something a little worrying about how quite a few of them run. (Not Mint). What I've found is that even when the computer is just idle, one at a time, the processors cores are being pushed to 100%, and all the rest of the cores are being pushed a little hard too while this is happening. The worst usually have the word "Ultimate" in their name.
I use LibreOffice to play with docs from MS Office (including viewing Visio docs), and it seems to work just fine, but we aren't using the latest and greatest MS Office at work. 2007, I think.
Yeah we use 2013 at work and getting ready to release 2016 out to everyone. Working for a technical school, we always have to be on the latest and greatest if we can.
I recently finished up building a triple boot system (XP-32, W7-64, Mint 17.3 64). I have been an XP user on my personal machines up until this point and have never had serious issues, I still think XP is one of the best operating systems out there. I have quite a bit of professional experience with 7 and like it very much as well. A few people have been bending my ear to try out Mint, so here I am.
So for the Mint users... why do you use it? What sort of things does it really excel at? What does it notably lack, compared to the MS operating systems mentioned? My questions are broad, I am just trying to get an idea of how I want to start using this system.
Thanks.
I think for first time users of Linux, Mint is one of the best Linux distros around, as you don't have to tinker around with it much to get it to work.
If you're a User, explore all the programs that are available with Mint (and other distros), just as you would Windows.
Compare LibreOffice or OpenOffice with MS Office. Personally, I think MS Office is the best of the bunch, but its bloated. I probably use only 30-40 % of it's features at work.
Which is why I prefer LibreOffice for personal use. As long as I keep it simple, not be too fancy and save it in the Open Document format, it works great.
IMO, the real strength of Linux, though, is for developers. There are tons of free/almost-free development tools. And several great online communities for developers. (i.e. how to turn that old pc into a super router". Or "your own Kodi box" ).
There's this thing that I can't fully describe: when I'm using a Windows machine, I think about office documents, worksheets, applications and systems. When I'm on the Mac, I'm thinking more like a User, a Writer, check email, surf the web a bit. When I'm on my Linux machine, I'm thinking how do I build things, explore this, hack into that, etc.... I can do these things on the Windows or Mac computers. But I don't. I like being on the Linux machine the most. Obviously, this varies from person to person.
The very nature and philosophy of open source - sharing information, has made it an excellent platform for start-ups. Obviously, there are free, open source tools for the Windows platform too. But the best ones cost a lot of money. Which is fine if your company pays for it.
Anyway, just be aware that there are security concerns with Linux Mint because some of their security updates settings are disabled and/or are a bit later than Ubuntu, on which Mint is based (except Mint Debian). Years ago, an Ubuntu developer posted a little blurb about "I wouldn't use Linux Mint for online banking and such ....", which was later countered by Mint project leader Clement Lefebvre (he of the "don't use Mint if you support Israel" fame).
I'm not saying Mint is un-secure now. Just that they have had their problems in the past, and might not be as security-conscious as, say, Red Hat, Fedora or even Ubuntu - the Linux Mint team does not have the resources the aforementioned companies do. Early this year, the Mint website was hacked (via a wordpress plugin) and one of the .ISO download files was replaced with one with a trojan.
My first Linux install was a Debian build. But they took the "free software" idea to the extreme - no proprietary CODECs, and it didn't come with Firefox (I can't remember the reason why).
When I upgraded, I got a CD with a bunch of distros. Mint was the one that worked the best with multimedia, so I've stuck with it.
As to why to use Linux over Windows? Among other reasons, I like going into the software manager and seeing all free programs I can install, sorta like a free apps store. And some aren't available on Windows, i.e . QUCS.
One thing I would love for Linux to do is to be able to port over the latest and greatest version of Microsoft Office. While I give Microsoft a hard time on a lot of stuff, their office program is one of the best ones out there in my opinion. Never have had any luck running it with WINE. That is really the only thing that would stop me from using Linux full time. A lot of stuff I use can be used on Linux, even some of that stuff runs better on Linux than Windows.
Funny, I'm in a diiferent camp. I've used OpenOffice and LibreOffice with very few problems, even when converting to MS Word documents.
My complaint is that they are clones of MS Word - I'd like to see something different. Putting images in an MS Word document is more painful than the root canal I had. I'd like to see a word processing program that makes inserting pictures easy.
Location: Mableton, GA USA (NW Atlanta suburb, 4 miles OTP)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by troymclure
Funny, I'm in a diiferent camp. I've used OpenOffice and LibreOffice with very few problems, even when converting to MS Word documents.
My complaint is that they are clones of MS Word - I'd like to see something different. Putting images in an MS Word document is more painful than the root canal I had. I'd like to see a word processing program that makes inserting pictures easy.
IBM Lotus Ami Pro (formerly Samna Ami) and GeoWrite both were fairly good with pictures, especially the latter, which was interesting because it was a "DOS" program (part of the software bundle which came with Geoworks Ensemble from Berkely Softworks).
GeoWrite also had bitmap<->vector conversion tools for images.
Of course, Word killed all sorts of good alternatives because IT departments wanted to standardize on Windows, and MS was smart enough to write terms into their support contracts to tie bulk pricing deals with the exclusive use of their own software. I used to work in an IT department where all of the docs were written with a third-party program called FrameMaker, which was excellent for large/complex documents, and we were forced by the IT folks to switch to Word. It was an absolute nightmare in a dual-platform shop (Windows NT 4 and MacOS) because Word 97 and 98 tended to store documents in such a way that page layouts were tied into the fonts being used, and the Mac and Windows did not have identical font sets.
I guess Word does beat using DCF in an IBM mainframe TSO environment, which is what we used before that.
Have you tried using other tools? Scribus or even Dia might be worth checking out. I tend to do some documents in Visio because I need diagrams.
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