Windows 11 is a self inflicted torture if you adopt it just because you may have upgrade FOMO issues. Windows 10 EOL is still 2½ years away. Run it to the ground till then. W11 might even be properly debotnetted and debloated by then, like how W10 got the treatment years after its 2016 launch. Every new version of Windows is a guinea pig testbed for the first few years.
Either way, Linux+Steam with MS Office 2007 in a Windows XP virtual machine can suffice almost all of your needs. The rest is very specific needs like Photoshop, CorelDraw, games that do not work under WINE/Proton or any specific Windows software.
I really can’t see myself using windows ever again, I haven’t for over a decade now and there’s nothing I miss. I also find that Open Office works well enough, GIMP and Krita are great alternatives to stuff like Photoshop.
Open Office, LibreOffice et al just do not have the compatibility that need to exist with MS Office, so whenever you work with others, it falls apart. Ask any user collaborating with even 2-3 people, no matter job, university or school. Usage mostly goes in order of Word > Excel > PowerPoint > rest. I think a Windows XP VM is the best way to get around that while normally using Linux for everything else.
Everything else is a lot more specific use case. Professional users work usually alone with Photoshop. In case of CorelDraw and video editing software, there is a lot of to and fro. Those users generally either use Windows on separate SSD, or have separate production machines.
Why use MS Office 2007 when you can use LibreOffice?
Because LibreOffice is objectively shit for real world work. If LO were used by other people, it would allow for some standardised treatment of document formatting. It is useless to fight against Excel, Word and PowerPoint if you work with other people anywhere.
Best to treat these things as tools rather than be stuck with ideology getting in the way of doing things, and wasting energy on things best used elsewhere.
No, I do not prefer MS Office, but 2007 is pretty okay to use, and even 2016 is okay if you want to use newer version on 7/8.1/10/11.
Are you saying this because of the file formats? You DO know you can saves your documents in the Ms Office 2007 formats, and even make them your default file formats, right?
I mentioned formatting. It is inconsistent. If you want to ensure layout between MSO and LO user stays same, only way is to export as PDF to each other as final output, thus disallowing editing and making collaborative work impossible.
I tried to use LO on Linux for years at university forcibly with others, only to give up later and use MSO 2007 in a XP VM. It just never works out.
Stop being unrealistic FOSS evangelists and instead just try to make sure a reasonable amount of workflow is migrated to FOSS. Office suite is not a battle we can win for now.
Hm… I was under the impression it was rare nowadays to have such a difference between the two, clearly I was wrong. And yes, with such layout problems between the two suites, you can’t use LibreOffice if you’re working conjointly with peoples using Ms Office. (Which is, lest be honest, the case almost all the time.)
That said, for peoples at home who don’t need to share a modifiable version of the documents they create, y would still recommend LO over MsO, for no other reason than the price. (Which DON’T include peoples bringing work at home, nor those working on some collaborative documents in their free time.)
MS Office is a lot more polished even for personal use. No I do not care about OneDrive and few fancy things, but I care about the core offline features related to document. The weird part is I can expect MSO documents to open in LO correctly most of the time, even though the opposite is not true.
I get away with personally using LO, but the moment I think a document might need to be made for external sharing or work, MSO needs to be picked. I do not consider it a sin to use old MSO versions.
