[therealpygon]

Libreoffice can handle most office documents these days. Steam can run many games via proton/wine. In fact, for normal “day to day” stuff, I find Ubuntu is a solid replacement. The problems arise the moment some non-mainstream/non-prepackaged install is needed on any distro. The newest drivers, some alternative program, a non-standard networking configuration, etc. The moment any of that is needed the Linux distros immediately fall back to terminal commands which are not end-user friendly. I would guess that 99% of “normal” (but non-standard) things can be done with Mac and Windows via GUI only. Installing another driver, a program, etc. Linux is far from there and only seems to achieve that for the absolute most common operations overall (basics). I like Ubuntu, and I am coming to hate this new Windows approach, but the ecosystem of flexibility and “just use a terminal command” mentality will never really let it go fully mainstream (at least until that is resolved).

[greazy]

Unfortunately LO can not handle most people's document requirements. Not at any fault of LO, it's Microsoft who make comparability hard or impossible. So when working with most people who will be using Office, LO will fail to correctly format a document.

I'm reminded of this great article on the subject

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interopera...

Unfortunately MS make everything a moving target.

[pjjpo]

To be a little fair to Microsoft, they have made it much harder to enable macros over the years. So when stuck with a bank's spreadsheet that requires a win32 macro to convert for upload, I blame the bank.

Luckily grey market keys for both windows and office are so cheap I can just relegate these to a VM for those times it's needed.

The above is probably enough to keep the typical user on Windows forever though.