[quchen]

In my recent experience, a new culture of "I switched to Linux and it's fine" is establishing itself. It's on HN, sometimes on YouTube, sometimes my friends are unhappy with ads in their OS. It takes a very good reason to switch OS (most workflows break, after all), and I think the reasons are piling up into mainstream unhappiness.

[grepfru_it]

I switched to Linux. It was great! Then I got some contract work with Redhat. It was great! I completed the contract and provided a summary of my work in a .odt file I wrote on Fedora using LibreOffice. Suddenly it was not great! The team at RedHat said they could not open my file. That’s odd, I’m using their OS. Ok I’ll send the file in LibreOffice’s conversion to Word 2003 format. They opened the file and they said the formatting was off. They said can you just save it in Word and send it to us? I informed them I was using their operating system. They didn’t respond. I sent another message and said I could move to a different computer. Suddenly it was great again! I got paid handsomely for that work, but I had to use Windows.

This is why I do not believe you can switch to Linux. Because the world still runs on Microsoft. It was not until office for Mac reached feature parity (with office for Windows) when companies seriously considered macOS. Currently office for the web has not reached that parity. So the world is still smiling at Linux the same way you would at your 9 year old nephew saying “aww how cute” and then going back to the real world

[adrian_b]

When you create LibreOffice documents and you want to send them to others, which may not be LibreOffice users, the normal procedure is to export your documents as PDF files, which ensures that anyone can use them.

Less frequently, you may want to export your documents to MS formats, if you want them to be editable, but that is much less foolproof than exporting to PDF.

I have worked for many years in companies where almost everybody was using MS Office, while I preferred to use LibreOffice (nowadays Excel remains better than any alternative, but I actually prefer LibreOffice Write to MS Word, because I think that the latter has regressed dramatically during the last 2 decades). Despite that, my coworkers were not even aware that I was using LibreOffice, as all the documentation generated by me was in PDF format.

Product documentation in any serious company should be in PDF format anyway, not in word processor formats that cannot be used by anyone who does not have an appropriate editor or viewer. Even using MS Office is not a guarantee that you can use any MS Office document file, as I have seen cases when recent MS Office versions could not open some ancient MS Office files, which could be opened by other tools, e.g. they could be imported in LibreOffice.

[viraptor]

Not that I don't believe you, but something feels off...

> conversion to Word 2003 format

That's a twenty year old almost-dead binary format. Why would you do that instead of .docx? Or just a PDF.

> They opened the file and they said the formatting was off.

Who cares about formatting on a work summary? Did it have something more interesting than you can put in .rtf?

> not until office for Mac reached feature parity

It hasn't. There's still a difference in feature support.

[shiroiuma]

Why on earth would you not just send a PDF? LibreOffice even has a handy button just for exporting directly to PDF. Does your customer need to edit your work summary for some odd reason?

[ahartmetz]

I remember looking into the spec of the... I think it was the DWARF debug info format, mostly just out of curiosity. Also out of curiosity, I checked the PDF metadata. Creator: Microsoft Word. Curious.

[graemep]

.odt mostly works fine. Its the standard for editable files on gov.uk and it goes entirely unnoticed by most people so MS Word users presumably are able to open them.

[nephihaha]

Linux is great for people that are on HN etc because they're techies, but in my experience most normies struggle to cope with Linux.

[jetin]

There is also a whole population category that isn’t capable of differentiating Windows from Linux. Just yesterday I was showing something on Zorin OS to my father and I had to explain to him that I was not using Windows 10 like he is at home. As long as the web browser is working and he can use his printer, a desktop is a desktop and icons are icons that can be clicked. Any other operation will be written on paper in a step by step well phrased manner. OS choice doesn’t matter for him, he will always struggle so making him switch to Linux won’t change a thing of his experience.

[viraptor]

You'll see a number of stories where this is not the case. I moved my gf to Linux ~2 decades ago instead of upgrading a laptop. She never had issues I had to deal with after that.