I hate windows. But I have to use it for work. The worse it gets, the more I want to break free completely, minimise my exposure to this OS. The only part I truly cannot do without I think is Microsoft Excel.
Replacing with Excel 2016 or only using webversion or so is insufficient for sure, for work it needs the SharePoint/auto save etc etc stuff. Also power query getting data from SharePoint online.
Replacing with Libreoffice or so seems completely impossible, there’s too many ‘special’ files in organisation, with .xlsm macro mess, I don’t control all that, I can’t fully steer away from such mess but need full functional access.
Other than Excel, I think I could do all my work from a Linux desktop.
Is it possible by now, reliably working in an up to date excel from a base system Linux? What is the way? Have people done this? How? Do I need to run a virtual machine with win11? How do I do that? Does anyone here have experience with it? I have high degree of control over work devices and boss couldn’t care less, as long as I can get my work done.
Thanks and sorry if this is the wrong community for this question (where would it belong better?)
For work, I just use windows. Not my machine not my problem.
But the slowness… I have a stroke every time I press tab after any git command in Git Bash. The piece of shit takes three seconds to respond. In Linux it happens instantaneously.
I get paid by the hour! 😅 But for real though it’s a struggle. Mostly I try to use msys2 for everything but. I still have native git. There are some long standing bugs that make the vim excruciatingly slow to open or close, really I should go try to fix it but it doesn’t feel like a fun problem.
MSYS2 is a lifesaver!
On the bright side, you’re getting paid to wait around
( /s because I know the feeling, and it’s just slow enough you can’t step away and do something else)
the problem is my patience and frustration
I want to get my shit done and move on with my day, not sit here waiting on stuff and getting RSI from navigating directories so slowly
TIL about winboat thanks to this thread
Me too!
There is no Excel alternative. It sucks, bit its the reality. I run a VM specifically for a couple windows apps and 90% of that is excel.
I use version 2019 and manipulated the installer to only install excel and none of the other office suite apps.
You can also do the same in a docker container instead of VM (winboat) if that’s more your jam.
If you want more info on any of that I’d be glad to give you more details.
You could use something like WinBoat to make installing and using a virtual machine for Windows a lot easier. It also makes Windows apps feel almost like they are native to your Linux desktop, which is nice.
Alternatively, you could try running Excel in wine using Bottles, but I’m not sure how well that’ll go since Excel is kind of a monster of an application.
I will look into Winboat, thanks
Habe you tried winboat? Is basically a docker container with a Windows virtual Maschine inside of it.
Found ze German
No never heard of before, but everyone here is suggesting it so I will check that out. Thanks
There’s a software called Winboat which integrates Windows apps natively in your Linux system and under the hood it’s spin up a virtual machine for it. You can try that for Excel
Wow thank you for this tip! I’m going to give another app a try!
Youre welcome, good luck :D
So it’s not excel, it’s share point you can’t live without.
Infuriaring isnt it!
We just moved to m365 and it sucks, excel is less user friendly than sheets and I hate both.
I get it is needed for its power usage but i detest it. I cannot fathom how a suite of software as bad as m365 is just out there being used.
Calendar sucks. Outlook sucks. Excel sucks. Word sucks. Powerpoint is fine. Sharepoint is woeful. How many other half apps are connected? Loops, etc.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaah
The crown jewel of shittiness in their suite has got to be Teams. Such a dogshit chat program.
Its crazy you can fail so badly at cloning a competitors product yet still be so successful
Oh god. So annoying teams is. The user you’re chatting with might use Skype for bla bla. No he ain’t, he’s next to me. With teams app.
Onedrive force usage… I prefer Dropbox, better ui, better office support than Onedrive. Best of all with Dropbox, shared files are actually reachable by everyone in the team. Sharing through Onedrive, colleague can’t access file even though we set it up as reachable by anyone.
Holy fuck onedrive is ass, drive does a good job of separating yours and shared drives without necessitating a huge bloated framework like sharepoint.
I only use the webapps and they will not accept it, every meeting link opens a “do you wan to download the program” window which requires two aditional clicks to get to my meeting. Their calendar sucks, changing meetings and permissions sucks.
So on my linux PC, I have made a KVM (Kernal Virtual Machine) using QEMU and made a Windows 11 machine inside it (and I bought a digital license for it), which I have work office and email set up. I personally only need to use it occasionally. If you give it enough resources it works decently & runs all windows software; although as it doesn’t have a dedicated graphics card it won’t look as slick as native windows 11 machine and run GPU intense software well (you can get it it’s own dedicated video card and pass it through but really isn’t worth it for just using Excel). It means I can main linux but use Windows occasionally if I really have to. It means you can have a full Windows machine with work Microsoft account set up for Office, One Drive etc - depending on your employers policies of course. You can cut down the resources you allocate it if you want to be switching between the Windows machine and other software in Linux, but Windows can be laggy without enough resources as it’s so poorly optimised.
There are sites that guide on setting up a windows 11 machine in linux, but essentially you need to install KVM modules and Virtual Machine manager in linux (available on all distros). You do need to access your PCs bios to ensure the settings that allow virtual machines to access the CPU are on (slightly different name between AMD and Intel CPUs).
Then you create a machine in Virtual machine manager, give it plenty of resources (especially if the idea being when you use it if it’s the only think you’ll be doing, give it access to most of your CPU cores and the majority of your RAM), and create a decent size virtual hard drive file (I’d say minimum 128gb or more as Windows is bloaty - you can set the virtual drive file size to be flexible so it has a max size but the actual file size is only what is used by the guest system but some file systems still use the whole space unfortunately; not sure how Windows behaves). Download the Windows 11 installer ISO, and then add that file as a virtual CD drive for your guest machine, boot the guest machine, and you should get the Win 11 installer. The VM can only see the virtual hard drive file, so you can install Win 11 safely onto the drives it sees with no risk to your PC. Then reboot and you should have a new Windows install; test it - if it works, buy a digital license (if you want…) and install Office using your 365 account OR if you have old CDs then pass those through to the virtual machine and install as on any Windows PC.
I got it working under both Wine and Bottles for someone that needed it, but it was a real pain in the ass, and the reports on actually successfully doing so are hit or miss.
Found this solid write up on various options and results though, which sounds like it could be helpful for you while investigating: https://gist.github.com/eylenburg/38e5da371b7fedc0662198efc66be57b
LinOffice looks promising, thanks!
Does CrossOver Office support a version of Excel which ticks your boxes? Are you in a position at your workplace to move them off Excel? I honestly have never found an organisation where they were using it for what it was meant for, often being used in place of proper tools - databases, issue management systems, requirements tracking, etc - where the better tool would be better and cheaper.
But, like JIRA, the people who make decisions only know one tool, and that tool is a hammer.
Bingo on the used as database ;) It’s very hard to move them away from that, I have insufficient impact on that
Run windows in a vm for work.
Had to look into this recently for similar reasons. My conclusion was that once you have macros involved, you can’t use anything but an actual copy of Excel. I’ll be spinning up a qemu VM with Windows to support Excel and the full version of Visual Studio when I get that far.
I avoid O365 as much as possible, but when I need to, I do occasionally use it with Crossover and it seems to work. Activation was a little bit janky, but did work.
Crossover is a paid version of WINE, and the other apps I’ve seen mentioned run Windows in a VM and forward the apps through RDP. There are advantages to both approaches, but I prefer the efficiency of Crossover.
If its for work, its on a work machine.
That said, I have a lot of efforts (personal projects with hardware I get given, or side work not related to my job) where I need specific software. For those, I have a VM tailored to that application that’s been trimmed down as much as possible.
This let’s me rdp into them, do what I need to do, save to a designated location, and shut the VM down. Since its a VM I tend not to give it network access unless required, and I have USB drive I pass through to the VM.
This makes sure everything works, I limit the access of MS with local only accounts and win 10 (among other specific versions like XP for a specific piece of hardware, server 2008 for an irritating piece of software I sometimes need, etc).
All the VMs are on my proxmox cluster, easy to start/stop with a script.
