[viraptor]

Latest excel has gold level support: https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI...

I know there are plenty of things that don't work with wine, but realistically, how many of them does each person need to work, and how many are "defaults"? For example if you spend 90% of your time in illustrator, do you need excel specifically, or "an app with text in cells"? And if you're crunching market data in excel all day, do you need Adobe, or just something to draw an arrow on a screenshot?

[dkersten]

I had a similar discussion with my mother recently. She was buying a new laptop and went to check it out in the shop a few days before she actually went to buy it. The lady in the shop on the first visit tried to upsell her some office package for some crazy money. I instead got her to think about what she actually needs and wants and got her to realize that for the odd document or letter she writes and prints (and doesn't share files with others where pixel perfect formatting is important), so a copy of Libre Office actually does everything she needs and then some, and saved her, I don't remember how much, $200 or something.

[yyyk]

If I had a penny for every time a 'Gold level' supported program simply failed to work properly or required some nearly undocumented workaround* , I'd be rich.

* No, I don't consider having to search bugzilla 'documentation'.

Edit: Note that I'm talking about Wine here. When wine is wrapped by people who know what they're doing it works well - Crossweavers/Proton etc. - for the specific subset of programs they're tuned for. Otherwise you have all the wine-typical issues outside that subset.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Right? Don't get me wrong, that Wine works at all is pretty damned incredible, but anyone who thinks of it as a drop in Windows replacement is going to be severely disappointed.

[jodrellblank]

> Latest excel has gold level support

"The test results for this version are very old"

"What works: "Basic editing of the slides (inserting and formatting texts, images)""

"What was not tested: "Advanced functionality""

----

Nobody has tested it recently, nobody knows if "advanced" features work, and they think it's PowerPoint. What does 'Gold' mean?

[viraptor]

> Nobody has tested it recently

Whatever worked is highly unlikely to stop working. You can expect better support than in past test.

> What does 'Gold' mean?

https://wiki.winehq.org/AppDB_Rating_Definitions

[mikestew]

Whatever worked is highly unlikely to stop working.

New to software development, are we? That is such a laughably bad assumption that I’ll assume what I think you meant to say is not really what you meant to say.

But I’m glad to know that editing slides works just fine in Excel. From the link, “Gold” means: “Works as well as (or better than) on Windows with workarounds.” The test results say online login crashes. That tells me their certification program doesn’t mean shit.

[viraptor]

It's not a certification program. It's just reporting system.

And yes, it is what I meant. For software like wine, if something works in version X, you can expect it will work in X+1. Sure, there will always be some regression from time to time, but wine's whole existence is based on the idea that they support Window's APIs. These are not random features they'll decide to remove from time to time.

[braindeath]

> For software like wine, if something works in version X, you can expect it will work in X+1.

Anyone that expects this is setting themselves up for disappointment.

My actual experience with this has not matched yours. Wine is extremely fragile. There is a reason why things like winetricks and using dedicated wine prefixes exists, for one.

This is not a knock on wine really, but the complexity of the problem at hand.

> These are not random features they'll decide to remove from time to time.

Emulating windows APIs is extremely complicated. Even with the best intentions of not breaking something it happens, quite a bit.

You are extremely naive.

[tanr54ok]

The crowd on HN is biased towards software development, something overwhelmingly well supported on Linux (it’s my daily driver as much as possible for that). But I assume there is a long tail of other professionals here... using their systems for actual industry work that isn’t programming. An area that is terrible on Linux sadly.

Photoshop and Illustrator and Premiere are not “defaults” on any system I know of. If you need to draw an arrow on a screenshot, there are ironically more free beer and open source programs available on Windows to do this (even gimp). If someone wants to pirate adobe that isn’t an aspiring designer (which is sort of a rite of passage), and has it just to collect that’s cool, but irrelevant... but I assume if someone has the CS on their machine it’s to do actual work with industry standard tools - that certainly is the case for me.

There are plenty of things to do in Excel that are best served by excel and not crunching market data. I have tried libreoffice calc multiple times in the past. Google sheets is also cool for certain things, but no excel killer.

And here’s the kicker: If you need to just put arrows on screenshots or an app with text in cells (and you’re not a dev), then you don’t need a desktop running Linux or windows... you can do with an iPad.

[amaccuish]

That's not the latest excel, which would be Excel 2019.

[rk06]

You got those examples and mixed up