[npteljes]

A second Linux installation would do the same for you. The insurance is less Windows, and more having redundancy. Especially true if the situation is time critical - a default Linux installation won't stall you with a mandatory update.

[srazzaque]

For some things yes, but not for all things. I can think of 2:

For a remote interview that I had a while back over Cisco WebEx, when things didn't work on my Fedora machine immediately, I'm glad I had my wife's XPS13 with Windows as stand by. Zero time wasted, worked immediately. If that didnt work, it would have been a phone call. I really wouldn't have wanted to muck around with some other distro at that point in time, even if I disagreed with the values of the software developers in question.

For those situations where someone emails me an Excel or Word file that they would like my edits in, and I'm simply not in the position to extoll the virtues of open formats or coach them in Markdown or LaTeX, I have a Windows VM and office.

[npteljes]

I also dual-boot because some of the games I like run on Windows better. But this is not what OP was about, OP's Linux worked well otherwise, that's why I suggested that if they had two of them, they'd have the same "insurance". So that it's not a matter of the operating system itself, but the redundancy.

[trynton]

@srazzaque: "For those situations where someone emails me an Excel or Word file that they would like my edits in, and I'm simply not in the position to extoll the virtues of open formats or coach them in Markdown or LaTeX, I have a Windows VM and office."

Why not get them to install LibreOffice and sent you the spreadsheet in the native format?

https://www.libreoffice.org/

[npteljes]

Because this creates friction, and from the other party's point of view, it's you who introduces it.

But I think MS Office Online, and to some extent ONLYOFFICE solves this problem mostly, no need for Windows or a VM.

[colejohnson66]

LibreOffice doesn’t format all Word documents the same. They’ve done an amazing job, but AFAIK, they haven’t solved every quirk. Also, if you use Excel, Calc doesn’t support everything from VBA. So esoteric VBA macros won’t work sometimes.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d love for LibreOffice to become better, but having Office on a second install is also a sortove “insurance” for when LibreOffice doesn’t work 100% on old documents.

(The Office XML based file formats are a lot better here. I’m mostly talking about the old OLE-dump pre-XML formats)

[depressedpanda]

> For those situations where someone emails me an Excel or Word file that they would like my edits in, and I'm simply not in the position to extoll the virtues of open formats or coach them in Markdown or LaTeX, I have a Windows VM and office.

My solution to this is that if someone sends me something that can only be opened in Word or Excel, they don't want me to look at it.