[phkahler]

>> If RH find it to be a lot of work that is supporting very few users, then it doesn't have to say anything about their solvency. Just a spreadsheet cost calculation.

A Linux distribution is more than the sum of its parts. Having out-of-the-box ability to read MS office docs is a huge deal. Nobody wants to fuck around installing something extra to read a defacto standard document format.

[tssva]

Even the creator of the defacto standard document format doesn't ship the ability to read it out of the box. Neither does the other major desktop operating system vendor.

[glowingly]

Wordpad has read docx files for a while now.

edit: I just checked my Win11 VM, and Wordpad is included by default. It also reads and writes docx and odt.

[tssva]

WordPad only supports limited capabilities of the docx format.

[LeFantome]

Having to install a Flatpak does not make Linux any less “out of the box” than MacOS or Windows. They are all going to require installing something.

If you are not going to buy Microsoft Office, LibreOffice may be your best bet on all platforms.

These days, if you ARE going to buy Office, it is likely to be a subscription to Office 365. If you are a subscriber, you can your documents in a web browser in Linux as well as you can on Windows. You can even use Edge.

[einpoklum]

Indeed, Windows has no out-of-the-box office productivity suite. But - at large companies, and most organizations with IT services setting up a machine for you, the default image installed for new users does have it.

For independent individual users, if we could somehow arrange it so that LO were installed by PC builders / laptop vendors - that would increase its user base from ~200M to 2 Billion within a few years. It would trounce MS Office.

[LeFantome]

“At large companies, and most organizations with IT services” you are increasingly likely to get an Office 365 subscription. If so, you can use your web browser to access all of this stuff including Outlook, OneDrive, and Teams.

If your company has standardized on Office 365 or Google Docs, the experience is pretty similar on all platforms ( Linux included ).

I use Outlook in a browser more than I launch it as an application ( even on Windows ). The same is true of Teams. To be honest, I do not use Word heavily much anymore ( but it works more than well enough to read any doc I might need on Windows ).

On Linux, I do tend to use LibreOffice to author presentations or spreadsheets rather than PowerPoint or Excel in the browser. Office 365 online would work fine for most of what I do though.

LibreOffice is more for people that DO NOT work large companies I think.

[microtonal]

It's pretty much two or three clicks away with Flatpak and LibreOffice get to control the experience. People also install Microsoft Office or Apple Pages/Keynote/Sheets through the app store, and however Office is installed on Windows.