So, at school we use the whole Office 365 suite for a myriad of tasks.
Teams is used as the main way to share exercises and lesson material, Outlook is used as the resident email service, and you’re expected to use OneDrive to store all/most of your data. There are some additional apps that require Windows, but beyond the office 365 suite they are all replaceable.
What I’m wondering is, what distro can run/access those apps without too much hassle and set-up?
I’m looking to do this on a HP probook x360, upgraded to 32 GB of ram. The only peripheral of note I’ve got is a Ugee drawing tablet, but I can use the openTabletDriver or their own on some distro’s.
Any distro.
Use a Windows VM for things that are unavailable or don’t work well as a web app. The absolute easiest way to run a Windows VM is VMware Player especially if you use a stable OS like Debian or Ubuntu LTS. The built-in KVM hypervisor works fine too but it requires more work to setup a Windows VM with all the drivers, shared folder, etc. And it won’t have graphics acceleration of any sort.
For teams specifically I’m just using the web version with chromium. Installed as a chromium app so I have quick access to it and have it on my taskbar. Rest of Office 365 works just fine in any browser. (Outlook, SharePoint, Power apps etc) For OneDrive Sync you can use https://abraunegg.github.io/ which should work on most distros.
That’s what we do at $dayjob, also.
You don’t need Chromium as it natively supports Firefox and Firefox based browsers
Firefox would give me weird problems with teams in the past. Have not tried it in a while though. I’ll try it and if it works without problems now I’m happy to leave chromium behind.
Any distro you’d like. Use the office / outlook stuff in a browser. I believe kde has a way to use onedrive in dolphin, though personally I would keep my data on my computer unless it is for a group project, just make sure it’s backed up. I’d also have a VM handy with the spice guest tools. It is good to have at least for when you have to hand your computer to someone who may be uncomfortable with linux. I would use debian on a school computer for the ludicrous stability, but use whatever floats your boat.
I would go with the WRB apps for the office stuff and recommend Thunderbird as a client for outlook.
Sorry, I tried to search it but to no avail. What are the WRB apps?
I meant web apps
Outlook is a client. Do you mean Exchange?
Yes
I have the same situation at work, where I’m actually the CTO and have the power to change that but… It’s been like this for two years before I came in and right now there are a lot of dependencies to fix. It’ll take at least a year to prepare tos switch away, it sucks.
Having said that.
I’m running kubuntu myself and use the web version of teams and office, which both are hilariously bad to the point where you really have to ask the question why people pay money for this shit.
Google is an evil company but at least their software works to a reasonable point. Teams and office365 and outlook are so bad that I could write a multi page bug list and that is ignoring the fact that its just so hard to get anything done. Everything requires extra clicks, teams call connection lost? Sucks to be you, you can’t simply reload like in Google Meet, you have to ask your client to include you again in the call which is just sad. Outlook go back to the previous message with the browser back button which is there for exactly jat reason? Yeaaahhh, sucks to be you, buddy. Just a few random design issues from a long, long list.
Fuck everything about Microsoft
Edit: teams requires chrome, video calls won’t work on firefox for the moment, causing a crash in some codec library
Try OnlyOffice
Have already before and would love to again but…
I want it integrated with next cloud, and it MUST have perfect compatibility with Microsoft Office.
The former, so far, has always been a hellscapr to setup, even with the help of developers.
I’d suggest simply dual-booting windows and your choice distro. You’re going to be using Microsoft services either way, whether through the browser or native apps. Just use windows boot for school exclusively and have you’re onedrive and office there. and then personally use linux.
- Install the user Flatpak for Teams
- Log into your OneDrive online account, use the file manager plugin for the files
- Use any mail client you like for the e-mail, Thunderbird for example works fine
- Use the web version of Office, sadly
The web version of office is very bad and mostly unusable. You can supplement it with libreoffice but that sounds like it isn’t an option.
In my experience it’s most of the installed version of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. It’s leagues above Google Docs.
While the web suite is not as feature rich as the installed version or as LibreOffice, I’ve experienced some compatibility issues between LibreOffice and MS Office. (but most importantly, their school requires MS Office)
No offense to you but I call BS. Since when is some random product leagues better for every use case.
If you don’t want to learn something new I can respect that. However, Microsoft isn’t God
I agree, I actually prefer LibreOffice in most cases, especially Calc. I wouldn’t require a class to all use the same product under the illusion that it’s the only good one.
That said, I’ve had LibreOffice Writer’s .docx files show different styling when opened by MS Word and vice versa, so in the context of MS Office being required by OP’s school, I recommend MS Office online as I’ve had good experience with that.
None of those things you’ve mentioned require you to install something to your system. Outlook has a website which works perfectly fine on Firefox, and you can access OneDrive on web. As for Teams, I’ve had varying amounts of luck with the web app, but I think that’s more to do with my myriad browser addons than my system? I dunno though
I exclusively use teams on the web on Rocky. Firefox, Chrome, and edge all work for me.
As most others said, pretty much any distro is fine. You have a powerhouse of a laptop, so running a Windows VM inside of KVM would pose no problem, but if you can, I’d advise to try avoiding a VM.
Teams is basically just a web app masquerading as a classic application using Electron, so you can just use Teams inside of your browser of choice with minimal features missing (the only one I noticed was green-screen, but I didn’t care that much about it).
Even if you use a lot of Office, you’d be surprised at how similar LibreOffice is to MS Office. The UI is a lot worse IMO, but 99% of the features are there. Tables in Word/Writer seem to behave quite a bit differently for one which can get annoying, along with the usual problems of switching from one UI to another. As for formats, LibreOffice supports MS Office extensions. There are some differences in rendering because of what I see as MS bullshit, but it’s limited to padding, font size, etc. (and missing fonts), but if your teachers are open to it you can easily send them the original as well as a PDF reference just in case.
I didn’t use Office web apps for a few years now, but when I did they were missing a lot of features (more than 80% i’d say), but others say the situation has improved, so you can try that in your browser of choice like Teams.
If you need the desktop Office apps, you maybe could use Wine or something to run them on Linux, but I don’t have any experience with that so I don’t know how well they behave or how the setup is.
You could easily run a VM with KVM with the specs you listed. Personally I find the installation of KVM and Windows VM creation a bit convoluted, but there are great tutorials availiable online and it’s a one-time ordeal of maybe 15-45 minutes (including VM creation, depending on how fast you want to go/how familiar with the Linux command line you are), so not that bad. Utilizing virt-manager limits command line use to just the first setup of KVM. Installing the VM can be done graphically using virt-manager.
I don’t know how drawing tablet passthrough compatibility in KVM is (probably great though). RedHat drivers enable shared clipboard and dragging files over between the host and VM, so even that should be quite painless if you choose to go the VM route.
So I’m confused. Wouldn’t you want Windows? Also outlook can be replaced by Thunderbird.
So basically I see two options. First, if your device has 4 or more cores and 16gb of ram you can run Windows in KVM. If that isn’t the case you need to pickup another device or not use Linux.
I mostly want to switch since it feels better. It’s a first big step into becoming independent from Microsoft, and I don’t like the way they’re going with LLM’s among other things (I.E. totally oblivious of any security issues or broken code until the internet/EU spanks’m for it)
The main reason though, windows 10 has ShapeCollector.exe to help windows learn your writing style. Windows 11 removed that, and just didn’t replace it with anything. Really irks me that.
In terms of thunderbird, school needs to grant permission, which I did ask for. Don’t think they’ve granted it though.
Why do you need permission to use Thunderbird but not Linux? It seems a bit weird.
I would highly recommend against installing a pirated version of Windows like BearOfATime suggests (at least via the second link he provided) - it could cause trouble for both you and your school.
Microsoft supports Ubuntu LTS for their employees, and more recently RHEL. Not my first choices, but in particular you’ll see stuff like AAD auth on Azure VPN supported on Ubuntu LTS. There will also be some work going into proper Intune support, if that matters.
I would prefer Fedora or Debian for a more stable environment, and use Arch at home, but we have to keep interoperability in mind sometimes.
Another thing to look into, and I really hate to since Broadcom bought them, but you can run Windows inside VMWare, and use unity mode to break individual windows out into your DE. Beware of the new licensing.
Why wouldn’t you use KVM?
It really depends, but generally, I want to use as much Linux as possible, and for me a bigger part of that is the UI than the hypervisor.
I found that Virtual manager and gnome boxes are both solid from a UI perspective. The big upside is that you don’t need to install a bunch of extra stuff. They are easy to install and setup and it is smooth sailing one you setup the guest
But they don’t break windows from within the guest, into the host desktop environment. You see the entire desktop as a container.
That’s the nice part. You get a shared clipboard and autoresize so you can use it like a regular app.
365 admin here. Use whatever distro you want and just use the web versions of Office apps. They’ve been greatly improved and are nearly identical to their desktop counterparts. Especially if you’re leaning heavily into OneDrive/Sharepoint.
This is your answer, OP.
As a backup you can have a VM with Windows and the full apps if you need them (like Access for instance).
How good are VMs at booting a physical partition?
I often use fields, so I have to go back to desktop Word eventually to add them in. 🥲
Users only use a fraction of the feature set but everyone uses a different fraction 😂
I always find 365 word does not format correctly particularly with tables and text.
Format your document? Format your expectations. Fuck you, that will be $35/mo. -Microsoft, probably
I needed a laugh today, thanks, lol
I use the web version of all O365 apps, even Teams, and I also have a Windows VM in case I need the desktop apps for whatever reason.
Ya, this comment is way too far down. All 365 apps with within the browser. Problem solved.
Except it sucks…
When I had to use Office and LibreOffice wasn’t sufficient, I just had a Windows VM running. The web versions are hot garbage (or at least used to be 3 years ago and I doubt that’s changed). I’m not sure if there’s a direct way to mount OneDrive on Linux (rclone maybe?) but if there isn’t you could do that via a network share over the VM.
KMail can connect to Exchange mailboxes. KOrganizer might even be able to access the calendar from one, I don’t remember.
The web versions are hot garbage (or at least used to be 3 years ago and I doubt that’s changed)
It’s better, less hassle than run a VM just for that.
I’d rather take the hassle of doing initial Windows setup once than the hassle of continuously fighting against awful software.
continuously fighting against awful software
Arguably this is why some people don’t bother with a VM and use the web apps instead.
