Linux Software that You Use to Replace Windows Software

Discussion in 'all things UNIX' started by AutoCascade, Aug 24, 2015.

  1. Daveski17

    Daveski17 Registered Member

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  2. UnknownK

    UnknownK Registered Member

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    Argumentum ad populum
    ?

    It's like saying every browser except IE is "trash" because IE has been the defacto standard in the business world for decades.

    What can outlook do which Kmail , Thunderbird, Evolution or any other FLOSS mail client can't do from a personal usage point of view in a non-corporate setup?
     
  3. chrisretusn

    chrisretusn Registered Member

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    I don't replace Windows software with Linux software. I just Linux and find most of my needs satisfied with Linux programs. If I need a program that requires Windows, I use Windows. In my case it's via VirtualBox so no need to dual boot. The only thing I use Windows for these days is doing my taxes (US). I prefer downloading vice doing and saving my tax data on-line via the browser. Why use WINE when I can use Windows. Games? Steam is working out well for me. Most of the games I play are PS4 or Android games anyway.

    LibreOffice is my choice regardless of operating system, just don't care for Office. I rarely encounter (outside of minor, easily fixed) issues with Microsoft formats. In those few cases I have, the most recent a flier in Word, was because the author really didn't know what they are doing and made an unnecessarily complex document in Word where the same result could be accomplished with less complexity. Hope that makes sense. Instead of fixing it, I simply asked for a PDF version.

    What do you consider wild stuff? I have many complex spreadsheets in Calc. I find Excel to be somewhat incompatible with Calc, especially in the area of external linking and some formulas. I do a lot of things in Calc and find that Excel just doesn't do it for me.

    I occasionally get Publisher documents, Draw handles those just fine. For creating similar type documents, Scribus or LyX does the job. Or just plain Tex/LaText to get the desired results.

    I've never used Photoshop so can't compare; but I am perfectly happy with GIMP. For my photo library I use digiKam, my email I use Claws Mail.
     
  4. Daveski17

    Daveski17 Registered Member

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    I think the OP was asking what Linux software on a machine actually running Linux is the nearest Windows equivalent and effectively replaces it. On Ubuntu I use SMPlayer as my predominant media player and I think it rivals VLC in popularity on Ubuntu and derivative systems. I find qpdfviewer and LibreOffice more than competent and I even use LibO on Windows as I have not installed Office on Win 7.
     
  5. zakazak

    zakazak Registered Member

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    One example from my job:
    Ever day about 250 Items are getting added to a sharepoint spreadsheet. At the end of the year to complete spreadsheet (~90.000 lines, each with ~30 columns) are getting synced into an excel sheet. Those items will then get "overlayed" with the data from previous years, they then get filtered, calculated into statistics, diagrams, etc.
    This is a task that takes on my office computer a few hours (computer calculating time on 4 cores). Excel never crashed on this, Excel does this just fine, Excel is reliable on this. And I am not even sure if anything except Excel would support sharepoint, syncing that amount of data, etc

    Before I started working and still went to school I only worked with OpenOffice or LibreOffice. When writing a 100-150 page documentation including pictures, diagrams, etc it would freeze those applications and make them unstable/slow/long to load. Office handled those file with ease. I didn't even encounter any lag while scrolling through those 100+ pages.
    Even in school I encountered tasks that made me boot up Excel in a virtual box because else I would encounter crashes or get annoyed by lags while working.

    Microsoft Office, at some point, is just more stable and has better performance. Feature wise it might not be anything fancy compared to Open/LibreOffice (at least on the private working sector). Same goes for Outlook in my opinion.
     
  6. chrisretusn

    chrisretusn Registered Member

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    @zakazak, thanks for the input. Interesting. SharePoint is a Microsoft product. It makes sense to use Excel. That said, LibreOffice does support MS SharePoint via CMIS protocol to access Document Management Systems. I don't have access to SharePoint so cannot comment on how well it works. I have some very large spreadsheet that do a lot of what you are saying. Same goes with 100+ page writer documents. The big difference may be that I am not looking for MS Office compatibility. Most documents I deal with use the OpenDocument format native to LibreOffice. That said I just opened some Word 400+ page documents and scrolled through them without issues. It could be there have been some improvement since the last time you used LibreOffice.

    This might be of interest: Feature Comparison: LibreOffice - Microsoft Office - The Document Foundation Wiki


    I prefer LIbreOffice, you prefer MS Office and that's OK.

    Have to comment on Outlook, there really isn't anything that can replace it especially with dealing with Exchange.
     
  7. Kerodo

    Kerodo Registered Member

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    You won't understand unless you've used Outlook in a business/corporate setting or even a personal setting for decades and know all it's in's and out's. I'm not interested in defending something that doesn't need defending. Either you have experience with this or you don't. If you don't understand, don't worry about it. No offense, but it would take much too long to educate the clueless, with little to no payoff. Sorry... ;)

    Just use what you like, and move on like the rest of us...
     
    Last edited: Aug 26, 2015
  8. elapsed

    elapsed Registered Member

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    It was a bit of a shock but it is the internet so my expectations of things are always low.
     
  9. NGRhodes

    NGRhodes Registered Member

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    A lot of choice between 2 quite different products such as LibreOffice and MS Office can be less about the feature parity and more about the business processes that need to be supported.

    I use Thunderbird + davmail for email and calendaring, adding invites from email is frequently glitchy, apart from that has been fine.
     
  10. mirimir

    mirimir Registered Member

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    I've hacked large (many GB) corporate data dumps. But I had no custom software, and often little documentation. My main tool was SQL Server. But some things are just easier in spreadsheets. The data is just sitting there. Maybe it's just that I'm very visual. Also, it's possible to do some amazing things with VLOOKUP.

    Anyway, like zakazak, I typically ended up with many large sheets of summary data in Excel. I'd pull out slices, further summarize, look at charts, etc, etc. Once I'd decided what reports were most useful, I could go back and write SQL to get them directly from the raw data. Then I'd just do tables and charts in Excel.

    So I can do the overall analysis in MySQL and Calc (or even Gnumeric). But the scoping part is problematic. Also, Calc only uses one CPU core, so it's much slower. And it tends to crash when calculations get too complicated. I don't recall that I've ever managed to hang or crash Excel in Windows 7.
     
  11. act8192

    act8192 Registered Member

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    MS Office - I can't replace Excel. VBA macros, user defined functions, and even some standard functions don't work in LibreOffice and OpenOffice.
    Outlook is also difficult to replace. Word is ok for the most part unless it has VBA macros.
    In Windows, Kingsoft office is the closest to functioning, but it, too, fails some macros. Don't know if Kingsoft has a Linux version.
     
  12. MisterB

    MisterB Registered Member

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    That is pretty intense. The only thing I use in Office is Word. I'm still using the 2003 version. It does everything I need as far as writing is concerned. If I ever need to dump it, there are a lot of decent alternatives for both Linux and Windows. I'm really focused on content when I use it and don't want to be distracted by learning a new version, much less a new word processor so I continue to use it.

    In my current Ubuntu experiment, there is not much I would miss if I went totally to Linux but it would take some adjustment. I would still have some software that I would use in a Windows VM or Wine.
     
  13. UnknownK

    UnknownK Registered Member

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    Believe me I have no interest whatsoever in whatever thing anybody else uses or not. I have no interest whatsoever in this outlook thing becasue I am not going to use it ever. I just wanted to know is there anything my mail client, as a personal mail client, is not able to do which outlook is able to do. If you think I am clueless just because I don't use a certain "superior" mail client, whatever that clueless means, I don't give a hoot.
     
  14. Amanda

    Amanda Registered Member

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    I only use FOSS software. I can find replacements for every software I need, like:

    * GIMP, I find it better than PS;
    * Blender, better than Maya or SolidWorks;
    * SimpleScreenRecorder, better than FRAPS;
    * K3B, better than Nero;
    * Iceweasel from Trisquel's repositories, because even vanilla Firefox on Linux is a complete disaster for privacy;
    * Kmail for mail;
    * Inkscape, replacing CorelDraw;
    * VLC for any purpose, even to make me a toast once in a while;
    * LibreOffice for, well, office;
    * Okular for PDFs;

    Etc, etc, etc.
     
  15. chrisretusn

    chrisretusn Registered Member

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    Thanks. That is some crazy stuff your doing. Yes VLOOKUP is an amazing function. There are things I used to do with MS Office, notably Excel and Access back in my working days the involved extracting data (10's of thousand of records) from SyBase doing similar crazy things. Sort of miss those days. Using anything other the MS Excel or Access was just out of the question. :)

    Never noticed that. I am sure I will now. Using a six cpu machine.
     
  16. Joxx

    Joxx Registered Member

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    care to explain?
     
  17. Balthazar

    Balthazar Registered Member

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    I'll let amarildojr explain himself but I can think of a lot of things I have to do in order to surf more privately.

    The standard earch engine is Google plus your specific country code. Which brings me to geo location being enabled and other "services" making it easy to track you.
    Just a few keywords that come to my mind:
    WebRTC, DomStorage, History settings, cookies, Flash, cash, javascript, user agent, "health report"...

    You don't need to change "everything" but you should be aware that some of these settings are very invasive by default.
     
  18. Amanda

    Amanda Registered Member

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    Sure.

    Vanilla Firefox on Linux has no privacy improvement over Windows Firefox at all, they're the same product: same mandatory OpenH264 plugin download, same about:config options on 99.99999% of times, including "geo.enabled", "referrer", "browser.newtabpage.enhanced", "browser.send_pings", "social.remote-install.enabled", "media.peerconnection.enabled", "beacon.enabled", "network.prefetch-next", "social.toast-notifications.enabled", and all privacy-enemy settings set to "true" which goes against user privacy.

    Mozilla doesn't care about user privacy, we've become a product to them in which they can make money on, that's why there are "forks" of Firefox that aim at privacy, that's why Mozilla have sponsors that are displayed and track you once you open a new tab, that's why it's privacy settings are a joke, and that's why you get a Google tracking cookie by default just by opening Firefox for the first time.

    So there are mainly 3 categories of Firefox on Linux:

    - Vanilla, which is the same as the Windows' version and is a privacy joke;
    - Debian's, which is Iceweasel but still has privacy problems;
    - Parabola/Trisquel Iceweasel, which comes with all of the above mentioned about:config options set to "false", not to mention all other privacy-friendly settings;

    There's also GNU IceCat which is pretty neat, but it's a bit outdated. I don't remember if IceCat is more or less privacy-friendly than Parabola/Trisquel Iceweasel, but I think it's not.

    The Iceweasel that Parabola uses is the same Iceweasel Trisquel uses, and since Parabola is literaly Arch Linux it's 100% safe to download and install it on Arch, with the following commands:

    Code:
    wget https://repo.parabola.nu/libre/os/x86_64/iceweasel-1:40.0.deb1-4-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz
    Code:
    pacman -U iceweasel-1\:40.0.deb1-4-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz
    For Debian users I think it's possible to install the Trisquel version if you backport it to the Stable branch. For Testing/Sid it should install just fine.

    And for Ubuntu users it should install with no problems.
     
    Last edited: Aug 27, 2015
  19. Wroll

    Wroll Registered Member

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  20. Balthazar

    Balthazar Registered Member

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    I think it is much more privacy-friendly than Iceweasel and it's not that outdated anymore. Just do a quick check on panopticlick. You will see that by default the Iceweasel fingerprint is unique (equals one in about 5.8 million). Using Icecat panopticlick shows that one in about 2700 browsers have the same fingerprint. In other words, the bits of identifying information are very low by default compared to other browsers. Of course, Javascript disabled plays an important role but there's also a very common user agent (you don't need another spoofer) and there's a lot of the stuff you and I mentioned earlier disabled by default.
     
  21. Amanda

    Amanda Registered Member

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    You can see that the lastest version of IceCat is 31 https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuzilla/

    Pardon my ignorance, but doesn't this make Iceweasel "better", regarding what you consider "more privacy-friendly"?
    I mean, if my car is so unique that only 1 in 5 million people have it, how is it that my neighbor's car is more unique if 1 in 2700 people have it?
    Don't forget that "5.7 million" is the number that represents how many people have cars in this example.

    I don't consider panopticlick a good way of measuring privacy. It REALLY doesn't matter how "unique" your browser is.
     
    Last edited: Aug 27, 2015
  22. Balthazar

    Balthazar Registered Member

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    I am using Icecat on Parabola and it's 38.2 at the moment.
    I just use it as a sort of indicator. I don't take it too seriously because there are flaws that are also being discussed on the links provided there.
    In general I do consider a browser that has the same fingerprint as every 2700th browser to be more privacy-friendly than something that is unique. Of course that is just theoretical and is based on the dataset of 5.8 million. There are lots of other factors to take into account.
    What really counts is that Icecat has a lot of the "services" mentioned above (e.g. geolocation, user agent) disabled or spoofed by default.
     
  23. Amanda

    Amanda Registered Member

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    Are you sure? Because the version on Parabola's repo is 31.8 https://www.parabola.nu/packages/libre/x86_64/icecat/
    Not to mention that is the latest version on gnu.org's ftp server.

    Oh, I I see what you mean, now. It's easier to spot a unique browser/car ;-) That makes sense.

    But also, it's harder to spot a unique browser that changes fingerprint from a timely manner.

    I can't give exact numbers right now, but I remember seeing a few services that were "On" on IceCat and were "off" on Parabola's Iceweasel.
     
    Last edited: Aug 27, 2015
  24. Amanda

    Amanda Registered Member

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    @Balthazar , what is the value on "general.useragent.override" of your browser?
     
  25. Balthazar

    Balthazar Registered Member

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    Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/38.0
     
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