Hi. So my girlfriend wants to try out Linux (Elementary OS, she thinks it looks pretty) and needs my help setting everything up (she’s not that good at tech). I’ve never use Linux before. From what I’ve read MS Office is not supported on Linux, but there’s Libreoffice. My gf uses a lot of MS Office for high school (Word & Powerpoint mostly), so I’m curious if Libre is a good substitute? As in compatibility, features, etc.?
Here is a feature comparison between the two.
tl;dr: It’s a great piece of software that does everything the vast majority of people will ever want it for. For the other percent, it does some things MS Office can’t do and vice versa.
Thanks. I’m assuming a high school student is included in “the vast majority of people”. :)))
Absolutely!
LibreOffice will function perfectly fine for a single user taking classroom notes, or making a presentation, or a spreadsheet, or what have you. You might notice it crash occasionally, but in the dozen or so times it crashed on me, it has a 100% success rate at recovering the file. It’s kind of remarkable.
One thing to make your girlfriend’s transition easier: you can reconfigure the UI to be more similar to more recent versions of MS office. The first time you open it, there will be a popup that brings you directly to the relevant settings menu. It’s not one to one but the major options are going to be in similar places after you changed the UI.
For presentations she can check out Penpot. It’s web based, mainly for UI design, but super easy to use. Also FOSS.