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.
Edit: Thanks guys!
User helpimnotdrowning recommend Mint! This’ll be my first real daily foray onto Linux, so it’s definitely a good option. I’ll also have a look at Gnome Vs KDE. I’ve been looking at KDE in the past, but gnome is definitely worth a peep as well.
User BearOfATime, thanks for giving the software name that allows for a seamless VPN transition! I’ll also look into the win 10 LTSC. Not sure it’s a right fit, but it’s always fun to learn more!
As a couple of you recommend, there seems to be a teams flatpak to download, so I’ll have a look into that!
Finally, I’d like to thank y’all for the useful and helpful answers! Many of you said to try the webapps, so I’ll be doing that! My current plan is to use VMWare (alt is Vbox. VMware works (and looks) better) and try to actively use a mint VM. Not sure If I’ll be able to stick to it, and not unknowingly switch to windows, but having it as a starting app should solve a couple issues. Slower start times, sure, but that’s not the worst. Your advice is very much appreciated! It’s given me a good confidence boost to start. Thanks for that :D
From all the comments it looks like it’s quite a challenge to go native Linux.
One option, run a VM using KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine, native to some distros).
You can install Windows IOT LTSC (Long-term Servicing Channel), which receives only security updates 2x/year, no others. It also doesn’t have all the bloat. It’s what I run for daily use.
Win10 LTSC. It gets updates 2x/year, has very minimal bloat.
Windows LTSC Downloads, don’t forget to grab the key.
Then get O&O Shutup to reduce bloat even more (mostly just to limit telemetry on Windows).
And you can permanently license it using Microsoft’s own scripts. - Scripts on Github.
At one time you could directly launch apps in VMs using SeamlessRDP, I’m not sure if that still works or if there’s something new.
As others have said, wtf is wrong with the school - requiring OneDrive? FFS
Only do that if you have 16 or more GB of ram. Also Win 10 standard is fine or pro if you want AD.
Pro gives you Group Policy, which is essential for controlling things any more (especially telemetry and automatic updates, for example).
And yea, gonna need some ram to run a VM. Linux may run OK on lesser amounts, but even a VM of Windows can get pretty hungry. It’ll run ok with 8 allocated to it, and it’ll slog along with less, but still run.
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.
Any distro that can run Chromium / Chrome. And everything other than Teams will work even on Firefox.
Teams works for me as long as I’m not taking calls, just have to switch the user agent to pretend to be Chrome (but only sometimes)
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 use Fedora 40 workstation (Gnome) , run everything (Outlook, OneDrive, etc.) on browser, Teams as a FlatPak, and use Only Office for Excel, which I then upload to One Drive.
So far it’s all worked like a charm.
You can also use OneDrive on the native file explorer if you sign into GNOME with your Microsoft account
Yeah, that too, but for my work account that didn’t work for some reason, so I just use it over a browser.
Sign into Gnome with your Microsoft account
I think I just had a stroke
No distro can just do that.
Try crossover, which is said to have best Windows app support. But Microsoft is actively fighting it, on their apps.
Your school is very, very, very shitty.
I would go with the web 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
Thank you!
See wubuntu, it has OneDrive client https://sourceforge.net/projects/windows-ubuntu/
do not run wubuntu
Office 365 runs out of the box on Crossover.
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.
I’m using arch Linux. But for the most part I don’t think it really matters.
Flatpack Teams, and web version the rest of the M$ software.
It works well enough. Though web versions of M$ software is weirdly limited for reasons I can only understand as arbitration.
For instance very large excel files don’t load in web excel, and iirc you cannot insert formulas in web word.
Basically it doesn’t matter if you can use the webapps.
Mint is the best traditional noobie distro, while I would suggest Silverblue, if you just want to use a robust system that requires far less maintenance effort than a traditional distribution with limitations that may are may not affect you at all.
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.
It is pretty is to setup a Windows VM
continuously fighting against awful software
Arguably this is why some people don’t bother with a VM and use the web apps instead.
You can run teams in linux. I don’t know if the same goes for Outlook, but I found that accessing the web version via portal.office.com was sufficient.
But I’d recommend the unofficial one from flathub. The official one has stopped receiving updates in 2022 in favour of the web app, which is what the unofficial one is.
The non web app is probably just a web app and browser wrapped in one.
