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Firefox is ending support for Windows 7, 8 and 8.1, and users are urged to switch to Linux
(www.pcgamer.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2026
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One of the main places windows is used, like it or not, are organizations and companies. Especially small ones. Specially ones that are not in wealthy countries. And the only thing that keeps them from switching to linux is microsoft office. (Most importantly Word, excel).
My company has ~20 people and I would switch them over to linux if it wasn't for word and excel.
While libreoffice is great on it's own, companies send eachother xlsx and docx files. And libreoffice isnt great at reading or writing them. Specially complex ones. I don't think it's much of libre office's fault, but more the shitty incompatible, unstandardized microsoft formats.
Currently I'm the only Linux user in the team, and I constantly advocate Linux, but I know if anybody switches, compatibility with microsoft office is going to be a problem. I can take the risk with the tech team but not the office section (hr, sales, secretary accounting etc.) really.
Try onlyoffice and slowly try to shift to libreoffice with open document formats. Or just skip that part and move everyone to the web versions of office. Also if you guys are on office 2010, the last time I ran it via wine, it worked completely fine.
No you cannot shift to open document formats because you can't send an odt file to another company. They will not know what it is. In the enterprise world you have to "send them the word" or "the excel".
I'm most case you provably want to just send the document as PDF, don't you? For which use case do you want to send an editable document to another company?
Many companies will send you docx files out of sheer idiocity. And tell you to "send the word" to them.
And excel is always transferred as xlsx
It's called collaboration. When I worked as a toolmaker, I needed to use SolidWorks, despite not being a big fan, because our customers used SW and they were often literally on the other side of the planet.
Man I feel you and I know it's just how things are. But I often ask myself the following question: Why are lots of office workers so bad with computers? It's the tool they use for 1/3 of working day in their life. Just like a craftsman should learn to use their tools. No, instead they always act like it's something only tech guys should know about.
This might be a bit harsh, but to be honest, you can't expect them to be smarter. Otherwise they would also be engineers.
An electrician drives around in their van full of their tools. They are expert in their tools, but some can’t even change a tire on the van.
It’s the same with office jobs. You use a bunch of tools on the computer, but the computer isn’t necessarily a part of your tool set, it’s your vehicle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument#Response