MS Office

MS Office is one of my main two problems in moving to Linux.

I work part-time in an education company, and they use PowerPoint for all our lessons.

Their files have themes and animations and such, and really it needs to look and function identically on my computer when I'm teaching a class. It's an educational environment, it's vital that there are no hiccups in performance or flow. Technical hitches are extremely disruptive.

Moreover, LibreOffice's presentation app "Impress" has a couple of key issues that are considerably worse than MS Office's PowerPoint (aside from all the other issues regarding formatting, layout, animations, and compatibility).

One such issue is:

In the Presenter view during a presentation, the "next slide" view only shows the next slide; it doesn't show the current slide after the next click! This is really important because, as a presenter (in my case, as a teacher), we need to be able to see what is going to happen after our next click.

How LibreOffice reached version 25 and still has issues like this is completely beyond me.

There are a bunch of solutions for running MS Office on Linux.

I think the most reliable one is probably virtualisation, and for that there is a fun project called "WinBoat" From what I recall, it basically runs Windows in a VM, and then exposes the desktop and individual windows to you via RDP (remote desktop protocol). The experience should be pretty snappy cos you're just remote-desktopping directly to the very same computer, so there's no network lag.

7th December 2025 — I'm focussing on getting a Windows VM working on my Linux OS this week so watch this space!