I hate windows. But I have to use it for work. The worse it gets, the more I want to break free completely, minimise my exposure to this OS. The only part I truly cannot do without I think is Microsoft Excel.
Replacing with Excel 2016 or only using webversion or so is insufficient for sure, for work it needs the SharePoint/auto save etc etc stuff. Also power query getting data from SharePoint online.
Replacing with Libreoffice or so seems completely impossible, there’s too many ‘special’ files in organisation, with .xlsm macro mess, I don’t control all that, I can’t fully steer away from such mess but need full functional access.
Other than Excel, I think I could do all my work from a Linux desktop.
Is it possible by now, reliably working in an up to date excel from a base system Linux? What is the way? Have people done this? How? Do I need to run a virtual machine with win11? How do I do that? Does anyone here have experience with it? I have high degree of control over work devices and boss couldn’t care less, as long as I can get my work done.
Thanks and sorry if this is the wrong community for this question (where would it belong better?)


For work, I just use windows. Not my machine not my problem.
But the slowness… I have a stroke every time I press tab after any git command in Git Bash. The piece of shit takes three seconds to respond. In Linux it happens instantaneously.
On the bright side, you’re getting paid to wait around
( /s because I know the feeling, and it’s just slow enough you can’t step away and do something else)
That’s more the fault of running software designed for Linux on Windows.
I fully blame this on NTFS being terrible with metadata and small files. I’m sure everyone’s tried copying/moving/deleting a big folder with 1000s of small files before and the transfer rate goes to nearly 0…
Well - Windows has always had poor “fork()” performance compared to Linux (Windows applications prefer threads). So running lots of small applications that do lots of forking will take a performance hit.
I get paid by the hour! 😅 But for real though it’s a struggle. Mostly I try to use msys2 for everything but. I still have native git. There are some long standing bugs that make the vim excruciatingly slow to open or close, really I should go try to fix it but it doesn’t feel like a fun problem.
MSYS2 is a lifesaver!
the problem is my patience and frustration
I want to get my shit done and move on with my day, not sit here waiting on stuff and getting RSI from navigating directories so slowly