Hi all,
it took me years to find CrossOver which is kind of crazy as I am consistently using Linux for years. Until now I would use vmWare to run entire virtual machines, and never had a lot of success trying to run things in Wine, however, this offering looks so much more promising. Currently testing it and, what can I say, it exceeds all my expectations by far!
One of my customers plans to go Linux as well, and I need to set up a test machine for proof of concept. Fedora 38 Workstation will be the platform. Most of what it offers is totally sufficient, however, there is one pain point where this customer will need to continue using Microsoft, which is Word. LibreOffice Writer is fine but they are working with other companies who insist that LibreOffice be less than 100% compatible and exchanging documents between M$ Office and LibreOffice would mess them up in undesired ways. It's probably their own fault but whenever anything non-Word is at play, by reflex that is their culprit. One could learn how to design documents cleanly to be most compatible but you know, there is no intention to learn if what they do usually works. Like using spaces and tabs for indentation and numbering chapters manually because "all that automatic stuff doesn't work anyway". That sort of people.
I believe that this is mostly thanks to M$ not adhering to their own specifications (which is kind of proven by the fact that the desktop applications are not even fully compatible with their Office365 counterparts). But what can I do?
So what we dream of is using LibreOffice internally wherever possible, along with Thunderbird/Lightning as an Outlook replacement. It's still a firm requirement that Word be in use for the customers who specifically demand it though, which brought me here.
I am considering a CrossOver installation to integrate Word seamlessly into the Linux environment. This works amazingly well with Office 2016 by the way! But we need to be more future-proof, for "reasons".
I may not be the first to rant about this but I was a bit disappointed to find that there is no preset for an Office 2019 bottle yet. Tried my luck by using an Office 2016 bottle on a 2019 installation media (deviating from the suggested Windows 7 32-bit and instead choosing Windows 10 32-bit) but it ends after some time (I think it might actually be near the finish line) in one of these beloved M$ messages, sort of "oh well that's really so so funny but something didn't work out here". Eventually it will roll back the entire setup and leave an empty bottle. No details of any sort though, and I am not expert enough to find installation logs that might shed some more light on this matter.
We may be well off with Office 2016 for a time but I don't know how long until M$ screws up and both sides will have to use the same version of Word to be really compatible. Which may well be 2019 or 2022 or whatever is to come. Moreover, there's a support deadline for Office 2016 impending which is problematic if you use it in business.
Looks like M$ are crunching to harden the golden cage. Office 2019 setup requiring Windows 10 is not a good sign. Maybe they tangled the OS and Office up so much that it is no longer possible to be freed?
Whatever, early Office 2019 release candidates have been around for 5 years and it looks like CrossOver currently doesn't support it, and I am missing clear statements about this. For sure I am not the only one who is aching to see this work. Granted, it's a small team and provides support for thousands of apps but imho M$ Office, as miserable as it may be, is one of the main reasons for half the world to stick with Windows against their will.
I would be so happy to have some good news to share with my customer so we know this is a sustainable approach. They may fall back to Windows otherwise which would be a huge step back for everybody involved.
Do I need to mention that a lifetime license is the least I can do once I have some degree of certainty? 😉
Thank you so much guys. What you achieved is already unbelievable!
Cheers,
Joe
