People always say this but the 90% doesn’t count. The 90% is easy. It’s the other bit that people hit and compatibility issues mean any non standard approach whether it’s fair or not will always, always get the blame.

Plus I dispute that libreoffice has even close to 90% of what excel can do.

I’ve never met a document an office document that wouldn’t have been better as a wiki (if it is intended to be impermanent), or as a something like a LaTeX document (if it is not).

I've found that OnlyOffice has much better Microsoft Office compatibility. I just install it via flatpak, remove the network permission, and go about my business perfectly. While LibreOffice -> LibreOffice works perfectly fine, whenever it opens a .docx file it always wants to save it as a .odf which is a nonstarter. Not because I don't want to support open document formats but because everyone expects a .docx back if they send you one. It also struggles consistently for any type of advanced formatting (as a .docx).

Libre office has some annoyances though. I cannot for the life of me disable the document recovery model that always pops up on every launch regardless if a document needs to be recovered or not. Also I cant seem to get printing to default to 8 1/2x11 formatting.

Functionality is pretty good but the UI is from the 1990s.

Trade one devil for another?

I’ve never looked to see the compatibility of Office to Gsuite.

So unless it is 110% perfect it is a non-starter. The second we have a supplier send an excel with some goofball formula in it and we don’t see some data or can’t open it - it’s over.

This isn’t even getting to the next devil… Adobe.

My employer blocks access to Google Docs as part of our confidential information protection policy. They're certainly not the only ones. I'd hesitate to call on-premises file management "specialized needs" - rather, it's (still) the default, particularly if you take a peek outside of the software bubble.

Don't want anyone to use that but that is good to prove that almost everybody can use a spreedsheat that is not Excel. Including LibreCalc. And many others.

The same situation is for email. Who needs Outlook? Nobody! You can do almost everything with Thunderbird. So does Outlook have some "special" things? Maybe, never used it!

I even had my email on clawsmail and it was amazing.

I've used it for very simple things but I don't thing it even has 1% of the installed Excel program does. It is too simple and buggy.

Few days ago wife opened an excel file on the browser and something was right away wrong, she noticed, can't remember what it was. Had to download and execute local.

Gaming has actually seen the biggest improvement on Linux in the last couple of years, check out https://www.protondb.com/ for just how many titles are playable.

I figured that one is mostly solved now between Steam, Bazzite or even just VM Windows ( if you really have to go that route ).