CrossOver 19 Enters Beta With Better Microsoft Office Support On Linux

[Vistaus]

I got reports of stuff in it (excel/word/Outlook) breaking multiple times each major Windows 10 update, some was fixed after the fact with Office 2003 updates, after someone (yours truly) fiddled with the stupid update settings to "enable updates for other microsoft products" and restarted and prayed the gods.
On some systems I had to nuke Office 2003 and reinstall it.
This is not uncommon for newer office versions too, but if the only reason stuff still works is because Microsoft publishes patches for it, then when it is declared EOL it can stop working at any moment.

On many systems Outlook 2003 can't connect to servers using ssl https://www.tenforums.com/browsers-e...ent-email.html
Or can't open links unless you fix registry manually https://www.slipstick.com/outlook/li...in-windows-10/

Really I'm not going to say it works fine. You can get it to work, but it's not smooth.

Outlook is a terrible app, no matter the Office version. I was talking about stuff like Word, Excel, Powerpoint, OneNote, etc.

[starshipeleven]

I don't entirely disagree with some of the things you say, but Office 2003 *does* work fine on Windows 10. There's no support anymore, but for personal use, that's not really an issue.

I got reports of stuff in it (excel/word/Outlook) breaking multiple times each major Windows 10 update, some was fixed after the fact with Office 2003 updates, after someone (yours truly) fiddled with the stupid update settings to "enable updates for other microsoft products" and restarted and prayed the gods.
On some systems I had to nuke Office 2003 and reinstall it.
This is not uncommon for newer office versions too, but if the only reason stuff still works is because Microsoft publishes patches for it, then when it is declared EOL it can stop working at any moment.

On many systems Outlook 2003 can't connect to servers using ssl https://www.tenforums.com/browsers-e...ent-email.html
Or can't open links unless you fix registry manually https://www.slipstick.com/outlook/li...in-windows-10/

Really I'm not going to say it works fine. You can get it to work, but it's not smooth.

[betam4x]

6 TB? I have a Office 365 subscription primarily for all of that OneDrive space, but I only have 1 TB. Still a great deal, though But an even better deal if Office 65 would be ported to Linux (or at least work fine under Wine - I don't want to pay even more money to get it to work under CrossOver).

Yes, each user gets 1 TB. You get 6 users on an account on every plan except the cheapest. If you aren't using the other accounts you can share the space via shared folders on your own account. It's too bad they don't provide an easier way to do this. However, at even just 1 TB, that makes them extremely competitive with many providers. At 6 TB? No contest. Cheaper than Backblaze B2.

[betam4x]

As a long time Wine developer, I would like to share my view on this and no I'm not employed by Codeweavers. Codeweavers is doing a great job on Wine and I believe they have the best forward with Wine. It is correct that Crossover Office has changes, which are not in Wine. This is not so much, because they don't want them in Wine. Alexandre maintains very high code quaity standards for Wine. Any changes need to be done properly. A product like Crossover Office needs to ship at some point and hacky implementations or application specific hacks are sometimes needed. The source for the Wine build in Crossover Office is public and anyone can see the changes. Over time these improvements make it over to Wine in a "proper way", which is why Wine may lack support for certain apps. Though it can also lead Crossover Office. Generally speaking mainline Wine is also the development branch for Wine and used directly by Codeweavers.

Also a wine contributor, and I'm going to disagree here. We've evidence to prove it. Look how quickly Wine became compatible with a gazillion games just because Valve dropped a wad of fat cash on someone's doorstep. I'm not going to comment on Wine's codebase either except to say it's a constant, huge, glaring FIXME. I respect any developer that devotes their time to open source development (I have, on many different projects), but that doesn't mean I can't hold a project to higher standards, especially if money is involved and the source code is used as a demo for the real thing.

[Vistaus]

this is a lie

I don't entirely disagree with some of the things you say, but Office 2003 *does* work fine on Windows 10. There's no support anymore, but for personal use, that's not really an issue.

[Vistaus]

Office 365 was also released standalone as Office 2019. Also, Office 365 is one of the best Office products, and value proposition out there, with up to 6 tb free per account of Microsoft OneDrive and a host of other features.

6 TB? I have a Office 365 subscription primarily for all of that OneDrive space, but I only have 1 TB. Still a great deal, though But an even better deal if Office 65 would be ported to Linux (or at least work fine under Wine - I don't want to pay even more money to get it to work under CrossOver).

[starshipeleven]

There's nothing wrong with the MS Office Suite. It's a fine set of applications which work great.

This is complete bullshit, Word and Excel in Office 2016 are much worse than in 2013 or even earlier.
The fucking Outlook is a joke, the search function breaks every few months, and IT IS A BAD THING DAMNIT.

Over my life I've managed over 200 workstations with MS Office and there's not been a single issue to talk about.

those are rookie numbers

In fact people report that even MS Office 2003 works just fine on Windows 10.

this is a lie

There's too much drama here on Phoronix about any proprietary software as if Open Source is magically always better just because you can access the source code.

If you can't fix it yourself you can still hire someone to fix and contribute it.
Now try doing the same for closed source applications.
And don't tell me Office works great, a lot of those migrating from Office 2013 are slapping me on the phone because this and that is different or not as fast or can't find it anymore. IT IS A FUCKING OFFICE SUITE WHY YOU CHANGE THE INTERFACE EVERY RELEASE DAMNIT.

Every few months I get some poor sod that can't fucking search email in Outlook 2016 because it's broken.

[timrichardson]

It remains quite useful for me to have Office 2016 running on my linux desktop. It stopped working with Crossover 18.5, but my existing "bottle archive" works again with 19 beta.

[board]

This doesn't sound impartial and unbiased. On the contrary it sounds caustic and almost insulting.

There's nothing wrong with the MS Office Suite. It's a fine set of applications which work great.

Licensing cost, cloud integration, forcing colleagues and other people you distribute docs to to use the same proprietary format.

[tinywrkb]

I believe this update should also include font shaping improvements of Hebrew scripts in dwrite contributed by Nikolay Sivov of CodeWeavers which were added in Wine 4.1 or 4.2.
With Office 2013 or newer shaping was pretty much broken before (anything older use usp10 and the native dll works with Wine) and now it can do even diacritics almost perfectly.
Not sure what the state of shaping Arabic script but if you need it, are willing to test, capable of applying patches, compile Wine, or maybe you even own a CrossOver license then you should try reaching out to CodeWeavers, its developers are pretty friendly and helpful.