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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   2915 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 5, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I've got my wife pretty bought-in on super cheap Chromebooks for 'laptop-like' stuff. She genuinely lives in a browser and isn't ever doing computationally expensive stuff, so it works pretty well. There's maybe one or two things that would make me weakly prefer for her to have a Mint laptop, but given our shared preference for super cheap, small form factor, low power (low heat), long battery life, etc., I think chromebooks get the job done well enough.

For the main desktop, which I ask to do a lot more stuff, I have it dual-booting Win10 and Mint at the moment. There are a few niche things I'm still figuring out, but the main one is Excel. We have a fair amount of stuff in Excel, and it appears that things don't translate directly into Libre... especially any of the books with significant VBA macros. A cursory amount of research tells me that it's actually annoying to get Excel working in Linux, so I might be staring down having to just re-write everything and having a clean break in compatibility for prior years' info. I've still only done cursory research into it, partly because I don't want to think about having to redo it all.

I keep a windows VM for things like that. Defeats the purpose of Linux only slightly.

This is what I do - run Windows in a VM. I have a few games that don't run in Linux. If you never let Windows access the Internet, a lot of the annoyances are mitigated.

Yeah, I guess. I was looking at WINE/such first, and my "cursory amount of research" was basically just asking an LLM, which IIRC told me that they had problems with Excel. I should revisit doing it with a VM. Biggest challenge will be making a workflow that is wife-approved, since she needs to use it, too.

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