I’ve been dual-booting Linux and Windows for a while, with Windows as the fall-back option in case I wanted to use Office for something. Now that they tried to trick me into paying a subscription for their AI slop machine, I’m finally, fully out. It was a pain to actually track down and back-up the stuff that was held for ransom in OneDrive, but now it is done.
Libre office is better too. MS builds so much bloat in it hampers functionality hard. I only use MS for work.
Depends what you need. Many publishers require certain features from MS Word that are not available or are not as ‘compatible’ in LO Writer (not that its LO’s fault ;), but for most use case I would agree. Things are a bit more complicated in the case of Excel as far as I can understand what I read (edit: I don’t use much spreadsheets myself).
I’ve quit using MS Word a few years ago, fully switching to LO Writer. There are a few issues here and there but nothing that’s a deal breaker (and Word had its own issues too), and I must quite like many things in Writer—beside the app not spying on me, I mean ;)
Out of interest, what sort of features are you referring to that publishers require?
Depends on what you need from Excel. All the simple stuff and most of the medium complex stuff is available in Calc. However, there are still many Excel only features where Calc can’t compete. Not a big deal for most people since those tend to be slightly obscure features anyway. If Calc can’t get the job done, I suggest switching to R or GNU Octave. You’ll thank me later.
This true for most people, but Calc is limiting for certain use cases.