Pages takes me back as I really enjoyed all the Apple-first products (remember Sofa and Cultured Code?) but nowadays I can’t justify getting into macOS.

Thus far I have had pleasant experience with LibreOffice. Shockingly pleasant and easy to use and fast. I moved most of my MS Office printable media to it. I had to chase down different font weights to capture as close to the thickness that Word/Excel + print drivers would output, but the Libre output is to my eyes a lot better in almost every case, so that’s a win I’ll take.

Decades ago I was using OpenOffice but it had a long way to go back then, so I stuck with MS Office all these years.

I’m sure I’ll come across something that doesn’t quite work right but it’s unlikely I’ll encounter an Excel application built on macros in the wild anymore. (famous last words)

n.b. I have no idea what the hell is up with Microsoft over the last year. I feel like HN could use a thread where people just share horror stories. I’ve heard about the CoPilot nonsense, the cramming of AI into everything, but I stuck to Windows 10 to avoid as much of it as possible, although now it’s EOL. That they’re just shitting on everything solid they’ve done over the years does not make any sense to me.

I thought about doing this, combining it with Win 10 Enterprise IOT, but in the end it’s delaying the inevitable. I’m migrating away from Microsoft Office and Windows in general because Linux is an easy sell when most activity is done through a browser anyway.

I think Scribus is a suitable replacement for Publisher? I don’t think it’s any worse but I don’t think it’s at the level where it can compete against InDesign and Quark. However the major upside is that it is open source and runs on Linux just fine.