You can run teams in linux. I don’t know if the same goes for Outlook, but I found that accessing the web version via portal.office.com was sufficient.
But I’d recommend the unofficial one from flathub. The official one has stopped receiving updates in 2022 in favour of the web app, which is what the unofficial one is.
Well, XFree86 ( before Xorg and before KMS ) was an adventure. I spent hours guessing the vertical and horizontal frequencies of my monitor trying to get decent resolutions.
Other than that, Linux was way more work but “felt” powerful relative to OS options of the time. Windows was still crashy. The five of us that used OS/2 hated that it still had a lot of 16 bit under the hood. Linux was pure 32 bit.
Later in the 90’s, you could run a handful of Windows apps on Linux and they seemed to run better on Linux. For example, file system operations were dramatically faster.
And Linux was improving incredibly rapidly so it felt inevitable that it would outpace everything else.
The reality though was that it was super limited and a pain in the ass. “Normal” people would never have put up with it. It did not run anything you wanted it to ( if you had apps you liked on Mac, Windows, OS/2, Amiga, NeXTstep, BeOS, or whatever else you were using ( there were of potential options at the time ). But even for the pure UNIX and POSIX stuff, it was hard.
Obviously installation was technical and complex. And everything was a hodge-podge of independently developed software. “Usability” was not a thing. Ubuntu was not release until 2004.
Linux back then was a lot of hitting FTP sites to download software that you would build yourself from source. Stuff could be anywhere on the Internet and your connection was probably slow. And it was dependency hell so you would be building a lot of software just to be able to build the software you want. And there was a decent chance that applications would disagree about what dependencies they needed ( like versions ). Or the config files would be expected in a different location. Or the build system could not find the required libraries because they were not where the Makefile was looking for them.
Linux in the 90’s had no package management. This is maybe the biggest difference between Linux then and Linux now. When package management finally arrived, it came in two stages. First, came packages but you were still grabbing them individually from FTP. Second came the package manager which handled dependencies and retrieval.
The most popular Linux in the mid to late 90’s was Red Hat. This was before RHEL and before Fedora. There was just “Red Hat Linux”. Red Hat featured RPMs ( packages ) but you were still installing them and any required dependencies yourself at the command line. YUM ( precursor to NRF ) was not added until Fedora Core 1 was release in 2003!
APT ( apt-get ) was not added to Debian until 1998.
And all of this meant that every Linux system ( not distro — individual computer ) was a unique snowflake. No two were alike. So bundling binary software to work on “Linux” was a real horror-show. People like Loki gave it a good run but I cannot imagine the pain they went through. To make matters worse, the Linux “community” was almost entirely people that had self-selected to give up pre-packaged software and to trade sweat-equity for paying for stuff. Getting large number of people to give you money for software was hard. I mean, as far as we have come, that is still harder on Linux than on Windows or macOS.
You can download early Debian or Red Hat distros today if you want to experience it for yourself. That said, even the world of hardware has changed. You will probably not be wrestling IRQs to get sound or networking running on modern hardware or in a VM. Your BIOS will probably not be buggy. You will have VESA at least and not be stuck on VGA. But all of that was just “computing” in the 90’s and the Windows crowd had the same problems.
One 90s hardware quirk was “Windows” printers or modems though where the firmware was half implanted in Windows drivers. This was because the hardware was too limited or too dumb to work on its own and to save money your computer would do some of the work. Good luck having Linux support for those though.
Even without trying old distros, just try to go a few days on you current Linux distro without using apt, nrf, pacman, zypper, the GUI App Store, or what have you. Imagine never being able to use those tools again. What would that be like?
Finally, on my much, much slower 90’s PC, I compiled my own kernel all the time. Honestly multiple times per month I would guess. Compiling new kernels was a significant fraction of where my computing resources went at the time. I cannot remember the last time I compiled a kernel.
It was a different world.
When Linus from LTT tried Linux not that long ago ( he wanted to game ), he commented that he felt like he was playing “with” his computer instead of playing “on” his computer. That comment still describes Linux to some extent but it really, really captures Linux in the 90’s.
For teams specifically I’m just using the web version with chromium. Installed as a chromium app so I have quick access to it and have it on my taskbar. Rest of Office 365 works just fine in any browser. (Outlook, SharePoint, Power apps etc) For OneDrive Sync you can use abraunegg.github.io which should work on most distros.
Firefox would give me weird problems with teams in the past. Have not tried it in a while though. I’ll try it and if it works without problems now I’m happy to leave chromium behind.
I think Codeberg is totally open as opposed to GitLab which has an open core and paid enterprise version. There’s also SourceHut but you have to pay to use it (no free tier). As far as I know there aren’t any public Forgejo instances. (Codeberg is Forgejo)
I think any of these are better than GitHub (I say as I still use GitHub).
Any distro should work just fine, so the typical three: Debian, Fedora, Arch, or something else. Gnome 46 supposedly added support for Microsoft accounts as well as onedrive in the Nautilus file manager, so you should be able to “store all of your data.”
Office won’t run on Linux or through Wine (AFAIK), I’ve converted to using LibreOffice on both Linux and Windows, which has yet to give me any issues.
Teams, as part of O365, also doesn’t have a Linux app, however… with the (paid) Thunderbird addon Owl for Exchange, you can read+send Outlook emails; it also adds a Teams icon to your Thunderbird sidebar that acts as a link to the web client.
Thunderbird, by default, can only read from Exchange mailboxes, but can’t send from them. If you don’t want to pay, the developers are working to add full Exchange support as stock. (There are also less legitimate ways to get Exchange support, like cracking Owl, but out of respect for the addon dev, you’ll have to find it yourself)
Edit:
If you’re new to Linux as a whole, I’ve seen many recommendations for Mint (a Debian and Ubuntu derivative), but I’ve never tried it myself. I started with Debian since I wanted a stable system that wouldn’t break down by itself or something. It’s rock solid on my Framework 13 Ryzen.
As for a Desktop Environment (DE), you can’t go wrong with GNOME or KDE. I prefer KDE since I don’t like the “look” of GNOME and it’s more “Windows-like” (but still it’s own thing), but it’s really just personal preference.
Office used to work via Wine in the past (using older versions of Office), but the latest versions of Micr$oft Office is so badly written, it's hard to setup and run office under Wine indeed.
I was wondering the applicability of Libre to the officeland as I haven’t really used either in a number of years.
On the DEs: I’ve been gnome based pretty much always, almost never used gnome itself, directly. Xfce is my workhorse. Recently tried & dig cinnamon. Am ready to convert for a few months, at least.
I’ve tried KDE a few times, always short-lived as I can’t abide lack of keystroke windows management (I’m guessing they have them & I never took the 5 minutes to learn them). Mostly tried years ago. It was heavy and made my trash PCs choke. Felt like chrome does now.
Ubuntu’s native DE I can’t stomach for similar lack of common keystrokes and bad colors (again, a few minutes to change & learn because something else probably put me off enough that I wasn’t interested). Corporate construction has to be pretty awesome to get me to want to use it. No corporations come to mind that fit that.
Just this weekend I installed Manjaro after having tons and tons of issues with SUSE since the Plasma 6 upgrade. I have a laptop with AMD integrated graphics, which Plasma is running on, so your issues may not apply to me. But if I run any apps on the Nvidia GPU in full screen, I do get the flickering issue.
My biggest issue I have is that no matter what distro I use, as soon as I install the proprietary Nvidia driver, my system fails to boot like 20% of the time. It just freezes during boot with no error messages or warnings that I can find. But once it boots, it works.
I’m not sure how to run Plasma on my dedicated GPU so I can see if I have the same issues you have. But with my current setup, it works.
Any distro you’d like. Use the office / outlook stuff in a browser. I believe kde has a way to use onedrive in dolphin, though personally I would keep my data on my computer unless it is for a group project, just make sure it’s backed up. I’d also have a VM handy with the spice guest tools. It is good to have at least for when you have to hand your computer to someone who may be uncomfortable with linux. I would use debian on a school computer for the ludicrous stability, but use whatever floats your boat.
Use a Windows VM for things that are unavailable or don’t work well as a web app. The absolute easiest way to run a Windows VM is VMware Player especially if you use a stable OS like Debian or Ubuntu LTS. The built-in KVM hypervisor works fine too but it requires more work to setup a Windows VM with all the drivers, shared folder, etc. And it won’t have graphics acceleration of any sort. With that said I’ve personally migrated from VMware to KVM in anticipation that Broadcom who recently purchased VMware will turn their software to shit or start asking for more money, or both.
I would say zypper up is the better command, just because it’s kinda funny. pacman is better overall, but it gets less fun when you start adding arguments like -Syu, if only because it’s a “language” you have to learn and isn’t self-documenting in any way.
Pacman gets huge bonus points though for having a config option to turn to progress bar shown during package installation into a ‘pacman’ (letter c) chomping from left to right :)
(done by adding ILoveCandy under the Misc options in /etc/pacman.conf)
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