Is Manjaro suitable on PC professional office desktop?

Hi Manjaro Team,

the question is in the title subject.

Thanks.

Hi,

Your question is a little bit… vague, to say the least. I’m a writer, I write under Manjaro. So, yeah Manjaro is 100% suitable… for me :wink:

If you want to maybe get more specific answers, you should give us more context: what kind of office work? What you/the user needs to be able to do (letters? Reports? Novels? Spreasheets? Accounting? Advanced financial stuff?). What kind of compatibility with MSOffice is required (and
fort what apps: Word, XL, PPT,…). And so on.

Edit: also, is it a company provided laptop or the user’s own, and stuff like that. Anything that will help people decide if they can give you any insight :wink:

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Absolutely - but if you depend on proprietary closed source software - like Microsoft Office or Adobe products like Photoshop, Illustrator and alike - then it is not.

You will need persistence to learn the tools from ground up.

Even if you are in the Windows superuser category - you will be starting over.

You will need to decide if you are willing to put the necessary amount of work into learning the new systems - and depending on how busy you are - there may not be enough time.

The most common pitfall is to keep Windows as a dual-boot system - this is a bad idea - because you will never learn how the Linux apps is working - you will fall back to your well known environment - and thus making the transition longer and more painful.

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Moving to Non-technical questions

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All i need for my daily work

Email- Mailspring, Bluemail, Evolution, Thunderbird
Office- Libre-office, WPS-office, onlyoffice, freeoffice
Accounting- ManagerAccounting, PDFsam, Hibiscus Homebanking
Timetracking- Clockify
Passwordmanager- Enpass
Webbrowser- Firefox, google chrome, vivaldi, opera, brave
google drive - insync
mega drive - megasync
notes- simplenote
discord, zoom, msteams for linux, telegram, whatsapp Dark, kdeconnect

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Hibiscus and Manager Accounting are in AUR.
I’d say a virtual machine with Windows might be a solution for most requirements.

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I use Manjaro Linux on my home office x86_64 desktop and ARM laptop. My workplace office x86_64 desktop runs Ubuntu. IMHO, Manjaro Linux perfectly fine for a professional office dekstop. The main caveat here is that my ‘profession’ is edpidemiology/statistics.

From a general work point of view, you’ll find that 95% of your Windows/macOS coworker issues will stem from fonts they have that you don’t, and vice versa. You can get around this by installing ttf-vista-fonts and ttf-vista-fonts from the AUR. For the rest, you can create a ~/.fonts directory and poach monaco, helvetica and helvetica neue from someone’s Mac, and cambria, calibri (and maybe a few others) from someone’s Windows machine. I’ve generally found Libreoffice to be good for Windows file format interoperability (make sure you use Windows file formats when sharing documents with others. If you give a Windows/Mac user an ODF file you may give them an aneurysm).

For accessing network shares (and if we’re talking workplace office), you’ll need an understanding and cooperative work IT department to tell you the protocols they support. If it’s something like CIFS, you’ll then need to bash your head against a brick wall for several hours, until you eventually find the magical combination of mount parameters required.

Of course, if we’re talking workplace office, the big question will be: what are you allowed to use. I’m stuck with Ubuntu at my work, (and I had to fight to get that).

In addition to the software @hanny00 listed:

I’d also add:

address book - gnome-contacts + evolution
calendar - gnome-calendar + evolution
file sync - syncthing
password manager - 1password
text file editing - atom, vscode, kate
stats/coding - RStudio, spyder, rkward
ref manager - zotero
document prep - texstudio, RStudio
IM - signal-desktop
Twitter client - cawbird

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Hi,

Imagine that I am a network administrator and/or IT technician, and that I want to offer workstations under Gnu/Linux to a company or a public administration. Knowing that Manjaro is a rolling-release distribution and that it will be easier to update/upgrade compared to others distributions (Ubuntu, …), I was wondering about the choice of Manjaro as a replacement for Windows 7, see Windows 10 on professional workstations. Do you think this is a good idea ? Knowing that Microsoft Office can be used through Wine (Office 2010 working very well), or that alternatives like Onlyofffice, FreeOffice, LibreOffice are available. And Gnu/Linux has a large software library in all areas.

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This question is a bit vague. What software do you primarily use? Some proprietary software are not available, Ex: Microsoft office, Adobe products (Though you have other opensource alternatives to them).

I think that if your Linux skills are good, there’s no real issue other than your time. Being a sys admin for just a single system can be a headache - it will break at the worst possible moment for you. I’d suggest trialling it on one or two machines for your more adept computer users, rather than rolling it out to everyone. See how you and your users get on for a few months. Maybe put Ubuntu on one and Manjaro on another. Speaking slightly from the same position as you as I may end up managing a workstation in another Uni Department, for which I’m currently musing over the Linux distro to use; Manjaro vs something uber stable and boring, such as Debian/CentOS.

From a distro-specific point of view, with Manjaro, I’ve found the most important thing regarding updates is to keep an eye on the forums. You will often find manual interventions are required. I’d also advise keeping more than one kernel installed: linux-latest & linux-lts aren’t bad options. Maybe also test the updates on one machine before updating the rest.

I think I read someone say somewhere that from a sys admin point of view, the main difference between a rolling release distro and a point-release distro was the distribution of your headaches. For a point release distro you’ll have a massive headache once every year or so. For a rolling release distro you’ll have small headaches every week or two.

Regarding office suites, it’s up to you, but I’d avoid wine unless you absolutely need it for something. Linux has a few very good office suites. Some of them even mimic Microsoft Office, like WPS Office.

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Yes, I know it is a bit vague because I don’t have a concrete case.The only thing I would to know is if Manjaro could it be an Operating System substitute to Windows on professional workstations ?

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You’d probably be better off using fedora, it’s what RedHat does.

However, foisting a new unfamiliar system onto office workers is a sure fire way to piss them all off.
If they use MS Office which I imagine they do, adding extra points of failure is silly.

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I know the Ubuntu distribution is recommended for professional workstations. Mainly LTS versions supported for several years. The problem with Ubuntu is that upgrades are often problematic.

@BusinessOrc: I tested Fedora on a workstation for myself, but I had some issues with it. Updates that were too recent caused problems. That’s why, I went to Manjaro.

I think the main reason people use LTS releases is that they have no intention of ever upgrading the machine to a newer release, and don’t plan on still being employed at the company when the support runs out.

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I think you would need to be certain about the skill levels of the end users and their preparedness for embedding any change in the work situation.

I have to use Windows 10 at work. Since I use only Manjaro at home my Windows problem solving skills have deteriorated.
I suspect that if you canvas your professionals in the office not many of them will be users of Linux and probably only have Windows, Apple or Android experiences.

That said, it is remarkable how many of my colleagues have taken to managing video-conferencing software in a very short space of time because of the coronavirus.
I would start with their perspective first. They may be really keen on change.

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I disagree with your classifying this thread as non-technical. This is a very technical thread. Companies and organizations spend a lot of money on IT. This thread is discussing very technical issues. For instance, will existing software run on the proposed system, who will serve as the Administrator of the systems, re-training of staff, and use of windows software on Linux.

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Just want to say hello. I am a Medical Anthropologist. I saw RStudio, spyder and rkward on your list. Great choices.

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@zoner:

Based on the OP, this category is the closest that the new forum has to Product Recommendations or Off-Topic.

So, it could delve into a myriad of topics? Each one of your examples should be a thread in it’s own right.

These two ***(IMO)*** don’t even belong on the Manjaro forum even if the user is running Manjaro. Choosing who gets admin rights is your personal choice, and will not gel with my (or almost everyone else’s) opinion.

As far as re-training, if you’re the business owner, that onus is on you, and you alone. Staff training is not what a support forum is all about.

In my opinion, Manjaro or Arch or its flavors are not really good choice for office use for a few reasons as follows.:

Printer support/compatibility is weaker than with Debian or its distros and printing, various brand and type of printers and their change by time is expected in office use.

The other is the rolling nature of Arch based systems as you will have to update your system several times but at least once a moth to avoid bigger issues which might arise if you update the system just once a while in a year, like running the OS without updates for 3-12 months you might face great issues, but updating frequently also may break the system or cause non available or buggy system for hours if not day while you have to fix it. You can chose LTE kernel for stability on the long run but I guess you still have to handle frequent updates.

I would say Arch or Manjaro etc rolling distro is okay for office only if you have a kinda overly enthusiastic technical power Linux IT manager available all day.

I’m still a Linux noob and love my 5.8 Manjaro system with KDE on my home power PC (except printing…) , but installed Manjaro Gnome and KDE and Debian and KdeNeon on our office PC at our retail shop and unfortunately the Manjaro Gnome there is pure struggle, freezing, cannot print, desktop file transactions freeze the OS etc. And we still did not have to update it yet… Debian stable with KDE or lighter desktop might be a better choice for office use.

Honestly, after weeks of trying to switch to Linux on 4 of our machines in the family and in the office, today I am seriously wondering if I should just reinstall Win on all machines again… Or maybe to give in to Canonical or Red Hat and install Fedoras with Gnome or KdeNeons. But those are like Microsoft in my eyes.

This is why Linux is mostly trapped at the hobbyist level. :sunglasses:

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