Starting today, Microsoft Teams is available for Linux users in public preview, enabling high quality collaboration experiences for the open source community at work and in educational institutions. Users can download the native Linux packages in .deb and .rpm formats here. We are constantly improving based on community feedback, so please download and submit feedback based on your experience.
The Microsoft Teams client is the first Microsoft 365 app that is coming to Linux desktops, and will support all of Teams’ core capabilities. Teams is the hub for teamwork that brings together chat, video meetings, calling, and collaboration on Office 365 documents and business processes within a single, integrated experience.
I genuinely hope this is the harbinger of the rest of Microsoft Office also finding its way to Linux natively. LibreOffice is workable in a pinch, but for proper compatibility nothing beats the real Office (sadly). I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft has long had Linux versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and so on, much like how Mac OS X has been running on Intel all along before Apple made the switch.
I’m not sure how fair it is to say Microsoft is bringing an app to Linux. Teams is an electron app so most of the hard cross platform work was done by other companies and open source groups.
Also, teams is pretty bad; we use teams at work, purple complain about it constantly. I’ve used teams on another team, and people complained about it there too.
Similarly to cosmotic’s point about Teams being Electron, the on-line Office365 web apps all work pretty well, independent of platform. Not on local files, of course, but you can upload documents to OneDrive in order to work on them. Point being that Microsoft do seem to have the technology-level issues licked. Making stand-alone desktop apps out of their web-tech versions, or not, is presumably a question of demand and business issues.
Didn’t you hear? Documents and files are so 20th century. No-one does that any more 🙂
It is very unlikely that MS has a Linux version of Office given that it’s a native Win32 app. If they wanted to bring Office to Linux, it is likely that they would ship half a Windows along with it (think Wine).
Well, there are greater and lesser versions of Office, these days. As well as the Web version I mentioned, above, there are also the versions that run on macOS, and iOS and Android tablets. These don’t seem to be Wine-based, and arguably aren’t a million miles from what you would need on Linux+X11, assuming a suitable GUI shim, which could easily be electron.
This is the best summary about the “cross platformness” of the Office Sourcecode that I know of: https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-aligns-its-different-office-code-bases-as-of-the-latest-mac-office-release/
If you read through that you will see mentions about 2014 when the “maximize sharing” got serious and 2018 when “For the first time in over 20 years, Office is again built out of one codebase for all platforms (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android)!”
source: https://twitter.com/Schwieb/status/954037656677072896
Related Source:https://www.thurrott.com/office/150577/office-2016-mac-now-aligned-windows-android-ios
“the shared code is all C++. Each platform has native code interfacing with the OS [ie, Objective C for Mac and iOS, Java for Android, C/C++ for Windows, etc].”
Teams seems like a completely seperate program that followed a completely seperate development track and was never built in C++.
The “Modern OneDrive Sync Client” was also never really a part of Office so drawing any conclusions about “plain old Office” based on Teams/OneDrive clients coming to Linux makes no sense from a code point of view. However politically/strategically it would make sense for Microsoft to make their software available on Linux (go where the customers are), although with a lower priority because of marketingshare
Well, there’s office apps for android. So they sort of run on linux…
Having a family member pretty high up in that area, I can say that no, there is not long existing Linux versions of Office. I’m not sure why Thom `wouldn’t be surprised` if there were. There’s no secret relationship between Microsoft software and Linux.
Oh yes I can’t wait for an installer that speads MS Office like a cancer all over my / as it’s done on Windows and macOS! I bet fonts go to /sbin and templates go to /proc/microsoft/7824578234782378927893478/i/was/going/to/tell/you/about/this/thing/that/happened/templates. And will we finally get an /etc.db registry that kills the whole system if Office has a hickup? Grrrrreat!
just run it in firejail or equivalent sandbox.
I was just being sarcastic. I’m in the fortunate position that I have not needed an office program other than LibreOffice since, umm, it was still called StarOffice back then.
A native Linux version of OneNote would certainly get me one step closer to dropping macOS and Windows…
Now, you know why Microsoft has ported Edge to Linux.