Let's hope that «multi-monitor support» will help this bug [1] go away! I have found that most of the Windows apps I used to rely on have good counterparts working on Linux, but sadly nothing matches Powerpoint (no, LibreOffice does not count).
Its easy to generate complex vector graphics as well as presentations. Orders of magnitude increase in productivity compared with Latex or Beamer. This might not be felt in the coding community, as their diagrams are standardized and hence simple .
Libreoffice Present is pretty buggy. For example, sometimes clicks don't do the right thing. Also, I've had slide elements become uneditable. These bugs are really noticeable when making presentations with complex slides. Libreoffice also produced really poor kerning, poor antialising and figure quality after resizing (though perhaps this has improved since my last try).
Beamer and google slides are fine when you want bullet points or a figure. My scientific work produces lots of pictures and graphs - figure placement and labelling is really important. Animations are also sometimes necessary. Beamer, google slides and libreoffice just don't work well there.
I try to avoid using MS products (not hate, just trying to favour free software), but I had to learn extensively about Office last year and I really enjoyed the UX. It has some powerful features for working with animations, transitions and effects. Take this example [1] -I don’t think it’s even possible to do in Google Slides, which finds its power by being more simple and multiplatform.
So it depends on your needs, which also applies to Beamer.
The other issue is that even if you had an office application with feature parity to Powerpoint, Powerpoint is still the one that everyone else is using. As a result, perfect file compatibility is more important than features. I haven't used Open/LIbreOffice in about two years - I stopped because I could not collaborate with colleagues on the same PPT file if I was using LibreOffice. Little things in format and layout would get messed up when you went back and forth.
I love LibreOffice and rely only on it. But its Impress part is really cumbersome to use compared to PowerPoint (and I hate to admit that).
All the icons are lined up front and hard to distinguish; some bugs are really annoying (animated transitions don't work on my computers); some functionalities are tough to find : grouping/ungrouping for example.
You don't need animated transitions in presentations. This eye-candy is fun the first time you see it, but later it's just an irritating delay.
UI preferences are a matter of taste and habits. I find PowerPoint ui a hot garbage mess where I can't find anything, and LibreOffice is logical and structured to me. So my mileage obviously varies.
If a feature is unnecessary, it does not matter if it is buggy.
As a person who regularly reviews students presentations, I tell you this: these "grabbing attention" gimmicks achieve nothing but irritate the audience. If you rely on it, you better think again, how to grab attention with your presentation contents.
Don't believe me? Ok. Check any of the presentations that had successfully pitched projects to VCs. None of them will contain any "attention grabbing" animations. Example: [1]
Of course "I" don't need it. But you see, there’s this kid of mine. In his school, you’re somehow pushed to use PowerPoint (see Microsoft schools programme)... So he’s confronted with his friends who totally abuse the visuals (and the teacher somehow likes that too). So social pressure comes in. And although the kid could use LibreOffice, he’s so dissappointed to not be able to play in the same league as his friend that I have hard times convincing him to stay out of MSFT. So no, I don’t need animated transitions but he does (and don’t start me on the fact I could explain him why transitions are a distraction, usually).
I love Google Slides, it allows me to get make slides without aditional complications, I do prefer simpler slides, and to be honest I kind of dislike it when people have animations that take literal seconds! The way I see it, slides are an aid, they're there just to help me stay on track and to guide me. That does NOT mean that you should read of of it... Sorry, it's just so many people get presenting SO wrong... It angered me so much that when I was in University I decided to make a presentation about making presentations, in hopes that maybe the students would learn a thing or two and make start making better presentation.
tl;dr;
Google Slides is web-based, thus it works everywhere
For games i use Lutis (https://lutris.net/) which gives you something similar to "profiles" (they call it runners, pre-configured isolated WINE instances) for each application. Also it includes a bunch of tricks and helpers out of the box.
I don't understand what is so hard about WINEPREFIX and WINEARCH? Instead of a new VM, just use a new wineprefix for each application. Wintetricks works in your prefix, it doesn't take any special setup.
I surely hope so, given that these make it possible to do things with Wine which are difficult if not impossible with a real Windows installation without having to do silly things with VMs or containers. As an example I use Wine to run Sketchup (2016, off-line) on Linux. After 30 days the thing times out and wants me to buy a license which is no longer available given that Sketchup has gone with the times and now does cloudy things. Since I just want to run the thing off-line without any external interference I prefer the 2016 version over newer incarnations. On Windows I'd have to try to eradicate every last trace of Sketchup from the registry and any other location used to determine whether this is the first time the program has been installed. On Linux the solution is simple, just wipe $WINEPREFIX and re-install (an automated process) to the same location. A simple script does the job, sketchup -r and I'm set.
By the way, $WINEPREFIX can also be used to make sure you don't wreck your entire Wine setup with a single typo. Just make sure all your serious use of Wine is done with a specific, non-default prefix and you're set.
"now does cloudy things" has really made my day, thanks. Unfortunately, a lot of modern software does cloudy things, Windows 10 and MS Office included.
I love IntelliJ approach to these cloudy things. They know developers are smart enough to remove whatever smart thing they can come up with, so instead, they do the obvious and kindly step back.
I apologize for removing their registry entry on Windows for Rider and I promise I will pay for the product when I am financially confident enough to do so. :)
There's applications to do this on Windows too. Using Sandboxie you can create a sandbox on the file system to isolate files (for sketchup for example) in the same way you can use a Wine prefix to isolate a single application.
Of course this doesn't cover all uses, but in my experience Windows tools exist to provide most features you can use Wine for. The difference is having to download 20 apps for 20 things and writing 20 scripts to automate everything versus downloading wine and just writing 20 scripts.
It bears mention that sandboxie is now free and transitioning to open source. So hopefully the original poster doesn't also have to uninstall and reinstall it due to cloudy things.
Use PlayOnLinux as a GUI for managing different prefixes but don't use the built-in install scripts , there are GUI configs but you can also open with a button a terminal in the correct prefix and type commands there if needed.
You may still need prefixes because for game A the wine direct3d will work better but for game B you may want DXVK and if you want to mod Skyrim you will have to compile a patched wine version,
POL will also manage all versions of wine for you so it can grab the latest one if you need it or some very old one if some game/application needs that.
I read about a month ago about hat the dev of DXVK had tons of issues where small patches to fix X issue were breaking Y issue and it made no sense, so is a impossible job to be 100% compatible with all games and application bugs.
Whilst the barest of bare anecdata, I can, e.g., run mineways.exe on Catalina 10.15.3 using wine64 4.0.2 (from homebrew) happily[1].
[1] Ok, you have to cancel the "bogus app move to bin?" prompt for both mineways.exe and vcruntime140_1.dll which is messy but I can live with that for OS emulation.
This is not accurate. This version of Wine can’t run 32-bit Windows apps on 10.15, but 64-bit apps do run. Also, CodeWeavers CrossOver can run 32 and 64-bit apps on 10.15.
I'll admit this is a very niche usecase, but not even CrossOver runs 16 bit apps anymore (like Minesweeper for Windows 98). Luckily the Windows XP version is basically the same and is 32-bit.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 98.7 ms ] thread[1] https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7416
Beamer and google slides are fine when you want bullet points or a figure. My scientific work produces lots of pictures and graphs - figure placement and labelling is really important. Animations are also sometimes necessary. Beamer, google slides and libreoffice just don't work well there.
It is called LibreOffice Impress.
[1]: https://youtu.be/3wtwVE5injI
All the icons are lined up front and hard to distinguish; some bugs are really annoying (animated transitions don't work on my computers); some functionalities are tough to find : grouping/ungrouping for example.
If only I had time, I'd work to fix that...
UI preferences are a matter of taste and habits. I find PowerPoint ui a hot garbage mess where I can't find anything, and LibreOffice is logical and structured to me. So my mileage obviously varies.
Anyways, presentations are supposed to grab attention. Nothing grabs attention better than an animation.
As a person who regularly reviews students presentations, I tell you this: these "grabbing attention" gimmicks achieve nothing but irritate the audience. If you rely on it, you better think again, how to grab attention with your presentation contents.
Don't believe me? Ok. Check any of the presentations that had successfully pitched projects to VCs. None of them will contain any "attention grabbing" animations. Example: [1]
[1] https://medium.com/@gc/the-beginning-of-uber-7fb17e544851
tl;dr; Google Slides is web-based, thus it works everywhere
[0]: https://products.office.com/en-us/free-office-online-for-the...
It always seemed to me the easiest thing was to spin up a new VM for every application I wanted to run in Wine.
I feel like that isn't the intention, but without any built-in profile management you're always one typo away from wrecking your entire Wine setup.
By the way, $WINEPREFIX can also be used to make sure you don't wreck your entire Wine setup with a single typo. Just make sure all your serious use of Wine is done with a specific, non-default prefix and you're set.
I apologize for removing their registry entry on Windows for Rider and I promise I will pay for the product when I am financially confident enough to do so. :)
Of course this doesn't cover all uses, but in my experience Windows tools exist to provide most features you can use Wine for. The difference is having to download 20 apps for 20 things and writing 20 scripts to automate everything versus downloading wine and just writing 20 scripts.
You may still need prefixes because for game A the wine direct3d will work better but for game B you may want DXVK and if you want to mod Skyrim you will have to compile a patched wine version,
POL will also manage all versions of wine for you so it can grab the latest one if you need it or some very old one if some game/application needs that.
I read about a month ago about hat the dev of DXVK had tons of issues where small patches to fix X issue were breaking Y issue and it made no sense, so is a impossible job to be 100% compatible with all games and application bugs.
https://github.com/ergoithz/pywinery
Apple is doing us no favors here, so be aware.
Whilst the barest of bare anecdata, I can, e.g., run mineways.exe on Catalina 10.15.3 using wine64 4.0.2 (from homebrew) happily[1].
[1] Ok, you have to cancel the "bogus app move to bin?" prompt for both mineways.exe and vcruntime140_1.dll which is messy but I can live with that for OS emulation.