Almost a year ago, I took a position as an IT Manager in a Microsoft Office 365 environment. I made great effort to take on the incredible task of learning this job by immersing myself in all things Microsoft: Windows 11, Outlook, Teams, Office, and so forth.
I did start to bring in a crutch to reduce the dread but focused on using Windows as much as possible. After 3 months there, I decided that Windows was just not going to happen for me. Between the odd window focus challenges, the limitations of file explorer and the incredibly sluggish UI experience, I was at my limit with Windows. I made up my mind that this is just not for me and it will never be for me. I needed to make openSUSE Tumbleweed my home daily work environment. That is where my efficiency and work satisfaction dramatically increased.
I will go over what my solutions are for the various activities in my job that require the usage of Microsoft Office 365, plus a remote desktop solution that is pretty cool. This is not a complete list but rather the main things that affect me in my day to day work activities. I do this all on openSUSE Tumbleweed, my operating system of choice.
Solutions
In order to play nice in the Microsoft Office 365 environment, I did a lot of searching over a period of time and this is my current ensemble of applications to provide the adequate integration for my Linux based machine to work well in the Office 365 environment.
Outlook
Although I could just use the Outlook web client in the browser, after going back and forth with this, I have found that the best experience for using Outlook on my system was to run Prospect Mail.
Prospect Mail | Best Microsoft Outlook Experience on openSUSE
The main reason here is the rapid locating of the mail client itself. One of the big reasons I do not like web mail clients is the exactly the lack of client. Either I have more browsers open with the same icon or it is lost in a sea of tabs. Having a separate application is exactly how I want it.
Alternatively, I could use Ferdium and have it as a service there but it wasn’t as good of experience, for me, as the separate client. I also appreciate having a System Tray icon visible when I am in work mode.
My other big reason for using Prospect mail over just a web browser is to take advantage of the application “Junction” that allows me to direct specific traffic to my desired destination. For example, if what I click on is a work related activity, I can just send it to Edge. If I want to open the link in something “safer” I can use an alternative.
The one problem I have with Prospect Mail is occasionally when opening up a document or a link to something, instead of it opening it up externally, it will do so within the “wrapper” where I will be stuck there. My only remedy is to reload Prospect Mail to get out of it.
Overall, Prospect Mail provides a better Outlook experience than Outlook itself. Despite the one issue I do have with it.
Teams
The official Teams for Linux was discontinued by Microsoft. It is unfortunate but there is a solution out there using the venerable Flatpak. A quick search on flathub.org will bring you to an Electron App that is a wrapper around the web client.
https://flathub.org/apps/com.github.IsmaelMartinez.teams_for_linux
This is also available as a Snap and AppImage. A native RPM is also available by simply typing in.
opi teamsThere is also a Snap you can install if you prefer that.
https://snapcraft.io/teams-for-linux
For the latest AppImage release, go to the Releases page on Github.
For my purposes and preferences, I have decided that the Flatpak works best for me. I think it would be worth trying all the solutions again at some point but as of today, the Flaptak seems to work best for the screen sharing and video conferencing bits. I had issues with browsers or even Ferdium crashing when trying to share a screen or window. The webcam did, however work. Basically, the feature I use the least in video conferencing. This was probably a Wayland issue as this didn’t happen when using X11 for my display server.
One other benefit to using Teams as a separate application is the ability to click on a web conferencing link and using Junction, direct it to Teams. That is incredibly convenient. Sure, it is an extra click due to using Junction but it is worth the convenience.
I will add that it is probably more convenient just living in the Microsoft world with the tight integration of the Office environment with the operating system, but I do happen to prefer this over the tight integration. There would be the possibility of completely removing the Teams portion of video conferencing for an open source equivalent, like Jitsi or perhaps using Zoom that could also be accessed in this way. For me and my current environment, Teams in this way works perfectly.
One cool thing about the current state of Linux is the way you can share screens, your workspace, a rectangular region or a new virtual output. This is relatively new thanks to the like of Pipewire and the plumbing to make it all work.
Teams in Linux is fantastic and works just as well as it does in Windows with all the same sound device issues. So, if you can troubleshoot the sound devices in Windows, it is just as easy in Linux.
Microsoft Edge
I went back and forth between the Flatpak, Snap and RPM with Microsoft Edge for a few weeks. What I ended up going with here is to use the Flatpak. I know, I know, I know, you are going to scold me and tell me that this is not an open source browser, and you are absolutely correct but let me explain myself here.
Since I work in a “Microsoft Shop” and I can synchronize Edge browser with my Microsoft account it made sense to do all my work activities in Edge. This allows me to segregate out and move between machines quite cleanly. Truly, this works great for my current position and work activities.
https://flathub.org/apps/com.microsoft.Edge
I can move between various machines, some of which are Windows, and have my browser history, favorites and extensions on each system. This is great for productivity within my role at the company. I will absolutely not do without this fantastic feature for this particular set of tasks.
Microsoft Office 365
For the most part, I prefer to use LibreOffice for all office suite activities except for one, Microsoft Excel. It is basically the one “killer app” that Microsoft has. LibreOffice Impress is better than PowerPoint on just about everything and I prefer using LibreOffice Writer over Word. The other feature I really want is the collaborative editing you can do with Microsoft Office so I installed Office 365 with Crossover Linux.
Note: I used the 32bit version of Office 365, NOT the 64bit version. This will install Office in a 32bit version of Windows 7, for what it’s worth.
The good news, it does install without any issues the bad news, I can’t get the collaborative and auto save features to work so I call this a partial success. If this could be remedied, this would basically make using Windows completely irrelevant for all my primary tasks.
It appears that Office 365 in Linux is about 95% there. It is just the one little OneDrive integration bit that is missing and maybe there is a fix on the way. Once that is fixed, this will be just as good of an experience as being on Windows.
OneDrive
Insync for OneDrive. I have talked about this as a solution before here but I wanted to illustrate what I think is very awesome about the OneDrive portion of Insync and how much I prefer this over the official OneDrive client for Windows.
I have blathered on about Insync and how wonderful it is for using it with both Google Drive and OneDrive. That can be found here:
Insync | Google Drive and OneDrive Sync Client on openSUSE
OneNote
Ended up using Edge but what is almost perfect is P3X-OneNote. A pretty nice application, really but the problem for me is the lack of a dark mode that works for me. It does have a dark mode but it inverts the colors which makes any screen shots or pictures the reverse of what they should be. It is really close but just not what works for me. If you prefer a light theme, this will be great for you.
https://patrikx3.github.io/onenote
Using Edge with OneNote is really good enough for me. I can use the Dark Reader extension to make it look just right with the images not being inverted for the correct look and feel. The reality of the matter is, the actual OneNote client is better. It is more responsive because of how it caches the data locally.
Of all the applications, this one is most likely to be replaced with a Non-Office 365 solution.
Remote Desktop Client
Remmina is the application of choice for managing the various machines I need to remote into. I have tried several but this one works the best for me in and of itself. It probably deserves its own article but I will just illustrate, in short, why this is the best.
I don’t feel comfortable giving host names and IP addresses so forgive the blur. What makes this great is that I have rapid access to the various systems and break it down into groups. I am incapable of over emphasizing how awesome this application is for access all the systems I access to get my work done.
Since Remmina is in the official Tumbleweed and Leap repositories, this is as simply as running one quick command in the terminal to install it for openSUSE.
sudo zypper install remminaThere are also Flatpak and Snap packaging options.
This truly is a fantastic remote desktop client, especially for managing Windows machines. Simply wonderful. The feature that I find most valuable is how I am able to jump into the desired system right from the system tray menu. With only a couple of clicks, I am in, do what needs to be done and I can hop back out.
I don’t know if this exists on Windows, I would like that, actually, as I could see this sort of remote desktop management invaluable to the engineers and other tech centered people I work with.
What Works Well
Prospect Mail, Teams and Edge work fantastically well, just as you would expect. I find that the applications I run on openSUSE runs slightly better than the Windows native applications on Windows itself. Perhaps it is just me but it is much more enjoyable. The way screen sharing is handled on the Plasma Desktop with Wayland as the display server is simply fantastic.
Remmina is by far the best remote desktop client I have ever used on any machine. I use this a lot for managing the various systems at both sites for which I am responsible. I have found that interacting with the domain controllers and Windows file share in this manner has been incredibly efficient. I also appreciate that whether I am accessing a machine with RDP or VNC, it all works very smooth and efficiently in one centralized application for managing this. This application alone has made a world of difference in job efficiency.
Insync tends to be a bit more reliable than the OneDrive client on my Windows machine. Maybe I ran into a few flukes with the Windows OneDrive client but I have had to restart it a few times, not lately but there were a few times. I also prefer how Insync segregates out the different shares.
What Does Not Work Well
I don’t have a OneNote solution I am completely happy with. What I am using now is passable and works well enough but it is often a bit slow and laggy. I really need to find an adequate replacement for OneNote, mostly because the search feature is rather terrible within the application itself. I have been using TiddlyWiki for my personal notebook but I think I am reaching some of its limits for documentation purposes in the way I would like to use it.
OneDrive integration with Microsoft Office 365 for collaborative editing is just not available to me. It really hampers me using one of the greatest features Office 365 has but my workaround is using the browser version for that specific purpose. I do like to use Excel for a couple of specific spreadsheets, regardless of its lack of autosave. Basically, anywhere LibreOffice fails me which is not very often, I will use the Microsoft equivalent.
Final Thoughts
Being an administrator in a Microsoft heavy environment with openSUSE is absolutely doable. It isn’t 100% but it is very close. There are a few applications that we use that does not work in Linux at all but I have whittled it down to a single application.
On another thought, if you were setting up a corporate environment and wanted end user systems to be Linux, you could save some licensing costs only purchasing the Office 365 E1 license and use the web versions of applications instead of the local clients. For the most part, I am primarily using only the features of the E1 license on my openSUSE Tumbleweed machine with the occasional use of Excel running through Crossover Linux.
I have successfully made openSUSE Tumbleweed my home, daily, work environment in a Microsoft Shop. This has dramatically improved my efficiency and work-life satisfaction. That dread of using Windows to do my job has essentially evaporated.
References
https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux
https://snapcraft.io/teams-for-linux
https://flathub.org/apps/com.github.IsmaelMartinez.teams_for_linux
https://flathub.org/apps/com.microsoft.Edge
Ferdium | Centralized Web-Based Services Application
https://remmina.org/
https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover
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