this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2025
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Linux

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Linux is awesome at home, but aren't y'all forced to use Windows at work? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 week ago by PlutoniumAcid@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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I'm liking the recent posts about switching to Linux. Some of my home machines run Linux, and I ran it on my main laptop for years (currently on Win10, preparing to return to Linux again).

That's all fine and dandy but at work I am forced to use Windows, Office, Teams, and all that. Not just because of corpo policies but also because of the apps we need to use.

Even if it weren't for those applications, or those policies, or if Wine was a serious option, I would still need to work with hundreds of other people in a Windows world, live-sharing Excel and so on.

I'm guessing that most people here just accept it. We use what we want at home, and use what the bossman wants at work. Or we're lucky to work in a shop that allows Linux. Right?

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[–] Dymonika@lemmy.one 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Linux has more and better ways to produce nice PDFs than Windows does

Go on...

[–] pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Fair enough!

Conversion

First, I haven't yet encountered a pre-existing document on Linux that didn't turn into a nice PDF when fed into "Print - Save as PDF", which I have found to be present by default on Gnome and KDE (the two most popular desktop environments). So for the majority of distros, Print to PDF is pre-installed and available.

For advanced use cases, there's Pandoc. Pandoc can convert most document formats to many other formats, and gives fine grained control over every step.

Authoring PDFs

For authoring a quick PDF, there's LibreOffice and OpenOffice.

And of course there's GnuImp, Krita, and so many more options for editing some images to add in.

Most distros ship with LibreOfffice or OpenOffice, and at least one image editor.

But I do recommend investigating some free and open image editors. There's many use cases and twice as many options. If the default isn't for you, what you need may be one (free) Software search away.

But can I just use plain text? (Yes)

For control freaks like me, there's also a whole ecosystem of tools that work well with Markdown, ASCIIDoc, LaTex, and ReStructuredText.

For the curious, start by trying VSCodium with a Markdown extension.

You can tune your extensions here, but I think I recall "Markdown All-In-One" getting me all the way from raw text to nice enough looking PDFs in one command. Maybe it was two, using the built in "Print to PDF" dialog.

Once again, PanDoc is the powerhouse of this use case, and many excellent tools are available.