Linux Questions

[Taem]

I've decided against using LibreOffice. It is simply not up to the professional quality I can achieve with my documents in MS Office...

I was going to ask.

Lastly, once I do that, there is no reason for me to keep my windows partition. Is there a way to reformat the entire windows partition to Linux Mint? Such a hassle moving all of my documents, pictures, and videos off the drive, but I guess it can't be helped with a full partition wipe. How about the backup HD used for system crashes with the windows 10 backup on it? Can that be safely wiped and used for Linux?

I am not 100% sure what you are asking, but I hope this is relevant. If you are interested in saving a backup of your Win10 system disk/partition, perhaps clonezilla would be of use? For altering partitions I used this guide:
https://www.rootusers.com/use-gparted-to...partition/

LibreOffice is fine for day to day documents. For crafting professional articles however, it leaves much to be desired, or rather, converting my .docx to LO standard f*'s them up completely and irreparably, and many, many features I used heavily in MS Word are omitted from LO, but I was power user. I saw all this not to dis on LO, but to say I've found a suitable replacement in SoftMaker Office! It's essentially the same as MS Office, with the same pagination and everything. All of my documents open flawlessly and display perfectly. I'm only missing the Text Effects that the latest MS Word came with, which is a bit of a disappointment. The Picture Effects are also a hassle, but nothing I can't adjust to with Photoshop anyhow. Oh yeah, I'll have to see if PS works in Linux... such a pain.

Regarding the second part, I was just asking how to wipe my old partition to another Linux drive, then if the backup harddrive used for Windows 10 clean installs (essentially the CD I believe) could be partitioned for Linux also.

EDIT: Nothing in Linux is easy... First, I thought getting MS Word 2010 and MS Excel 2010 to work in WINE would be cake. Turns out its anything but, with several features not working for those able to get it up and running. Turns out you can do it with a commercial version of WINE called CrossOver which costs $60 annually. However... I found out that installing and using WINE opens your Linux OS to Windows vulnerabilities; it would have been nice to have known that from the start. I guess I'll uninstall WINE off my system.

So I scour the internet to stay Linux based and find SoftMaker, touted as the spiritual successor to the MS Office suite. I have to admit that the Word equivalent, TextMaker, is so far excellent, missing only a few standard features that 2010 has. However it's Excel counterpart is utter trash; copying and pasting cells does not copy any formatting... There does not seem to be a way to change the date from the Euro standard day/month/year to the American standard. And none of the cut/copy/paste functions on my keyboard work in SoftMaker - or LibreOffice for that matter - but work fine in all other applications on Linux. SoftMaker will cost me an additional $99.

I'm thinking of using LibreOffice for my Excel documents since they can be converted without much loss, and my Word documents in SoftMaker and I'll only lose the text effects and picture effects. For the documents that rely on these effects heavily, I'll have to continue using dual-boot until I can find a suitable workaround. The most frustrating thing so far is getting the cut/copy/paste working on my keyboard... such a simple thing you'd think! Not ctrl-x/c/v mind you, but actual media buttons for cut/copy/paste. Another issue I'm having is that I'm one of the millions of users who may-or-may-not have a legal copy of Photoshop *ahem*, and I don't see myself spending the $1K+ for the full version so I can get it up and running on Linux, especially since I plan on uninstalling WINE. I'll have to learn to adapt to new graphics software on Linux, however I doubt I can do even half the things I've learned to do on PS, which means I'll have to stay dual-booted when working on pictures.

So I have to remind myself, what is the reason I wanted to switch to Linux in the first place? I was, and am, tired of W10 constantly rebooting without my permission, not knowing what updates it's installed, losing critical documents during the update process, MS known data mining, etc. I thought the switch to Linux would be an easy road, but it's far from. What's the point of staying dual-booted if I have to keep booting into Windows? I think for an average computer user, Linux would work just fine, but for a graphics editor, or for someone who has hundreds of documents already prepared in MS Office, its a difficult transition, if not impossible. Linux could be a real competitive OS if it weren't so fractured with all it's different builds and distros. I'm still personally on the fence rather to continue prodding along until I get something that works with what I need it to, or to give up. Just when you think you've finished the race with Linux, you find out you're only half way down the track and the hurdles just keep coming!