I can guarantee you that there is no equivalent to word on Linux. All compatible office suites display word documents differently, and none come close to feature parity if we're talking about advanced macros and similar.

There is no alternative to Windows If they need Microsoft office for work... Or a VM just to run that shitty application.

Same applies to video conferencing software. If he is forced to use a specific tool, he'll probably be be plain out of luck. Most can't host the conferences from Linux.

Thankfully, most people don't need word or one specific brand of video conferencing software... So using Linux would still be an option to a lot of people

I've found WPS Office (https://www.wps.com/linux) to be pretty good in terms of both compatibility and UI similarity.

> no equivalent

...

> that shitty application

Pick one!

you clearly didn't understood the point i was trying to make.

I don't like Word and thankfully, don't need it myself. I'm perfectly fine with word.office.com and google docs, as I neither need nor want the advanced features. I also don't mind if the document has an occasionally entirely different layout and sometimes even an entirely broken one.

If you are forced to use the doc/docx formats and need to share these files with other people, you'll be forced to use Microsoft Office and by extension Windows. There is no viable alternative.

all alternatives only work if you only need to produce PDFs and don't need to collaboratively edit said doc/docx

and exactly the same applies to the video conferencing tools. If you can choose your own, appear.in works fine from linux for example.

If you need to use Ciscos or SAPs (for example) video conferencing tools, you'll be plain out of luck on linux, unless you're fine just joining other peoples sessions (never hosting one yourself)

Crossover runs Word + Excel 2016 on Linux extremely well.

I found SoftMaker Office 2018 to work well in terms of compatibility with MS Office.