I'm considering Fedora or openSUSE Leap for a Lenovo X1 ThinkPad tablet that's having trouble with Windows 11. The main concern is finding an Office replacement for academic documents, general office work, Word formatting and occasional Excel sheets without macros.
The user can get frustrated by unfamiliar interfaces, and the internet connection isn't reliable. Is SoftMaker a good option, or is there something else worth trying?
SoftMaker is worth a look for this. Its interface is fairly close to Microsoft Office, which may make the switch less frustrating. There's a free version to try as well as a paid version, so you can test it before spending anything.
I'd try a few actual documents, especially ones with complicated formatting, pictures and tables. Check how they look after saving and reopening them in Word too. A familiar interface won't help much if the documents don't come out right.
OnlyOffice has an interface that's pretty close to Microsoft Office. That makes it an obvious one to test, but similarity in the menus doesn't guarantee that editing objects in a document will feel the same.
850yards_of_sidewalk:
She already tried it and had trouble moving pictures and tables, particularly when transparency was involved. That's a big concern for her formatting work.
LibreOffice is another offline option. Writer and Calc can cover ordinary document and spreadsheet work, though the interface isn't identical to Word and Excel. Whether that difference is manageable depends a lot on the person using it.
Give her a small task she normally does and let her try it herself. Moving to a new operating system and a new office suite at the same time could be a lot of change.
Microsoft 365 in a browser could be useful for simple work and shared files, and there are free browser options. But with unreliable internet, I wouldn't make a web-only setup the main plan. Google Docs and Sheets are another possibility for basic files, with the same connection concern.
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roundabout-ish!:
The paid suite also has Zotero integration, which may be useful for academic work. Check whether the free version has the features needed before settling on it.