TL;DR — Office-on-Linux is a tolerable compromise, not a solved problem and not a reason to keep Windows. Two of your installed apps have no honest replacement: OneDrive (no first-party client, and no Linux client offers files-on-demand [1], while tenant policy can block the OSS ones outright [2]) and OneNote (web-only; the Obsidian importer refuses work/school accounts [3]). Everything else lands: Teams is officially web/PWA-only even on Windows-adjacent terms [4], Evolution 3.60 speaks Microsoft 365 Graph natively [5], and Excel for the web got the full Power Query editor in January 2026 [6][7].
Your installed Microsoft/sync/AI stack, mapped
| Windows app (installed) | Linux replacement | Parity | Migration notes |
|---|---|---|---|
Microsoft 365 - en-us + - nl-nl (Word/Excel/PowerPoint 16.0.20228) |
ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors ⭐ 5.1k + Office for the web | ⚠ | No native Office for Linux exists and won’t [8]. OOXML is ONLYOFFICE’s native format [9]; keep LibreOffice for ODF and offline heavy lifting. VBA breaks everywhere → see fidelity section |
Microsoft OneNote - de-de/en-us/fr-fr/nl-nl |
OneNote for the web; P3X OneNote ⭐ 2.1k wrapper; migrate to Obsidian/Joplin | ⚠ | Weakest link. Export path is lossy and the official Obsidian importer is personal-account only [3] |
Microsoft.OutlookForWindows (new Outlook) |
Evolution 3.60 with the “Microsoft 365” (Graph) account type [5]; Thunderbird 145+ for mail only [10]; OWA in a browser | ⚠ | New Outlook is Windows-only and Microsoft has announced nothing for Linux [8]. Pick by protocol, not by looks — EWS dies 1 Oct 2026 [11] |
MSTeams |
Teams PWA (Edge/Chrome) [12]; teams-for-linux ⭐ 4.9k | ⚠ | “Teams is no longer supported on Linux” — Microsoft’s own client matrix, updated 16 Jul 2026 [4]. Web is the supported path |
Microsoft Teams Meeting Add-in for Microsoft Office 1.26 |
none; schedule from Teams/OWA, or DavMail’s CalDAV online-meeting [13] |
✗ | It’s an Outlook-desktop COM add-in; there is no Outlook desktop on Linux [8]. Thunderbird cannot mark an invite as a Teams meeting on its own [14] |
Microsoft.MicrosoftOfficeHub |
m365.cloud.microsoft in any browser |
✓ | The Office app became the Microsoft 365 Copilot app; office.com/microsoft365.com redirect there [15] |
Microsoft.Office.ActionsServer, Microsoft.OfficePushNotificationUtility |
— | ✓ | Windows-only plumbing for the Office/OneNote apps. Nothing to replace; they disappear with the suite |
Microsoft OneDrive 26.123 + Microsoft.OneDriveSync |
abraunegg/onedrive ⭐ 12.7k; rclone ⭐ 59k; onedriver ⭐ 2.5k; Insync (paid) | ⚠ | Microsoft has never shipped a Linux client [16]. No files-on-demand in the OSS daemon [1]; budget full local disk |
Dropbox 262.4 + DropboxInc.Dropbox |
Official Dropbox for Linux | ✓ | ext4, zfs, xfs, btrfs and eCryptFS-on-ext4 are all supported now [17] — the 2018 ext4-only rule [18] was rolled back in 2019 [19]. ⚠ no ARM [17] |
LibreOffice 26.2.1.2 |
same version, native | ✓ | 26.2 landed Feb 2026 with Excel-interop work [20] |
Obsidian 1.11.5 |
same version, native | ✓ | Official AppImage, .deb, snap, Flatpak, plus arm64 [21] |
[Store] Claude |
Claude Desktop for Linux (beta) | ✓ | Shipped 30 Jun 2026 for Ubuntu 22.04+/Debian 12+; ⚠ no Computer Use, no dictation yet [22] |
Copilot 150.0 + Microsoft.Copilot |
browser, or the unofficial copilot-desktop snap |
⚠ | No official Microsoft Copilot desktop app for Linux; the snap is a community wrapper by Ken VanDine, last updated Feb 2026 [23] |
Teams: the PWA is the supported path, and it is thinner
Microsoft’s admin doc now lists Linux as ❌ “Teams is no longer supported on Linux”, with Web as ✅ on Edge, Chrome, Firefox and Safari [4]. The PWA was announced as GA for Linux and is a feature of the web client, not a separate app [12].
What actually breaks:
- Screen sharing on Wayland — needs the full stack: an xdg-desktop-portal backend for your compositor, PipeWire running, and the app pointed at the portal capture path [24]. Concretely in 2026: on Ubuntu 26 + GNOME/Wayland, teams-for-linux’s snap build fails ScreenCast (“Bind context provider failed”) while the .deb works — snap confinement, not code [25]. Community verdict: the PWA in Chrome/Edge behaves better than Electron wrappers for capture [24].
- Background effects — blur and the built-in set work; uploading a custom background is limited in the Linux PWA [26], and Fedora users report background filters failing outright in the PWA [27].
- Notifications — long-running Microsoft Q&A thread: silent notifications, toasts self-deleting after ~5 s, missing “meeting started” alerts [28]. This is the single most-reported daily annoyance.
- Meeting add-in — gone. Schedule from Teams itself or OWA.
teams-for-linux ⭐ 4.9k (Jul 2026) buys back system notifications, tray with badges, custom backgrounds, screen sharing and multi-account profiles — but it is an Electron wrapper of the same web app, disables contextIsolation and sandboxing to reach the Teams DOM, and is explicitly unaffiliated with Microsoft [29]. A first-hand 2026 report of a locked-down M365 org calls a Teams flatpak wrapper “exactly the same as on windows” in function [2].
Outlook: choose by protocol, because EWS dies this October
The deadline dominates every other consideration. EWS is disabled by default across Exchange Online tenants on 1 Oct 2026 and fully shut down 1 Apr 2027, with admin allow-lists needing to be created before end of August 2026 [11][30]. Anything EWS-only is a client with a three-month shelf life.
| Client | Protocol to M365 | Calendar / contacts | Verdict | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Evolution 3.60 + evolution-ews |
Graph (“Microsoft 365” account type) and EWS | ✓ | ✓ | Best bet. Maintainer, 3 Jul 2026: preview status ended in the 3.52/3.56 era, “many main pain points had been fixed”, ⚠ “feature parity is not complete” [5] |
| Thunderbird 145+ | EWS shipped Nov 2025; Graph in progress | ✓ | ✗ | Exchange email is native and add-on-free [10]; Graph is “entering the final stretch toward feature parity”, calendar only planned after that [31][32] |
| Thunderbird + OWL for Exchange | EWS | ✓ | ✓ | €10/yr, syncs calendar + address book, MFA-aware [33]; also surfaces Teams chat inside Thunderbird [2] |
| Betterbird | inherits Thunderbird’s | ⚠ | ⚠ | Stable line is still 140.13.0esr — pre-EWS. The 153 series exists but ships with “do not use this version in production yet” [34] |
| DavMail ⭐ 750 6.8 gateway | Graph or EWS → IMAP/CalDAV/LDAP | ✓ | ✓ | Graph mode now exposed in the GUI, OAuth2 mandatory so MFA/Conditional Access work, and it can auto-create Teams meetings via the CalDAV online-meeting setting [13] |
| Outlook on the web | — | ✓ | ✓ | Zero-risk fallback, officially supported in Firefox/Chrome on Linux [8] |
One reassuring data point for third-party clients generally: Microsoft confirmed to the Thunderbird team that “approved mail clients such as Thunderbird will continue to be able to obtain user consent for permissions that were previously unavailable to third-party applications” [31].
OneNote: the one you should migrate off, not replace
There is no Linux client. Options, worst-to-best for a work tenant:
- OneNote for the web — the supported path. ⚠ local (non-cloud) notebooks are a desktop-only feature, so anything not synced to OneDrive/SharePoint has to be uploaded first [35].
- P3X OneNote ⭐ 2.1k (Jul 2026) — an Electron wrapper around the same web app with locale auto-detection; still actively released in 2026 [36]. Buys window/tray integration, not features.
- Migrate to Obsidian (already installed) via the official Importer — OAuth to Microsoft, notebooks → folders, pages →
.md. ⚠ hard blocker: “Only notebooks owned by your personal account can be imported”; work/school accounts unsupported, locked sections invisible until unlocked [3]. - onenote-md-exporter ⭐ 1.6k — the escape hatch for work notebooks: a Windows console app that drives OneNote → DOCX → Pandoc → Markdown, with Joplin and Obsidian output targets [37]. Run it before you wipe Windows — it needs the OneNote desktop app you’re about to delete.
- Known losses in any export: handwriting/ink, text tags, password-protected sections (skipped unless unlocked), and images nested in tables [38].
OneDrive: four bad options, pick your poison
Microsoft “hasn’t shipped one in 15 years and probably won’t” [16].
| Tool | Model | SharePoint / Teams libraries | Files-on-demand | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| abraunegg/onedrive ⭐ 12.7k | sync daemon (bi-directional, or upload/download-only, --dry-run) |
✓ Business + SharePoint libraries + shared folders, multi-tenant Entra ID | ✗ explicitly in “what’s missing” | CLI-only, no official GUI; runs on all major distros, FreeBSD/OpenBSD, Docker/Podman [1] |
| rclone ⭐ 59k | on-demand copy/sync, or mount |
✓ | via VFS cache | ⚠ mount without --vfs-cache-mode writes/full breaks most apps (no random writes, no seek-on-read) [39] |
| onedriver ⭐ 2.5k | FUSE filesystem, download-on-access | ⚠ limited SharePoint support [16] | ✓ this is its whole point | Closest thing to Windows’ behaviour; last commit Jan 2026 [40] |
| Insync (paid) | GUI sync | claims SharePoint + OneDrive for Business | ✗ | ⚠ conflicting evidence: Insync’s own Linux page advertises OneDrive/ODB/SharePoint [41], while a competitor states “Insync used to, dropped support in 2024” [16]. Trial before paying |
The real risk is not the tool, it’s your tenant. abraunegg’s app registration shows as an unverified publisher and requests broad delegated scopes, which is exactly what admins block [42]. A March 2026 first-hand account: OneDrive sync “remained the major pain point — native Linux clients lack files-on-demand, and the organization blocked both popular open-source solutions from signing in” [2]. Mitigations that exist in the client: Intune SSO via the Microsoft Identity Device Broker D-Bus interface, and the OAuth2 device authorisation flow for Entra ID [43]. Test sign-in on day one, before you commit.
Dropbox, by contrast, is boring in the good way: official client, Ubuntu 18.04+/Fedora 28+, ext4/zfs/xfs/btrfs/eCryptFS-on-ext4, 64-bit only, no ARM [17].
Office file fidelity: three tiers, and two sharp edges
| Engine | .docx/.xlsx/.pptx round-trip | VBA | Power Query |
|---|---|---|---|
| Office for the web | reference-perfect (it is Office) | ✗ “Macros do not run in a browser window”; ActiveX/form controls don’t render; IRM-protected or digitally-signed workbooks won’t open at all [44] | ✓ full editor since Jan 2026 — view/refresh for all M365 subs, authoring for Business/Enterprise plans [6]; ⚠ desktop still wins on local-file sources, the full connector library and heavy M work [7] |
| ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors ⭐ 5.1k | best offline OOXML fidelity — OOXML is its internal format, so .docx/.xlsx/.pptx aren’t a conversion | ✗ macros are sandboxed JavaScript against the Document Builder API; VBA is not supported by design [9][45] | ✗ |
| LibreOffice 26.2 | good and improving: Excel 2010–365 is now the default XLSX export target, BIFF12 clipboard removes paste size limits, floating-table DOCX interop, partial OOXML chart-style round-trip [46][20] | ⚠ partial: “Support for VBA is not complete, but it covers a large portion of the common usage patterns”; needs Tools ▸ Options ▸ Load/Save ▸ VBA Properties ▸ Executable code, and you “may have to edit the VBA code and complete the missing support with LibreOffice Basic” [47] | ✗ |
Office Watch’s 2026 verdict on the open-source suites is the honest one: fine for everyday documents, but “once you start dealing with complex Word layouts, large Excel models or macro-heavy files, compatibility gaps become obvious” [8]. Practical split: ONLYOFFICE for files you exchange with Windows colleagues, LibreOffice for your own work, the web app whenever a document must come back byte-faithful.
Two sharp edges, restated: VBA does not survive anywhere on Linux (partially in LibreOffice, not at all in ONLYOFFICE or the browser), and Power Query authoring is now a web/licence question rather than a platform one — that edge got much duller in January 2026.
The locale angle
Your Office install is four-locale (en-us, nl-nl, de-de, fr-fr for OneNote). Nothing here is lost: LibreOffice UI and dictionaries are per-package (libreoffice-l10n-nl, -fr, -de on Debian/Ubuntu, libreoffice-langpack-* on Fedora), switchable at Tools ▸ Options ▸ Language Settings ▸ Languages [48]. P3X OneNote added an “Auto (system)” language option for locale detection in 2026 [36]. Office for the web follows your account language, not the OS. What you do lose is having four locales resident at once with per-document proofing switching — on Linux that’s one UI language plus N dictionaries.
What still argues for a Windows VM
Only three things from this angle: OneNote export (run onenote-md-exporter before wiping [37]), VBA-heavy workbooks, and the Teams Meeting add-in workflow if your calendar habits are built on it. None of them is a daily driver. Note the honest counter-view: Office Watch rates a Windows VM the “best for power users” option precisely because feature parity is otherwise unattainable, at the cost of a licence and the resources [8].