I’ve been using [Gentoo] Linux as my primary OS for quite a few years now. I like it. It helps me work, the way I want to work. The only downside to being this committed to using Linux is the lack of a good office suite. Yes, there is LibreOffice, KOffice, and was OpenOffice. However, from my experience those don’t offer nearly the nice experience that MS Office does.
This is where Crossover Linux comes in. I hate sounding like a marketing tool for a company. But this is a product I’m glad I paid for. It has saved me many headaches. Crossover Linux is a tool that basically turns Wine into apt-get/portage/yum, but for Windows binaries. On top of that, there is the support and innovation that wine doesn’t give you right out. Without Crossover office, to install MS Office you’d have to modify your wine environment many times, grab and install the dependencies in a sorted order, and then finally try [and possibly fail] at installing MS Office. That was depending on which guide you’re looking at. With Crossover Office, to install MS Office just open the wizard to install software, create a new bottle, and tell it that you’re installing MS Office, provide the installer files and it does all of the hard work for you. Crossover even finalizes the install by setting up the nice menu items in the K menu, and in your file manager.
Another neat feature that it has is bottles. Basically it creates sandboxed environments for each application. You can have your Steam install files separate from MS Office, or WoW files. Yes, I did say it runs steam. CrossOver office is just $50 for 6 months of free upgrades, and you get email support.
If you want to save quite a lot of time, and remain productive on Linux, get this product. Lastly, by supporting this company, you support their effort to give back to the Wine project. Their employees regularly release their changes back into the Wine project.