Technology

both affinity and photoshop run well on wine for me. there are native tools like krita that work well for less complex use cases.

as for office i use some basic macros and calculations and libreoffice works for me, but there are many choices that may or may not work for your friend.

admittedly, software discovery on linux is awful. the app store isnt that good on some distros and theres basically no promotion.

Best replacement for excel is: anything that doesn't rape your data whilst pouring sugar in you gas tank. /s

TLDR - R, Python, mariaDB, for real data analysis stuff + minor role for whatever spreadsheet package.

For hobbies / analysis / data manipulation , storage , graphs and general stats fuckery here's my advice; as someone who does this stuff - "badly I might add" - for a shitty public sector organisation that just can't decide whether to bend over M$ barrel or Oracle's barrel:

• use R (via R-studio if you need an "environment") for more statsy stuff and easier graphs.

• Python for more general mathsy / programmy / web scrapy stuff - can do decent graphs with libraries like plotly and matplotlib stuff like that, scipy, numpy, and pandas are the other basic libraries for analysis and maths and large datasets. peopl like using 'jupyter notebooks' - I don't get it personally - but 50 Phil Ochs fans cant be that wrong.

• Set up a mariadb or something if you need databasey stuff, I doubt you need to look at more hardcore stuff like postgresql for "hobbying" ; my personal (1 user) databases were built several years ago and mariadb is just fine for that. but some of the high vol transactional DB at work do use postgresql.

These are all good to learn in my experience, even if you think they're harder than excel; ( are they tho'? array formlae!?). They're sort of interoperable - subject to learning. They - naturally - have their open-source annoyances.: a million ways to do everything, and versioning issues. (Excel still has fucking vlookup() tho' - talk abut legacy baggage - but no it's not as bad as the open souce maelstroms).

You can still ouput data into a spreadsheet for viewing formatting and messing with stuff - but there are other ways.

Footnote: Yes I do still use excel, but normally mostly for final formatted report for customer who wants it. Having R/python directly write data into excel is so much better than letting excel open anything. Excel just can't let an innocent SNOMED code go unmolested; you have to be on high alert if you let excel actually do anything.

Also spreadsheet for messy data cleansing - for looking at mess, to help refine the R/python cleansing script. I'd happily use libre/ods for any of these but I don't fancy putting the request in to IT and . . . having to speak to IT about it.

Office 365. I hate it, but I don't need a windows PC to use it.

AutoCAD does need to die, but there absolutely is no real substitute for MasterCAM. I have a windows PC just for running that software, because nothing comes even kinda close. That license is expensive though, holy shit.