
OnlyOffice is an alternative to LibreOffice - pkz
https://personal.jatan.space/2020/04/18/onlyoffice-better-than-libreoffice/
======
crowf
One deal breaker for me regarding OnlyOffice is that they have absolutely no
support for RTL
[https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DocumentServer/issues/19](https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DocumentServer/issues/19)
. From what it looks like there is a 5 year opened issue requesting RTL
support. Until they support RTL, I can't use them.

Softmaker on the other had does support RTL. They still have a long way to go
to be at the level of Microsoft office, but they are the best Linux office
suite that I found

~~~
esquire_900
It's a great read and an educative insight into the working behind onlyoffice.
The issue (RTL support) is dodged, promises are made ("It's on our roadmap")
but none are kept. When gh user ramezrafla starts doing the heavy lifting and
started coding, he is basically met with... silence? He codes for free, helps
them implements an important feature, and the onlyoffice response is that it
will cost him $100k for them to make time for the issue.

~~~
oefrha
Someone claims to have started to implement a big feature (no code shared
AFAICT, only a screenshot; there's a dead link though so maybe at some point
some code was shared), and asked devs to video conference with them to help
them understand the code base. Devs refused and gave them a quote for paid
feature development. Seems entire appropriate.

IMO unsolicited contributions and contributor entitlement (not to be confused
with user entitlement) is a major issue in open source. Don't start working on
a huge feature unless you've gotten the green light to do so, or prepare to be
rejected. In fact, prepare to be rejected even if you've gotten the green
light. Doubly so if you can't even write the code without help. It doesn't
matter if you're doing work for free; unwanted work just waste both parties'
time, and it's emotionally draining on both sides when the work is eventually
rejected. Also, if you're just a random guy without a track record of solid
contributions to the project, your chances of implementing an important
feature "right" is not good. Ramp up your involvement with small features
first. Build trust.

Personally, I'm no stranger to huge unsolicited contributions throughout my
open source career. PRs that made changes everywhere, made the wrong
architectural decisions, included tons of irrelevant commits and sometimes
even changed existing coding style just for the hell of it. What should I say
to the contributors? Often times it would cost me less time to rewrite the
feature than guide them to fix their contributions. Often times it's not even
a feature I would include.

A reminder that open source maintainers don't owe you anything, not even time
to review your PR. Video conferencing to help you write your unsolicited PR is
a huge stretch by any standard.

(As for "promises", it is indeed on the roadmap, under "planned for future
versions":
[https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DocumentServer/blob/19e3a5d/Ro...](https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DocumentServer/blob/19e3a5d/Roadmap.md#common-
tasks-for-all-editors-1) Projects should totally have their own pace and
priorities rather than blindly "listen to the community", and I've seen my own
feature requests implemented after being on the roadmap for five years in
software I use, so again, nothing inappropriate here.)

~~~
chris_wot
That’s the same attitude as the OpenOffice.org team that led to the split that
caused LibreOffice.

The other side of this equation is: if you get forked then expect either that
your software will be fragmented, or the form will take over from you.

If the software is under a free license, and you won’t accept contributions,
then the corollary to the assertion that you cannot expect your PR to be
accepted is: don’t get upset when a competing fork of your project takes away
your market share.

~~~
oefrha
Hmm, somehow you jumped from not scheduling a video conference to help some
random dude understand your code, to "won't accept contributions". Plus some
random remarks about market share that are completely irrelevant to my
comment. Great job attacking a straw man, I guess.

------
aneutron
Okay so, here we go again: An article which does not go into any detail about
specifics, and makes a very bold claim (i.e. this product is better than this
one because I said it's better).

Why is this on the front page ....

~~~
stuaxo
It does go into specifics, better MS office compatibility and a ribbon UI.

My CV evolved over the last 20 years as a word doc, and loading it in anything
else explodes it into 2x the pages.

Yes, I could redo the whole thing, but other things in life are a higher
priority.

I use word 2016 in crossover, which is stable...ish.

I will gladly try this.

~~~
aneutron
First of all, LibreOffice does support a Ribbon UI, without all the patent-y
stuff.

Secondly, "better MS office compatibility" is really, really a non-
constructive and large comparative. For example, a good post would have been
to list exactly what goes wrong, or what are the most annoying bugs.

Most of the time, the developers can use posts like those to pin-point exactly
what is wrong and fix it quite swiftly. Because it's not only an open source
project that _strives_ for compatibility, but it's also made by benevolent
humans who don't necessarily have a very definite document of what should be
implemented and how. So telling them "hey guys, this should work like this,
can you please fix it" is miles better than just saying "hey, your product
sux, onlyoffice is better compat with word, bye".

I'm sorry if this somehow comes out a bit offensive, it is not, it's just that
sometimes we tend to forget that those developers won't necessarily have the
use cases we do, and hence will never optimize for them if we don't report
them, and that just dismissing the whole software in favor of another without
citing detailed analysis helps neither.

~~~
chris_wot
And interestingly, when I check the issues list, I see issues with rendering
ligatures, merged cells not displaying, page sizing issues, inability to set
the page background colour properly...

Not knocking the developers, but it seems to me they have their own
compatibility issues. In fact, a fair few of them. Which means that the blog
review is... fascinatingly biased and anecdotal and glosses over the fact that
any competing software to MS Office will have its own unique list of
compatibility bugs.

------
freetime2
I gave LibreOffice a go, but quickly became frustrated with incompatibility
issues and some of the other quirks in Calc.

So I've switched to using Google Docs, which is powerful enough for my modest
needs and has so far been pretty frustration free. It also has the advantage
of being easily accessible from my other non-Linux devices. The free browser-
only versions of Microsoft Office also look good... but I just haven't had a
reason to seriously evaluate them.

What are the benefits to going with something like OnlyOffice over Google's
and Microsoft's offerings?

~~~
chipotle_coyote
The benefit that the linked article specifically mentions is being able to
round-trip documents between OnlyOffice and coworkers who are still using
Microsoft Office apps without losing any formatting. If you're not in a
position where you have to do this, it probably doesn't sound like a big deal.
Most of the time I don't have to do this, and I think most engineers hanging
around HN wouldn't need to, either. But if you _are_ in a position where this
is a job requirement, it generally makes "hey, it's 95% compatible" into a
100% nonstarter.

I've found this is super hard to explain to people who haven't had to deal
with it. I have, in sending fiction stories back and forth to editors. The
formatting for those is _ridiculously_ simple... except that you need absolute
100% compatibility with Word's document revision tracking features to see your
editor's comments, respond to them, accept or reject their changes, and so on.
And while I haven't checked in a couple years, when I did, the only non-
Microsoft stuff I found that could do it reliably were two commercial, Mac-
only word processors (Apple Pages and Nisus Writer Pro). I hadn't heard of
OnlyOffice before this; if I ever switch to Linux, I'll keep it in mind.

~~~
6c696e7578
If M$ really loves open source, then they would have opened their office
formats. They may even have made life easy for themselves by dropping their
proprietary formats in favour of open.

This has never happened. Their intention is to retain customers on Office 365
and Azure AD subscriptions to keep large corporations on their books.

A large portion of people are moving away form documents and using things like
markdown which is a sensible move. Another sensible move is towards LaTeX.
Calc and presentations though is a sore point.

I think the days are numbered for office applications on the desktop, sadly.
There is certainly much less interest in it now than there was a decade ago,
maybe this is true for the laser printer also, are the two in tandem?

Do we need a spreadsheet? Isn't that an anti-pattern where we'd just be better
off with sqlite and a perl/python script to pipe to gnuplot? I know one of
things I hated greatly was having to do the same graph fiddling over and over
again. It is probably better to have the graph/calculation run on demand.

'member when the reveal that MS buried system information in word documents
shocked people as it allowed for tracing authors? Regardless of editing,
opening the document on another computer grow the file.

~~~
MikusR
Like this?
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML)

~~~
regularfry
I remember MS being roundly criticised for OOXML when it landed, because it
had fairly major parts that were defined by reference to the behaviour in the
MS implementation. Literally "the correct behaviour according to the
specification is whatever Microsoft Word does".

I can have a certain amount of sympathy for MS doing that, because if your
proprietary file format includes things like "take a dump of whatever the app
happens to have in memory in some magical region or other", it's an uphill
battle to get anything rigorous out of it in the first place. It doesn't
satisfy one of the main goals of an open standard, though: that anyone should
be able to offer a complete alternative implementation, purely by reference to
the standard.

So no, not like that.

~~~
Someone
I think there wasn’t a way for Microsoft to do this in a way that satisfied
all critics.

Their XML-based format existed for a few years before it was made into an open
standard, so the alternative would be a standard that didn’t describe the
format of the zillions of documents ‘out there’.

Also, chances are nobody at Microsoft itself did know the exact effect of many
of the more obscure flags.

So, you either get a clean start, or you get a standard that ‘all’ existing
documents can be converted to without change/loss of formatting (‘all’ in
quotes because there likely are truly old documents starting life, say, as
WordPerfect documents converted into “WP compatible MS Word .doc”, edited a
bit, converted to “MS Word .docx”, edited a bit more, converted into open
office XML whose layout changed over time)

If you want the former, use
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument).

~~~
6c696e7578
I remember WP being a very stable format between versions, unlike Word ~ 2000,
it wasn't able to manage their own document formats. So if people put up with
the issues then, why not now?

------
RandomWorker
One thing that is overlooked by the authors, is that libreoffice now also has
ribbon with icons similar to Word. I'm still pretty happy with libreoffice
writer, however excel is still king, calc is just horrible. Try to make
anything a bit more interesting than a line graph, 2 axis's you'll get stuck
quickly

~~~
microcolonel
Calc's problems run deep. Every other release breaks the _find_ function or
something similar in a way that literally crashes when editing my company's
massive golden workbook.

Nonetheless it is still usable. When we have more scale, we'll probably just
implement a subset of ODS as an import for a custom spreadsheet program that
I've been working on in my more-free time (looking to make explicit
loops/tables of intra-row and previous-row dependent expressions, enabling
lazy sequences [or just sequences with length defined by downstream users] and
more straightforward static compilation w/ LLVM or similar).

ODS is pretty bad, especially the way LO writes it. For example LibreOffice
adds like 50 styles to your ODS files, even empty ones, every time you save;
and one of them is called "Default", even though ODS has an explicit mechanism
for _default styles_ that LibreOffice recognizes. I could go into all the
levels of hell in LibreOffice-generated ODS files (not to say others don't
have their own flavour of hell). LibreOffice, and I suspect most ODS
generating programs, routinely generate schema-invalid ODS files for a good
reason (boolean value cells with integer cached values, which are essential).

I think my new legacy-optional spreadsheet can be pretty killer, and I hope to
bring it to the masses at some point.

~~~
akho
In Excel, intra-row and previous row are better handled by DAX (PowerPivot),
than the grid as such. This is, of course, unique to desktop Excel. If you are
at the point where you are building your own engine for that sort of thing,
and have a “massive golden workbook”, wouldn’t SSAS make more sense?

~~~
microcolonel
We have already built our own compiler, it's just that a lot of work has to be
done to deduplicate expressions (in part because references are stored in A1
form, this is also part of why it takes about 15 seconds to unzip the ODS and
parse the XML), and even more to consolidate intermediate cells, and dirty
prologues/epilogues on tables don't help (because they often mean the first
cycle will be odd).

With explicit cycles, most of that work can be avoided.

Furthermore, explicit row iteration means that you can attach reductions to
the generator based on the range (i.e. you have a GEOMEAN and a SUM with a
statically known range), which often means you don't need to store the results
of the iteration, and that also you don't have to compromise between AOS/SOA
storage for reductions that can be run with the generator.

Static primitive, option, and union types are also a goal. You can think of
standard Excel/Calc values as a tagged union Option type.

Also relying on Windows or macOS to edit our core sheet is kinda out of the
question. None of our developers even run windows, and the majority don't even
run macOS. Two of us came from a company that did that, and the Excel virtual
machines were always finicky there.

------
mmwelt
The author talks about "top notch Microsoft Office compatibility", including
formatting. However, something relatively simple, such as "Center Accross
Selection" cell formatting in Excel does not display correctly in OnlyOffice.
Hmm...

------
yellowapple
> Now I know a lot of FOSS enthusiasts will be unhappy about the idealistic
> part of the recommendation

Why would we be unhappy with it? Seems like at least some version of it is
FOSS (GNU GPL or AGPL on all the repos I'm seeing).

I ain't familiar with it, though. I've also been reasonably happy with
LibreOffice, so I haven't been motivated to look all that hard for
alternatives.

~~~
samtuke
Their commitment to Open Source has been questioned, given the small OS
community size and apparent lack of transparency around releases and
development. I haven't verified these criticisms myself however.

------
dima55
If this thing isn't free software, and if one really cares about MSword
compatibility, then why wouldn't they just go use MSword?

~~~
crowf
MSword doesn't support Linux. Personally, if it were to I would purchase it

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
If you're willing to pay, have you looked at codeweavers crossover?
(Disclaimer: I've not personally tried this)

~~~
crowf
I don't mind paying. I tried WINE but that didn't work well enough for me. I
will try codeweavers crossover

------
chris_wot
I’m rather curious about these claims. What specific formatting issues is he
referring to, and what version was he using?

Also, they claim LibreOffice is not available on MacOS.

This article is quite light on detail.

~~~
II2II
While I don't know what formatting issues the author was referring to, they do
exist. They are typically the product of people doing wonky things in order to
format documents in a particular way that looks fine on their own computer,
like embedding tables in tables. There are also features that LibreOffice
supports in a different way (e.g. multiple page layouts within a word
processor or spreadsheet document).

~~~
chris_wot
Sure, that’s almost certain. Not even Microsoft gets it completely correct
between versions of Office. But I think he’ll eventually find that his new
favourite Office suite will also have compatibility issues.

I’m fine with completion, but I’m looking for specific issues. It’s really far
too vague to know what they are talking about.

~~~
andrewshadura
And it does have issues. In fact, LibreOffice offers better compatibility.

------
merlinscholz
OnlyOffice's developers are... Questionable. Referring to this:
[https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DocumentServer/issues/805](https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DocumentServer/issues/805)

~~~
edoceo
For those who don't want to click: Mobile editing was removed from community
edition and only in the $950 license edition. A poorly announced change which
made he community mad.

~~~
arp242
Where do you get the $950 from? It's listed in the $149 (currently $100) "home
server" lifetime license on their pricing page:
[https://www.onlyoffice.com/integration-edition-
prices.aspx](https://www.onlyoffice.com/integration-edition-prices.aspx)

~~~
ColanR
950 EUR is from the first comment in the linked github issue.
[https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DocumentServer/issues/805#issu...](https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DocumentServer/issues/805#issue-578506040)

~~~
arp242
Yeah, I saw that; the OO person in the replied mentioning the $100 price as
well, so either something changed in the meanwhile (possibly as a response to
the feedback?), the poster was mistaken, or I'm not understanding their
pricing page correctly. As far as I can see for personal usage the "home
server" plan should be grand.

------
henriquemaia
All looks well and dandy until you need to integrate Zotero into the flow of
your work. Unfortunately, OnlyOffice doesn't offer a Zotero integration tool.
That's a huge deal breaker for any academic.

~~~
ebalit
OnlyOffice can be extended through plugins apparently [0]. Creating a plugin
to search for a reference and generate a list of the citations should be
doable and provide most of the benefit. What are the Zotero integration
features that you rely on?

EDIT: In fact there is already a Zotero plugin available [1]

0: [https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/sdkjs-
plugins](https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/sdkjs-plugins)

1: [https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/plugin-
zotero](https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/plugin-zotero)

------
melling
OpenOffice to LibreOffice to OnlyOffice...

Does Microsoft still have 95% market share?

Put your wood behind 1 arrow.

[https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/35197/meaning-
of...](https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/35197/meaning-of-more-wood-
behind-fewer-arrows)

------
aritmo
Is this the same "blogger" that yesterday was disparaging snap packages?

I can see a pattern in being superficial in their writings.

~~~
nxpnsv
With 14 mentions of ONLY0FFICE it certainly reads like paid content or SEO
nonsense. Not sure there's any money in it in this case though.

------
29athrowaway
There is also SoftMaker FreeOffice (the free version of SoftMaker Office):

[https://www.freeoffice.com/en/](https://www.freeoffice.com/en/)

Unlike OnlyOffice, it's not open source, but it is an excellent product that I
have used for some time now with no adverse results. Works well with HiDPI.

I have a deep respect for the people behind the LibreOffice project, but to me
it still feels a lot like its predecessor: StarOffice from Sun Microsystems, a
product that I did not like.

I have not tried Caligra Office or Abiword / Gnumeric lately, probably I
should.

~~~
Qub3d
According to the comparison page from SoftMaker[0], _Spell-checking_ is a
feature reserved for the paid version.

I'm not against reserving features for a paid version, but spell-checking? The
thing that is implemented in all modern browsers and even basic editors like
notepad++? The bare-bones markdown editor I use[1] has spell checking. Not
shipping a major word processor of any sort without spell checking in 2020
makes me immediately cross it off my list.

[0]: [https://www.freeoffice.com/en/freeoffice-
comparison](https://www.freeoffice.com/en/freeoffice-comparison)

[1]: [https://typora.io/](https://typora.io/)

~~~
LargoLasskhyfv
I think they mean the "Duden Korrektor" from
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duden](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duden)
which is _the_ authority on German language, and as such a commercially
licensed product, which they can't give away.

------
anonytrary
I remember using LibreOffice. It does the job, but with noticeable
deficiencies. At this point Google Docs basically replaced the MS Office suite
for me. Who even needs "powerpoint" anymore? All of the "character bullet
sound animations" are like the 90s web of office software. I basically use
Google Docs to look at shared notepads and CSVs, and that's about it.

~~~
smabie
Excel is much more powerful than Sheets. But maybe that's a bad thing. I've
seen entire billion dollar portfolios run on Excel.

~~~
Erlich_Bachman
If it works, why would it be bad?

~~~
smabie
No it didn't work, the performance of the fund was terrible and the portfolio
manager was a muppet.

------
bitL
At some point LibreOffice made super weird visual design choices, icons look
like they were drawn by a 5-year old and they completely botched math formula
editor. Compared to that even Star Office 5 (predecessor of OpenOffice) looked
more professional. I am wondering what is going on?

~~~
mindfulhack
I completely agree.

Opening ONLYOFFICE and using it for one minute, to me it's immediately better
than LibreOffice. This is the first FOSS Office I may actually desire to use
when I have to do some document writing.

It has a better default font, a much nicer, comfortable-feeling and inviting-
to-use interface, and it saves to a more useful format like DOCX by default.

LibreOffice puzzles me as to why they choose such bad-looking defaults when
the options are there to make it better.

My perspective is one that matters in FOSS. This is not just about advanced
technical things with power users. It's about casual users too. It's about
Linux having something actually comparable to MS Word. It's about the entire
FOSS ecosystem.

If LibreOffice want their software to be used more, then they need to make it
actually look and feel good - out of the box - and not just as a configurable
option.

I mean this with the greatest respect. I'm a FOSS advocate. Part of furthering
FOSS should be that it looks and feels nice, and not just that it's FOSS with
a GPL license.

~~~
mindfulhack
In fact, I'm so impressed with ONLYOFFICE's out of the box experience that IMO
it should be Linux Mint's default pre-installed Office. On macOS and Linux it
looks awesome.

------
Stierlitz
The obvious solution is for Jatan to have his correspondents install a local
copy of LibreOffice. There's even a Windows version.

[https://www.libreoffice.org/](https://www.libreoffice.org/)

“I’m a science writer who uses Linux because it just functions better for me
than Windows or macOS and because I’m an open source enthusiast. Given my
profession, I have to frequently collaborate with people on other operating
systems who almost always use either Microsoft Office or Google Docs.”

“After three years of trying, I can tell you that LibreOffice just doesn’t cut
it. Either me or the other person will lose some formatting in the documents
at some point. And as a document travels from one computer to another, things
quickly become a mess.”

------
stOneskull
sounds like a paid advertisement.. but then again, competition is good. don't
want libreoffice to get stagnant.

------
m-p-3
They crippled the open-source version in Nextcloud to only offer read-only
access through mobile web

[https://www.reddit.com/r/NextCloud/comments/fktqug/onlyoffic...](https://www.reddit.com/r/NextCloud/comments/fktqug/onlyoffice_fcked_us/)

Collabora is the way to go if you plan on using it with Nextcloud.

[https://nextcloud.com/collaboraonline/](https://nextcloud.com/collaboraonline/)

------
codygman
Maybe libreoffice needs a more strict word online compatibility mode that
compromises UI and functionality for as perfect as possible compatibility.

For instance a user in the thread mentioned all background colors can be
applied in libreoffice, but in word online some are restricted.

Ux having those restricted colors grayed out by default with a hover note why
seems perfect to keep compatibility and show where word online is wonky.

Hope this makes sense, will have to pay or in a better format to the issue
tracker tomorrow.

~~~
thiht
Libre Office is already bloated to the point of being unusable imo. If some
features are not available in a given context, they just should not be shown,
instead of trying to show off how it's superior.

Less is more.

~~~
codygman
If the UX isn't done well I agree. However there a great opportunity for
pushing for compatibility and a more portable document format in a less
annoying way than gimp does for xcf.

------
p1necone
Is there really an issue with compatibility of documents between Libre Office
and MS Office? I always thought that was just FUD.

~~~
Mengkudulangsat
I found compatibility issues between MS Office (Windows) and MS Office (Mac),
or even between MS Excel and Ms PowerPoint, it has always been a mess.

Try making a table in Excel and pasting it into Powerpoint.

------
kissgyorgy
It comes with Nextcloud, you can install it with a click of a button:
[https://nextcloud.com/onlyoffice/](https://nextcloud.com/onlyoffice/)

~~~
LockAndLol
Doesn't work too well (as in at all) in docker.

~~~
kissgyorgy
Does not need Docker AFAIK.

------
m0zg
AGPL ensures no serious business users will touch it with a 10 foot pole.

~~~
dvdkon
If they're that prejudiced against the AGPL, they'll probably be happy to pay
for one of the proprietary editions (which have more restrictive licences, but
don't tell them that).

~~~
m0zg
If you're going to pay anybody anything, you might as well pay Microsoft
$8.5/mo and get the real thing. Microsoft salted the earth on commercial
viability of competition with this pricing.

------
aurelien
It's open source ... not free as in freedom.

~~~
andrewshadura
Open source _is_ free as in freedom, see opensource.org.

The problem with OnlyOffice is non-community-oriented development and the
predatory licensing model where they hold all copyrights and dual-license
their code AGPL+proprietary, while forbidding others do the same (since they
hold the copyrights), therefore putting themselves at the centre of their
universe.

Compare that with the healthy community around LibreOffice where nobody holds
copyrights for all of it, so the copyleft actually protects all involved
parties from unfair competition and makes them cooperate for the common good.

For OnlyOffice, the open source license is just a marketing trick and a source
of occasional free patches.

~~~
amenod
> The problem with OnlyOffice is non-community-oriented development and the
> predatory licensing model where they hold all copyrights and dual-license
> their code AGPL+proprietary, while forbidding others do the same (since they
> hold the copyrights), therefore putting themselves at the centre of their
> universe.

> Compare that with the healthy community around LibreOffice where nobody
> holds copyrights for all of it, so the copyleft actually protects all
> involved parties from unfair competition and makes them cooperate for the
> common good.

This is a very good point, and very well said! I agree completely - from
activist point of view. It really does benefit users the most.

BUT! It doesn't benefit developers and maintainers _at all_ , which leads to
the common problem of "it works for me" attitude. This is an understandable
though regrettable situation. To put software to another level it takes lots
of additional effort in areas which are usually not fun. Why would someone do
it?

LibreOffice is a great case in point. While I use it regularly, it lacks in
two important areas:

\- 100% compatibility with MS Office

\- UI is ugly and in places unintuitive

I can imagine that the first problem is not fun, and the second is difficult
to solve with so many people involved. I don't believe LibreOffice will ever
solve these two problems. Incentives matter.

~~~
Qub3d
This was mentioned in the context of Linux desktop/mobile UI, but applies to
Libreoffice quite well:

> Open source development can't do good user interfaces for the same reason
> wikipedia can't write a novel with a coherent plot. The limitations of the
> development model do not allow for this. The old adage "too many cooks spoil
> the soup" is not a warning about lack of nutrition, it's a warning that
> aesthetic issues do not survive committees. Peer review does not produce
> blockbuster movies, hit songs, or masterpiece paintings. It finds scientific
> facts, not beauty.

From
[http://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html#selfhost](http://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html#selfhost)

------
SomeoneFromCA
Am I only one who prefers OpenOffice over LibreOffice?

------
TheRealPomax
tl;dr according to the author:

\- MS office compatibility

\- tabs

\- cloud support

\- ribbon UI

Personally, none of those are even remotely relevant (and MSO compatibility is
a given, which suite doesn't support docx etc these days?).

The only times I still reach for MS Office is when I need its million times
faster speed compared to OpenOffice and friends (libre office, etc), for
things like "sorting 20,000 lines of CSV in Excel using multiple column
constraints because I need the first 100 entries after sorting" or "writing
out some maths that doesn't justify using full-blown XeLaTeX", so... this just
reads like a blog-shaped ad.

I'm curious to learn how much the author got paid to post this, given how
little what-I-use-it-for-information there is in this post.

~~~
chris_wot
I’m not surprised if you are using OpenOffice. Try using a LibreOffice.

~~~
avhon1
I believe TheRealPomax was thinking of LibreOffice, and other OO derivatives,
when they said "OpenOffice and friends".

~~~
chris_wot
At this point, the two projects are totally different. I know I wouldn’t use
OpenOffice.

------
juancn
I don’t get why people keep using desktop office apps.

Google docs is more than enough for everything I’ve ever thrown at it.

~~~
avhon1
My 3 cents:

I trust my hard drive availability _a lot_ more than I trust my internet
availability.

I don't trust Google to maintain Docs, or my Google account, for the rest of
my life.

I dislike when applications unexpectedly change. Cloud apps are both more
likely to do this, and don't have the option of reverting to a previous
version.

~~~
arp242
It depends on your usage; I don't really like using this kind of software in
general, but on the rare occasions I need to use it (usually to fill in some
document for some organisation or government) I just use Google Docs. Almost
all of these documents are fairly ephemeral so long-term storage isn't really
an issue (actually, lack of it is a feature, since it often contains sensitive
personal information). Google Docs works "good enough" for this and doesn't
require installing a lot of software for a 10-minute task.

For more serious usage, I'd probably look for a desktop solution, since that's
just so much quicker (Google Docs is really slow), but for casual usage it's
pretty good.

