I find LO to be very buggy and unintuitive in its UI. Equations are a pain, it forgets styling options, etc..
But as a user who uses it completely independently of MS Office, just for my documents, the peace of mind I have knowing I am using a powerful multiplatform open source software which won't betray me is priceless.
I know my documents are safe and I can move between OSes at my will. This kind of freedom is essential for me and I am grateful for that
Having used many different word processors across the decades, I wholeheartedly agree with the "won't betray me" comment. So many products have risen and fallen in the past forty years that an open and documented file format is essential for the products of our labour to have lasting value. The cross platform support is also liberating.
As for the unintuitive UI, it is a complex product that is designed to meet a multitude of needs. In that respect, it is not all that different from Microsoft Office. (If anything, I find it to be slightly more intuitive than Microsoft Office since the means of achieving some things in Microsoft's product is downright quirky.)
I don't even use LO that much, and I'm panic saving in cycle every time I do because it crashes of me so often. Hell, it crashed on me this week, on a 5 pages doc with images, text, one table and a few titles. Nothing fancy.
I keep reading people saying it's stable for them, but I've was using it already when it was called OOo, before we had docx support, before docx even existed.
And it always has been this buggy.
I donate to the project, I report bugs, I keep advising people to use it.
But still, either I'm incredibly unlucky, or people are just ignoring all the crashes and became blind to them.
Which is a phenomenon I'm seeing a lot in the FOSS world: power users just don't see the bugs anymore because they work around them to easily and effortlessly, almost automatically. It doesn't help getting the software to a better state, nor does it inspire confidence to the new comers we oversell stability to.
So really, really, like the last 10 times you used LO, are you sure there was no problem at all?
I'm on Fedora 34 and LO kept crashing on me as well, sometimes seconds after I opened the application. I discovered that the version I had pre-installed with my OS was some clever application delivery format (Flatpak? I don't remember). I uninstalled this and reinstalled it from dnf, and it has been immaculately stable since. Not a a single crash or issue.
I was about to post a similar comment. One of the reasons was that before memory protection (that different hardware already for ages) any rogue pointer could crash any other application or the OS. Developing software was an exercise of rebooting Windows. Ah, the reset button!
can applications remind users to save the document once before the autosave kicks in? i was burned many times before i actually read it somewhere. this should be in the quick start somewhere
Be sure to use LibreOffice "still" rather than "fresh", i.e. the bottom one of the two version on their download page (which is the second latest, but more stable release): https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download/
LO has a bugbounty now, this might have the sideeffect of improving the situation somewhat in regards to random crashes. A crash is after all often an indication of a memory corruption.
I've had no crashes the last ~20 times I've used Writer and Calc. I have had the occasional crash or other issue in Draw when working with network and database diagrams that were originally made in Visio, but Draw is already the black sheep of the LibreOffice suite.
I believe that if regular crashes indeed exist, their cause must depend either on the Linux distribution and the combinations of libraries that are installed on the user computer or on the available memory size.
In that case the crashes are probably caused by bugs that are difficult to reproduce on the developer computers.
I have been using LibreOffice daily for many years, since almost immediately after it forked from OpenOffice. It continues to have various annoying behaviors, which I consider bugs (however less than those that I consider bugs in MS Office), but it never crashes on any of my computers.
However, I compile LibreOffice from source, on a Gentoo Linux.
The fact that LibreOffice never crashes in this particular configuration, does not give much information about how it might behave on Fedora or Ubuntu, because LibreOffice uses a very large number of external libraries and the crashes could depend on their versions.
Besides the dependence on the Linux distribution, there might be a dependence on the available memory. I do not have any computer with less than 32 GB RAM. Maybe the crashes are possible only on computers with less installed memory.
There might be even more esoteric variables that influence the appearance of crashes, e.g. which typefaces are used in your documents.
I am pretty sure that we do not use the same typefaces, as I do not use any of the typefaces that are distributed as default in Linux, but I use some commercial typefaces, which I have purchased separately.
I believe that the only way for such elusive bugs to be solved is that whoever experiences the crashes should attempt to create a reproducible crash and file a bug report.
Over 15 years, across dozens of machines in various homes and organization? Unlikely.
I do have a big difference of stability depending of the OS and app though. Windows LO is more stable than Linux LO, and Draw is more stable than Calc, which is more stable than Writer.
It reminds me of my student. Their code doesn't run, and when I get to the machine, it suddenly fixes itself magically. They think they are extremly unlucky, but I tell them I have in fact, magic hands and heal computers by touch.
i have a fun one. i like to write and use firefox for research. i am using kde neon and past 3 weeks, on 7.2.5 and earlier, i think from 7.2.2 every often if i Alt-tab out of libreoffice, the app would crash. thankfully i have a habit of automatic ctrl-s whenever i take a break after finishing a sentence so i never lost any data but it was fun to have the same bug for quite some time.
Can you talk more about your typical use cases? Are you working with huge spreadsheets containing a lot of formula? Word processing documents with a lot of complex embedded content?
I have been using OpenOffice or LibreOffice for two decades now, on Windows, MacOS, and Linux, and I don't think I've had a single crash or freeze. Ever.
Large datasets typically for manual transformations before automating it with some python solution. Works exceptionally for massive CSC datasets for instance.
Some financial models, but not often. I am also a massive Excel fan, and do not aim to replace it.
Writing simple documentation and letters with TOC and macros in header footer.
Both, which I think is part of the problem. They’re splitting engineering effort between Office 2003 style, Office 2007 (ish) style, and Office Online style UIs. They probably have less engineering resources than Microsoft Office and it shows.
I, on the other hand, really like that i can make LibreOffice Writer look like a slightly overgrown WordPad and i wouldn't like this customizability to be removed. I'm sure someone else likes to put their toolbars on the side or whatever.
And TBH the different UIs aren't really that big of a deal, they're just different arrangements of action buttons and menus, that is only a tiny fraction of the engineering effort that you'd need even for the word processor part and it isn't like they change their UI all the time.
Actually, the UI can be changed to one of several different variants by selecting View > User Interface... It has 7 options to choose from. If you like the newer "ribbon" style UI, then select the "Tabbed" UI variant.
This is one thing I really like about LO. People familiar with older MS Office can be comfortable in it, but it can also be changed for people more familiar with or preferring the "ribbon" UI.
LO needs more general QA testing and more dev time invested towards macOS the neglected OS. All this needs to be financed and things are not so easy finding solutions for this decade old problem.
Since moving to Ubuntu from Mac, I use LibreOffice daily for loading large XLS documents from clients. I might have to drop to a VM with Excel maybe 1-2% of the time, but the rest of the time LibreOffice is amazing. Thank you to the LibreOffice team for their continued efforts towards Office compatibility.
I just upgraded to LibreOffice 7.3 after seeing this post, and the upgrade fixed a problem that I had with LibreOffice on Windows 10 that I haven't encountered on other platforms (macOS and Linux), where typing text in LibreOffice Writer had a noticeable delay. After upgrading, the delay is now gone. Thank you LibreOffice developers for resolving this issue; I've been using LibreOffice ever since it forked from OpenOffice.
LO is fantastic free software. The fact we even have an office suite that isn't controlled by MS or Google or another big player is great for users. My only gripes with LO are that the UI feels dated sometimes (I think they're working on this, if I recall), but that's a shallow take from me. I don't often use anything aside from small spreadsheets and text documents for college essays, so I've never noticed a limitation.
I've been using LibreOffice since StarOffice 5.2 (which had its own taskbar).
It really is amazing. The best trick in Writer is to use the "Styles" sidebar and apply document-wide styles to the document like you would in CSS. This makes layout in large documents a breeze.
If you don't like the UI, there's "View > User Interface..." where you get to choose between 7 different UI layouts.
I think LO is just too complicated. There's a reason Google Docs and Quip have done well, and it's because 99% of people don't need any of the complicated features LO offers.
It would just be easier to start from scratch with simpler goals (i.e. not an MS Office competitor) rather than re-engineer an extremely complicated codebase.
I've been using Linux since 2005. Back then I used to use AbiWord, which was really excellent. Unfortunately, it's more or less dead now.
These days where possible I use markdown. When I need more, I'd rather use Google Docs (if on Linux) or Microsoft Office (if on my work Mac).
It isn't well known, but LibreOffice can be simplified to about the point of Google Docs by selecting View > User Interface and choosing Tabbed Compact as the UI variant. There are actually 7 UI variants that can be selected.
Of course having so many different UI variants is also added complexity...
Recently tried the markdown+pandoc route but couldn't get pdf rendering to look decent or for document links to work, or for a multitude of other things to work... Which is a shame because markdown is great for everything else
LO is amazing, and works surprisingly well and at least on Linux, once you get icons colors right works in dark mode (which I love). It would be good to put a cycle or two of clean up on the MacOS version. It works, but has a lot of rough edges - and Mac users tend to be less accepting of visual issues.
LO has a lot of room for improvement. I am confident it will improve. I use it in a way that is pretty incredible and goes beyond the uses people are discussing on HN.
I have watched developers of the project discuss what they are working on and seen their various presentations on things they've improved over the years. Some of the flaws cause all sorts of performance issues that have recently been fixed. It will get better and better with each passing year so long as they continue to receive funding.
LO is one of the best opensource projects in my opinion.
It is unfortunate that FOSS graphic design software (outside of blender) is no where near my opinionated standards. Just imagine if the Affinity designer / publisher software was on linux or became opensourced due to some legal issue. What a world that would be.
As much as I still use LibreOffice, I can't help but feel that it's yesterday's software. Actually, that thought has gone through my mind for the last 15 years.
It's a behemoth, no doubt, and I'm glad it's around, but man is it clunky. For years it had pretty bad rendering on high DPI screens, the icons don't really match modern OSs (yeah that's nitpicky I know), and good luck theming it because any theming it supports has proven to me to be very inconsistent. While I wouldn't call LibreOffice slow, it's not as snappy as it should be.
I kind of wish someone would blow it up and start over while keeping the one great thing about LibreOffice... the 90's style hierarchical UI navigation as opposed to everything being buttons and ribbon bars.
First, there's no such thing as something you should "never" do, especially when it comes to code. Our problems are so abstract that few if any tools should be off-limits.
Second, the author leaves out any examples of where rewrites succeeded. Windows NT was effectively a rewrite and is the grandfather of every version of Windows that came after Windows ME. Game engines and websites are rewritten all the time to varying degrees of success. OBS was a full rewrite and they're killing it. Slack did a rewrite and, whether you like them or not, they've been very successful.
Some of what he says makes no sense IMO, like:
> [...] when you start from scratch there is absolutely no reason to believe that you are going to do a better job than you did the first time.
Perhaps there's no reason to believe that you will certainly do a better job, but surely much of the time there are lessons to be learned even if the old team is entirely gone. When I'm brought on to new projects, I can pretty quickly tell what's dysfunctional, why that is, and what parts can at least benefit from serious cleanup.
He goes on:
> [...] you probably don’t even have the same programming team that worked on version one, so you don’t actually have “more experience”. You’re just going to make most of the old mistakes again, and introduce some new problems that weren’t in the original version.
What the author is doing here is making the same logical fallacy that he attempted to point out in the opposite position, except he's actually making it here. He's assuming that the team rewriting a hypothetical codebase are going to make most of the same old mistakes again. While that's definitely possible, is it really so certain? Can no one learn lessons from code regardless of whether they themselves wrote it?
A full rewrite was a bad idea for Netscape at a time where the market around the web was brand new and moving ridiculously fast. It's the circumstances that lead to the Netscape rewrite being a disaster. Not all software is subject to those issues, commercial or not, and not all software teams are the same.
Windows NT was made by company with a monopoly position and truckloads of money pouring in. They hired Dave Cutler to do the preliminary designs.
LO can barely keep the lights on and has well capitalized competitors at all sides. A ground up rewrite is not gonna happen unless someone with deep pockets shows up. No doubt any new product will be created by youngsters that despise 90s pragmatism, local data model, and lack of telemetry. Meaning it won’t be a product for me.
Yes, that's certainly true. Yet that's kind of my point; saying to "never" do something like a full rewrite is a bit extreme because it's almost entirely situational. Now while I do share a general pessimism on rewrites, they can be appropriate. Money and power of course help with that.
> No doubt any new product will be created by youngsters that despise 90s pragmatism, local data model, and lack of telemetry. Meaning it won’t be a product for me.
*sigh* Yes.
Although LibreOffice has one thing going for it in that regard... which is that it seems less likely that youngsters would even be interested in creating a word processor to replace the legacy LibreOffice. Many of them may not even know what LibreOffice is. Unless the word "blockchain" became attached to it (don't get any ideas, kids!), word processors are boring. If a rewrite ever happens, maybe there's at least a slight chance the engineers will be some coding veterans with wizard beards.
My test is whether I can take a document with complex equation formatting and export it into docx without a hitch.
I haven't tried it yet with the new version but in the past it's always failed miserably. (To be clear, the same thing happens with Word in exporting to other formats too.)
I just wish conversions with equations was more seamless in general.
Did you open a bug report with the said document? You might never know, the corner case with your specific document might be fixed by a willing developer.
I count myself lucky in that I rarely have to use those 'productivity' tools. When I have to write print-quality documentation every other decade, I (dreadfully) re-learn the subset of LaTeX I need for the task at hand. When I needed to write a bill however last month, I fetched a template for LO (Ubuntu 18) from the web. Last night I wrote a second one, which to my dismay resulted in a quite different looking PDF: the alignment was off and the fonts were wider. I spent then quite some time to realign the fields. A quite underwhelming result.
Next time 'round will be LaTeX again ...
I read on stack exchange that “outline mode” has finally been implemented for writer, but haven’t confirmed yet. Been waiting a decade plus for this. :-D
Trying it for the first time in 3 years and it doesn't work on Mac OSX intel. Everything is huge and the the cursor hitpoint is off by 150-200px so you have to click above everything.
Is anyone testing this software on the Apple hardware? Bizarre that a clean install on a 2 year old computer causes such issues.
Long time user (10 years maybe?) and I do love it! I don't have to deal with MSO files (most official documents are in PDF already, I don't work "corporate") and for my personal needs it works perfectly fine.
Though, I would love to see some (minor) UI refresh.
I always find people complaining about the UI in libreoffice so weird. It's simple and perfect. Not to mention if you don't like the default, it provides alternatives.
Every time I am forced to use MS Word, on the other hand, I lose the will to live.
Has anyone with Apple silicon given this a shot? I notice with this release they’re offering native support. I’m planning to give it a spin but I’m curious what others have noticed in converting from MS.
Oh, nice. Just installed it and finally the font rendering in Writer on Macos looks nice. Is that a new thing? The last version I installed a while ago had very blurry rendering.
On Windows, the LibreOffice installer claimed that Firefox was using files that needed to be updated. This Reddit thread has some background on why that is:
Yes, I saw this installing 7.3.0.3 this morning: I started the computer, opened Firefox, then downloaded and installed LibreOffice. I have an aversion to closing my browser (and all of its tabs) unnecessarily, so I looked this up and found the Reddit post.
I had been using LibreOffice for a year and found that it is extremely buggy. Scrolling starts lagging as long as you have lots of commends on the page. If track changes is turned on, sometimes spaces are inserted in the wrong place. Sometimes it crashes during editing (although it recovered my documents), and such.
It can do some basic editing, but is far less complete compared to MS Office.
Libreoffice is an integral piece of software, but I often bump into messages like the below, which does not exactly instill confidence if a workbook is important.
Warning loading document SomeDocumentFinalVFUpdatedActuallyFinal.xlsx: The data could not be loaded completely because the maximum number of columns per sheet was exceeded.
The thing is, Blender 3d shows that an open source project can compete with the big boys. I've not encountered any gimp crashes, although I don't use it in anger enough. LO writer on the other hand crashed several times for me yesterday.
Works great for small edits/updates to long pdf documents. It tends to go wonky when you really start changing the main layout of the preceding document.
But as a user who uses it completely independently of MS Office, just for my documents, the peace of mind I have knowing I am using a powerful multiplatform open source software which won't betray me is priceless.
I know my documents are safe and I can move between OSes at my will. This kind of freedom is essential for me and I am grateful for that