I've started switching back to LibreOffice because the situation with MS Office nagging me to save my files to the cloud, or to use "connected" AI experiences, keeps getting worse.
(The connected experiences, including Copilot, can be disabled with a dialog hidden deep in Office's Trust Center, but even that's confusingly worded. It's unclear from the wording and the structure of the dialog what the combination of checking "all connected experiences" but unchecking "experiences that analyze your content" should actually do, for example.)
MS Office is certainly the more polished product, especially Excel. There are some spreadsheets I can't feasibly convert to LibreOffice Calc without equivalents to Excel's lambdas and tables.
But LibreOffice does the job in most cases. I'm really excited to see this new work—especially CRDT-based sync between desktop app instances over a network file server, which would turn LibreOffice into a significantly better experience than MS Office for my purposes.
I'm curious why people bother tolerating modern versions of MS Office when they could instead use an offline version like 2019 and call it a day?
Are the more recent versions really that necessary or useful for features? I miss using 2007 when the ribbon was introduced and the UI finally felt organized.
This is my main reason. Additionally, yes, some of the Excel features that would attract me to it over LibreOffice Calc—such as the aforementioned lambdas—aren't available in older, non-365 versions of Office.
It is based on the formerly proprietary StarWriter, from a German company. Later acquired by Sun if I remember correctly, then open sourced.
There is another commercial German competitor from this time, SoftMaker. I used to buy the suite for Linux, just recently switched to LibreOffice. I never liked the clunky Libreoffice but since SoftMaker refuses to support LanguageTool....
There is actually a third German text processor from this time, Papyrus. Born on Atari ST.
There's also onlyoffice [1] which recently got a little more traction due to its integrations for moodle, owncloud, nextcloud etc. I think all of their software is AGPL3 licensed last time I checked. Their suite somewhat targets selfhosted collaboration for the web browser.
Has anyone audited/read their code. I found it very suspicous that a company as small as them would be able to deliver software as complex as it was on the face of it. But when I last checked, I guess it hadn't been open sourced yet. Being Latvian, I am skeptical of other Latvians, but in this case, I'm skeptical of running potentialy Kremlin aligned source.
For what it's worth, their server can be hosted on Windows and Linux, so somebody could make a Dockerfile for it. But yeah, in any case I'd double check for any log4j like known vulnerabilities.
> Later acquired by Sun if I remember correctly, then open sourced.
Sun named it OpenOffice. LibreOffice was forked from OpenOffice after Oracle acquired Sun. OpenOffice was subsequently donated to the Apache foundation.
Oracle stalled development, made the bugtrackers etc private, and kicked out all of the contributors and tried to commercialize the product at the time. The reason for Oracle "dumping" it to the Apache graveyard is that most of the "free" (as in unpaid) contributors switched sides to LibreOffice because of Oracle's hostile behavior towards the development community. And they donated OpenOffice because it was effectively a dead project for a couple of years.
There's probably still some contributor talks about it on one of the old CCC conferences on their media server.
If you want to learn about how to manage open source, Oracle's track record is a prime example of how not to.
Now that it's in the Apache Foundation's hands, my hope is that OO and LO will make amends and merge back together, like what happened with OpenWRT and LEDE. Given how many years they've diverged that might not be possible from a technical standpoint, but at least from a branding standpoint it'd be an improvement.
Isn't there strong beef between the remaining OO maintainers and the LO folks? It basically prevented LO from just being merged back into OO, instead we got that years-long confusion where non-tech people would download the horribly outdated OO and be like "wow this sucks imma go with MSO!"
Yeah, I would assume that there's still beef between both parties, and I can kind of understand that. If you're getting a cease and desist letter because of some trademark bullshit for your open source forks... then I'd be pissed too. The way Oracle treated the developer community was pretty insane to be honest.
Some links for others to read-up:
Press Announcement for "Oracle Open Office" which wasn't open anymore:
IBM being the reason that Oracle donates Open Office to Apache Foundation due to them pointing out to Oracle that their copyleft license agreement with Sun invalidates Oracle's proprietary claims:
The problem is that Apache Foundation is being stubborn[1] to admit the OpenOffice death, which distracts and prevents users from using so much better software (LibreOffice) that harms an open source image and ecosystem in general.
Yes, and now there are unfixed security issues in OpenOffice over a year old, so the ASF really, really should put it in the Attic ASAP. If more people in the FOSS world raise awareness about this, perhaps it will finally happen, so users become aware of maintained, fixed successor projects:
Slightly more correct: Sun kept StarOffice as a commercial offering and also open sourced it under the name of OpenOffice.org in parallel. The .org was quite important to them in the name.
> LibreOffice was forked from OpenOffice after Oracle acquired Sun.
The actual forking happens earlier with a patch set living outside Sun and sponsored by some Linux distros for a while. After Oracle's acquisition however the foundation was built and the name LibreOffice was picked.
> The .org was quite important to them in the name.
Apparently because, in some country in which Sun did business, someone else had already trademarked “OpenOffice”, but Sun’s lawyers believed the addition of “.org” was enough to sidestep that trademark.
I think in many jurisdictions, if someone else already has legal claim to a trademark, sticking “.org” on the end may not be sufficient to escape infringement. But, maybe under the laws of whichever country this trademark existed in, it was. Or at least, so Sun’s lawyers believed-hence, they were quite insistent on including the “.org”
Within Benelux, the company had an agreement with nl.openoffice.org where the latter would include a notice on their website to clarify that they were not affiliated with the trademark holder.
No, a 40 year old codebase with only 25 years of commit logs. And the initial commits during the Sun releases are insane - they took a bunch of commits, mashed them together and then added them as a single commit with a log message stating what all the commits they munged together did. Nightmare fuel.
Honestly, though, looking more than 10 years back in revision control is usually only for curiosity. Whatever historical reasons existed for code to be a certain way are likely impenetrable or no longer relevant.
Nah, I've often found the opposite to be true. Granted, it requires proper commit messages and code comments, but I've had my fair share of "oooh I see" moments when I encountered nonsensical crazy code. Sometimes it reassured me that it could safely go, other times it revealed a whole new dimension nobody was really aware of anymore that then got a good chunk of comment space in the code base.
A) great commit messages,
B) comments that are worse than the commit message so that you have to go scavenge in revision control,
C) a single or very few commits where the craziness happened,
and D) a codebase that hasn't drifted enough that this signal is hard to find.
I've had poor luck spelunking for reasons in things like the Linux kernel. 90% of my revision control effort looks at things from the past couple of years, and before then it rapidly becomes diminishing returns.
My mother-in-law couldn't get her old Word docs to format correctly on her new laptop (Win11 + MS Office365). Rather than fiddle around trying various settings I installed LibreOffice and with it her docs rendered correctly. Made her happy. Libre Writer reminds me of Word2000, which means I don't waste time learning new ways to perform mundane writing tasks.
My parents evolve backwards when it comes to computer literacy. It seems they especially unlearn all the windows 8+ changes, since a lot of UI philosophy stayed unchanged from 95 to the end of the XP era, so that appears to be burned into their brains forever. Word 2000/XP. They don't really write any documents anymore, but LO might actually be more what they expect today than modern MSO.
My mom uses LibreOffice, too. Granted, she doesn't do anything special. Just a few docs for housekeeping. I even forgot about the fact that she is using it. Just recently noticed it again. I would assume she would have had WAY more problems if she would have to use some stupid microsoft account to be able to use word.
You can actually use this to import pdfs generated with Matplotlib as vector graphics into Impress presentations. This allows you to change, e.g., the color of lines or the legend (or any other part of the plot) right within Impress to better fit your presentation. I found this extremely useful in the past. In Powerpoint, I could not even import an svg, let alone a pdf (although maybe the newest version supports this?).
The only downside is that currently you have to first import the pdf into Draw and then copy the shapes/curves over to Impress. I hope they will add direct import into Impress in the future.
Ha I saw that one when I was trying to work out why this wasn't working. Alas no nothing that good.
Turned out the issue was if you set a print range then it has to talk to the printer driver on windows and that takes forever to respond if the thing is a network printer and it's asleep. You open the ODS file it just hangs.
I'm not sure if they fixed it. It was reported on bugzilla and was rotting already for years. I got so annoyed with it and just thought fuck it and bought an Office license.
Edit: downvoted to -1. Stay classy HN. I need to get stuff done not bugger around with defects all day. Nothing wrong with that!
Ah I just get annoyed. You write up your genuine experience and it gets buried. That's not helpful to anyone. It's not helpful to the engineers on a project or the customers. But it validates someone's ego somewhere. It just seems so immature.
I'd rather there was no upvote or downvote at all.
> I'd rather there was no upvote or downvote at all.
You've had an account for 11 days, I'm not sure you've had enough experience to form a proper opinion on this. I feel like the upvoting/downvoting system helps a lot.
I’ve been here a long long time. Around 2009. Occasionally I walk away for a few months.
I was there when it wasn’t possible to criticise MSFT because of the second coming of Satya. I was there when Google did no evil. Now look where we are.
Well, I've had an account for over a year. I think that the voting system is not generally very good, as it is subject to the same ills as all other such systems. Productive comments with unpopular views inevitably get buried, especially on threads which touch anything to do with politics.
It gives me an indication of whether my comments please people or annoy them, and encourages me to keep the two in balance so that my karma stays level.
I have a theory that there's a limit to the human ability to be genuine, and "just be yourself" is not very meaningful, because all interpersonal communication is inescapably an act. Of course you can have sincere intent, and make a great effort to convey what you think is true, but this always has to be done in some kind of register, and so it's always a performance (however simple). Shrek tells us that ogres are like onions, but if you peel all the layers off an onion it vanishes.
Beyond your current self you have room to craft the even greater art-work you aspire to become. The creative effort ideally captures the emotions and experiences.
You are your own composition.
Arguably, judging you should be a privilege reserved for people who know you.
Should civilized men engage in this assumption that everyone is easily understood entirely by written words or does the act describe how shallow the jury is?
I'm sure I have much to learn from people down voting my comments without saying anything.
If only we could all be more like them, then we wouldn't need to have these conversations. haha
The upvote and downvote buttons are a couple millimeters apart on mobile and there's no feedback (that I've noticed, anyway) regarding which one you've pressed. There's probably a lot of accidental voting.
Change your default printer to Microsoft Print to PDF (if you're on Windows) and it will fix the issue. But I agree, that bug is a huge pain in the ass.
Congrats Adobe, you lost? (guess it depends on the pov, although I do think overall it's primarily a loss when a product is such a pain in the arse that ppl can't even be arsed to pirate it)
absolutely agree. We get lots of csv files to process and most of our consultants will check them in excel and totally mangle them one way or another. You _can_ make excel import them without messing them too much but it's several hoops away from the normal file open procedure so they forget. Libreoffice Just Works. Love it. And the way it can split a multi-tab excel file into separate csv files from the command line is a godsend. Although the documentation for the incantation for the filters to make it do it is rather lacking. But once you get it, it's fantastic
Excel has two different ways to open csv.
The open/doubleclick is kinda compatiblity mode, with reasons for default options lost in history.
The way you are supposed to use csv is open blank workbook, data tab and import.
It should be able to sniff the csv flavor before ingesting it.
Maybe it would be cool to tie the settings to the file path so that it simply opens /banana/2.csv assuming it is just like /banana/1.csv (skipping the dialog)
Excel/Calc is like an IDE for CSV. Much easier for the eye to spot errors if data is aligned. A text editor won't show you if you're missing column data for some row.
I dunno about StarOffice code, but the interchange file format became the Open Document Format (ODF) is almost unchanged. I've worked with it since before ODF was formalized. The current version is at most a polishing of structures that have been there well over 20 years. It's also, in extraordinary sharp comparison to the XML structures Microsoft drafted (confusingly called Office Open XML), well-designed and joy to work with.
Don't get me wrong, I use LibreOffice a lot, but I kind of despise it. The biggest headache I have, with Writer - which is what I use most often - is that if I select text in order to change the formatting, it changes formatting of stuff not selected. I think this has to do with paragraph styling .. it's just very unintuitive how it figures out what belongs to a paragraph or not. My human brain wants to separate paragraphs with line breaks. So why would formatting selected text on one line change the styling on adjacent lines that aren't selected?! It is extremely infuriating how its styling behaves in general.
I think it's also worth noting that rich text formatting is the primary reason to even use a word processor instead of a plain text editor in the first place. Embedded objects and exporting tools are all useful too. But most of what I use Writer for could be done in a text editor if I didn't need styling. So all these years later, a core feature - arguably THE core feature that necessitates the existence of the application to begin with - is still broken and unintuitive.
And when I search for help on how to get styling things working etc. and I find posts by other people that share these concerns, the answers are legacy document formats etc. that contain these bugs by design so it's something that's really hard for the developers to fix.
It's been a while since I've used it, but IIRC this is actually my favorite feature: it encourages the use of stylesheets vs ad-hoc formatting. As annoying as it is in the moment, when it comes time to integrate multiple documents into a consistent whole (or apply entirely new styling), having a stylesheet vs. miles of ad-hoc inline styles makes it fairly painless.
Sadly... The rich text editor I mostly use these days (Google Docs) goes in the complete opposite direction; trying to apply a new stylesheet is mostly a waste of time. Which is why for any non-trivial document, I mostly rely on Markdown -> HTML + CSS.
The way Writer works with styles is same how every other type setting program does it. Indesign, Scribus, Affinity, Quark. Not sure how this would be out of the ordinary. Maybe MS Word doesn't have paragraph styles at all? Not sure i haven't used in in a long while.
Character styles are settings for selected group of characters (things ike emphasis, italic, underline). Paragraph styles are set for whole paragraph you are in. You make new paragraph by hitting enter. If you hit enter twice you make two paragraphs. In paragraph style you define how paragraphs should be separated (empty line, first line indent, rule whaever you want). You should never do what can be done using paragraph style by writing them because later when you want to change them you would have to change it everywhere instead just changing style.
Writer does differ from Word in quite an unintuitive way.
Create a document with two one-line paragraphs.
In Word, put the cursor at the start of the first paragraph. Press SHIFT+DOWN. This selects the first paragraph. Apply a paragraph style, Heading 1, say. Paragraph one has the new style, paragraph two does not.
In Writer, do the same thing. The style is applied to both paragraphs!
I use Writer all the time but this funkiness in paragraph selection continues to bug me. You have to select paragraphs excluding the final paragraph mark, which requires more keystrokes than Word's selection behaviour.
What do you mean by selecting paragraph? Paragraph styles are applied to the paragraph your line cursor is in or if you highlight/select multiple characters it sets their paragraph to be that paragraph style.
Single character can only be part of a single paragraph. So if you select characters that are in different parahraphs and want to set their paragraph styles it should set all of them.
Ive just tried it in Writer and like i said its seems to be the “norm” how other soft does it (i dont have acess to Word to test that).
MS Word works with styles in a very similar way, and the appropriate thing to do is modify the styles to match your use case. But Word does not necessarily enforce this, and so creates additional ad-hoc if you manually go in and change specific formatting. Luckily it is fairly easy to make a change like that and then find the real style and tell Word to update the style to match your selection.
While I have never noticed changes in formatting of non-selected things when modifying a style, except for the formats of "bullets and numbering", I had problems with changes in adjacent apparently independent things by the insertion or deletion of formatted text.
To guard against such problems especially in paragraphs that use "bullets and numbering", where the font used for bullets and numbers appears to be linked with the font used on the associated line, I have become used to insert some random letter before the place where I would paste formatted text, if it is a place where this may not work as expected, which blocks any spreading of that format. After pasting the specially formatted text, I delete the previously inserted letter.
This undesired spreading of the formatting style happens only over white spaces and invisible control characters, it does not happen over normal printable characters, so inserting a printable character is guaranteed to contain the style.
This is largely the reason I gave up on rich text editors in favor of a plain text source and some sort of rich text compiler.
There is an absolutely mind boggling amount of programming work that goes into making a WYSIWYG word processor. and this complexity tends to bleed out into editing quirks and corrupted documents. Not that there are no quirks or corruption with an explicit separate compiler it is just that it will not touch your original source, so you can fight the quirks in a systematic way. I think this is why word perfect users love the show codes function so much.
"You know why they call a word processor right? Have you ever seen what a food processor does to food?"
This is largely the reason I gave up on rich text editors in favor of a plain text source and some sort of rich text compiler.
I have written a lot of words in troff/groff + various macros and adjacent tools (eqn, pic) over many years and produced consistently decent if plain looking documents. And I've started using it again. Still covers about 85% of getting words on paper in a readable format. Spent lots of time with LaTeX, too, which produced perhaps nicer looking documents over all (and beautiful mathematics), but at the expense of much more complexity; YMMV.
I used StarOffice 3.something to 5.someotherthing (I think...) on Debian back then. It had a kind of DE built in and I recall that I mostly used that on top of XFce3.
I was on a Computer Chronicles kick and watched a late-80s demo of a Sun workstation with StarOffice. It was then that I realize the legacy of the app.
I've been following it along the whole time. I fondly remember using StarOffice on my SGI Indigo back in the early 1990's to do all my homework in college.
Likewise! For some reason I had it chronologically penciled in roughly with Firefox's introduction. Oh man, I'd better call my mom, and schedule a doc appt...
The "NotebookBar" tabbed user interface is a huge change and was implemented a few years ago. Still needs some refinement (anyone is welcome to help the Design community volunteers!) but there have been some very big changes...
Although I don't use it frequently, I love that LibreOffice exits. I was wondering if there are any online resources that summarizes some of the cool tricks and features of LibreOffice for an occasional user like me?
My favorite thing about LibreOffice is that it can open CSVs without breaking them. Pretty much everything else about it is a slow, unintuitive mess, but this one killer feature makes me always install it and something that somehow Excel does not have.
I have tried to use LibreOffice Base to connect to the database... It needs some love.
The workflow to import CSV was to actually copy cell data from a spreadsheet and paste it... It was a weird experience. I went with DBeaver which is clunky too but more capable.
I have also tried to use the javascript API for LO Calc but I couldn't find any documentation even though I have read it was possible in some places... was it unmaintained and taken away ?
I tried to do things with Draw quite some time ago, it was a clunky clunky. I hope it got better.
Writer is just fine though imho, pretty much does what you expect from rich text editor
Someday in the unimaginable future, Microsoft will be a memory, Word will be lostech available only via running a cracked binary inside fifteen nested VMs, and a working copy of the LibreOffice source will still be kicking around on an FTP server somewhere and developed by users communicating over IRC.
When I was at Intel in the late 90's, early 2000's, one CPU project decided it was going to use it exclusively. It was agonizing: slow, terrible UI, buggy, missing a lot of features. I never tried it again, did it get better? It's tragic that there is no competition in this space (rip Lotus).
There was a long period of time where LibreOffice Writer had severe performance regressions due to a rework of graphics handling that removed most of the image caching. If you had a slower system or a high DPI / Retina display it could be agonizingly slow due to constantly rescaling images on the CPU. It started sometime in either 3.x or 4.x and didn't get resolved until mid ~7.x. I stayed on an old version for a long time.
I actually found it pleasantly similar to the older versions of MS Office, before we got the ribbons, also with customizable themes and actually a decent amount of layout options: https://imgur.com/a/libreoffice-ui-80hwOp0
What personally bothers me more is the performance, which can be pretty hit or miss.
Still, I hope the project remains going for the decades to come.
It's subjective. LibreOffice UI is why I stay away from MS Office. I can't find anything in MS Office anymore, I have to rely on their "search for command" feature (or whatever it's called) to be able to do anything. LibreOffice is mostly intuitive for me. On the other hand, my father does not like it and keeps nagging me to buy him the MS product (I can't justify the costs for his casual use though).
> LibreOffice UI is why I stay away from MS Office. I can't find anything in MS Office anymore,
Exactly this. I much prefer LO to any version of MS Office since 2007. And early in my career I trained people on how to use MS Office and was something of a domain expert.
18Y ago they threw that into the shredder along with all my knowledge and muscle memory. What little functionality is left is literally not worth the pain and annoyance of trying to use it.
I think that sometimes making drastic UI changes like MS Office did is one of negative incentives of commercial software. They always need something visually noticeable to justify added value of new versions.
Unlike Word at least you can still select all its options without having to run it maximized hogging all of the screen. I'll take that over over prettier and unusable.
Which one? It has 7 different UI paradigms you can choose from.
Personally i like the "Single toolbar" UI, it only shows a menubar and a toolbar with the most common stuff, which i find a great balance between minimalism and discoverability.
Though i only use like 1% of LibreOffice's features - and really only use Writer (which i mainly use as a dumb rich text editor) and Calc (mainly for a few calculations one could most likely even do in VisiCalc :-P).
Did the same back in the day with OpenOffice. MS Word would crash ad-hoc past a certain page count plus the auto-indexing feature of OO actually worked and was predictable. Also.. the styling was, if clunky, at least workable! Actually think the later versions of LibreOffice have started going down hill, heavier (initially the libre fork prided itself on being light-weight afair) and still as ugly as ever.
A faculty not allowing LaTeX seems like a weird choice, what were their reasons? Did they need direct access to a document for editing or something? Would honestly be a huge red flag for me if someone would tell me in which editor I cannot write a doc.
This isn't running Office for yourself, this is running Office 360 for your company. Not by subscribing to Microsoft who runs it for you, running it yourself.
I think the project is great, but for me it is connected now to an empiric rule of big complex projects with a large user base: An issue will be fixed more or less quickly if it affects millions/thousands of users, otherwise it will live forever in an eternal priority queue. There's an issue I noticed in LibreOffice, found the corresponding tracker post, confirmed it with a test, and now it is only visited by a robot checking whether stall issues are worth deleting. Another example is Chromium, where I posted an issue about wrong rendering of some elements with rare sets of attributes. The post is more alive than the LibreOffice one, but nevertheless, never fixed since it requires precious developers time but too niche to gain much attention
Libreoffice features prominently in the "eurostack" initiative/proposal that was launched today. If there will be ever mainstream self-sovereign compute, it will almost certainly include this incredible project.
The nag I will always repeat: libreoffice should have made much bigger, much sooner, strides to integrate the Python ecosystem in deep ways (striking on its own and ignoring Microsoft's path).
Had it done so, it would now undisputably own the desktop productivity future, with local LLM integration just the trendy example.
Thank you for sharing. The embeddable nature of this sounds great, the idea of having one spreadsheet solution that can run as code, on the browser, desktop or even within another app sounds amazing.
As someone with a couple of apps kicking around that would benefit massively from a robust spreadhsheet solution, I wish you luck.
> that version (Apache OpenOffice) is an orphan that nobody maintains anymore.
That's not true. The team maintaining AOO is small, but it's not abandoned. As evidence, I submit the fact that the last push to the Git repo[1] was a whopping 42 minutes ago.
The vast majority of the Apache OpenOffice commits are done by two people who solely focus on manually fiddling with the source code formatting and fixing typos in the comments. I'm not sure why this is (maybe they think it's a fun hobby?) but I wouldn't consider it to be the same as if the project was regularly getting bugfixes and new features.
No doubt there have been a lot of commits of that nature. But even a cursory skimming of the commit history shows plenty of "meatier" changes over the last couple of months.
And even if one person is committing nothing but typo fixes, that's still a binary difference versus being "orphaned" as far as I'm concerned. Sure, it would be nice if the project had more active contributors, but I'd rather celebrate the folks who are contributing rather than denigrate them and the project. But that's just me.
According to the Apache Security Team, Apache OpenOffice has:
> Three issues in OpenOffice over 365 days old and a number of other open issues not fully triaged.
Do you think it is responsible to keep serving users vulnerable software and misleading them that it's being updated with pointless code commits?
It's vulnerable, there's been no major update since 2014, and now unfixed issues over a year old. Those changing typos in the source code instead of actually fixing the issues should really be ashamed.
Maybe it's a covert side-channel communication method. Keep an eye out for them switching between tabs and spaces, that could signal impending nuclear war.
Sad. I've seen a couple of projects like this - maintainer who isn't a strong programmer or has no vision/direction for the project so they just change NULL to nullptr etc.
By pretending the project is still alive (it's not, especially compared to the amount of changes in LibreOffice) they actively harm the users that heard about OpenOffice and use 10 years old abandonware, instead of the modern version of the office suite that it light years away. When user meets the problem that was fixed in LO long time ago, they might decide to switch to Microsoft or other paid alternatives instead, as everyone knows them. The only reasonable thing Apache should do is to archive the repository and put an announcement that users should use the LibreOffice instead.
I mean... ok, maybe not literally nobody, but LibreOffice has 50x the contributors (1314 vs 26) and 60x the commits (500k vs 8k). Apache OpenOffice's last major version was more than a decade ago. It may not be dead-dead, but it's at least in a very long coma with zero chance of revival.
I don't know why Apache doesn't just shut it down; it serves no purpose anymore.
The Apache Security Team report says it now has "three issues in OpenOffice over 365 days old and a number of other open issues not fully triaged". So it's not just unmaintained, but actively putting users at risk. It's not clear why the ASF won't put it in the Attic.
IIRC the first big split was with go-oo project that was adding features that were in the comercial version. Then go-oo merged with the libreoffice fork.
Unfortunately some time ago libreoffice started to plan to do the same - put features bugfixes into comercial libreoffice while renaming the peasant oss version into libreoffice personal or something like that.
Totally incorrect. LibreOffice had no plans to do a "commercial" version - it's from a non-profit organisation. A few years ago, the version from The Document Foundation was given the label "LibreOffice Community" to make it clear that it's a community-driven project and doesn't provide long-term support or other things that enterprises need. (Because enterprises were getting it from TDF and expecting technical support contracts and other things.)
Both the article you linked and the disclaimer put by The Document Foundation (linked by the article) mention nothing like the "some time ago libreoffice started to plan to do the same - put features bugfixes into comercial libreoffice while renaming the peasant oss version into libreoffice personal or something like that" bit you wrote.
If anything their disclaimer makes clear:
> None of the changes being evaluated will affect the license, the availability, the permitted uses and/or the functionality. LibreOffice will always be free software and nothing is changing for end users, developers and Community members.
Reading the page and comments the whole thing was most likely a stupid name to try and differentiate the regular LibreOffice from 3rd party versions/forks that provide commercial support. They seem to have changed that name to "community" as one of the comments suggested, though instead of being plastered everywhere it is only seemed to be used when comparing the regular LibreOffice vs the "Enterprise" versions offered by 3rd parties.
Same here. If you need it occasionally for personal use it's fine. But as soon as you need to swap documents with other people on a regular basis it just doesn't work, as there is just a bazillion ways in which it will not render MSO documents properly and it will drive both sides mad.
As long as it's just a "a document" that's consisting of headlines, paragraphs and bullet points it might not matter, but anything involving more advanced formatting, even just formal letter will usually look bad once loaded in LibreOffice, unfortunately.
There is a guy (Patrick Luby) slowly chewing his way through the weirder mac issues and he seems to be making progress, so things are getting better (slowly)
Would those bugs be specific to M4 macs? Using LO without probs here for very simple docs if the increasingly rare occasional need for a printed letter comes up.
Strange bugs on Mac made me switch to OnlyOffice (and also open source) for the very seldom local file editing of office documents (using mostly Google Workspace).
LO has helped me in the past with some projects that would crash MSFT Word (they were *.docx files, the irony...). But I wish it had a better, more modern UI (icons too small and outdated).
I think they're beautiful, and much more communicative than modern icons. Personally, I prefer the density of the small ones although I'm surprised there's no larger setting (in general, buttons got bigger when touchscreens were introduced but I still do all my serious work with a keyboard and mouse).
I have said this before, but I still don't understand there isn't a supported version of LibreOffice that I can pay for. I'm mostly happy with Google's online tools, but I want a Linux-compatible offline spreadsheet and word processor often enough that I wouldn't blink at $600/year and I would seriously consider a larger amount.
> In that way, you can get long-term Service Level Agreements (SLA), personalised assistance, technical support, and custom new features.
Thanks, but not quite what I'm looking for. I want a fully maintained and supported offline word processor and spreadsheet for Linux, much as Windows/OSX has Microsoft Office.
If I felt that LibreOffice was maintained and supported, I would not be asking.
I'm very confused about what you are asking, exactly. In your first post, you ask for "a supported version of LibreOffice that I can pay for", when it's pointed out to you that you can, it's not actually LibreOffice that you want to pay for, because you insinuate it's not maintained and supported?
Even though the paid offer includes technical support and a simple git log shows 50 commits in the past 24 hours in the core repository?
We have different definitions of "supported and maintained". My definition means that it doesn't crash, and that it opens my clients' documents without mangling them. I have absolutely no interest in how many lines of code went into a source code repo in any time period, and I don't want one-to-one technical assistance.
Typically old binary; unfortunately these are the documents which clients' accounting and legal departments tend to send me. OOXML is better, though not always identical to the Word rendering. Spreadsheets, in fairness, tend to do pretty well.
Bug reports: no. I do participate in open source projects, but I really just want to pay someone else for an office suite.
You could probably pay for someone to fix the few rendering/incompatible issues with those old binary formats as a patch. Any paid solution would likely have similar issues, so paying for the functionally you want/need directly is likely the only alternative to just using Word directly, and you could give back to the community in a big way if that's something you value. It might cost as little as $200 or so.
The problem is I think so few people care about those old binary formats these days, so there probably isn't much demand to improve compatibility for the edge cases you are encountering.
Yeah, as I understand it you have to buy it to get the supported version.
Not sure why they don't have an online store or something and you have to contact them to purchase it though, that seems to add unnecessary friction for someone who just wants a single license (makes more sense for enterprise users).
You can buy the Mac and Windows version online for a small fee. I guess interest in a "boxed" Linux version is low enough they don't make it easy to buy a single license.
No although your price end is steep - that's more then I pay for the Jetbrains suite, for example.
The reason such a thing should exist is to drive industry adoption: it's a lot easier to get things into the corporate and government world, ironically, if there's someone selling a subscription and support and looking like a normal software vendor for it.
I wish they improved more on macro developer experience. I recently tried to add basic fetching of Jira tickets information. I tried Basic, Python (various APIs). I gave up because any kind of simple automatization becomes nightmare in there.
Yea, for example I want to use librecalc more but it only vertically scrolls by column and not smoothly. It's intolerably annoying to me. I cant figure out if there's any way to have smooth vertical scroll but so far no.
Never heard of onlyoffice thanks I will check it out.
I agree with it (at least Calc, which is what I use most) being sluggish and having bad UX. But it’s free (with a donation option I use). LibreOffice could do with some polish.
you can disagree all you want , that is experience from our tests and based off from all the complaints from my clients (50 users) back in 2022 .
OnlyOffice had become daily drivers for us and it is leaps and bounds better in Terms of Performance , Ease of Use and Compatibility with office formats.
Very simple formatting could break and LibreOffice refuse to fix those but blames Microsoft for the format changes - that is deal breaker for us.
Oracle (Sun) never released LibreOffice, despite what this article says.
LibreOffice continues to be a fascinating C++ codebase. If you want to work on a large scale C++ legacy product, then I'd say this is the best codebase to work on.
Every once in a while I'll try LibreOffice out but I can never get past the UI. I've also never seen it in use at a company which begs the question: who is using it?
> I hope this version will let me open a file from within LibreOffice directly, without granting full disk access (Mac)
I'm currently, for no better reason than that I haven't upgraded, running LibreOffice 24.8.0.3 on macOS Sequoia. I haven't given it FDA (checked the list of apps with FDA permissions, and it's not there), but just tried opening a few files from within the app, and had no issues.
It hadn't even occurred to me to look for it on the App Store. I went to check, and noticed that it's $9. Since the reviews suggest that it's not always kept up to date there, and since part of that $9 is going to Apple, I wonder what the advantage of installing through the App Store is over installing directly and donating $9 to the Document Foundation?
Good reminder, just went to the doc foundation and donated a bit. I've been using LO (and OO before) for ages, remiss not to pay it back at all. Thanks!
I'm just a sample of one but I've used LibreOffice on Windows, Mac and Linux and never ran into that issue. It may be worth asking about it on SuperUser [1] if that site is still useful.
Is there a tl;dr on the crdt/collaboration feature? How does one get the share up and running, do you get a special link that you can send to someone? How smooth can it get? I'm guessing it's hard to do without some sort of relay system (like syncthing) or servers for hosting links (like https://file.pizza )
It's got to be better than that version of Word that let us create a document on computer X (shared student lab of computers back in the day) and then, after saving and coming back, refused to load the same document back due to lack of memory.
Edit: we had to go back to an older draft and split it into two parts, as I recall..
I can't remember why, but I gave up attempting to use LibreOffice.
If I remember correctly, the PowerPoint program didn't have text size as a front page icon. Instead you had to click a few buttons or something... I didn't really care to learn what symbols meant what, or the workflow.
(The connected experiences, including Copilot, can be disabled with a dialog hidden deep in Office's Trust Center, but even that's confusingly worded. It's unclear from the wording and the structure of the dialog what the combination of checking "all connected experiences" but unchecking "experiences that analyze your content" should actually do, for example.)
MS Office is certainly the more polished product, especially Excel. There are some spreadsheets I can't feasibly convert to LibreOffice Calc without equivalents to Excel's lambdas and tables.
But LibreOffice does the job in most cases. I'm really excited to see this new work—especially CRDT-based sync between desktop app instances over a network file server, which would turn LibreOffice into a significantly better experience than MS Office for my purposes.