6 ms·

I'm all for FLOSS solutions and love Linux and many of the things that are freely available to us. I wouldn't trade Linux for Windows for any sort of developmen

I'm all for FLOSS solutions and love Linux and many of the things that are freely available to us. I wouldn't trade Linux for Windows for any sort of development work. However, I'll be the first to admit that MS Office simply blows Libre Office out of the water. I'm very good with Excel and Calc, but I'm many times slower with Calc. The hotkeys, variety of equations, and simple features simply aren't available in Calc. I know that if I'm say 3x slower, the cost associated with that across a year and across a team is going to outweigh the MS subscription. There is nothing wrong with ceding the crown to the better product.

madez 9y ago
Can you make yourself more specific? What hotkeys, equations and simple features are missing?
- sz4kerto 9y ago
  Performance is relative easy to test: open a CSV with 100k rows in Excel, Calc and Google Spreadsheets.
  - em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
    I suspect most of Libre Office's slow performance is a result of using JAVA.
    - MegaDeKay 9y ago
      Nope. From https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Java https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Java - "Note though that very little of this Java code is actually part of the shipped product." A lot of the Java stuff is ancillary, and chunks of Java code have been rewritten to C++ over time. Part of the reason that LibreOffice is slow is that it was essentially debugged into existence. Michael Meeks from Collabra would often post to Planet Gnome about his optimization work. There is certainly hope looking forward. It is a lot faster than it used to be, and they will hopefully be enabling Multi-threading in Calc for LibreOffice 6.0. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=LibreOffice-Calc-Threading https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=LibreOff...
    - amake 9y ago
      Did you just time travel here from 1999?
  - jsjohnst 9y ago
    Try doing that in MS Office for Mac, equally as bad. :( IT team at a previous employer had to setup Windows VM for some sales folks (who otherwise loved Mac) because it was so bad.
rwmj 9y ago
I've used MS Office, Libreoffice and Google Apps and find them all equally appalling. Terrible, clumsy, complicated, inaccurate UI, unusable version control, ugly output. (Compared to git + emacs + TeX/docbook/perldoc/HTML/plain text).
- unixhero 9y ago
  Well sure. But unlike You, bureaucrats are not computer scientists.
- Philipp__ 9y ago
  Oh, I always come to HN and hold my breathe not to see comments like this... Do you think that someone who has never touched computer except for Facebook, MS Office and emailing should know Lisp and UNIX environment?
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Now try to teach someone that pastes images into Word to send them as attachment into emails to use git + emacs + TeX/docbook/perldoc/HTML/plain text.
- MonkeySalvation 9y ago
  "Terrible, clumsy, complicated and ugly" are exactly the kind of adjectives that spring to my mind when thinking of git, emacs and (to a lesser degree) TeX.
photon-torpedo 9y ago
The switch now announced does not include switching back from LibreOffice to MS Office. They have a lot of existing LO templates which would cost too much (work/money) to migrate.
- andai 9y ago
  So they're switching from LiMux to W10 and will run LO on it?
ocdtrekkie 9y ago
And really, this is just to say we need to encourage better open source solutions. Open source will never win when closed source is better: Everywhere open source solutions have won is when the quality and user experience has beaten the closed source offering. Consumers, and largely, most businesses, will never choose open for open's sake.
haagch 9y ago
They are going to spend tens of millions of Euro on the migration. The cost of contracting someone to add hotkeys, equations and simple features to libreoffice is nothing compared to that.
- veidr 9y ago
  The cost of figuring out exactly what to contract somebody to build, though — especially for a non-technical bureaucratic agency — is likely to be fairly astronomical. (I doubt they are sitting around the conference table saying "Fuck! If only the Linux office suite had these seventeen keyboard shortcuts and the equation editor had these thirty-nine additional features, there would be no need to switch!") Windows probably really does work better out of the box for their use cases and user base, but I doubt they could tell you why exactly.
  - mtgx 9y ago
    The $50 million is just for the switch. They'll probably pay a few million every year for the licenses. Yeah, I don't think they can justify it from a cost point of view. This move was political and Microsoft convinced them to do it by building an HQ there.
  - bjkmhgcghm 9y ago
    > I doubt they are sitting around the conference table saying "Fuck! If only the Linux office suite had these seventeen keyboard shortcuts and the equation editor had these thirty-nine additional features, there would be no need to switch!" What are the arguments supporting the switch, then? One would think they determined there are some features missing from the Linux based setup and found out that the Windows solution has those, then decided that they have to switch. If this wasn't the case, then what are they basing their decision on? Flipped a coin, or simply corruption, or what?
chrisper 9y ago
The reality is that Munich is a "Microsoft City" with a large Microsoft Office there. I don't have any proof, but I doubt this is a coincidence.
mtgx 9y ago
What if Munich alone invested $50 million into making LibreOffice better? Wouldn't that be a much better ROI for their investment? Besides, if they using Excel for finance stuff, they're doing it wrong anyway: https://www.wsj.com/articles/stop-using-excel-finance-chiefs-tell-staffs-1511346601 https://www.wsj.com/articles/stop-using-excel-finance-chiefs...
- extrememacaroni 9y ago
  Not necessarily, one investment buys you the software that meets your needs now, the other is a donation that buys you at most a promise for software that maybe meets your needs sometime in the future. This assuming they had a need that OSS Office didn't cover, of course.
  - jsjohnst 9y ago
    Don’t disagree, but playing devils advocate, they won’t be on Windows / Office till 2023 per linked article. Five years is a long time in the land of software to resolve promises.
lucb1e 9y ago
> MS Office simply blows Libre Office out of the water Graphically, sure. But after not using MS Office for a few years, I really prefer LibreOffice. It does everything I need (and a lot more, actually) and I know where all the buttons are. Other than that it looks prettier, there is zero reason for me to use MS Office. (I can only think of reasons why I wouldn't want to use MS Office.) And if MS Office is what you're going for, then it still runs in Wine. No need to convert the entire infrastructure.
- jotm 9y ago
  How's LibreOffice compare to OpenOffice? Last time I tried the latter, it would create weird formatting in documents when opened in MS Word.
  - lucb1e 9y ago
    I have very little experience with OpenOffice. If I remember correctly, OO was bought by Oracle after which the community forked LibreOffice, and that is now installed by default in many GNU/Linux distributions. I think I haven't used OO in at least five years, so I can't really say anything about it.
  - ptman 9y ago
    LibreOffice is the one you want to use. OpenOffice is so undermaintained that they have problems patching security holes, nevermind improving
  - btschaegg 9y ago
    Generally, it seems that after the whole Oracle fiasco and the Apache part, LibreOffice is miles ahead. When it comes to formatting in Word though, it should be worth noting that MS Word supports ODT files by now.
skosch 9y ago
Read the article (and, if you are able, the ones in German) – this has nothing at all to do with Excel having more hotkeys. LiMux has been around for a long time, and those wrinkles had been pretty much ironed out. Mayor Reiter openly calls himself a "Microsoft fan". He got Microsoft to move their German HQ to Munich, which was a significant deal for the city. They then hired Accenture, an official MS partner company, to write an report on the city's IT problems. It concluded that LiMux administration is poorly coordinated between departments, and that was all the justification they needed to push for a migration back to Windows. I am surprised this Techcrunch piece is so "balanced", including a parroting of the understated official cost estimates. This deal is a stupendous waste of taxpayers' money, and German-language news (at least those I've read) are much less subtle about it.
hungerstrike 9y ago
> I wouldn't trade Linux for Windows for any sort of development work. Same. Windows has all the Linux dev tools plus a huge host of tools that Linux devs can only dream of. The only thing I need/want Linux for is cloud deployment. If I'm deploying an Intranet server, Windows servers is what people want there. It amazes me that Linux devs speak so highly of their own tools and yet they can't even build a decent desktop system that just works, that masses of people want to actually use. And devs are people too :)
- jenscow 9y ago
  > that masses of people want to actually use The masses want to use Windows. To make the masses want Linux, it would have to be like Windows.
  - hungerstrike 9y ago
    Not at all. Look at the Macintosh OS - it's the polar opposite of Windows and it didn't take much to gain more popular acceptance than Linux.
- yndoendo 9y ago
  I wouldn't trade Windows for Linux for development and everyday computing, even gaming. Microsoft and Apple both have slow and clunky UIs. I am actually more efficient on Gnome with extensions than either of the two. Only use Mac OS and Windows for their compilers and application packaging with cross-platform code bases. "Masses of, 1st world, people" are also the ones that don't understand or care about concepts such as security, privacy and true right to own. Never found the masses argument that supportive to a valid argument since group-think doesn't actually prevent problems but increases them.
  - hungerstrike 9y ago
    Most developers aren't even using a Linux desktop OS though. Linux desktop distros are so bad that Apple was able to come along and eat up whatever market share it has among developers just by being stable. > Never found the masses argument that supportive... It is supportive when discussing things such as necessities. So, for instance, we can all agree that everybody needs to breathe air, right? Likewise, the masses (developers or otherwise) need stability in their OS (among many other things).

madez 9y ago

Can you make yourself more specific? What hotkeys, equations and simple features are missing?

sz4kerto 9y ago
Performance is relative easy to test: open a CSV with 100k rows in Excel, Calc and Google Spreadsheets.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
  I suspect most of Libre Office's slow performance is a result of using JAVA.
  - MegaDeKay 9y ago
    Nope. From https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Java https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Java - "Note though that very little of this Java code is actually part of the shipped product." A lot of the Java stuff is ancillary, and chunks of Java code have been rewritten to C++ over time. Part of the reason that LibreOffice is slow is that it was essentially debugged into existence. Michael Meeks from Collabra would often post to Planet Gnome about his optimization work. There is certainly hope looking forward. It is a lot faster than it used to be, and they will hopefully be enabling Multi-threading in Calc for LibreOffice 6.0. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=LibreOffice-Calc-Threading https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=LibreOff...
  - amake 9y ago
    Did you just time travel here from 1999?
- jsjohnst 9y ago
  Try doing that in MS Office for Mac, equally as bad. :( IT team at a previous employer had to setup Windows VM for some sales folks (who otherwise loved Mac) because it was so bad.

rwmj 9y ago

I've used MS Office, Libreoffice and Google Apps and find them all equally appalling. Terrible, clumsy, complicated, inaccurate UI, unusable version control, ugly output. (Compared to git + emacs + TeX/docbook/perldoc/HTML/plain text).

unixhero 9y ago
Well sure. But unlike You, bureaucrats are not computer scientists.
Philipp__ 9y ago
Oh, I always come to HN and hold my breathe not to see comments like this... Do you think that someone who has never touched computer except for Facebook, MS Office and emailing should know Lisp and UNIX environment?
pjmlp 9y ago
Now try to teach someone that pastes images into Word to send them as attachment into emails to use git + emacs + TeX/docbook/perldoc/HTML/plain text.
MonkeySalvation 9y ago
"Terrible, clumsy, complicated and ugly" are exactly the kind of adjectives that spring to my mind when thinking of git, emacs and (to a lesser degree) TeX.

photon-torpedo 9y ago

The switch now announced does not include switching back from LibreOffice to MS Office. They have a lot of existing LO templates which would cost too much (work/money) to migrate.

andai 9y ago
So they're switching from LiMux to W10 and will run LO on it?

ocdtrekkie 9y ago

And really, this is just to say we need to encourage better open source solutions. Open source will never win when closed source is better: Everywhere open source solutions have won is when the quality and user experience has beaten the closed source offering. Consumers, and largely, most businesses, will never choose open for open's sake.

haagch 9y ago

They are going to spend tens of millions of Euro on the migration. The cost of contracting someone to add hotkeys, equations and simple features to libreoffice is nothing compared to that.

veidr 9y ago
The cost of figuring out exactly what to contract somebody to build, though — especially for a non-technical bureaucratic agency — is likely to be fairly astronomical. (I doubt they are sitting around the conference table saying "Fuck! If only the Linux office suite had these seventeen keyboard shortcuts and the equation editor had these thirty-nine additional features, there would be no need to switch!") Windows probably really does work better out of the box for their use cases and user base, but I doubt they could tell you why exactly.
- mtgx 9y ago
  The $50 million is just for the switch. They'll probably pay a few million every year for the licenses. Yeah, I don't think they can justify it from a cost point of view. This move was political and Microsoft convinced them to do it by building an HQ there.
- bjkmhgcghm 9y ago
  > I doubt they are sitting around the conference table saying "Fuck! If only the Linux office suite had these seventeen keyboard shortcuts and the equation editor had these thirty-nine additional features, there would be no need to switch!" What are the arguments supporting the switch, then? One would think they determined there are some features missing from the Linux based setup and found out that the Windows solution has those, then decided that they have to switch. If this wasn't the case, then what are they basing their decision on? Flipped a coin, or simply corruption, or what?

chrisper 9y ago

The reality is that Munich is a "Microsoft City" with a large Microsoft Office there. I don't have any proof, but I doubt this is a coincidence.

mtgx 9y ago

What if Munich alone invested $50 million into making LibreOffice better? Wouldn't that be a much better ROI for their investment? Besides, if they using Excel for finance stuff, they're doing it wrong anyway: https://www.wsj.com/articles/stop-using-excel-finance-chiefs-tell-staffs-1511346601 https://www.wsj.com/articles/stop-using-excel-finance-chiefs...

extrememacaroni 9y ago
Not necessarily, one investment buys you the software that meets your needs now, the other is a donation that buys you at most a promise for software that maybe meets your needs sometime in the future. This assuming they had a need that OSS Office didn't cover, of course.
- jsjohnst 9y ago
  Don’t disagree, but playing devils advocate, they won’t be on Windows / Office till 2023 per linked article. Five years is a long time in the land of software to resolve promises.

lucb1e 9y ago

> MS Office simply blows Libre Office out of the water Graphically, sure. But after not using MS Office for a few years, I really prefer LibreOffice. It does everything I need (and a lot more, actually) and I know where all the buttons are. Other than that it looks prettier, there is zero reason for me to use MS Office. (I can only think of reasons why I wouldn't want to use MS Office.) And if MS Office is what you're going for, then it still runs in Wine. No need to convert the entire infrastructure.

jotm 9y ago
How's LibreOffice compare to OpenOffice? Last time I tried the latter, it would create weird formatting in documents when opened in MS Word.
- lucb1e 9y ago
  I have very little experience with OpenOffice. If I remember correctly, OO was bought by Oracle after which the community forked LibreOffice, and that is now installed by default in many GNU/Linux distributions. I think I haven't used OO in at least five years, so I can't really say anything about it.
- ptman 9y ago
  LibreOffice is the one you want to use. OpenOffice is so undermaintained that they have problems patching security holes, nevermind improving
- btschaegg 9y ago
  Generally, it seems that after the whole Oracle fiasco and the Apache part, LibreOffice is miles ahead. When it comes to formatting in Word though, it should be worth noting that MS Word supports ODT files by now.

skosch 9y ago

Read the article (and, if you are able, the ones in German) – this has nothing at all to do with Excel having more hotkeys. LiMux has been around for a long time, and those wrinkles had been pretty much ironed out. Mayor Reiter openly calls himself a "Microsoft fan". He got Microsoft to move their German HQ to Munich, which was a significant deal for the city. They then hired Accenture, an official MS partner company, to write an report on the city's IT problems. It concluded that LiMux administration is poorly coordinated between departments, and that was all the justification they needed to push for a migration back to Windows. I am surprised this Techcrunch piece is so "balanced", including a parroting of the understated official cost estimates. This deal is a stupendous waste of taxpayers' money, and German-language news (at least those I've read) are much less subtle about it.

hungerstrike 9y ago

> I wouldn't trade Linux for Windows for any sort of development work. Same. Windows has all the Linux dev tools plus a huge host of tools that Linux devs can only dream of. The only thing I need/want Linux for is cloud deployment. If I'm deploying an Intranet server, Windows servers is what people want there. It amazes me that Linux devs speak so highly of their own tools and yet they can't even build a decent desktop system that just works, that masses of people want to actually use. And devs are people too :)

jenscow 9y ago
> that masses of people want to actually use The masses want to use Windows. To make the masses want Linux, it would have to be like Windows.
- hungerstrike 9y ago
  Not at all. Look at the Macintosh OS - it's the polar opposite of Windows and it didn't take much to gain more popular acceptance than Linux.
yndoendo 9y ago
I wouldn't trade Windows for Linux for development and everyday computing, even gaming. Microsoft and Apple both have slow and clunky UIs. I am actually more efficient on Gnome with extensions than either of the two. Only use Mac OS and Windows for their compilers and application packaging with cross-platform code bases. "Masses of, 1st world, people" are also the ones that don't understand or care about concepts such as security, privacy and true right to own. Never found the masses argument that supportive to a valid argument since group-think doesn't actually prevent problems but increases them.
- hungerstrike 9y ago
  Most developers aren't even using a Linux desktop OS though. Linux desktop distros are so bad that Apple was able to come along and eat up whatever market share it has among developers just by being stable. > Never found the masses argument that supportive... It is supportive when discussing things such as necessities. So, for instance, we can all agree that everybody needs to breathe air, right? Likewise, the masses (developers or otherwise) need stability in their OS (among many other things).