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LibreOffice is now an excellent alternative for both business and home use.
by blanderman 8y ago
LibreOffice is now an excellent alternative for both business and home use.
- colechristensen 8y agoIs it really? I have occasionally tried open office and clones for a very long time and "adequate alternative" was the best impression I ever got and far from the worst.
- umanwizard 8y agoJust to be clear, LibreOffice is not a clone of OpenOffice. It is OpenOffice -- the project was forced to change its name for legal reasons.
- blanderman 8y agoIt was forked from OpenOffice after Oracle bought OO, and most of the core developers moved to LibreOffice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice
- umanwizard 8y agoSo, by any reasonable definition, Oracle's (and now Apache's) version is the fork, and LibreOffice is the main line. LibreOffice is a continuation of the original development team, and the original code. The only thing they don't have is the name, which doesn't matter much in my mind. So why do you say that what's now called "OpenOffice" is the main line, and "LibreOffice" is a fork? What's your definition of a fork, exactly?
- criley2 8y agoLibreOffice has never been an excellent alternative, IMO. It comes across as a mediocre port of a copy of Excel from 15 years ago. Teaching users who are not great with computers and who know modern excel how to use some 1999-era LibreOffice Calc software is not fun. LibreOffice recreates the worst parts of menu/modal hell and it's not a place the modern user is good at navigating. In every case I recommend Google Sheets over Calc these days. So much easier to teach, more intuitive design, and more simply interoperable with the outside world.
- partycoder 8y agoWhile I appreciate the colossal volunteer work that the LibreOffice people have done, I don't like it. It is in essence the same as StarOffice from Sun, an office suite that wasn't even very good back in the Sun years.