9 ms·

“LibreOffice is at serious risk”

126 points by rsecora 6y ago

MattGaiser 6y ago
Does anyone here work an environment where LibreOffice is sufficient? It replaces Word well, but for Excel, there is just too much of a shift for me. It is a great product, but given the market saturation of Office, I am not sure there is really a place for it in the market spectrum.
- anthony_barker 6y ago
  Financial services company here. Calc + Pandas + google sheets for us.
- aloisdg 6y ago
  As long as you are looking for a capitalism-free solution, you will need something else than Office.
- bonzini 6y ago
  Actually I miss Access the most. As an Excel replacement it has what I need to do my taxes and to set up voting sheets and schedules for conferences.
  - beamatronic 6y ago
    Is there anyway to do visual basic, Access-type apps in the cloud? I mean a full cloud-based IDE?
    - oh-4-fucks-sake 6y ago
      Might not be the exact right feature-set here, but Google Sheets allows you to write custom functions in Javascript. IIRC, you can hook a Google Sheet up to Google Forms and this might give you what you want.
      - bonzini 6y ago
        It doesn't let you do declarative queries (read: SQL) and it's not relational.
        JustARandomGuy 6y ago
        Google Apps Scripts (equivalent to VBA in Office) can script most Google products; you could build a form on one tab of a Google Sheet, use Apps Scripts to store and query data against Cloud SQL, then use another tab of Sheets to output the data from Cloud SQL. https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/jdbc https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/jdbc
        bonzini 6y ago
        That's not what a replacement for Access should be like.
  - grandinj 6y ago
    LibreOffice Base is an Access-type program
    - canada_dry 6y ago
      In the same way a Lada is an automobile. Perhaps it's improved, but a while ago I tried to program Base and found the documentation around it's functions/methods/properties to be scant and/or terribly out-of-date, and pretty much useless.
      - grandinj 6y ago
        Ouch! :-) Yeah, it's the unloved step-child of the LibreOffice suite, we fix stuff sometimes, but there is no commercial user of it to fund development
    - blihp 6y ago
      In theory, but not in practice. Yes, it's a somewhat visual database. But it doesn't have anywhere near the power or ease of use that Access did 20 years ago and its integration with the rest of LO isn't even close to what Access does in MS Office. If that weren't bad enough, the underlying database it uses is effectively an island in the larger open source world. In the Windows world, just about everything can interact with Access. Just about nothing can with Base.
- hanniabu 6y ago
  I really wish they worked on the UI more. Better yet, it'd be great to offer an online version. You can make it so you can work right away on a new file all client side and save the files to your desktop, Drive, Dropbox, etc, or continue working on a file from one of those locations.
  - goldfishlover 6y ago
    It's honestly probably easier to work on new project than try to finagle around the libre/open office UI code
- hpen 6y ago
  I use LibreOffice calc daily as an excel replacement on Linux. I am a Software Developer and prefer to use Linux for my development OS.
  - Falling3 6y ago
    I'm in the exact same boat. I know there are differences between excel and calc, but none of them affect my daily usage - which to be fair is about 60-70% using it ass a glorified CSV editor.
  - 8b16380d 6y ago
    Same. I find no problem with it at all.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Havoc 6y ago
    >I use LibreOffice calc daily as an excel replacement on Linux. I am a Software Developer The issue is not whether software developers can replace their (barely existent) Excel usage but whether accountants & office workers can. I have yet to meet a SINGLE accountant aware of openoffice/libreoffice's existence. OO/Libre is deader than dead in the one segment where it matters.
    - sushshshsh 6y ago
      How many people out there have workloads that can't be met by LibreOffice Calc? I would like to meet those people because they must have very interesting jobs and automating their work would have a high monetary impact.
      - Bud 6y ago
        Um, for starters, anyone who needs stable software, professional support, timely software updates, or the ability to run on a mainstream OS. So basically? Everyone.
- the_af 6y ago
  I'm not a power user, but I've been using LibreOffice as a Word and Excel replacement for years. Lately both have been replaced by Google Docs, for better or worse. I haven't touched MS Office in more than a decade, and I don't miss it.
- sudasana 6y ago
  I use LibreOffice daily, I wrote all my publications including my monograph with it. For my purposes, Calc works just as well as Excel too.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  >Does anyone here work an environment where LibreOffice is sufficient? I used to do IT for a high-school with ~300 students, faculty and staff. Ubuntu dolled up to look kinda Windows-ish on half the lab machines. Windows on the other half. Faculty got a Toshiba Sattelite Pros that had windows licenses. Servers all ran linux. We used Libreoffice on everything and aside from a few complainers it was fine.
- speeder 6y ago
  I've been using LibreOffice for 15+ years with no issue, only times I remembered MS Office exists is when someone sends stuff in Office proprietary formats and no software wants to open them.
  - mixmastamyk 6y ago
    Same. I've used calc to check my taxes and prepare invoices for close to twenty years. Never had an issue, even circa 2000.
- orthoxerox 6y ago
  It's pivot tables that made me buy MS Office. Neither Office.com nor LibreOffice Calc allow you to sort a pivot table by field values.
- toast0 6y ago
  OpenLibreOffice.org Calc works close enough to Excel for me. Microsoft Excel is more polished clearly, so I'd use it, but I'm not going to figure out how to pay for it. In my experience, Google docs sheets doesn't work well with equations, if I update a cell that others depend on, those other cells don't always update, or update with significant delay, and it becomes difficult to use. (My equations are usually pretty simple, just sum this column, multiply by this cell, etc. One page financial sheets, not like tax return estimators with tons of hidden calculations behind the scenes)
- butz 6y ago
  Dealing with various CSV files is just much more simple on LibreOffice Calc than in Excel. Especially when non standard encoding is involved.
- tannhaeuser 6y ago
  It suffices in the few cases I use an office suite for. Calc does its job; it doesn't necessarily have to compete with Excel on features or looks. There were spreadsheet apps on DOS long before Excel, such as Lotus 1-2-3 or even MS' own Multiplan.
- rwmj 6y ago
  Sure, I use LibreOffice as well as Google Docs for spreadsheets, and both are equally horrible. Clumsy user interface, slow, awkward. How is it that the scroll bar simply doesn't work sanely in either of them? I'd love there to exist some kind of "command line spreadsheet".
- pantaloony 6y ago
  I've always found Open/Libre Office unpleasantly heavy-weight and fragile. On Linux I use lighter stand-alone programs (which are... fine, kinda, for lack of anything better) and on Mac, the bundled Apple office programs, which I love—they open almost instantly and I can leave them on in the background and forget they're there, no crashes, no noticeable effect on system responsiveness even on very old Macs, nothing bad at all, plus they interoperate pretty well.
- st1ck 6y ago
  Yes, except that we use google spreadsheets for collaborative editing. My coworker switched from MS Office to LibreOffice just because the former never detected UTF-8 encoding in TSV files.
thrownaway954 6y ago
i used to use LibreOffice back in the day when MSOffice was too expensive. nowadays i just use google docs and google sheets. i'm sure 90% of people out there use a browser/cloud based office product. if LibreOffice wants to remain relevant, they should make some sort of cloud based product (if they already have, i'm not aware of it).
- toppy 6y ago
  They addressed this partly by LibreOffice Online: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/ https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/
  - thrownaway954 6y ago
    it says its unsupported. this leads me to believe this isn't anything official from them, just something of any experiment. i'm not going to "test" not trust an unsupported office suite that i need for everyday use.
- bryanlarsen 6y ago
  https://www.collaboraoffice.com/collabora-online/ https://www.collaboraoffice.com/collabora-online/
  - thrownaway954 6y ago
    i don't see a plan for personal use. maybe i'm missing something?
    - gary-kim 6y ago
      Collabora Online is Collabora's branded version of LibreOffice Online. They also have a version they call Collabora Online Development Edition that you can find here for personal use: https://www.collaboraoffice.com/code/ https://www.collaboraoffice.com/code/. There is no stable edition of LibreOffice Online but you can find a daily build of the master branch for Docker at https://hub.docker.com/r/libreoffice/online https://hub.docker.com/r/libreoffice/online. Both LibreOffice Online from Docker Hub and Collabora Online Development Edition have a configured limiation of 20 connections for 10 different doucments so personally, I'd recommend building from source. You can find the source code for LibreOffice Online here: https://git.libreoffice.org/online https://git.libreoffice.org/online. I suspect the lack of a stable version of LibreOffice Online is intentional as a way to try to drive more business towards companies such as Collabora.
danpalmer 6y ago
As much as I’d love free software to be popular for being free, that’s never been the case and is increasingly unlikely to ever become the case. Free software needs to learn to compete on features if it’s going to have the mainstream adoption necessary to survive. This worked in engineering tools, Nginx and Apache are the most popular web servers in their category, Postgres and MySQL have enormous support, and so on. I wonder why these are really so different? Most devs don’t care that much about the freedom I don’t think. Maybe there’s something the free software movement could learn from what engineering products are doing and apply it to consumer products?
- tharne 6y ago
  I think part of it at least is that the engineering tools have, on average, a more technically sophisticated user base and those tools mostly involve working at the command line or through an IDE like VS Code or the like. I think a lot of where free software falls down is on the GUI, which is less of an issue with engineering tools.
  - karlding 6y ago
    I agree. GUIs are hard! On the other hand, it seems like Open Source has a lack of designers that are willing to contribute. For example, in Tantacrul's critique of MuseScore [0], there's issues highlighted that seem obvious in retrospect, but in Open Source projects, unless there's someone who drives the user experience, it's easy to miss all these small things that add up to signal (whether rightly or wrongly is besides the point) a lack of polish. [0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=4hZxo96x48A https://youtube.com/watch?v=4hZxo96x48A
    - throwbacktictac 6y ago
      That is squarely where the problem lies. There are good open source developers out there as evidenced by the great Github projects. There are also good designers out there such as those that maintain Dribbble.com profiles. What keeps them from collaborating to produce top notch projects? Thanks for sharing Tantacrul video. He's quite an entertaining bloke!
askafriend 6y ago
Just an anecdote: LibreOffice has had 0 impact on my life in the past decade. In that decade, my expectations for text editing software has changed dramatically. I expect online, cloud-based, collaborative, document editing. Anything less is a no go, and I expect modern interfaces for software I use often. Unfortunately the LibreOffice pitch is just un-compelling to me. I won't really be losing any sleep over this.
- oh-4-fucks-sake 6y ago
  To that point, I know Office 365 has really caught on, but Google Drive/Docs/Sheets really beat them to market and it's become my go-to for collab.
- phaemon 6y ago
  Just an anecdote: no office software of any kind has had an impact on my life in the past decade. That's because I'm no a middle management wanker! Two pints prick.
  - askafriend 6y ago
    I also explained how my expectations changed and how Libre's new pitch doesn't sound compelling with that context. It would help if you expand on your anecdote why no office software of any kind has had an impact on your life in the past decade and what expectations you have for office software that could possibly help you.
    - phaemon 6y ago
      Firstly, because,"office software" is useless crap. It fills the gap between the computer literate and illiterate in the same way that pointing and grunting fills the gap between the written equivalent. Secondly, where's my pint?
      - askafriend 6y ago
        I don't know what a pint is.
jimbob45 6y ago
In all honesty, I think that most of the LibreOffice audience would be happier with WordPad if they knew it existed (middle school students, one-off work projects, personal story-writing).
- rwmj 6y ago
  Isn't that a proprietary Windows-only product? How is it anything to do with LibreOffice?
rjohnk 6y ago
In regards to naming, why not call it "LibreOffice Community Edition" instead of "Personal"?
shp0ngle 6y ago
This is hard to read without context. From I can gather - there is a company, called “Collabora”, that sells LibreOffice consultancy and LibreOffice “online” installations. This company now contributes majority of development to LibreOffice. And lead the development of “LibreOffice Online”, maybe? And from what I can get, their business is not doing that well. This e-mail is written by someone from that company.
- corbet 6y ago
  The context is currently a few lines down on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23789659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23789659
  - ghaff 6y ago
    Fundamentally, OpenOffice and then LibreOffice never became a serious business for any company with significant resources. It arguably circled nearby with Novell and IBM at various times but nothing ever really clicked. Now there are 40 developers. Mostly from a company that apparently isn't doing that great. LibreOffice has always been understaffed relative to the competition. But it wouldn't shock me if there were more HR people associated with GSuite than there are LibreOffice developers.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - shp0ngle 6y ago
    I did not see that link when I posted this :)
- mjw1007 6y ago
  Yes, some of it seems oddly written. On first reading, I thought this bit was the author reporting that other people are frustrated with TDF, and that this indicates that there is a problem: « Frustration with how TDF markets and positions its 'product' (LibreOffice) against the ecosystem that contributes the majority of the coding work is at an all-time high. » But I think actually this should be read as « We (Collabora) are more frustrated with the TDF than ever. »
cmckn 6y ago
I haven't seen LibreOffice in at least 5 years and haven't used it in at least 10. IMHO it's never been...good. It's the same situation as GIMP vs. Photoshop. I'd _much_ rather use Photoshop. Sometimes, you do get what you pay for.
- core-questions 6y ago
  Ehh, it's always been fine. But who is going to pay for it, when it basically works and it's free? People who have the money to pay for an office suite will just buy Microsoft. There's a reason why this product has been bouncing around for 20+ years from StarOffice to OpenOffice to Libreoffice, owned by Sun and Novell and SCO or whatever, who can even remember? It's not going to be a money maker, because there's never, ever going to be any reason to buy it. Even if they port it to the browser and market a cloud/onprem-capable competitor to Office 365, people still won't buy it. The ideal candidates for using it are institutions like schools that are cash strapped, but then how will they train their students to use MS Office, how will they deal with all their macro-infested Excel sheets and Access DBs? No good answer.
- rvense 6y ago
  That's a strange comment - both LibreOffice and Gimp have seen some development in the past ten years.
  - cmckn 6y ago
    For sure, I was attempting to say that my opinion isn't up-to-date on LibreOffice. I tried it many times back in the day, and it never impressed. Like others have said, it's fine. I just wouldn't call it good, and I'd rather use something else. I have the same opinion of GIMP, and have used it much more frequently and recently.
- basch 6y ago
  and then theres https://www.photopea.com/ https://www.photopea.com/ which handles a ton of quick dip into photoshop needs.
  - 6y ago
cxr 6y ago
The LibreOffice project's imprimatur should be to stop existing. This isn't facetious or snark. Make it a long-term goal—let's say 15 years. The editing paradigm perpetuated by the legacy of MS Office is a dead end. The web has its shortcomings, so it's easy to see why people opt for MS Office-based workflows, but the end goal should be to wean businesses off contemporary word processors and raise a generation of kids who aren't taught to write essays in Microsoft Word or any other office suite that resembles the ones we see today. A standardized "Markdown for the Web" (or AsciiDoc) with native browser support would be a good 80/20 start and would move things out of weird proprietary office formats and towards plain text. Users themselves need not know the underlying file format is based on plain text, just like most don't know that HTML is plain text—because they usually aren't even aware of HTML in the first place. (Besides word processing, spreadsheets are a whole other larger problem that can be handled once there's traction on this front.) Right now LibreOffice is aligned against this goal as a result of perverse incentives to continue perpetuating the MS Office model of document creation, editing, and (let's face it: email-based) distribution. The failure of standards bodies and browser developers to address the real needs of MS Office customers should not be discounted. Heck, even EPUB which is largely (X)HTML isn't even really Web-native, and that's a total failure on the part of browser makers. It might be prudent for the commercial companies associated with LibreOffice to stop thinking of themselves as vendors of an MS Office alternative and start thinking of themselves as a group who can see where the puck should be, and then move both the Web and businesses+classrooms there, too—and capitalize on being the first mover. NB: Re-inventing the office suite as a web app (à la Google Docs) is not the kind of thing I'm talking about.
- amadeuspagel 6y ago
  Whatever the kind of thing you're talking about is, I don't see why the companies associated with LibreOffice would be in a good position to do it, how they can see where the puck should be better then anyone else.
- mattkrause 6y ago
  I'm not sure I understand why you think this would be a good goal. Plaintext formats are certainly nice. Markdown can certainly do formatting for many simple documents (school reports, memos, etc). Sometimes, however, you want more fine-grained, print-style control over layout, even for documents that are often sent electronically (e.g., résumés). People still do print things out too, like fliers and signup sheets. A lot of Word's other features seem superfluous, but I'd bet that almost everyone uses an idiosyncratic subset of them: I don't use mail merge, but depend on "Compare Documents", for example.
ptx 6y ago
The post says that LibreOffice, the version you would download from libreoffice.org, is "un-supported" and "not suitable for deployment in an enterprise" and that some other commercial version is "more authentic and genuine". Why does the LibreOffice project then allegedly produce an unsupported, non-genuine, unauthentic and unsuitable piece of software? They seem to be doing a good job in most respects, so how and why are they supposedly failing to produce usable releases? Debian's version seems fine, so perhaps Debian is adding some of this mysterious authenticity?
- zanny 6y ago
  Seriously if they want to sell LO just stop offering free downloads. Yes, its free software, and alternative builds would percolate around for normal users but you have the brand and I cannot imagine most companies would be keen on either doing self managed builds or getting them from filehippo or something. And yes, removing the free builds would severely stymie consumer adoption, but I don't even think there is much of that left to begin with. Your average kid uses Google Docs and has no reason to download anything.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    Some hobbyist--or some company offering optional support in some form--will just do the builds. There are tons of Linux distros in this category. Builds for open source software are a commodity. You can't stop them and still be open source.
    - wmf 6y ago
      There's always trademarks, although I don't know if LibreOffice brand recognition is strong enough to overcome not being free.
      - ghaff 6y ago
        True. On both counts. The potential users are probably not the casual ones who are just using free online office suites by default anyway.
LockAndLol 6y ago
This is a pretty serious accusation or message to spread around. I for one wouldn't like to see Libreoffice die. We can't let the only serious, open-source alternative to the titan of M$ simply disappear. But this was too much of a long, badly structured rant. Without prior knowledge of the inner working, it looks like rambling. It would be a much better post if it were written like an article or wiki page with headers and subsections: - top 3 reasons there is serious risk in bullet points - each bullet point with a single paragraph or sentence summarizing what could be done to mitigate that point; maybe even a personal appeal to the reader - a header per reason going into depth of the why and a more in depth mitigation strategy than what was in the first bullet points - one header with subreasons that are important The whole thing should maybe even be prefaced with a sentence mentioning the target audience. I donate yearly projects like this and have no idea what else can be done.
sys_64738 6y ago
What support do you need for a word processor? LibreOffice is just a fork of OpenOffice.org so perhaps they should look to merging their code back into OO.org?
speedgoose 6y ago
I feel like Libre Office was a great alternative to Microsoft Office up to about 10 years ago. Since and from my obviously biased point of view, the only users left are the Linux users who do not want proprietary software, and the people who want a powerful office software but can't afford or don't want to pay for Microsoft office. The user interface is a relic of the past in my opinion. I heard that they were working on improving the user experience, but I don't know what's the state of these projects. I used to recommend OpenOffice and LibreOffice. Today I recommend Microsoft Office.
badsectoracula 6y ago
IMO this is the most interesting part: > Collabora - despite C'bra still putting a lot of work into LibreOffice Desktop, having an outstanding support capability, doing lots of marketing, being the largest code contributor to LibreOffice, and having lots of existing happy customers / references for desktop LibreOffice, ... etc. etc. > > We have not had -one- -single- -new- Collabora Office customer since 2018 - zero. > > => so it makes no economic sense at all to invest in -Desktop- Libreoffice you will never see a return. > > That is manageable - we are investing heavily in creating Online and that is going well, and it funds our work on LibreOffice.
29athrowaway 6y ago
In Linux, I use Softmaker FreeOffice. A free (but not open source) office suite of excellent quality. Looks as polished as MS Office, works perfectly with HiDPI, and is much faster than both MS Office and LibreOffice.
- setzer22 6y ago
  I used FreeOffice for a while, but strangely enough, I saw it struggle with medium-size documents. At some point, there were several seconds of input lag. Apart from that issue, their goal is MS Office compatibility, and they deliver quite well. Even more obscure features like review mode and highlighting of changes worked without issues, and I was able to exchange documents with MS Office users.
slipheen 6y ago
It seems to me like they're saying "Commercial development for LibreOffice is at serious risk". It may be that all commercially supported development on LibreOffice stops- I'm not sure this would be a terrible thing at this point. Abiword (is a MUCH smaller editor) and gets a release every few years or so - There's not much it needs anymore. Evolution is no longer commercially supported, nor is Thunderbird - Developent may have slowed down after they lost their patrons, but they already did most things that they set out to anyway. Many OSS software doesn't have or need commercial benefactors. My personal use-cases are certainly relatively restricted, but maybe it's OK to just let it go into maintenance mode? LibreOffice already does pretty much everything I'd want it to. I (again, personally) don't see a whole lot of demand for new features.
philistine 6y ago
I think a big issue with Libre Office is that it’s simply an open source version of Microsoft Office. They have no identity in my mind. This lack of identity invites unfair comparisons to Microsoft Office whenever you’re using it. The other office suite in my life is Apple’s iWork. And let me tell you, it has a ton of issues, but it is not a copy of Office at all. It has its own goals and identity. I self-published a book using Pages, it’s not completely lacking in features. But it does things in its own way. So I don’t compare it to Office. I evaluate it against the job that needs to be done.
agustif 6y ago
How feasible would it be to build a community open source modern stack cloud/multi-platform alternative? Someone is up for the challenge? I might give it a try, who knows.

126 points by rsecora 6y ago

Does anyone here work an environment where LibreOffice is sufficient? It replaces Word well, but for Excel, there is just too much of a shift for me. It is a great product, but given the market saturation of Office, I am not sure there is really a place for it in the market spectrum.

anthony_barker 6y ago
Financial services company here. Calc + Pandas + google sheets for us.
aloisdg 6y ago
As long as you are looking for a capitalism-free solution, you will need something else than Office.
bonzini 6y ago
Actually I miss Access the most. As an Excel replacement it has what I need to do my taxes and to set up voting sheets and schedules for conferences.
- beamatronic 6y ago
  Is there anyway to do visual basic, Access-type apps in the cloud? I mean a full cloud-based IDE?
  - oh-4-fucks-sake 6y ago
    Might not be the exact right feature-set here, but Google Sheets allows you to write custom functions in Javascript. IIRC, you can hook a Google Sheet up to Google Forms and this might give you what you want.
    - bonzini 6y ago
      It doesn't let you do declarative queries (read: SQL) and it's not relational.
      - JustARandomGuy 6y ago
        Google Apps Scripts (equivalent to VBA in Office) can script most Google products; you could build a form on one tab of a Google Sheet, use Apps Scripts to store and query data against Cloud SQL, then use another tab of Sheets to output the data from Cloud SQL. https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/jdbc https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/jdbc
        bonzini 6y ago
        That's not what a replacement for Access should be like.
- grandinj 6y ago
  LibreOffice Base is an Access-type program
  - canada_dry 6y ago
    In the same way a Lada is an automobile. Perhaps it's improved, but a while ago I tried to program Base and found the documentation around it's functions/methods/properties to be scant and/or terribly out-of-date, and pretty much useless.
    - grandinj 6y ago
      Ouch! :-) Yeah, it's the unloved step-child of the LibreOffice suite, we fix stuff sometimes, but there is no commercial user of it to fund development
  - blihp 6y ago
    In theory, but not in practice. Yes, it's a somewhat visual database. But it doesn't have anywhere near the power or ease of use that Access did 20 years ago and its integration with the rest of LO isn't even close to what Access does in MS Office. If that weren't bad enough, the underlying database it uses is effectively an island in the larger open source world. In the Windows world, just about everything can interact with Access. Just about nothing can with Base.
hanniabu 6y ago
I really wish they worked on the UI more. Better yet, it'd be great to offer an online version. You can make it so you can work right away on a new file all client side and save the files to your desktop, Drive, Dropbox, etc, or continue working on a file from one of those locations.
- goldfishlover 6y ago
  It's honestly probably easier to work on new project than try to finagle around the libre/open office UI code
hpen 6y ago
I use LibreOffice calc daily as an excel replacement on Linux. I am a Software Developer and prefer to use Linux for my development OS.
- Falling3 6y ago
  I'm in the exact same boat. I know there are differences between excel and calc, but none of them affect my daily usage - which to be fair is about 60-70% using it ass a glorified CSV editor.
- 8b16380d 6y ago
  Same. I find no problem with it at all.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Havoc 6y ago
  >I use LibreOffice calc daily as an excel replacement on Linux. I am a Software Developer The issue is not whether software developers can replace their (barely existent) Excel usage but whether accountants & office workers can. I have yet to meet a SINGLE accountant aware of openoffice/libreoffice's existence. OO/Libre is deader than dead in the one segment where it matters.
  - sushshshsh 6y ago
    How many people out there have workloads that can't be met by LibreOffice Calc? I would like to meet those people because they must have very interesting jobs and automating their work would have a high monetary impact.
    - Bud 6y ago
      Um, for starters, anyone who needs stable software, professional support, timely software updates, or the ability to run on a mainstream OS. So basically? Everyone.
the_af 6y ago
I'm not a power user, but I've been using LibreOffice as a Word and Excel replacement for years. Lately both have been replaced by Google Docs, for better or worse. I haven't touched MS Office in more than a decade, and I don't miss it.
sudasana 6y ago
I use LibreOffice daily, I wrote all my publications including my monograph with it. For my purposes, Calc works just as well as Excel too.
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
>Does anyone here work an environment where LibreOffice is sufficient? I used to do IT for a high-school with ~300 students, faculty and staff. Ubuntu dolled up to look kinda Windows-ish on half the lab machines. Windows on the other half. Faculty got a Toshiba Sattelite Pros that had windows licenses. Servers all ran linux. We used Libreoffice on everything and aside from a few complainers it was fine.
speeder 6y ago
I've been using LibreOffice for 15+ years with no issue, only times I remembered MS Office exists is when someone sends stuff in Office proprietary formats and no software wants to open them.
- mixmastamyk 6y ago
  Same. I've used calc to check my taxes and prepare invoices for close to twenty years. Never had an issue, even circa 2000.
orthoxerox 6y ago
It's pivot tables that made me buy MS Office. Neither Office.com nor LibreOffice Calc allow you to sort a pivot table by field values.
toast0 6y ago
OpenLibreOffice.org Calc works close enough to Excel for me. Microsoft Excel is more polished clearly, so I'd use it, but I'm not going to figure out how to pay for it. In my experience, Google docs sheets doesn't work well with equations, if I update a cell that others depend on, those other cells don't always update, or update with significant delay, and it becomes difficult to use. (My equations are usually pretty simple, just sum this column, multiply by this cell, etc. One page financial sheets, not like tax return estimators with tons of hidden calculations behind the scenes)
butz 6y ago
Dealing with various CSV files is just much more simple on LibreOffice Calc than in Excel. Especially when non standard encoding is involved.
tannhaeuser 6y ago
It suffices in the few cases I use an office suite for. Calc does its job; it doesn't necessarily have to compete with Excel on features or looks. There were spreadsheet apps on DOS long before Excel, such as Lotus 1-2-3 or even MS' own Multiplan.
rwmj 6y ago
Sure, I use LibreOffice as well as Google Docs for spreadsheets, and both are equally horrible. Clumsy user interface, slow, awkward. How is it that the scroll bar simply doesn't work sanely in either of them? I'd love there to exist some kind of "command line spreadsheet".
pantaloony 6y ago
I've always found Open/Libre Office unpleasantly heavy-weight and fragile. On Linux I use lighter stand-alone programs (which are... fine, kinda, for lack of anything better) and on Mac, the bundled Apple office programs, which I love—they open almost instantly and I can leave them on in the background and forget they're there, no crashes, no noticeable effect on system responsiveness even on very old Macs, nothing bad at all, plus they interoperate pretty well.
st1ck 6y ago
Yes, except that we use google spreadsheets for collaborative editing. My coworker switched from MS Office to LibreOffice just because the former never detected UTF-8 encoding in TSV files.

thrownaway954 6y ago

i used to use LibreOffice back in the day when MSOffice was too expensive. nowadays i just use google docs and google sheets. i'm sure 90% of people out there use a browser/cloud based office product. if LibreOffice wants to remain relevant, they should make some sort of cloud based product (if they already have, i'm not aware of it).

toppy 6y ago
They addressed this partly by LibreOffice Online: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/ https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/
- thrownaway954 6y ago
  it says its unsupported. this leads me to believe this isn't anything official from them, just something of any experiment. i'm not going to "test" not trust an unsupported office suite that i need for everyday use.
bryanlarsen 6y ago
https://www.collaboraoffice.com/collabora-online/ https://www.collaboraoffice.com/collabora-online/
- thrownaway954 6y ago
  i don't see a plan for personal use. maybe i'm missing something?
  - gary-kim 6y ago
    Collabora Online is Collabora's branded version of LibreOffice Online. They also have a version they call Collabora Online Development Edition that you can find here for personal use: https://www.collaboraoffice.com/code/ https://www.collaboraoffice.com/code/. There is no stable edition of LibreOffice Online but you can find a daily build of the master branch for Docker at https://hub.docker.com/r/libreoffice/online https://hub.docker.com/r/libreoffice/online. Both LibreOffice Online from Docker Hub and Collabora Online Development Edition have a configured limiation of 20 connections for 10 different doucments so personally, I'd recommend building from source. You can find the source code for LibreOffice Online here: https://git.libreoffice.org/online https://git.libreoffice.org/online. I suspect the lack of a stable version of LibreOffice Online is intentional as a way to try to drive more business towards companies such as Collabora.

danpalmer 6y ago

As much as I’d love free software to be popular for being free, that’s never been the case and is increasingly unlikely to ever become the case. Free software needs to learn to compete on features if it’s going to have the mainstream adoption necessary to survive. This worked in engineering tools, Nginx and Apache are the most popular web servers in their category, Postgres and MySQL have enormous support, and so on. I wonder why these are really so different? Most devs don’t care that much about the freedom I don’t think. Maybe there’s something the free software movement could learn from what engineering products are doing and apply it to consumer products?

tharne 6y ago
I think part of it at least is that the engineering tools have, on average, a more technically sophisticated user base and those tools mostly involve working at the command line or through an IDE like VS Code or the like. I think a lot of where free software falls down is on the GUI, which is less of an issue with engineering tools.
- karlding 6y ago
  I agree. GUIs are hard! On the other hand, it seems like Open Source has a lack of designers that are willing to contribute. For example, in Tantacrul's critique of MuseScore [0], there's issues highlighted that seem obvious in retrospect, but in Open Source projects, unless there's someone who drives the user experience, it's easy to miss all these small things that add up to signal (whether rightly or wrongly is besides the point) a lack of polish. [0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=4hZxo96x48A https://youtube.com/watch?v=4hZxo96x48A
  - throwbacktictac 6y ago
    That is squarely where the problem lies. There are good open source developers out there as evidenced by the great Github projects. There are also good designers out there such as those that maintain Dribbble.com profiles. What keeps them from collaborating to produce top notch projects? Thanks for sharing Tantacrul video. He's quite an entertaining bloke!

askafriend 6y ago

Just an anecdote: LibreOffice has had 0 impact on my life in the past decade. In that decade, my expectations for text editing software has changed dramatically. I expect online, cloud-based, collaborative, document editing. Anything less is a no go, and I expect modern interfaces for software I use often. Unfortunately the LibreOffice pitch is just un-compelling to me. I won't really be losing any sleep over this.

oh-4-fucks-sake 6y ago
To that point, I know Office 365 has really caught on, but Google Drive/Docs/Sheets really beat them to market and it's become my go-to for collab.
phaemon 6y ago
Just an anecdote: no office software of any kind has had an impact on my life in the past decade. That's because I'm no a middle management wanker! Two pints prick.
- askafriend 6y ago
  I also explained how my expectations changed and how Libre's new pitch doesn't sound compelling with that context. It would help if you expand on your anecdote why no office software of any kind has had an impact on your life in the past decade and what expectations you have for office software that could possibly help you.
  - phaemon 6y ago
    Firstly, because,"office software" is useless crap. It fills the gap between the computer literate and illiterate in the same way that pointing and grunting fills the gap between the written equivalent. Secondly, where's my pint?
    - askafriend 6y ago
      I don't know what a pint is.

jimbob45 6y ago

In all honesty, I think that most of the LibreOffice audience would be happier with WordPad if they knew it existed (middle school students, one-off work projects, personal story-writing).

rwmj 6y ago
Isn't that a proprietary Windows-only product? How is it anything to do with LibreOffice?

rjohnk 6y ago

In regards to naming, why not call it "LibreOffice Community Edition" instead of "Personal"?

shp0ngle 6y ago

This is hard to read without context. From I can gather - there is a company, called “Collabora”, that sells LibreOffice consultancy and LibreOffice “online” installations. This company now contributes majority of development to LibreOffice. And lead the development of “LibreOffice Online”, maybe? And from what I can get, their business is not doing that well. This e-mail is written by someone from that company.

corbet 6y ago
The context is currently a few lines down on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23789659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23789659
- ghaff 6y ago
  Fundamentally, OpenOffice and then LibreOffice never became a serious business for any company with significant resources. It arguably circled nearby with Novell and IBM at various times but nothing ever really clicked. Now there are 40 developers. Mostly from a company that apparently isn't doing that great. LibreOffice has always been understaffed relative to the competition. But it wouldn't shock me if there were more HR people associated with GSuite than there are LibreOffice developers.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- shp0ngle 6y ago
  I did not see that link when I posted this :)
mjw1007 6y ago
Yes, some of it seems oddly written. On first reading, I thought this bit was the author reporting that other people are frustrated with TDF, and that this indicates that there is a problem: « Frustration with how TDF markets and positions its 'product' (LibreOffice) against the ecosystem that contributes the majority of the coding work is at an all-time high. » But I think actually this should be read as « We (Collabora) are more frustrated with the TDF than ever. »

cmckn 6y ago

I haven't seen LibreOffice in at least 5 years and haven't used it in at least 10. IMHO it's never been...good. It's the same situation as GIMP vs. Photoshop. I'd _much_ rather use Photoshop. Sometimes, you do get what you pay for.

core-questions 6y ago
Ehh, it's always been fine. But who is going to pay for it, when it basically works and it's free? People who have the money to pay for an office suite will just buy Microsoft. There's a reason why this product has been bouncing around for 20+ years from StarOffice to OpenOffice to Libreoffice, owned by Sun and Novell and SCO or whatever, who can even remember? It's not going to be a money maker, because there's never, ever going to be any reason to buy it. Even if they port it to the browser and market a cloud/onprem-capable competitor to Office 365, people still won't buy it. The ideal candidates for using it are institutions like schools that are cash strapped, but then how will they train their students to use MS Office, how will they deal with all their macro-infested Excel sheets and Access DBs? No good answer.
rvense 6y ago
That's a strange comment - both LibreOffice and Gimp have seen some development in the past ten years.
- cmckn 6y ago
  For sure, I was attempting to say that my opinion isn't up-to-date on LibreOffice. I tried it many times back in the day, and it never impressed. Like others have said, it's fine. I just wouldn't call it good, and I'd rather use something else. I have the same opinion of GIMP, and have used it much more frequently and recently.
basch 6y ago
and then theres https://www.photopea.com/ https://www.photopea.com/ which handles a ton of quick dip into photoshop needs.
- 6y ago

cxr 6y ago

The LibreOffice project's imprimatur should be to stop existing. This isn't facetious or snark. Make it a long-term goal—let's say 15 years. The editing paradigm perpetuated by the legacy of MS Office is a dead end. The web has its shortcomings, so it's easy to see why people opt for MS Office-based workflows, but the end goal should be to wean businesses off contemporary word processors and raise a generation of kids who aren't taught to write essays in Microsoft Word or any other office suite that resembles the ones we see today. A standardized "Markdown for the Web" (or AsciiDoc) with native browser support would be a good 80/20 start and would move things out of weird proprietary office formats and towards plain text. Users themselves need not know the underlying file format is based on plain text, just like most don't know that HTML is plain text—because they usually aren't even aware of HTML in the first place. (Besides word processing, spreadsheets are a whole other larger problem that can be handled once there's traction on this front.) Right now LibreOffice is aligned against this goal as a result of perverse incentives to continue perpetuating the MS Office model of document creation, editing, and (let's face it: email-based) distribution. The failure of standards bodies and browser developers to address the real needs of MS Office customers should not be discounted. Heck, even EPUB which is largely (X)HTML isn't even really Web-native, and that's a total failure on the part of browser makers. It might be prudent for the commercial companies associated with LibreOffice to stop thinking of themselves as vendors of an MS Office alternative and start thinking of themselves as a group who can see where the puck should be, and then move both the Web and businesses+classrooms there, too—and capitalize on being the first mover. NB: Re-inventing the office suite as a web app (à la Google Docs) is not the kind of thing I'm talking about.

amadeuspagel 6y ago
Whatever the kind of thing you're talking about is, I don't see why the companies associated with LibreOffice would be in a good position to do it, how they can see where the puck should be better then anyone else.
mattkrause 6y ago
I'm not sure I understand why you think this would be a good goal. Plaintext formats are certainly nice. Markdown can certainly do formatting for many simple documents (school reports, memos, etc). Sometimes, however, you want more fine-grained, print-style control over layout, even for documents that are often sent electronically (e.g., résumés). People still do print things out too, like fliers and signup sheets. A lot of Word's other features seem superfluous, but I'd bet that almost everyone uses an idiosyncratic subset of them: I don't use mail merge, but depend on "Compare Documents", for example.

ptx 6y ago

The post says that LibreOffice, the version you would download from libreoffice.org, is "un-supported" and "not suitable for deployment in an enterprise" and that some other commercial version is "more authentic and genuine". Why does the LibreOffice project then allegedly produce an unsupported, non-genuine, unauthentic and unsuitable piece of software? They seem to be doing a good job in most respects, so how and why are they supposedly failing to produce usable releases? Debian's version seems fine, so perhaps Debian is adding some of this mysterious authenticity?

zanny 6y ago
Seriously if they want to sell LO just stop offering free downloads. Yes, its free software, and alternative builds would percolate around for normal users but you have the brand and I cannot imagine most companies would be keen on either doing self managed builds or getting them from filehippo or something. And yes, removing the free builds would severely stymie consumer adoption, but I don't even think there is much of that left to begin with. Your average kid uses Google Docs and has no reason to download anything.
- ghaff 6y ago
  Some hobbyist--or some company offering optional support in some form--will just do the builds. There are tons of Linux distros in this category. Builds for open source software are a commodity. You can't stop them and still be open source.
  - wmf 6y ago
    There's always trademarks, although I don't know if LibreOffice brand recognition is strong enough to overcome not being free.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      True. On both counts. The potential users are probably not the casual ones who are just using free online office suites by default anyway.

LockAndLol 6y ago

This is a pretty serious accusation or message to spread around. I for one wouldn't like to see Libreoffice die. We can't let the only serious, open-source alternative to the titan of M$ simply disappear. But this was too much of a long, badly structured rant. Without prior knowledge of the inner working, it looks like rambling. It would be a much better post if it were written like an article or wiki page with headers and subsections: - top 3 reasons there is serious risk in bullet points - each bullet point with a single paragraph or sentence summarizing what could be done to mitigate that point; maybe even a personal appeal to the reader - a header per reason going into depth of the why and a more in depth mitigation strategy than what was in the first bullet points - one header with subreasons that are important The whole thing should maybe even be prefaced with a sentence mentioning the target audience. I donate yearly projects like this and have no idea what else can be done.

sys_64738 6y ago

What support do you need for a word processor? LibreOffice is just a fork of OpenOffice.org so perhaps they should look to merging their code back into OO.org?

speedgoose 6y ago

I feel like Libre Office was a great alternative to Microsoft Office up to about 10 years ago. Since and from my obviously biased point of view, the only users left are the Linux users who do not want proprietary software, and the people who want a powerful office software but can't afford or don't want to pay for Microsoft office. The user interface is a relic of the past in my opinion. I heard that they were working on improving the user experience, but I don't know what's the state of these projects. I used to recommend OpenOffice and LibreOffice. Today I recommend Microsoft Office.

badsectoracula 6y ago

IMO this is the most interesting part: > Collabora - despite C'bra still putting a lot of work into LibreOffice Desktop, having an outstanding support capability, doing lots of marketing, being the largest code contributor to LibreOffice, and having lots of existing happy customers / references for desktop LibreOffice, ... etc. etc. > > We have not had -one- -single- -new- Collabora Office customer since 2018 - zero. > > => so it makes no economic sense at all to invest in -Desktop- Libreoffice you will never see a return. > > That is manageable - we are investing heavily in creating Online and that is going well, and it funds our work on LibreOffice.

29athrowaway 6y ago

In Linux, I use Softmaker FreeOffice. A free (but not open source) office suite of excellent quality. Looks as polished as MS Office, works perfectly with HiDPI, and is much faster than both MS Office and LibreOffice.

setzer22 6y ago
I used FreeOffice for a while, but strangely enough, I saw it struggle with medium-size documents. At some point, there were several seconds of input lag. Apart from that issue, their goal is MS Office compatibility, and they deliver quite well. Even more obscure features like review mode and highlighting of changes worked without issues, and I was able to exchange documents with MS Office users.

slipheen 6y ago

It seems to me like they're saying "Commercial development for LibreOffice is at serious risk". It may be that all commercially supported development on LibreOffice stops- I'm not sure this would be a terrible thing at this point. Abiword (is a MUCH smaller editor) and gets a release every few years or so - There's not much it needs anymore. Evolution is no longer commercially supported, nor is Thunderbird - Developent may have slowed down after they lost their patrons, but they already did most things that they set out to anyway. Many OSS software doesn't have or need commercial benefactors. My personal use-cases are certainly relatively restricted, but maybe it's OK to just let it go into maintenance mode? LibreOffice already does pretty much everything I'd want it to. I (again, personally) don't see a whole lot of demand for new features.

philistine 6y ago

I think a big issue with Libre Office is that it’s simply an open source version of Microsoft Office. They have no identity in my mind. This lack of identity invites unfair comparisons to Microsoft Office whenever you’re using it. The other office suite in my life is Apple’s iWork. And let me tell you, it has a ton of issues, but it is not a copy of Office at all. It has its own goals and identity. I self-published a book using Pages, it’s not completely lacking in features. But it does things in its own way. So I don’t compare it to Office. I evaluate it against the job that needs to be done.

agustif 6y ago

How feasible would it be to build a community open source modern stack cloud/multi-platform alternative? Someone is up for the challenge? I might give it a try, who knows.