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LibreOffice 7.3
- jl6 5y agoI love that Libreoffice exists and I use it semi-regularly, but oh boy is its UI the canonical example of paper cuts.
- SanchoPanda 5y agoLibreoffice is an integral piece of software, but I often bump into messages like the below, which does not exactly instill confidence if a workbook is important. Warning loading document SomeDocumentFinalVFUpdatedActuallyFinal.xlsx: The data could not be loaded completely because the maximum number of columns per sheet was exceeded.
- bitigchi 5y agoNice. Seems like it includes lots of improvements for OOXML compatibility.
- derbOac 5y agoMy test is whether I can take a document with complex equation formatting and export it into docx without a hitch. I haven't tried it yet with the new version but in the past it's always failed miserably. (To be clear, the same thing happens with Word in exporting to other formats too.) I just wish conversions with equations was more seamless in general.
- bitigchi 5y agoDid you open a bug report with the said document? You might never know, the corner case with your specific document might be fixed by a willing developer.
- rbut 5y agoSince moving to Ubuntu from Mac, I use LibreOffice daily for loading large XLS documents from clients. I might have to drop to a VM with Excel maybe 1-2% of the time, but the rest of the time LibreOffice is amazing. Thank you to the LibreOffice team for their continued efforts towards Office compatibility.
- paulryanrogers 5y agoHave you tried Excel on Wine? It may run faster there, if you're not also relying on the VM for added security
- sharikous 5y agoI find LO to be very buggy and unintuitive in its UI. Equations are a pain, it forgets styling options, etc.. But as a user who uses it completely independently of MS Office, just for my documents, the peace of mind I have knowing I am using a powerful multiplatform open source software which won't betray me is priceless. I know my documents are safe and I can move between OSes at my will. This kind of freedom is essential for me and I am grateful for that
- agumonkey 5y agoI wanted to work on fixing Writer's custom fields UI, it's horrendous and it could be very useful.
- smallerfish 5y agoThey have a design team who are collaborative. You could get in touch with Heiko and help out. https://design.blog.documentfoundation.org/ https://design.blog.documentfoundation.org/
- agumonkey 5y agoas soon as I have a clear life schedule I'll ping them
- soufron 5y agoWell... MS Office is equally buggy...
- sdze 5y agoWrong. LO 7.3 crashed with a new Writer Document after I tried to change the toolbar. Imagine such a bad test coverage. icons still blurry on macOS retina display. Chronic bug unsolved since aeons Also due to one-process for all architecture, if one document crashes, it crashes all other documents with it.
- 5y ago
- ReleaseCandidat 5y agoIs it working again under Windows 10? I had to pin LO to 7.1.5 because of Skia.
- sdze 5y agoI don't even bother to try it out... Let me guess: It still sucks under macOS
- commoner 5y agoThe HiDPI bug on macOS was fixed in LibreOffice 7.1.2: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=138122 https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=138122
- indymike 5y agoLO is amazing, and works surprisingly well and at least on Linux, once you get icons colors right works in dark mode (which I love). It would be good to put a cycle or two of clean up on the MacOS version. It works, but has a lot of rough edges - and Mac users tend to be less accepting of visual issues.
- SloopJon 5y agoOn Windows, the LibreOffice installer claimed that Firefox was using files that needed to be updated. This Reddit thread has some background on why that is: https://www.reddit.com/r/libreoffice/comments/aoqmvr/libreoffice_62_installer_demand_to_close_firefox/ https://www.reddit.com/r/libreoffice/comments/aoqmvr/libreof... In short, you can probably ignore it and continue.
- glenstein 5y agoIs that still happening in 7.3?
- SloopJon 5y agoYes, I saw this installing 7.3.0.3 this morning: I started the computer, opened Firefox, then downloaded and installed LibreOffice. I have an aversion to closing my browser (and all of its tabs) unnecessarily, so I looked this up and found the Reddit post.
- linguae 5y agoI just upgraded to LibreOffice 7.3 after seeing this post, and the upgrade fixed a problem that I had with LibreOffice on Windows 10 that I haven't encountered on other platforms (macOS and Linux), where typing text in LibreOffice Writer had a noticeable delay. After upgrading, the delay is now gone. Thank you LibreOffice developers for resolving this issue; I've been using LibreOffice ever since it forked from OpenOffice.
- assbuttbuttass 5y agoLibre office is great. I typically use markdown + pandoc where possible, but if I'm forced to open a .docx LO is a godsend.
- CodeGlitch 5y agoRecently tried the markdown+pandoc route but couldn't get pdf rendering to look decent or for document links to work, or for a multitude of other things to work... Which is a shame because markdown is great for everything else
- assbuttbuttass 5y agoAre you using LaTeX as the rendering engine? I think that's the default in pandoc. It always produces great looking docs for me.
- CodeGlitch 5y agoI tried several renderers, thanks for the suggestion though.
- zahma 5y agoHas anyone with Apple silicon given this a shot? I notice with this release they’re offering native support. I’m planning to give it a spin but I’m curious what others have noticed in converting from MS.
- wintermutestwin 5y agoI'm using the previous version on Apple silicon. It seems to have no more problems than it did on my Intel based Mac.
- ceroxylon 5y agoI use LO on a 2012 Mac mini (Mojave) and 2020 M1 Air (Monterey), no issues on either machine.
- everfrustrated 5y agoGreat catch. I've been using it on a M1 mac with constant crashing after a few hours of idle use, will try upgrading! Never had a crash on Windows or Linux yet.
- lightwords 5y agoTrying it for the first time in 3 years and it doesn't work on Mac OSX intel. Everything is huge and the the cursor hitpoint is off by 150-200px so you have to click above everything. Is anyone testing this software on the Apple hardware? Bizarre that a clean install on a 2 year old computer causes such issues.
- buovjaga 5y agoMight be due to Skia graphics engine. It will be deactivated in 7.3.1. Could you try a pre-release version of 7.3.1: https://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/daily/libreoffice-7-3/MacOSX-x86_64@tb81-TDF/ https://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/daily/libreoffice-7-3/Mac... ?
- k__ 5y agoI switched to Google Docs a few years ago and never went back. Classical desktop office suites became quite convulted decades ago.
- ktosobcy 5y agoLong time user (10 years maybe?) and I do love it! I don't have to deal with MSO files (most official documents are in PDF already, I don't work "corporate") and for my personal needs it works perfectly fine. Though, I would love to see some (minor) UI refresh.
- noja 5y agoMy #1 LibreOffice annoyance: * The language for a document is not intuitive (it is under Tools> Options > Language Settings> Language, then tick "for current document only")
- mixmastamyk 5y agoI read on stack exchange that “outline mode” has finally been implemented for writer, but haven’t confirmed yet. Been waiting a decade plus for this. :-D
- jjice 5y agoLO is fantastic free software. The fact we even have an office suite that isn't controlled by MS or Google or another big player is great for users. My only gripes with LO are that the UI feels dated sometimes (I think they're working on this, if I recall), but that's a shallow take from me. I don't often use anything aside from small spreadsheets and text documents for college essays, so I've never noticed a limitation.
- pdenton 5y agoI've been using LibreOffice since StarOffice 5.2 (which had its own taskbar). It really is amazing. The best trick in Writer is to use the "Styles" sidebar and apply document-wide styles to the document like you would in CSS. This makes layout in large documents a breeze. If you don't like the UI, there's "View > User Interface..." where you get to choose between 7 different UI layouts.
- champagnois 5y agoLO has a lot of room for improvement. I am confident it will improve. I use it in a way that is pretty incredible and goes beyond the uses people are discussing on HN. I have watched developers of the project discuss what they are working on and seen their various presentations on things they've improved over the years. Some of the flaws cause all sorts of performance issues that have recently been fixed. It will get better and better with each passing year so long as they continue to receive funding. LO is one of the best opensource projects in my opinion. It is unfortunate that FOSS graphic design software (outside of blender) is no where near my opinionated standards. Just imagine if the Affinity designer / publisher software was on linux or became opensourced due to some legal issue. What a world that would be.
- powcontech 5y agoI am really curious how you are using LO?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- hank_z 5y agoA problem always bothers me is LO is laggy and unresponsive while GPU is used to train ml model in ubuntu.
- torstenvl 5y agoCommand: soffice Path: /Applications/LibreOffice.app/Contents/MacOS/soffice Identifier: org.libreoffice.script Version: 7.3.0.3 (7.3.0.3) Parent: launchd [1] PID: 539 Event: hang Duration: 1095.52s Duration Sampled: 1.00s (process was unresponsive for 1095 seconds before sampling) Steps: 10 (100ms sampling interval) Hardware model: MacBookPro16,2 Active cpus: 8 Boot args: chunklist-security-epoch=0 -chunklist-no-rev2-dev chunklist-security-epoch=0 -chunklist-no-rev2-dev Time Awake Since Boot: 1800s Time Since Wake: 1700s And it still gets confused by footnotes from .docx files. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- elcapitan 5y agoOh, nice. Just installed it and finally the font rendering in Writer on Macos looks nice. Is that a new thing? The last version I installed a while ago had very blurry rendering.
- ravenstine 5y agoAs much as I still use LibreOffice, I can't help but feel that it's yesterday's software. Actually, that thought has gone through my mind for the last 15 years. It's a behemoth, no doubt, and I'm glad it's around, but man is it clunky. For years it had pretty bad rendering on high DPI screens, the icons don't really match modern OSs (yeah that's nitpicky I know), and good luck theming it because any theming it supports has proven to me to be very inconsistent. While I wouldn't call LibreOffice slow, it's not as snappy as it should be. I kind of wish someone would blow it up and start over while keeping the one great thing about LibreOffice... the 90's style hierarchical UI navigation as opposed to everything being buttons and ribbon bars.
- mixmastamyk 5y agoThings you should never do: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
- ravenstine 5y agoInteresting blog post, but I'm unconvinced. First, there's no such thing as something you should "never" do, especially when it comes to code. Our problems are so abstract that few if any tools should be off-limits. Second, the author leaves out any examples of where rewrites succeeded. Windows NT was effectively a rewrite and is the grandfather of every version of Windows that came after Windows ME. Game engines and websites are rewritten all the time to varying degrees of success. OBS was a full rewrite and they're killing it. Slack did a rewrite and, whether you like them or not, they've been very successful. Some of what he says makes no sense IMO, like: > [...] when you start from scratch there is absolutely no reason to believe that you are going to do a better job than you did the first time. Perhaps there's no reason to believe that you will certainly do a better job, but surely much of the time there are lessons to be learned even if the old team is entirely gone. When I'm brought on to new projects, I can pretty quickly tell what's dysfunctional, why that is, and what parts can at least benefit from serious cleanup. He goes on: > [...] you probably don’t even have the same programming team that worked on version one, so you don’t actually have “more experience”. You’re just going to make most of the old mistakes again, and introduce some new problems that weren’t in the original version. What the author is doing here is making the same logical fallacy that he attempted to point out in the opposite position, except he's actually making it here. He's assuming that the team rewriting a hypothetical codebase are going to make most of the same old mistakes again. While that's definitely possible, is it really so certain? Can no one learn lessons from code regardless of whether they themselves wrote it? A full rewrite was a bad idea for Netscape at a time where the market around the web was brand new and moving ridiculously fast. It's the circumstances that lead to the Netscape rewrite being a disaster. Not all software is subject to those issues, commercial or not, and not all software teams are the same.
- awill 5y agoI think LO is just too complicated. There's a reason Google Docs and Quip have done well, and it's because 99% of people don't need any of the complicated features LO offers. It would just be easier to start from scratch with simpler goals (i.e. not an MS Office competitor) rather than re-engineer an extremely complicated codebase. I've been using Linux since 2005. Back then I used to use AbiWord, which was really excellent. Unfortunately, it's more or less dead now. These days where possible I use markdown. When I need more, I'd rather use Google Docs (if on Linux) or Microsoft Office (if on my work Mac).
- sudobash1 5y agoIt isn't well known, but LibreOffice can be simplified to about the point of Google Docs by selecting View > User Interface and choosing Tabbed Compact as the UI variant. There are actually 7 UI variants that can be selected. Of course having so many different UI variants is also added complexity...
- yuuta 5y agoI had been using LibreOffice for a year and found that it is extremely buggy. Scrolling starts lagging as long as you have lots of commends on the page. If track changes is turned on, sometimes spaces are inserted in the wrong place. Sometimes it crashes during editing (although it recovered my documents), and such. It can do some basic editing, but is far less complete compared to MS Office. Anyways, its PDF editor is great.
- plussed_reader 5y agoWorks great for small edits/updates to long pdf documents. It tends to go wonky when you really start changing the main layout of the preceding document.
- throwawayarnty 5y agoLibre office and gimp to me both crash too often to be reliable for professional work. At some point in your life a crash is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, so you might as well pay Microsoft and Adobe for the peace of mind.
- CodeGlitch 5y agoThe thing is, Blender 3d shows that an open source project can compete with the big boys. I've not encountered any gimp crashes, although I don't use it in anger enough. LO writer on the other hand crashed several times for me yesterday.
- guenthert 5y agoI count myself lucky in that I rarely have to use those 'productivity' tools. When I have to write print-quality documentation every other decade, I (dreadfully) re-learn the subset of LaTeX I need for the task at hand. When I needed to write a bill however last month, I fetched a template for LO (Ubuntu 18) from the web. Last night I wrote a second one, which to my dismay resulted in a quite different looking PDF: the alignment was off and the fonts were wider. I spent then quite some time to realign the fields. A quite underwhelming result. Next time 'round will be LaTeX again ...
- tpoacher 5y agoI always find people complaining about the UI in libreoffice so weird. It's simple and perfect. Not to mention if you don't like the default, it provides alternatives. Every time I am forced to use MS Word, on the other hand, I lose the will to live.