I use and promote Libreoffice instead of cloud SaaS and M$ religiously and have been doing so for decades. While it does feel that 'peak office suite' is solidly in the rear-view mirror and the majority of tools are becoming ~irrelevant (nobody does physical meetings anymore, writer < LyX and spreadsheets are being supplanted by custom code with better visualization control and web integration), I still need Writer to deal with lawyers and their 'change tracking' and 'comments', and Calc for presenting 'give me money' financials to investors. Is there now a preferred fork we should follow?

Maybe within the strict confines of these cases made by Microsoft, which also have inherent monopoly designs behind them.

Office documents are still fundamentally opaque to data extraction and generation. The user interfaces of the components are still heavily restricted to dedicated applications as opposed to providing some sort of means of embedding them in other contexts such as gasp a web page that might have an actually good Excel interface.

And I would say in general llm should be a massive boon to closing the compatibility gap between free office applications and the barriers put up by proprietary ones, particularly format. Parsing and saving

If we can have an office document foundation similar to what Labor office does to provide generalized libraries and code for parsing office document formats saving them across many platforms, something that just piecemeal across most programming languages and environments, it could be a huge boon to open days formats represented by these relatively important file formats:

The spreadsheet

The word document

The presentation

The flowchart/chart

Well, Microsoft with things like OLE kind of pushed some of these capabilities across the Microsoft ecosystem. That sucks and it failed because it was within the Monopoly.

But the vision was a good one.