I feel like the entire world needs to take a plunge towards LibreOffice for the good of all.

For starters, universities and government offices should not expect a proprietary format. Everyone should accept OpenDocument Format (ODF) or a similar FOSS format. MS Office, LibreOffice, OpenOffice and whatnot can compete in editing and rendering open formats.

Come to think of it, this is a good proposal for EU, thanks for the USB-C, by the way :)

I agree with you in principle, and I honestly genuinely kind of hate Microsoft Office and I haven't used it or LibreOffice since I learned how to do LaTeX and Pandoc and Typst.

That said, whether or not it should be the case, a lot of people want specifically proper noun Microsoft Office (TM), not something "as good or better" than Microsoft Office.

I think getting people people towards a less horrible computing setup, for most people, requires it being done incrementally.

The network effect of social media has nothing on the network effect of ms office

The biggest blocker for me is having confidence my output renders the same with people using MS Office, pdf output isn't always sufficient.

Realistically, the world is just gonna AI-plow their way through old moats like this. Don't know about new ones.

I can't tell what's going on with all the LibreOffice drama and whether it's a zombie on life support after the professional community management class kicked all the actual developers out (my take away).

The word editor isn't really Microsoft's product, it's just one of the many entry points to the Microsoft Office cloud sphere where all the data can be interconnected and shareable.

Except that Microsoft Office is just better.

But with the awesome job Microsoft does at breaking it, maybe in a few years, LibreOffice will be a good alternative, if the LibreOffice guys don't screw up too much on their side.

I think LibreOffice is an outdated and overall awful piece of software. It's not like Open Source champions like Linux, Blender and Godot at all.

Its only advantage is being Free. This product couldn't survive in the market if it was paid, arguably at any price. I really tried it to use and love it, but LibreOffice is just terrible.

I've been trying to slowly do this. But muscle memory and visual cues, embedded for 15 years just keep winning.

None of my excel sheets are just numbers, they're tied to database pulls and those dont work either.

Just trying to do the same things like merge cells I'm searching through a bunch of menus wondering what the hell it's called.

Theres a gui that looks similar but not enough. If they really want adoption, they need to completely add a office-clone mode and accept the consequences.

Makes me wonder about aiming all those subscriptions at LibreOffice. How fast could it be improved to gain parity or surpass MS Office?

Maybe the new Omarchy foundation thing will take it on. DHH has pretty publicly been asking for a version of office for Linux.

I avoid both like the plague. These apps make me feel less productive and the docs they produce always look ugly to me. I would rather md, html or latex.

That would require LibreOffice not being shit.