these types of bugs are epic. often due to people trying to mix and match date and int math

I miss Joe Armstrong.

That's really neat.

But now, I really want to know why my office suite needs to tell my printer what day of the week it is.

If the printer is smart enough to make use of that kind of information, then isn't it also smart enough to sort that out on its own? If so, then it seems superfluous.

Sure, Ubuntu bug from 2008 (!) exposed in an abandoned project must be super relevant for LibreOffice in 2026.

You should contact LibreOffice, explain what you're doing (and for how long you've been doing it), and propose for them to do it as an "official" thing, to have the same subscriptions as 365 but as recurring donations instead. It could be a cool donation campaign for them!

You say tex-deductible I sure think you meant LaTeX-deductible...

I consider LibreOffice Writer superior to old MS Word versions, and old MS Word versions superior to new MS Word versions.

In my opinion, the quality of MS Word peaked some time in the early 2000s.

So today, given the choice between LibreOffice and MS Word, I would always choose LibreOffice, even if MS Word were free, and despite the fact that LibreOffice Writer has some annoying bugs that have not been fixed for many years, but I find easier to work around those bugs than to cope with the user interface of modern MS Word.

On the other hand, I agree that MS Excel is clearly superior to LibreOffice Calc. Nonetheless, there already are decades since I switched to LibreOffice Calc and I did not need the extra features of MS Excel. For things beyond the capabilities of Calc, I use a real database, though that would probably not be the best solution for a typical office worker.

In the distant past I liked a lot MS Access, but I have no idea whether today it is still useful. I abandoned it many years ago, after I had some problems with the migration of data between different versions of MS Access and even more with the migration of data from MS Access to another database manager.

A major barrier to the improvement of giant FOSS replacements like GIMP and LibreOffice is that the people who develop it and the people who use it have become very used to all of its quirks. It's extremely hard to identify the rough edges in a UI without an external perspective.

Blender is a little different because every 3D modeling program is odd in its own way, and the new UI was close enough that it was easy to learn after the transition (I do still use the legacy keybinds though).

But Blender is very niche hobby software. To "succeed" (if we define success as capturing a significant user share from closed source spyware), Libre and GIMP need to offer workflows that are close to what the average non-coder technical person expects. Maybe that isn't valued by the teams, or maybe they don't have enough resources to make it happen, but the end result is a reputation of jank.

I dislike vibe coded clones because of concerns about the engineering quality. But the reason they're making waves when traditional FOSS hasn't is that the UX is leagues ahead.

> If LibreOffice were good enough already, it would already be popular.

Not true. There's inertia and network effects in play that often prevent better products from succeeding against established ones.

Octave is a similar old-school open-source replacement tool (to Matlab) that could benefit from similar investment. Though Octave's issues involve some ecosystem compatibility dynamics too, last I checked.

I agree that LibreOffice has ways to go. But the secret is that MS office is just worse in every single way except mind share.

Most people don't use MS office by choice though so "goodness" isn't a particular relevant metric.

ArtCraft is great for this. They try to recreate proprietary apps 1 to 1 so there's no real innovation, but it creates a baseline for new open source projects that can be even better than the original.

Audacity has gone through this transformation. Tantacrul (designer, MS Paint 3D, and musician) made a video about how he directed the rewrite of the UI for version 4:

https://youtu.be/QYM3TWf_G38

As an occasional user of GIMP, yes it does not quite have the final level of UX polish.

For example, moving a text layer (with 'pick layer') requires the cursor to be over the painted part of the glyphs to move that layer, if you miss then the background is moved instead. All that is required is a picking region around the glyphs and it would be fine.

Yes, but they eventually stop receiving updates, so you have to spend another $250 to get the newer version. And if you bought, say, Office 2021 just before Office 2024 is released (by necessity, for a new employee, say) then it has a significantly shorter lifespan. And you HAVE to spend this money because it is impossible to convince people they don't need Microsoft Word.

It's not even really particularly true, at least the implied criticism. My work uses M365 and Microsoft Office worked fine, both online and offline versions. Email stopped working, but AFAIK Open Office doesn't make an open source email server.

Is the outage so bad you actually can't launch excel.exe if you have a 365 license?

It's a technical debt to MS and will be phased out.

I have not used recently LibreOffice on Windows, so I do not remember if it was starting slowly.

But I can confirm that it is a problem specific to the Windows variant, because on Linux it starts instantly.

Sometimes when programs start slowly on Windows it is not their fault, but some antivirus garbage scans them every time, because they are not whitelisted, so it delays their startup.

I wish Microsoft office was anywhere near as quick if I'm honest. But no I don't know any way to improve startup time.

I prefer them working on other stuff (office interop, stability, i18n, a11y, etc.). 4-5 secs suffices

Microsoft Defender tends to slow down everything else on the system; just ask VLC

Does it matter? Are you in such a rush that you need your document program to open in under 4 seconds? What difference does this make?

If Libreoffice looks weirdly ugly and you're on a debian-based distro, try installing `libreoffice-gtk3`.

    sudo apt purge libreoffice*
    sudo apt install libreoffice-gtk3

I don't think MS Word is more intuitive. It's a trade-off between functionality and usability.

As a Linux user I (have to) use both Google Docs and LibreOffice.

Aside from collaborative editing, Google Docs is like an online version of Windows WordPad (not Notepad). It supports only a subset of MS Word but just enough for daily use. It refuses to open docs with advanced formatting -- my most recent example is a legal pleading.

LibreOffice supports more MS Word features, but is less polished and buggy. I occasionally find certain operations break the layout and a Ctrl-Z doesn't restore it.

What specifically is ugly?

Edit: I'm a developer. I'm literally asking so it can get addressed. I've actually had a look at the defaults and I can see a few issues that look like they should be reviewed, but I'm interested in what is considered a show stopper.

It's all very well to complain that something is "ugly", but it's so subjective that it can't be actioned in any way. If the point was to just complain, I suppose that's one thing you can do, but if you would like to make something less ugly you need to actually be more specific.

google docs isn't ugly?

If I am honest that sounds like a perfect task for AI. Fork it and modernize the user interface.

Seconding OnlyOffice. Much better experience and compatibility than LibreOffice, and works natively on Linux.

Assuming you have a classic desk job, how do you report to your teams / higher-ups / clients etc ?

As a fellow word processor escapee, I sort of figured word processors were just something you outgrew. I liked the markup language/renderer workflow so much better, No weird internal state that can't see fighting with you for control of the document. Something like word perfect's show codes is a good start for exposing that internal state, but you still can't edit it. So a markup language and an explicit transform step into the typeset document is the final form. But obviously that does not happen for every one and people just get really good at manipulating the hidden state that so infuriated me and start to love the infernal things.

I don't really like spreadsheets for mostly the same reason, Their "big bag of cells" data model really started to bother me. I found that relational databases have a data model that agrees with me and have largely replaced my spreadsheets with them. The user interface sort of suffers in comparison to something like excel, but at least my rows stick together. (better at whole data set manipulation, worse at single cell ad-hoc edits)

You know why they call them word processors right... Well have you ever seen what a food processor does to food.

Should kick them even harder when it's them that they pushed online-always for software that should've been, and was for long time, offline-capable.

No, it is offline desktop software that doesn't depend on a cloud. That is the point and they should be rubbing it in because Office used to be like that and now it is not.

It it can do the job, i'll take ugly.

Why do you think CLIs and TUI are making a huge comeback.

Web applications were prettier but so bloated and so slow.

Maybe I'm the odd one out, but I usually don't spend my time editing documents caring about how pretty/ugly the editor is.

I quite like that Libreoffice let's me disable the confusing "strip" layout that MS Office pushes on everyone.

Who cares? I use software to do a job, not to have pretty graphic design elements.

In other news, Claude outages today.

Likely LibreOffice is posting somewhere else too. The submitter here could have found other websites to submit, I think.

Self-hosting anything is not trivial. You have to maintain your own infrastructure and backups.

Github is far more than a git repository. You’re almost never using it for just git. The real value is the ecosystem.

Yes and no

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Feature_Comparison:_Libr...

Libreoffice has become quite good last years.

Not 100% compatible, but its become rather usable, for most use cases.

Definitely not as problematic as 10 years ago.

Compatibilty is probably 95% or greater. If you're a very demanding Excel user you might have some trouble (I never have; I do my taxes in LibreOffice using a spreadsheet designed for Excel and it's fine).

Never had an issue with a Word doc, at least not in the past 5 years or more.

No.

Microsoft Works?

I've had similar things break when I was on Arch years ago. My wife was quite unhappy that she couldn't log in to use it (I think it was a graphics driver thing). Even though I usually like Fedora, I recently settled on Void for my personal workstation and I've been thoroughly enjoying it.

This is why I stopped using Arch, just wait until you update and try to reboot and it doesn’t work, then you have to update again via mounting your disk through a liveusb installer.

Thats a thing though with Rolling release models.

All software can suffer from that, but thats what you wanted so idk why this falls back onto Libre Office

That sounds like an ArchLinux problem rather than a LibreOffice problem?

I can't quite put my finger on it, but I feel like there's maybe something else in this sentence that might be a greater source of your issues

Thats not really the fault of LibreOffice, is it now? Thats like me complaining about not being able to use my oven after I blew my fusebox

Yeah LibreOffice isn't wrong to throw shade but no matter how soft their wares are, they shouldn't throw them in glass houses.