[HN Gopher] LibreOffice still kicking at 40, now with browser tr...
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LibreOffice still kicking at 40, now with browser tricks and real-
time collab
Author : LinuxBender
Score : 336 points
Date : 2025-02-13 16:59 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| noja wrote:
| I hope this version will let me open a file from within
| LibreOffice directly, without granting full disk access (Mac)
| JadeNB wrote:
| > I hope this version will let me open a file from within
| LibreOffice directly, without granting full disk access (Mac)
|
| I'm currently, for no better reason than that I haven't
| upgraded, running LibreOffice 24.8.0.3 on macOS Sequoia. I
| haven't given it FDA (checked the list of apps with FDA
| permissions, and it's not there), but just tried opening a few
| files from within the app, and had no issues.
| noja wrote:
| How did you install it? App Store or direct?
|
| Edit: I installed via the App Store. Double-clicking a file
| in Finder works but opening from within LibreOffice does not.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > How did you install it? App Store or direct?
|
| Direct.
|
| It hadn't even occurred to me to look for it on the App
| Store. I went to check, and noticed that it's $9. Since the
| reviews suggest that it's not always kept up to date there,
| and since part of that $9 is going to Apple, I wonder what
| the advantage of installing through the App Store is over
| installing directly and donating $9 to the Document
| Foundation?
| WaxProlix wrote:
| Good reminder, just went to the doc foundation and
| donated a bit. I've been using LO (and OO before) for
| ages, remiss not to pay it back at all. Thanks!
| LinuxBender wrote:
| I'm just a sample of one but I've used LibreOffice on Windows,
| Mac and Linux and never ran into that issue. It may be worth
| asking about it on SuperUser [1] if that site is still useful.
|
| [1] - https://superuser.com/questions/tagged/libreoffice
| behnamoh wrote:
| LO has helped me in the past with some projects that would crash
| MSFT Word (they were *.docx files, the irony...). But I wish it
| had a better, more modern UI (icons too small and outdated).
| rkagerer wrote:
| What, these?
| https://www.libreoffice.org/assets/Uploads/Discover/LO52-Scr...
|
| I think they're beautiful, and much more communicative than
| modern icons. Personally, I prefer the density of the small
| ones although I'm surprised there's no larger setting (in
| general, buttons got bigger when touchscreens were introduced
| but I still do all my serious work with a keyboard and mouse).
| _fizz_buzz_ wrote:
| I always use LibreOffice to edit csv files. Excel always seems to
| mess with csv files in ways I don't want it to.
| mmooss wrote:
| Why not a text editor?
| jgalt212 wrote:
| It doesn't columnize.
| sceadu wrote:
| https://elpa.gnu.org/packages/csv-mode.html ;) (M-x csv-
| align-fields)
| tmtvl wrote:
| Now hang on: Emacs isn't just "a text editor", it's a
| Lisp environment which just so happens to have the best
| text editor as front-end.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Yeah, not sure which is more bloated, Emacs or
| LibreOffice :-)
| throwanem wrote:
| C-c C-a is quicker, as is C-c C-u to unalign them again.
| speed_spread wrote:
| Excel/Calc is like an IDE for CSV. Much easier for the eye to
| spot errors if data is aligned. A text editor won't show you
| if you're missing column data for some row.
| niccl wrote:
| absolutely agree. We get lots of csv files to process and most
| of our consultants will check them in excel and totally mangle
| them one way or another. You _can_ make excel import them
| without messing them too much but it's several hoops away from
| the normal file open procedure so they forget. Libreoffice Just
| Works. Love it. And the way it can split a multi-tab excel file
| into separate csv files from the command line is a godsend.
| Although the documentation for the incantation for the filters
| to make it do it is rather lacking. But once you get it, it's
| fantastic
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| Excel has two different ways to open csv. The open/doubleclick
| is kinda compatiblity mode, with reasons for default options
| lost in history. The way you are supposed to use csv is open
| blank workbook, data tab and import.
| celsoazevedo wrote:
| Anyone using LibreOffice on a Mac with the M4 SoC? It eventually
| freezes on my new M4 Max MBP when I explore the settings.
| olzhasar wrote:
| The same thing happens to me all the time. One of the most
| annoying things on Apple Silicon for me as a long time Linux
| enthusiast.
| celsoazevedo wrote:
| Disabling "Use Skia for rendering" (settings >> libreoffice
| >> view) seems to improve things a bit, but doesn't
| completely fix the problem.
| cormorant wrote:
| I have similar problems even on Intel Mac. I've messed with
| Skia rendering, Java versions, screen resolution, all to no
| avail.
| therealmarv wrote:
| Strange bugs on Mac made me switch to OnlyOffice (and also open
| source) for the very seldom local file editing of office
| documents (using mostly Google Workspace).
| grandinj wrote:
| There is a guy (Patrick Luby) slowly chewing his way through
| the weirder mac issues and he seems to be making progress, so
| things are getting better (slowly)
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| Would those bugs be specific to M4 macs? Using LO without probs
| here for very simple docs if the increasingly rare occasional
| need for a printed letter comes up.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| LO got me through college. Always nice to see it's still being
| worked on.
|
| I only wish it auto-updated on Windows...
| mksaunders2 wrote:
| Auto-updates on Windows were implemented in the previous major
| release :-)
| baudaux wrote:
| I would like to put LibreOffice in https://exaequos.com !
| ilaksh wrote:
| They mention ZetaOffice as a new wasm version.
| baudaux wrote:
| I will have a look, if it is available online
| doright wrote:
| I had no idea the lineage of LibreOffice went back that far.
|
| I wonder how much StarOffice code still remains in the repo.
| Hooray_Darakian wrote:
| Could be a fun target to run git-of-theseus on
| technothrasher wrote:
| I've been following it along the whole time. I fondly remember
| using StarOffice on my SGI Indigo back in the early 1990's to
| do all my homework in college.
| pixelpoet wrote:
| Likewise! For some reason I had it chronologically penciled in
| roughly with Firefox's introduction. Oh man, I'd better call my
| mom, and schedule a doc appt...
| moolcool wrote:
| > I wonder how much StarOffice code still remains in the repo.
|
| The UI/UX doesn't feel like it's changed very much
| mksaunders2 wrote:
| The "NotebookBar" tabbed user interface is a huge change and
| was implemented a few years ago. Still needs some refinement
| (anyone is welcome to help the Design community volunteers!)
| but there have been some very big changes...
| ok123456 wrote:
| StarOffice was exciting circa 1999. You could get an office
| suit on Linux that was useable and largely compatible with MS
| Office.
| xattt wrote:
| I was on a Computer Chronicles kick and watched a late-80s
| demo of a Sun workstation with StarOffice. It was then that I
| realize the legacy of the app.
| gspencley wrote:
| It's too bad that that's kind of changed.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I use LibreOffice a lot, but I kind of
| despise it. The biggest headache I have, with Writer - which
| is what I use most often - is that if I select text in order
| to change the formatting, it changes formatting of stuff not
| selected. I think this has to do with paragraph styling ..
| it's just very unintuitive how it figures out what belongs to
| a paragraph or not. My human brain wants to separate
| paragraphs with line breaks. So why would formatting selected
| text on one line change the styling on adjacent lines that
| aren't selected?! It is extremely infuriating how its styling
| behaves in general.
|
| I think it's also worth noting that rich text formatting is
| the primary reason to even use a word processor instead of a
| plain text editor in the first place. Embedded objects and
| exporting tools are all useful too. But most of what I use
| Writer for could be done in a text editor if I didn't need
| styling. So all these years later, a core feature - arguably
| THE core feature that necessitates the existence of the
| application to begin with - is still broken and unintuitive.
|
| And when I search for help on how to get styling things
| working etc. and I find posts by other people that share
| these concerns, the answers are legacy document formats etc.
| that contain these bugs by design so it's something that's
| really hard for the developers to fix.
| somat wrote:
| This is largely the reason I gave up on rich text editors
| in favor of a plain text source and some sort of rich text
| compiler.
|
| There is an absolutely mind boggling amount of programming
| work that goes into making a WYSIWYG word processor. and
| this complexity tends to bleed out into editing quirks and
| corrupted documents. Not that there are no quirks or
| corruption with an explicit separate compiler it is just
| that it will not touch your original source, so you can
| fight the quirks in a systematic way. I think this is why
| word perfect users love the show codes function so much.
|
| "You know why they call a word processor right? Have you
| ever seen what a food processor does to food?"
| kjs3 wrote:
| _This is largely the reason I gave up on rich text
| editors in favor of a plain text source and some sort of
| rich text compiler._
|
| I have written a _lot_ of words in troff /groff + various
| macros and adjacent tools (eqn, pic) over many years and
| produced consistently decent if plain looking documents.
| And I've started using it again. Still covers about 85%
| of getting words on paper in a readable format. Spent
| lots of time with LaTeX, too, which produced perhaps
| nicer looking documents over all (and beautiful
| mathematics), but at the expense of much more complexity;
| YMMV.
|
| I suppose Markup is the inheritor.
| Shog9 wrote:
| It's been a while since I've used it, but IIRC this is
| actually my favorite feature: it encourages the use of
| stylesheets vs ad-hoc formatting. As annoying as it is in
| the moment, when it comes time to integrate multiple
| documents into a consistent whole (or apply entirely new
| styling), having a stylesheet vs. miles of ad-hoc inline
| styles makes it fairly painless.
|
| Sadly... The rich text editor I mostly use these days
| (Google Docs) goes in the complete opposite direction;
| trying to apply a new stylesheet is mostly a waste of time.
| Which is why for any non-trivial document, I mostly rely on
| Markdown -> HTML + CSS.
| omnimus wrote:
| The way Writer works with styles is same how every other
| type setting program does it. Indesign, Scribus, Affinity,
| Quark. Not sure how this would be out of the ordinary.
| Maybe MS Word doesn't have paragraph styles at all? Not
| sure i haven't used in in a long while.
|
| Character styles are settings for selected group of
| characters (things ike emphasis, italic, underline).
| Paragraph styles are set for whole paragraph you are in.
| You make new paragraph by hitting enter. If you hit enter
| twice you make two paragraphs. In paragraph style you
| define how paragraphs should be separated (empty line,
| first line indent, rule whaever you want). You should never
| do what can be done using paragraph style by writing them
| because later when you want to change them you would have
| to change it everywhere instead just changing style.
| scblock wrote:
| MS Word works with styles in a very similar way, and the
| appropriate thing to do is modify the styles to match
| your use case. But Word does not necessarily enforce
| this, and so creates additional ad-hoc if you manually go
| in and change specific formatting. Luckily it is fairly
| easy to make a change like that and then find the real
| style and tell Word to update the style to match your
| selection.
| jonathaneunice wrote:
| I dunno about StarOffice code, but the interchange file format
| became the Open Document Format (ODF) is almost unchanged. I've
| worked with it since before ODF was formalized. The current
| version is at most a polishing of structures that have been
| there well over 20 years. It's also, in extraordinary sharp
| comparison to the XML structures Microsoft drafted (confusingly
| called Office Open XML), well-designed and joy to work with.
| stymaar wrote:
| IIRXC Office Open XML is so much of a hack Microsoft Office
| itself doesn't implement the specification
| correctly/completely.
| n_plus_1_acc wrote:
| Some say it's on purpose...
| mattl wrote:
| Given that StarWriter was initially for the 8-bit Z80 based
| Amstrad CPC in 1985, I'd wager very little.
| baumschubser wrote:
| At least the executable is still named "soffice"
| relwin wrote:
| My mother-in-law couldn't get her old Word docs to format
| correctly on her new laptop (Win11 + MS Office365). Rather than
| fiddle around trying various settings I installed LibreOffice and
| with it her docs rendered correctly. Made her happy. Libre Writer
| reminds me of Word2000, which means I don't waste time learning
| new ways to perform mundane writing tasks.
| pinoy420 wrote:
| When I read that $person has installed $opensource_thing for
| $tech_illiterate_relative I always imagine the "anon uses gimp"
| greentext.
| dailykoder wrote:
| My mom uses LibreOffice, too. Granted, she doesn't do
| anything special. Just a few docs for housekeeping. I even
| forgot about the fact that she is using it. Just recently
| noticed it again. I would assume she would have had WAY more
| problems if she would have to use some stupid microsoft
| account to be able to use word.
| 8b16380d wrote:
| One of the best foss projects imo
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| There's a short history of Star/Open/Libre Office at [1] [in
| Denglish].
|
| [1]: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/History
| rossant wrote:
| I like this alternative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnlyOffice
| dsr_ wrote:
| We installed it, tried it, and paid for a license.
|
| Then we learned about the password recovery mechanism, the non-
| logging of useful things, and the support system.
|
| I recommend it highly to certain people, but not people I like.
| skrebbel wrote:
| Can you elaborate? What's "the non-logging of useful things"
| and why is it bad?
| dsr_ wrote:
| Imagine 400,000 repetitions of
|
| ASC.Mail.MainThread - CreateTasks(need 10 tasks).
|
| ASC.Mail.MainThread - No more mailboxes for processing.
|
| ASC.Mail.MainThread - All mailboxes were processed. Go back
| to timer.
|
| and not one entry about actually sending or receiving mail.
| cassepipe wrote:
| So is your complaint mainly as a scripting API user ?
| ww520 wrote:
| LibreOffice is such a great software, not just among open source
| but software in general.
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| The UI is really bad though.
| 632brick wrote:
| Unlike Word at least you can still select all its options
| without having to run it maximized hogging all of the screen.
| I'll take that over over prettier and unusable.
| KronisLV wrote:
| I actually found it pleasantly similar to the older versions
| of MS Office, before we got the ribbons, also with
| customizable themes and actually a decent amount of layout
| options: https://imgur.com/a/libreoffice-ui-80hwOp0
|
| What personally bothers me more is the performance, which can
| be pretty hit or miss.
|
| Still, I hope the project remains going for the decades to
| come.
| jacekm wrote:
| It's subjective. LibreOffice UI is why I stay away from MS
| Office. I can't find anything in MS Office anymore, I have to
| rely on their "search for command" feature (or whatever it's
| called) to be able to do anything. LibreOffice is mostly
| intuitive for me. On the other hand, my father does not like
| it and keeps nagging me to buy him the MS product (I can't
| justify the costs for his casual use though).
| solardev wrote:
| Wow, I thought OpenOffice was new software written as an
| alternative to Microsoft Office.
|
| Actually the history goes back way further. If anyone's curious:
|
| - First release of StarOffice was 1985. It was a closed source
| commercial word processor.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarOffice
|
| - Sun, now Oracle, bought StarOffice in 1999 and released it as
| OpenOffice the following year
|
| - Oracle bought Sun in 2010, and the community fragmented because
| nobody trusts Oracle
|
| - In 2011 LibreOffice was forked from OpenOffice
|
| - Later that year Oracle gave up on OpenOffice and gave it to
| Apache, but that version (Apache OpenOffice) is an orphan that
| nobody maintains anymore.
|
| So yeah, there's probably still LibreOffice code that dates back
| to 1985 in some form!
| mindcrime wrote:
| > that version (Apache OpenOffice) is an orphan that nobody
| maintains anymore.
|
| That's not true. The team maintaining AOO is small, but it's
| not abandoned. As evidence, I submit the fact that the last
| push to the Git repo[1] was a whopping 42 minutes ago.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/apache/openoffice
| ndiddy wrote:
| The vast majority of the Apache OpenOffice commits are done
| by two people who solely focus on manually fiddling with the
| source code formatting and fixing typos in the comments. I'm
| not sure why this is (maybe they think it's a fun hobby?) but
| I wouldn't consider it to be the same as if the project was
| regularly getting bugfixes and new features.
| mindcrime wrote:
| No doubt there have been a lot of commits of that nature.
| But even a cursory skimming of the commit history shows
| plenty of "meatier" changes over the last couple of months.
|
| And even if one person is committing nothing but typo
| fixes, that's still a binary difference versus being
| "orphaned" as far as I'm concerned. Sure, it would be nice
| if the project had more active contributors, but I'd rather
| celebrate the folks who _are_ contributing rather than
| denigrate them and the project. But that 's just me.
| mksaunders2 wrote:
| According to the Apache Security Team, Apache OpenOffice
| has:
|
| > Three issues in OpenOffice over 365 days old and a
| number of other open issues not fully triaged.
|
| Do you think it is responsible to keep serving users
| vulnerable software and misleading them that it's being
| updated with pointless code commits?
|
| It's vulnerable, there's been no major update since 2014,
| and now unfixed issues over a year old. Those changing
| typos in the source code instead of actually fixing the
| issues should really be ashamed.
| Cyphase wrote:
| Maybe it's a covert side-channel communication method. Keep
| an eye out for them switching between tabs and spaces, that
| could signal impending nuclear war.
| solardev wrote:
| I mean... ok, maybe not _literally_ nobody, but LibreOffice
| has 50x the contributors (1314 vs 26) and 60x the commits
| (500k vs 8k). Apache OpenOffice 's last major version was
| more than a decade ago. It may not be dead-dead, but it's at
| least in a very long coma with zero chance of revival.
|
| I don't know why Apache doesn't just shut it down; it serves
| no purpose anymore.
| mksaunders2 wrote:
| The Apache Security Team report says it now has "three
| issues in OpenOffice over 365 days old and a number of
| other open issues not fully triaged". So it's not just
| unmaintained, but actively putting users at risk. It's not
| clear why the ASF won't put it in the Attic.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| IIRC the first big split was with go-oo project that was adding
| features that were in the comercial version. Then go-oo merged
| with the libreoffice fork. Unfortunately some time ago
| libreoffice started to plan to do the same - put features
| bugfixes into comercial libreoffice while renaming the peasant
| oss version into libreoffice personal or something like that.
| mksaunders2 wrote:
| Totally incorrect. LibreOffice had no plans to do a
| "commercial" version - it's from a non-profit organisation. A
| few years ago, the version from The Document Foundation was
| given the label "LibreOffice Community" to make it clear that
| it's a community-driven project and doesn't provide long-term
| support or other things that enterprises need. (Because
| enterprises were getting it from TDF and expecting technical
| support contracts and other things.)
| cobertos wrote:
| My favorite underrated feature is editing PDFs directly at the
| object level with LibreOffice Draw.
| xattt wrote:
| This is a great hack if you want to make some parody products
| and need to lift a vector logo of a brand.
| fujinghg wrote:
| Mine is that one where I can't open ODS documents if my printer
| is turned off.
| decimalenough wrote:
| I don't suppose you were trying to do something crazy like
| print on a Tuesday?
|
| https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161.
| ..
| fujinghg wrote:
| Ha I saw that one when I was trying to work out why this
| wasn't working. Alas no nothing that good.
|
| Turned out the issue was if you set a print range then it
| has to talk to the printer driver on windows and that takes
| forever to respond if the thing is a network printer and
| it's asleep. You open the ODS file it just hangs.
|
| I'm not sure if they fixed it. It was reported on bugzilla
| and was rotting already for years. I got so annoyed with it
| and just thought fuck it and bought an Office license.
|
| Edit: downvoted to -1. Stay classy HN. I need to get stuff
| done not bugger around with defects all day. Nothing wrong
| with that!
| rkagerer wrote:
| Don't stress. Like _Whose Line Is It Anyway_ , "the
| points don't really count." :-p.
| fujinghg wrote:
| Ah I just get annoyed. You write up your genuine
| experience and it gets buried. That's not helpful to
| anyone. It's not helpful to the engineers on a project or
| the customers. But it validates someone's ego somewhere.
| It just seems so immature.
|
| I'd rather there was no upvote or downvote at all.
| soperj wrote:
| > I'd rather there was no upvote or downvote at all.
|
| You've had an account for 11 days, I'm not sure you've
| had enough experience to form a proper opinion on this. I
| feel like the upvoting/downvoting system helps a lot.
| fujinghg wrote:
| I've been here a long long time. Around 2009.
| Occasionally I walk away for a few months.
|
| I was there when it wasn't possible to criticise MSFT
| because of the second coming of Satya. I was there when
| Google did no evil. Now look where we are.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Well, I've had an account for over a year. I think that
| the voting system is not generally very good, as it is
| subject to the same ills as all other such systems.
| Productive comments with unpopular views inevitably get
| buried, especially on threads which touch anything to do
| with politics.
| cwillu wrote:
| You replied to someone's elation at an unexpected feature
| with snark based on a bitter experience, yes, you're
| going to get downvoted.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Change your default printer to Microsoft Print to PDF (if
| you're on Windows) and it will fix the issue. But I agree,
| that bug is a huge pain in the ass.
| pinoy420 wrote:
| Excuse me what. I did not know it could do this I shall have to
| try it
| cft wrote:
| That's my exact rationale for installing LibreOffice on a new
| Macbook. The performance on Apple silicon is very decent.
|
| Instead of the increasingly uphill battle with Acrobat torrents
| and cracks, I am a happy LibreOffice user. Congrats Adobe, you
| won.
| dingdingdang wrote:
| Congrats Adobe, you lost? (guess it depends on the pov,
| although I do think overall it's primarily a loss when a
| product is such a pain in the arse that ppl can't even be
| arsed to pirate it)
| cft wrote:
| Their anti-pirating countermeasures won. I switched to
| LibreOffice
| jokoon wrote:
| can do that with firefox now
| jacekm wrote:
| I think in FF (and also Edge) you can only add text or
| drawings, you cannot edit existing text.
| cassepipe wrote:
| Last time I tried that (6ish years ago maybe), I was glad I was
| able to but the interface was a pain to use. Hope it has
| changed for the better.
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| My favorite thing about LibreOffice is that it can open CSVs
| without breaking them. Pretty much everything else about it is a
| slow, unintuitive mess, but this one killer feature makes me
| always install it and something that somehow Excel does not have.
| enbugger wrote:
| I wish they improved more on macro developer experience. I
| recently tried to add basic fetching of Jira tickets information.
| I tried Basic, Python (various APIs). I gave up because any kind
| of simple automatization becomes nightmare in there.
| tiahura wrote:
| 40 years to catch Word 6 for Windows. Hopefully it doesn't take
| another 40 to reach Word 95.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| It's got to be better than that version of Word that let us
| create a document on computer X (shared student lab of
| computers back in the day) and then, after saving and coming
| back, refused to load the same document back due to lack of
| memory.
|
| Edit: we had to go back to an older draft and split it into two
| parts, as I recall..
| Beijinger wrote:
| It is based on the formerly proprietary StarWriter, from a German
| company. Later acquired by Sun if I remember correctly, then open
| sourced.
|
| There is another commercial German competitor from this time,
| SoftMaker. I used to buy the suite for Linux, just recently
| switched to LibreOffice. I never liked the clunky Libreoffice but
| since SoftMaker refuses to support LanguageTool....
|
| There is actually a third German text processor from this time,
| Papyrus. Born on Atari ST.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Division
|
| [2] https://www.softmaker.com/en/products/softmaker-office
|
| [3] https://papyrus.de/
|
| [4] https://papyrusauthor.com/
|
| English new version of Papyrus seems to be released in a few
| days.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > Later acquired by Sun if I remember correctly, then open
| sourced.
|
| Sun named it OpenOffice. LibreOffice was forked from OpenOffice
| after Oracle acquired Sun. OpenOffice was subsequently donated
| to the Apache foundation.
| cookiengineer wrote:
| Note that this story is only half complete.
|
| Oracle stalled development, made the bugtrackers etc private,
| and kicked out all of the contributors and tried to
| commercialize the product at the time. The reason for Oracle
| "dumping" it to the Apache graveyard is that most of the
| "free" (as in unpaid) contributors switched sides to
| LibreOffice because of Oracle's hostile behavior towards the
| development community. And they donated OpenOffice because it
| was effectively a dead project for a couple of years.
|
| There's probably still some contributor talks about it on one
| of the old CCC conferences on their media server.
|
| If you want to learn about how to manage open source,
| Oracle's track record is a prime example of how not to.
| cpill wrote:
| a 40yo code base. Eeeek!
| cookiengineer wrote:
| There's also onlyoffice [1] which recently got a little more
| traction due to its integrations for moodle, owncloud,
| nextcloud etc. I think all of their software is AGPL3 licensed
| last time I checked. Their suite somewhat targets selfhosted
| collaboration for the web browser.
|
| [1] https://www.onlyoffice.com/
| dsp_person wrote:
| "Distraction Free Writing" with pic of rainy background - would
| be pretty if this is animated!
| kibwen wrote:
| Someday in the unimaginable future, Microsoft will be a memory,
| Word will be lostech available only via running a cracked binary
| inside fifteen nested VMs, and a working copy of the LibreOffice
| source will still be kicking around on an FTP server somewhere
| and developed by users communicating over IRC.
| geff82 wrote:
| I just wrote a thesis in Libreoffice, because the faculty didn't
| allow to use LaTex. It really impressed me with its features. It
| is a pro-tool
| dingdingdang wrote:
| Did the same back in the day with OpenOffice. MS Word would
| crash ad-hoc past a certain page count plus the auto-indexing
| feature of OO actually worked and was predictable. Also.. the
| styling was, if clunky, at least workable! Actually think the
| later versions of LibreOffice have started going down hill,
| heavier (initially the libre fork prided itself on being light-
| weight afair) and still as ugly as ever.
| notorandit wrote:
| 40 years? Staroffice arrived around 1998-1999 afaict. Seems like
| a marketing hoax.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| StarWriter, the first app released of what later grew into
| StarOffice Suite, was released in 1985.
|
| Sun acquired StarOffice Suite in 1999, that's not when it
| originated.
|
| Maybe you should spend a few minutes checking facts before
| calling things hoaxes?
| resource_waste wrote:
| I can't remember why, but I gave up attempting to use
| LibreOffice.
|
| If I remember correctly, the PowerPoint program didn't have text
| size as a front page icon. Instead you had to click a few buttons
| or something... I didn't really care to learn what symbols meant
| what, or the workflow.
|
| I switched to Google Slides and moved on.
| nelblu wrote:
| Although I don't use it frequently, I love that LibreOffice
| exits. I was wondering if there are any online resources that
| summarizes some of the cool tricks and features of LibreOffice
| for an occasional user like me?
| haunter wrote:
| I think the feature comparison against MS Office is a pretty
| good resource
| https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Feature_Comparison:_Libr...
| cassepipe wrote:
| I have tried to use LibreOffice Base to connect to the
| database... It needs some love. The workflow to import CSV was to
| actually copy cell data from a spreadsheet and paste it... It was
| a weird experience. I went with DBeaver which is clunky too but
| more capable.
|
| I have also tried to use the javascript API for LO Calc but I
| couldn't find any documentation even though I have read it was
| possible in some places... was it unmaintained and taken away ?
|
| I tried to do things with Draw quite some time ago, it was a
| clunky clunky. I hope it got better.
|
| Writer is just fine though imho, pretty much does what you expect
| from rich text editor
| gnfargbl wrote:
| I have said this before, but I still don't understand there isn't
| a supported version of LibreOffice that I can pay for. I'm mostly
| happy with Google's online tools, but I want a Linux-compatible
| offline spreadsheet and word processor often enough that I
| wouldn't blink at $600/year and I would seriously consider a
| larger amount.
|
| Am I that unusual?
| XorNot wrote:
| No although your price end is steep - that's more then I pay
| for the Jetbrains suite, for example.
|
| The reason such a thing should exist is to drive industry
| adoption: it's a lot easier to get things into the corporate
| and government world, ironically, if there's someone selling a
| subscription and support and looking like a normal software
| vendor for it.
| mksaunders2 wrote:
| > I still don't understand there isn't a supported version of
| LibreOffice that I can pay for
|
| But there are, and has been for years, such versions:
| https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business...
| gnfargbl wrote:
| > In that way, you can get long-term Service Level Agreements
| (SLA), personalised assistance, technical support, and custom
| new features.
|
| Thanks, but not quite what I'm looking for. I want a fully
| maintained and supported offline word processor and
| spreadsheet for Linux, much as Windows/OSX has Microsoft
| Office.
|
| If I felt that LibreOffice was maintained and supported, I
| would not be asking.
| breakingcups wrote:
| I'm very confused about what you _are_ asking, exactly. In
| your first post, you ask for "a supported version of
| LibreOffice that I can pay for", when it's pointed out to
| you that you can, it's not actually LibreOffice that you
| want to pay for, because you insinuate it's not maintained
| and supported?
|
| Even though the paid offer includes technical support and a
| simple git log shows 50 commits in the past 24 hours in the
| core repository?
| dsp_person wrote:
| Would love to see a new project doing a complete re-write of the
| standard office suite
|
| - desktop / local first
|
| - cross-platform and first-class wasm build
|
| - optional online/collab capabilities
|
| - low bloat and fast compile time
|
| - highly extensible and reusable libraries, practically a GUI
| toolkit for building office-like applications
|
| - first class scripting e.g. creating/editing docs with python,
| as well as API for GUI / LLM control
|
| - Prefer to innovate completely new doc/spreadsheet formats
| rather than adhering to past baggage
|
| - Spreadsheet cells more like a shell/repl/notebook interface
|
| - first class touch & ink support
| v3ss0n wrote:
| We have OnlyOffice.
| nhatcher wrote:
| 100% agree. I _think_ we will eventually get there. But is
| going to take time.
|
| Many of your bullet points is what I am trying to do at
| IronCalc[1], that's a very small step in that direction.
|
| LibreOffice is an impressive technology, but I don't see it
| running smoothly on the browser. Maybe I am wrong, I want to be
| wrong.
|
| [1]: https://www.ironcalc.com
| thesurlydev wrote:
| Every once in a while I'll try LibreOffice out but I can never
| get past the UI. I've also never seen it in use at a company
| which begs the question: who _is_ using it?
| v3ss0n wrote:
| We once convince a big office to use it end up getting it
| replaced with FreeOffice and then a few months later OnlyOffice
| v3ss0n wrote:
| It's horrible, incompatible, sluggish, slow and resources hog.
| Very bad UX.
|
| OnlyOffice is leaps and bounds better.
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