I dug into the phrase “Put your wood behind 1 arrow” and found a type of culture I want nothing to do with. This quote is just dripping with toxic masculinity. The argument literally boils down to “Iterative development (agile development) isn’t manly.” My personal masculinity doesn’t need to be reinforced by my choice of software development practices.
> Face it, iterative development is for people who don't know what they want, who don't believe in themselves enough to trust their own specifications. They don't know their requirements, they don't know where their projects are going to end. No wonder they're afraid of the waterfall method--that takes a little confidence. Here's an analogy. You go out deer hunting. You take your bow and arrow, but do you need a map and a compass? Hardly, not if you are a real man! You take direction from the sun, go east for 3 days, and then shoot your bear. Sure, you meant to shoot a deer, but nobody can call you a coward for shooting a bear, right? And notice I said bow and ARROW, no "s." That's right. Real men bring only one arrow. They know how to aim (and they remember to take plenty of time when aiming), and they put all the wood behind that one arrow. Only sissies bring extra arrows for--what?--in case they "miss?" Real men don't know the meaning of the word. This is the way our fathers did it, and our fathers before them, and if it was good enough for them, it should be good enough for us.
It’s a stupid idea anyway. Firstly, no hunter only grinds one arrow. Secondly, it’s a saying my a Sun Microsystems executive. And we all know how well that went.
To be honest, I didn’t follow the link, but that quote sounds totally tongue in cheek. Maybe the author is serious, but it reads more like an article from The Onion.
While your interpretation of the phrase is interesting i think there is something as to much interpretation.
Reimplementation of existing software (what all those projects aim for) doesn't work that well with an iterative process. It might be one of the things where a waterfall like approach is appropriate. The requirements literally don't change.
So it doesn't make sense to maintain 3 different waterfalls (or a 4th if you count Apaches efforts) and people working together (not that manly) would have a better chance catching up the monolith that get's copied.
Personally, none of those are even remotely relevant (and MSO compatibility is a given, which suite doesn't support docx etc these days?).
The only times I still reach for MS Office is when I need its million times faster speed compared to OpenOffice and friends (libre office, etc), for things like "sorting 20,000 lines of CSV in Excel using multiple column constraints because I need the first 100 entries after sorting" or "writing out some maths that doesn't justify using full-blown XeLaTeX", so... this just reads like a blog-shaped ad.
I'm curious to learn how much the author got paid to post this, given how little what-I-use-it-for-information there is in this post.
You know, if you want to fast sort 20k lines, then Excel is the wrong tool. Access is better, and with their DOM linking model you can simply define once, use multiple times as you delete/edit/insert lines into that Excel/Word. Click of a button in Access and zbang! those lines are sorted instantly.
For single user Access is still fastest database to use locally. Nothing beats it! Well, until you need 50 millions records, at which point you definitely switch to PostgreSQL as none of Microsoft tools beats that beast when it comes to large data (MSSQL included!).
It really isn't. Access is great for _persistent_ data, but if I have a .csv file and I just need it quickly sorted so I can grab the top 100 entries after multi-column sorting, Access is about as useful as SQL: pointless for what I need.
Then you definitely don't know to use it to it's usefulness. But that's OK, as long as Excel fits you needs. You do know, just like in Excel, you can simply right click on column data and select order, yes? Or filter if you want.
To your point, if I have a .csv file I can simply copy/paste it to Access in a new table, and just next/next through the wizard that will pop-up. Now do a test, get that .csv file, with 20k rows, and paste it in Excel 50 times, so you'll have 1M records in a table. Let me know in how much time Excel vs. Access will order it.
While I do like Access for some use cases, and Access provides a decent UI option as a quick and dirty for anything with an odbc driver (even csv), It's not great or the fastest option.
For that matter, you can use SQLite about anywhere you might otherwise use JET, .Net Core now has a driver in the box, and you can use it anywhere .Net Core works.
OpenOffice.org was the first major FOSS project I ever contributed to, and it makes me sad to see that that trademark currently belongs to a dead project.
Let me know when Libre Office's Calc can sort 20,000 rows with multiple column constraints in less than half a second. Because last time I tried, it took over a minute, which is unacceptable for spreadsheet software.
No, I didn't. The article is about how it's better than OpenOffice and friends. And all of those are cross-platform software. In the same way they're all open source, so listing that as somehow a reason it's better is just nonsense.
ms office compatibility still fails in some cases. but to get to the truth we need to collect testcases and check if onlyoffice actually does a better job
I suspect the author was thinking of a more typical use case. Once you get into the more esoteric features of Microsoft Office, I doubt that any of the competition can keep up. Even if they matched it feature for feature, those features would have to be implemented in compatible ways.
Sometimes an overly enthusiastic post is just an overly enthusiastic post. While I acknowledge that it is good to have a bit of cynicism, it is probably better directed at the content than the motivation since motivations are far more difficult to determine.
I'm persevering with LibreOffice, but it does have its compatibility quirks. A few days back I was sent a .docx to proof and suggest changes. The requirement was to highlight added words in green and highlight queries in yellow.
I used the latest version 7 of LibreOffice. When the doc went back to the creator - using Office 365 - they called to say that they could not select and remove the highlighting and had to delete and retype the coloured words.
One quirk of Microsoft Word is that for historical reasons it has highlighting, which only allows a small number of specific colors, but also equivalent functionality in background shading for characters which allows arbitrary colors.
IIRC, because this doesn't really make sense, libreoffice just has highlighting which allows arbitrary colors, but it can be confusing because it may by necessity become background shading when you export as a word file.
Unfortunately, the UI for background shading is absolutely terrible in Word (there are different types of border/shading settings and you have to open the menu but then select the correct type to even see the current settings that are being applied) so people who don't know about it will be unlikely to figure out where it is or how to change it.
Blaming an application for not having perfectly reverse-engineered a convoluted, confusing and incomplete spec is harsh. I admit it's frustrating but maybe the sender should be using a standard format.
If you need flawless docx support then Word is the way to go. LibreOffice can never do docx perfectly because the implementation is archaic and some parts of the spec aren't properly-documented.
I can't speak for the author, of course, but recently while working with LibreOffice Calc I ran into an issue where it was completely mangling cell coloring in spreadsheet that a coworker sent me.
I was using the latest version of LibreOffice in Ubuntu 20.04, and my coworker was running the latest version of Microsoft Office for Mac.
The problem with this is that one can't simply submit work documents and these formatting issues are usually edge cases produced by people that are doing things they really shouldn't with Office.
While I don't know what formatting issues the author was referring to, they do exist. They are typically the product of people doing wonky things in order to format documents in a particular way that looks fine on their own computer, like embedding tables in tables. There are also features that LibreOffice supports in a different way (e.g. multiple page layouts within a word processor or spreadsheet document).
Sure, that’s almost certain. Not even Microsoft gets it completely correct between versions of Office. But I think he’ll eventually find that his new favourite Office suite will also have compatibility issues.
I’m fine with completion, but I’m looking for specific issues. It’s really far too vague to know what they are talking about.
I gave LibreOffice a go, but quickly became frustrated with incompatibility issues and some of the other quirks in Calc.
So I've switched to using Google Docs, which is powerful enough for my modest needs and has so far been pretty frustration free. It also has the advantage of being easily accessible from my other non-Linux devices. The free browser-only versions of Microsoft Office also look good... but I just haven't had a reason to seriously evaluate them.
What are the benefits to going with something like OnlyOffice over Google's and Microsoft's offerings?
I’m in a similar situation to you. I use Google Docs as my primary office suite and occasionally switch to native Microsoft Office when I need to edit a complex or macro-covered Excel sheet. Google Docs is very convenient, free of frustration, and quickly improving. It also integrates nicely with the other G Suite apps.
I think a lot of the free software people prefer to avoid proprietary web apps made by companies that they view as poorly aligned to their beliefs. Also, performance is a valid reason to avoid web apps.
I don't know if it's improved since I last tried it but the offline experience with Google Docs was not great. Web apps do require the web, and sometimes there are situations where you don't have it or are not willing to do it.
I've had no issues with offline mode. Pre-covid, I worked on a long document while on a cross-country flight and once I had WiFi again it just synced it up to Drive.
There's quite a bit of essential (to me) functionality that is not available offline though. For instance, you can't convert a sheet to PDF or XSLT. Version history is not available either.
The benefit that the linked article specifically mentions is being able to round-trip documents between OnlyOffice and coworkers who are still using Microsoft Office apps without losing any formatting. If you're not in a position where you have to do this, it probably doesn't sound like a big deal. Most of the time I don't have to do this, and I think most engineers hanging around HN wouldn't need to, either. But if you are in a position where this is a job requirement, it generally makes "hey, it's 95% compatible" into a 100% nonstarter.
I've found this is super hard to explain to people who haven't had to deal with it. I have, in sending fiction stories back and forth to editors. The formatting for those is ridiculously simple... except that you need absolute 100% compatibility with Word's document revision tracking features to see your editor's comments, respond to them, accept or reject their changes, and so on. And while I haven't checked in a couple years, when I did, the only non-Microsoft stuff I found that could do it reliably were two commercial, Mac-only word processors (Apple Pages and Nisus Writer Pro). I hadn't heard of OnlyOffice before this; if I ever switch to Linux, I'll keep it in mind.
If M$ really loves open source, then they would have opened their office formats. They may even have made life easy for themselves by dropping their proprietary formats in favour of open.
This has never happened. Their intention is to retain customers on Office 365 and Azure AD subscriptions to keep large corporations on their books.
A large portion of people are moving away form documents and using things like markdown which is a sensible move. Another sensible move is towards LaTeX. Calc and presentations though is a sore point.
I think the days are numbered for office applications on the desktop, sadly. There is certainly much less interest in it now than there was a decade ago, maybe this is true for the laser printer also, are the two in tandem?
Do we need a spreadsheet? Isn't that an anti-pattern where we'd just be better off with sqlite and a perl/python script to pipe to gnuplot? I know one of things I hated greatly was having to do the same graph fiddling over and over again. It is probably better to have the graph/calculation run on demand.
'member when the reveal that MS buried system information in word documents shocked people as it allowed for tracing authors? Regardless of editing, opening the document on another computer grow the file.
I remember MS being roundly criticised for OOXML when it landed, because it had fairly major parts that were defined by reference to the behaviour in the MS implementation. Literally "the correct behaviour according to the specification is whatever Microsoft Word does".
I can have a certain amount of sympathy for MS doing that, because if your proprietary file format includes things like "take a dump of whatever the app happens to have in memory in some magical region or other", it's an uphill battle to get anything rigorous out of it in the first place. It doesn't satisfy one of the main goals of an open standard, though: that anyone should be able to offer a complete alternative implementation, purely by reference to the standard.
I think there wasn’t a way for Microsoft to do this in a way that satisfied all critics.
Their XML-based format existed for a few years before it was made into an open standard, so the alternative would be a standard that didn’t describe the format of the zillions of documents ‘out there’.
Also, chances are nobody at Microsoft itself did know the exact effect of many of the more obscure flags.
So, you either get a clean start, or you get a standard that ‘all’ existing documents can be converted to without change/loss of formatting (‘all’ in quotes because there likely are truly old documents starting life, say, as WordPerfect documents converted into “WP compatible MS Word .doc”, edited a bit, converted to “MS Word .docx”, edited a bit more, converted into open office XML whose layout changed over time)
I remember WP being a very stable format between versions, unlike Word ~ 2000, it wasn't able to manage their own document formats. So if people put up with the issues then, why not now?
When I made a docx generator, I understood the 14000 page ECMA spec was barebones and I had to reverse engineer the output of MS Word to figure out the XML tags and attributes.
For those who don't want to click: Mobile editing was removed from community edition and only in the $950 license edition. A poorly announced change which made he community mad.
Not only that. Someone wrote a script that activated the document server using only the open source version provided in the repo. A OO developer couldn't even grasp the concept that this was legally allowed any why anyone would want to do that (as a consequence of OO's own license changes). Shortly after that the issue was closed/locked.
Yeah, I saw that; the OO person in the replied mentioning the $100 price as well, so either something changed in the meanwhile (possibly as a response to the feedback?), the poster was mistaken, or I'm not understanding their pricing page correctly. As far as I can see for personal usage the "home server" plan should be grand.
Yea, that's where I got it. It's pretty confusing (not a good thing for pricing). I've forwarded this whole topic to my team - I'd like my company that builds FLOSS to avoid these types of issues. Something fun for us to review on Friday.
I don't really see the problem with this; it's a $149 (currently $99) one-time payment for a life-time license for 10 users, or it's free for contributors. That seems more than seems reasonable to me, and there needs to be some incentive for people to actually pay for developer time and hosting, because "ask nicely" doesn't really scale.
The communication wasn't ideal, which the OO people said in the issue, but to call it "questionable" ... meh. Try making a living from 100% no-restriction open source software like this and let me know how it goes.
They need to make $. Source is licensed under AGPL 3, what else can they do? Are we all just freeloaders, never rewarding open source devs who spent so much effort on developing useful stuff?
I went from MS word to Google Docs for writing professional reports, and there is no comparison. For basic stuff, Google docs is fine, and they definitely have a better model for collaborating on a document. But docs feels 90% done - it is missing advanced formatting, copy paste integration with other Google products, and many other little things like that that make it challenging to use as a professional tool.
I could go on at length about all the stuff I didnt like about Word (especially collaborative editing on sharepoint, there have been some disasters), but at least it feels like a professional tool vs. the proof-of-concept feel of Google docs
Google docs requires a google account. Getting one of those has become very difficult and I’m not convinced having one is a net benifit.
For individual developers I’m also not convinced a spreadsheet is an improvement over sql + maybe some python scripts where you would use macros/charts.
It probably decided whether to require a phone dynamically based on various things.. but that seems to never be required for non-gmail (custom email) accounts
Because I do not want to create a Google account just to make documents. I do not want to store them on anyone else's server either, but on my own hard drive. What if Google stops supporting it? The list goes on and on.
I do not get why people think cloud is good. I am pro-privacy, and cloud is not exactly the embodiment of it. I do not want my documents to leave my hard drive, especially not in plain-text. If I want that, I just upload it somewhere or something.
So yeah, no way will I ever use Google Docs. Offline only.
LibreOffice is more than enough for everything I have ever thrown at it. :)
I trust my hard drive availability a lot more than I trust my internet availability.
I don't trust Google to maintain Docs, or my Google account, for the rest of my life.
I dislike when applications unexpectedly change. Cloud apps are both more likely to do this, and don't have the option of reverting to a previous version.
The one biggest thing going for Google Docs IMO is that a document usually displays exactly the same way regardless of the OS and font DPI setup of the user, at least as long as they are using Chrome on their OS. Fonts are loaded from the cloud, so you never run into issues with those, and you can even pick some awesome fonts from Google Fonts and not have to worry about whether the destination system has them installed. There are very few, if any, system fonts that are common to Linux, Mac, and Windows, and most system fonts are typographically terrible.
Usually documents created in Word and imported into OpenOffice inevitably have to push the last 1 line onto the next page and mangle all the alignments. Often because someone created the doc in Arial and it loads it as Ubuntu Sans for me and Helvetica for a Mac user or some such.
It depends on your usage; I don't really like using this kind of software in general, but on the rare occasions I need to use it (usually to fill in some document for some organisation or government) I just use Google Docs. Almost all of these documents are fairly ephemeral so long-term storage isn't really an issue (actually, lack of it is a feature, since it often contains sensitive personal information). Google Docs works "good enough" for this and doesn't require installing a lot of software for a 10-minute task.
For more serious usage, I'd probably look for a desktop solution, since that's just so much quicker (Google Docs is really slow), but for casual usage it's pretty good.
Google Docs kneels for me once documents get large enough. It works, sort of, but it gets ridiculously sluggish.
I haven't figured out what a reasonable cutoff is, but trying to work with a 60k words manuscript that Libre Office has no problem with was too painful.
Which was annoying, as I do prefer Google Docs for most uses.
Maybe your requirements include privacy, security, reliability, UI stability, indefinite access to your own data, high performance or some of the missing features? Can't guarantee any of those things with Google Docs.
Google Docs is OK, but it's still missing a lot of very useful features from Excel. Most important for me is being able to define tables.
Also, a lot of the keyboard shortcuts missing if you want to work fast. And if I'm in Excel then I do want to work fast, otherwise I'd fire up R or Python.
One thing that is overlooked by the authors, is that libreoffice now also has ribbon with icons similar to Word. I'm still pretty happy with libreoffice writer, however excel is still king, calc is just horrible. Try to make anything a bit more interesting than a line graph, 2 axis's you'll get stuck quickly
Calc's problems run deep. Every other release breaks the find function or something similar in a way that literally crashes when editing my company's massive golden workbook.
Nonetheless it is still usable. When we have more scale, we'll probably just implement a subset of ODS as an import for a custom spreadsheet program that I've been working on in my more-free time (looking to make explicit loops/tables of intra-row and previous-row dependent expressions, enabling lazy sequences [or just sequences with length defined by downstream users] and more straightforward static compilation w/ LLVM or similar).
ODS is pretty bad, especially the way LO writes it. For example LibreOffice adds like 50 styles to your ODS files, even empty ones, every time you save; and one of them is called "Default", even though ODS has an explicit mechanism for default styles that LibreOffice recognizes. I could go into all the levels of hell in LibreOffice-generated ODS files (not to say others don't have their own flavour of hell). LibreOffice, and I suspect most ODS generating programs, routinely generate schema-invalid ODS files for a good reason (boolean value cells with integer cached values, which are essential).
I think my new legacy-optional spreadsheet can be pretty killer, and I hope to bring it to the masses at some point.
In Excel, intra-row and previous row are better handled by DAX (PowerPivot), than the grid as such. This is, of course, unique to desktop Excel. If you are at the point where you are building your own engine for that sort of thing, and have a “massive golden workbook”, wouldn’t SSAS make more sense?
We have already built our own compiler, it's just that a lot of work has to be done to deduplicate expressions (in part because references are stored in A1 form, this is also part of why it takes about 15 seconds to unzip the ODS and parse the XML), and even more to consolidate intermediate cells, and dirty prologues/epilogues on tables don't help (because they often mean the first cycle will be odd).
With explicit cycles, most of that work can be avoided.
Furthermore, explicit row iteration means that you can attach reductions to the generator based on the range (i.e. you have a GEOMEAN and a SUM with a statically known range), which often means you don't need to store the results of the iteration, and that also you don't have to compromise between AOS/SOA storage for reductions that can be run with the generator.
Static primitive, option, and union types are also a goal. You can think of standard Excel/Calc values as a tagged union Option type.
Also relying on Windows or macOS to edit our core sheet is kinda out of the question. None of our developers even run windows, and the majority don't even run macOS. Two of us came from a company that did that, and the Excel virtual machines were always finicky there.
At some point LibreOffice made super weird visual design choices, icons look like they were drawn by a 5-year old and they completely botched math formula editor. Compared to that even Star Office 5 (predecessor of OpenOffice) looked more professional. I am wondering what is going on?
Opening ONLYOFFICE and using it for one minute, to me it's immediately better than LibreOffice. This is the first FOSS Office I may actually desire to use when I have to do some document writing.
It has a better default font, a much nicer, comfortable-feeling and inviting-to-use interface, and it saves to a more useful format like DOCX by default.
LibreOffice puzzles me as to why they choose such bad-looking defaults when the options are there to make it better.
My perspective is one that matters in FOSS. This is not just about advanced technical things with power users. It's about casual users too. It's about Linux having something actually comparable to MS Word. It's about the entire FOSS ecosystem.
If LibreOffice want their software to be used more, then they need to make it actually look and feel good - out of the box - and not just as a configurable option.
I mean this with the greatest respect. I'm a FOSS advocate. Part of furthering FOSS should be that it looks and feels nice, and not just that it's FOSS with a GPL license.
In fact, I'm so impressed with ONLYOFFICE's out of the box experience that IMO it should be Linux Mint's default pre-installed Office. On macOS and Linux it looks awesome.
Ehhh, kind-of. I'd put a HUGE asterisk on that, as you need to A) dig through the settings and tick a vague scary "ENABLE EXPERIMENTAL FEATURES" checkbox, then B) apply a random style called "Notebookbar" to get the ribbon UI.
Fine, if you're a linux tinkerer, go nuts. If you are trying to find a FOSS option for your parents, you are a literary (but not a technical) professional, or you want to keep your tech and writing work in different silos, ONLYOFFICE seems much, much better at this moment.
I've used the online o365 version a bit for work edits, but that's about it... it's not perfect, but much better than gdocs imo. There's an "unofficial" wrapper. I am glad teams works well at this point too.
Will probably see some sort of hybrid electron version of office in the future though, which will shift from the classic version and be more transparent between web and offline.
One deal breaker for me regarding OnlyOffice is that they have absolutely no support for RTL https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DocumentServer/issues/19 . From what it looks like there is a 5 year opened issue requesting RTL support. Until they support RTL, I can't use them.
Softmaker on the other had does support RTL. They still have a long way to go to be at the level of Microsoft office, but they are the best Linux office suite that I found
Your comment encouraged me to read it, so thanks for that.
I thought a bit about the phrase
"planned for future versions"
and I felt like I could see where there was a sort of miscommunication.
If someone said:
"Future versions of this product",
I think it could be reasonably understood to mean:
"any/all future versions"
which could mean:
"the (next and all subsequent) version"
The most natural meaning to me, and the one that I believe was intended is that they want it in a/some future version. And then I thought it this was simply because languages can vary in how they specify noun definiteness and indefiniteness? For example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_nouns_and_adjectives#St...
It's a great read and an educative insight into the working behind onlyoffice. The issue (RTL support) is dodged, promises are made ("It's on our roadmap") but none are kept. When gh user ramezrafla starts doing the heavy lifting and started coding, he is basically met with... silence? He codes for free, helps them implements an important feature, and the onlyoffice response is that it will cost him $100k for them to make time for the issue.
I do not see promisses in that thread, it is always vague "yeah sometimes". Also most open soirce projects I have seen do not help with unfineshed PRs unless it is priority for them, so expecting calls and support was quite optimistic.
I get that, and they have every right to handle it the way they see fit. If they don't want to invest into it, that's perfectly fine. It would just have been such a different experience if someone would have said "thanks for the effort, looks great, unfortunately we don't have the resources at this point". Would have been a 20 second investment. Instead they keep whimping people off, and the 100k thing just makes it completely ridiculous. It clearly shows where their priorities are, and where they aren't.
A comment claims that they didn't include RTL in the roadmap, but it has been there since early 2017[1]. In the current state of the document, it's not tied to a specific version, though.
Someone claims to have started to implement a big feature (no code shared AFAICT, only a screenshot; there's a dead link though so maybe at some point some code was shared), and asked devs to video conference with them to help them understand the code base. Devs refused and gave them a quote for paid feature development. Seems entire appropriate.
IMO unsolicited contributions and contributor entitlement (not to be confused with user entitlement) is a major issue in open source. Don't start working on a huge feature unless you've gotten the green light to do so, or prepare to be rejected. In fact, prepare to be rejected even if you've gotten the green light. Doubly so if you can't even write the code without help. It doesn't matter if you're doing work for free; unwanted work just waste both parties' time, and it's emotionally draining on both sides when the work is eventually rejected. Also, if you're just a random guy without a track record of solid contributions to the project, your chances of implementing an important feature "right" is not good. Ramp up your involvement with small features first. Build trust.
Personally, I'm no stranger to huge unsolicited contributions throughout my open source career. PRs that made changes everywhere, made the wrong architectural decisions, included tons of irrelevant commits and sometimes even changed existing coding style just for the hell of it. What should I say to the contributors? Often times it would cost me less time to rewrite the feature than guide them to fix their contributions. Often times it's not even a feature I would include.
A reminder that open source maintainers don't owe you anything, not even time to review your PR. Video conferencing to help you write your unsolicited PR is a huge stretch by any standard.
(As for "promises", it is indeed on the roadmap, under "planned for future versions": https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DocumentServer/blob/19e3a5d/Ro... Projects should totally have their own pace and priorities rather than blindly "listen to the community", and I've seen my own feature requests implemented after being on the roadmap for five years in software I use, so again, nothing inappropriate here.)
That’s the same attitude as the OpenOffice.org team that led to the split that caused LibreOffice.
The other side of this equation is: if you get forked then expect either that your software will be fragmented, or the form will take over from you.
If the software is under a free license, and you won’t accept contributions, then the corollary to the assertion that you cannot expect your PR to be accepted is: don’t get upset when a competing fork of your project takes away your market share.
Hmm, somehow you jumped from not scheduling a video conference to help some random dude understand your code, to "won't accept contributions". Plus some random remarks about market share that are completely irrelevant to my comment. Great job attacking a straw man, I guess.
That sounds like some great excuses that don’t help any users at all. Since LibreOffice and all other major word processors do support RTL languages it does seem like OnlyOffce is inferior.
I think it depends on the reason of why you release your code as an open source project in the first place. If your goal is simply to let your code available to general public, reviewing unsolicited contributions will feels like a huge drain of your time and probably not worth it as it may not align with your goal. Just let them fork your project and continue as usual. But if the goal is to build a community around your open source project, then I think it's still a good idea to engage with those unsolicited contributions even though it's a major time sink.
This homogeneity would be normal if they were working toward Russian market but even then you'd expect to see a token Latvian or some other nationality.
Normal 25 person IT company in Latvia working with west would have perhaps 10 Latvians, 8 Russians, an Estonian, a Lithuanian and someone from the west and perhaps someone from east (India or Pakistan) - all speaking English.
Ascensio only job offerings for sales managers (towards Western market no less!) were in Russian (which is borderline illegal in Latvia)
The only rational explanation is that OnlyOffice owners have set a comfortable culture for their workplace and see no need to change it.
> Now I know a lot of FOSS enthusiasts will be unhappy about the idealistic part of the recommendation
Why would we be unhappy with it? Seems like at least some version of it is FOSS (GNU GPL or AGPL on all the repos I'm seeing).
I ain't familiar with it, though. I've also been reasonably happy with LibreOffice, so I haven't been motivated to look all that hard for alternatives.
Their commitment to Open Source has been questioned, given the small OS community size and apparent lack of transparency around releases and development. I haven't verified these criticisms myself however.
All looks well and dandy until you need to integrate Zotero into the flow of your work. Unfortunately, OnlyOffice doesn't offer a Zotero integration tool. That's a huge deal breaker for any academic.
OnlyOffice can be extended through plugins apparently [0]. Creating a plugin to search for a reference and generate a list of the citations should be doable and provide most of the benefit. What are the Zotero integration features that you rely on?
EDIT: In fact there is already a Zotero plugin available [1]
Open source is free as in freedom, see opensource.org.
The problem with OnlyOffice is non-community-oriented development and the predatory licensing model where they hold all copyrights and dual-license their code AGPL+proprietary, while forbidding others do the same (since they hold the copyrights), therefore putting themselves at the centre of their universe.
Compare that with the healthy community around LibreOffice where nobody holds copyrights for all of it, so the copyleft actually protects all involved parties from unfair competition and makes them cooperate for the common good.
For OnlyOffice, the open source license is just a marketing trick and a source of occasional free patches.
I don't understand. If they offer any sort of GPL on their code, irrespective of some other license also placed on it isn't a user entitled under such AGPL to fork it as they please, where continued free (as in freedom) use and subsequent further forking can take place?
> Compare that with the healthy community around LibreOffice where nobody holds copyrights for all of it, so the copyleft actually protects all involved parties from unfair competition and makes them cooperate for the common good.
According to the recent discussion [1] it's not all that peachy for sustainable LibreOffice development either.
> The problem with OnlyOffice is non-community-oriented development and the predatory licensing model where they hold all copyrights and dual-license their code AGPL+proprietary, while forbidding others do the same (since they hold the copyrights), therefore putting themselves at the centre of their universe.
> Compare that with the healthy community around LibreOffice where nobody holds copyrights for all of it, so the copyleft actually protects all involved parties from unfair competition and makes them cooperate for the common good.
This is a very good point, and very well said! I agree completely - from activist point of view. It really does benefit users the most.
BUT! It doesn't benefit developers and maintainers at all, which leads to the common problem of "it works for me" attitude. This is an understandable though regrettable situation. To put software to another level it takes lots of additional effort in areas which are usually not fun. Why would someone do it?
LibreOffice is a great case in point. While I use it regularly, it lacks in two important areas:
- 100% compatibility with MS Office
- UI is ugly and in places unintuitive
I can imagine that the first problem is not fun, and the second is difficult to solve with so many people involved. I don't believe LibreOffice will ever solve these two problems. Incentives matter.
This was mentioned in the context of Linux desktop/mobile UI, but applies to Libreoffice quite well:
> Open source development can't do good user interfaces for the same reason wikipedia can't write a novel with a coherent plot. The limitations of the development model do not allow for this. The old adage "too many cooks spoil the soup" is not a warning about lack of nutrition, it's a warning that aesthetic issues do not survive committees. Peer review does not produce blockbuster movies, hit songs, or masterpiece paintings. It finds scientific facts, not beauty.
Why would that make any difference unless they're integrating the software itself into the product? The AGPL will not affect documents made or edited with the software.
If they're that prejudiced against the AGPL, they'll probably be happy to pay for one of the proprietary editions (which have more restrictive licences, but don't tell them that).
If you're going to pay anybody anything, you might as well pay Microsoft $8.5/mo and get the real thing. Microsoft salted the earth on commercial viability of competition with this pricing.
I remember using LibreOffice. It does the job, but with noticeable deficiencies. At this point Google Docs basically replaced the MS Office suite for me. Who even needs "powerpoint" anymore? All of the "character bullet sound animations" are like the 90s web of office software. I basically use Google Docs to look at shared notepads and CSVs, and that's about it.
I’ve seen this too with Excel. Some of those custom spreadsheets are so complex and developed over decades that it’s not worth my job to try using LO Calc on it. Billions of dollars are dependent on the results from the Spreadsheet. Crazy but true.
It's not like using Powerpoint is something based on taste or random enthusiasm. People who use it are the ones that need to make a presentation. It's not a choice, it's dictated by the task at hand.
If you just need to make a presentation, Slides does the job as well. There might be something that Powerpoint can do and Slides can't (those animated transitions? I'd be happy if Powerpoint removed them too), but in my experience it's not like trying to replace Excel with Sheets.
The author talks about "top notch Microsoft Office compatibility", including formatting. However, something relatively simple, such as "Center Accross Selection" cell formatting in Excel does not display correctly in OnlyOffice. Hmm...
Unlike OnlyOffice, it's not open source, but it is an excellent product that I have used for some time now with no adverse results. Works well with HiDPI.
I have a deep respect for the people behind the LibreOffice project, but to me it still feels a lot like its predecessor: StarOffice from Sun Microsystems, a product that I did not like.
I have not tried Caligra Office or Abiword / Gnumeric lately, probably I should.
According to the comparison page from SoftMaker[0], Spell-checking is a feature reserved for the paid version.
I'm not against reserving features for a paid version, but spell-checking? The thing that is implemented in all modern browsers and even basic editors like notepad++? The bare-bones markdown editor I use[1] has spell checking. Not shipping a major word processor of any sort without spell checking in 2020 makes me immediately cross it off my list.
I think they mean the "Duden Korrektor" from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duden which is the authority on German language, and as such a commercially licensed product, which they can't give away.
Libre Office is already bloated to the point of being unusable imo. If some features are not available in a given context, they just should not be shown, instead of trying to show off how it's superior.
If the UX isn't done well I agree. However there a great opportunity for pushing for compatibility and a more portable document format in a less annoying way than gimp does for xcf.
Okay so, here we go again: An article which does not go into any detail about specifics, and makes a very bold claim (i.e. this product is better than this one because I said it's better).
First of all, LibreOffice does support a Ribbon UI, without all the patent-y stuff.
Secondly, "better MS office compatibility" is really, really a non-constructive and large comparative. For example, a good post would have been to list exactly what goes wrong, or what are the most annoying bugs.
Most of the time, the developers can use posts like those to pin-point exactly what is wrong and fix it quite swiftly. Because it's not only an open source project that strives for compatibility, but it's also made by benevolent humans who don't necessarily have a very definite document of what should be implemented and how. So telling them "hey guys, this should work like this, can you please fix it" is miles better than just saying "hey, your product sux, onlyoffice is better compat with word, bye".
I'm sorry if this somehow comes out a bit offensive, it is not, it's just that sometimes we tend to forget that those developers won't necessarily have the use cases we do, and hence will never optimize for them if we don't report them, and that just dismissing the whole software in favor of another without citing detailed analysis helps neither.
And interestingly, when I check the issues list, I see issues with rendering ligatures, merged cells not displaying, page sizing issues, inability to set the page background colour properly...
Not knocking the developers, but it seems to me they have their own compatibility issues. In fact, a fair few of them. Which means that the blog review is... fascinatingly biased and anecdotal and glosses over the fact that any competing software to MS Office will have its own unique list of compatibility bugs.
“I’m a science writer who uses Linux because it just functions better for me than Windows or macOS and because I’m an open source enthusiast. Given my profession, I have to frequently collaborate with people on other operating systems who almost always use either Microsoft Office or Google Docs.”
“After three years of trying, I can tell you that LibreOffice just doesn’t cut it. Either me or the other person will lose some formatting in the documents at some point. And as a document travels from one computer to another, things quickly become a mess.”
169 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 363 ms ] threadDoes Microsoft still have 95% market share?
Put your wood behind 1 arrow.
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/35197/meaning-of...
> Face it, iterative development is for people who don't know what they want, who don't believe in themselves enough to trust their own specifications. They don't know their requirements, they don't know where their projects are going to end. No wonder they're afraid of the waterfall method--that takes a little confidence. Here's an analogy. You go out deer hunting. You take your bow and arrow, but do you need a map and a compass? Hardly, not if you are a real man! You take direction from the sun, go east for 3 days, and then shoot your bear. Sure, you meant to shoot a deer, but nobody can call you a coward for shooting a bear, right? And notice I said bow and ARROW, no "s." That's right. Real men bring only one arrow. They know how to aim (and they remember to take plenty of time when aiming), and they put all the wood behind that one arrow. Only sissies bring extra arrows for--what?--in case they "miss?" Real men don't know the meaning of the word. This is the way our fathers did it, and our fathers before them, and if it was good enough for them, it should be good enough for us.
http://www.waterfall2006.com/kroll.html
Reimplementation of existing software (what all those projects aim for) doesn't work that well with an iterative process. It might be one of the things where a waterfall like approach is appropriate. The requirements literally don't change.
So it doesn't make sense to maintain 3 different waterfalls (or a 4th if you count Apaches efforts) and people working together (not that manly) would have a better chance catching up the monolith that get's copied.
I find the saying on point.
- MS office compatibility
- tabs
- cloud support
- ribbon UI
Personally, none of those are even remotely relevant (and MSO compatibility is a given, which suite doesn't support docx etc these days?).
The only times I still reach for MS Office is when I need its million times faster speed compared to OpenOffice and friends (libre office, etc), for things like "sorting 20,000 lines of CSV in Excel using multiple column constraints because I need the first 100 entries after sorting" or "writing out some maths that doesn't justify using full-blown XeLaTeX", so... this just reads like a blog-shaped ad.
I'm curious to learn how much the author got paid to post this, given how little what-I-use-it-for-information there is in this post.
For single user Access is still fastest database to use locally. Nothing beats it! Well, until you need 50 millions records, at which point you definitely switch to PostgreSQL as none of Microsoft tools beats that beast when it comes to large data (MSSQL included!).
To your point, if I have a .csv file I can simply copy/paste it to Access in a new table, and just next/next through the wizard that will pop-up. Now do a test, get that .csv file, with 20k rows, and paste it in Excel 50 times, so you'll have 1M records in a table. Let me know in how much time Excel vs. Access will order it.
Usually paste into a new database table, then query/insert and drop said table when done. That or I'll write a one-off node script.
For that matter, you can use SQLite about anywhere you might otherwise use JET, .Net Core now has a driver in the box, and you can use it anywhere .Net Core works.
See https://lwn.net/Articles/699755/ and https://lwn.net/Articles/637735/ for details.
OpenOffice.org was the first major FOSS project I ever contributed to, and it makes me sad to see that that trademark currently belongs to a dead project.
- runs natively on the OS the author is using, unlike MS Office which only runs on Windows and Macs
Libre office has cloud support and ms office compatibility. What is this?
I used the latest version 7 of LibreOffice. When the doc went back to the creator - using Office 365 - they called to say that they could not select and remove the highlighting and had to delete and retype the coloured words.
IIRC, because this doesn't really make sense, libreoffice just has highlighting which allows arbitrary colors, but it can be confusing because it may by necessity become background shading when you export as a word file.
Unfortunately, the UI for background shading is absolutely terrible in Word (there are different types of border/shading settings and you have to open the menu but then select the correct type to even see the current settings that are being applied) so people who don't know about it will be unlikely to figure out where it is or how to change it.
Unless one can supplant the current ".docx" is standard across industry I don't see how your expect others to use a different format.
Personally, I wish odf were the default along with libreoffice.
Also, they claim LibreOffice is not available on MacOS.
This article is quite light on detail.
I was using the latest version of LibreOffice in Ubuntu 20.04, and my coworker was running the latest version of Microsoft Office for Mac.
Do you have an example document? The LO team are always looking at compatibility issues.
I’m fine with completion, but I’m looking for specific issues. It’s really far too vague to know what they are talking about.
So I've switched to using Google Docs, which is powerful enough for my modest needs and has so far been pretty frustration free. It also has the advantage of being easily accessible from my other non-Linux devices. The free browser-only versions of Microsoft Office also look good... but I just haven't had a reason to seriously evaluate them.
What are the benefits to going with something like OnlyOffice over Google's and Microsoft's offerings?
I think a lot of the free software people prefer to avoid proprietary web apps made by companies that they view as poorly aligned to their beliefs. Also, performance is a valid reason to avoid web apps.
I've found this is super hard to explain to people who haven't had to deal with it. I have, in sending fiction stories back and forth to editors. The formatting for those is ridiculously simple... except that you need absolute 100% compatibility with Word's document revision tracking features to see your editor's comments, respond to them, accept or reject their changes, and so on. And while I haven't checked in a couple years, when I did, the only non-Microsoft stuff I found that could do it reliably were two commercial, Mac-only word processors (Apple Pages and Nisus Writer Pro). I hadn't heard of OnlyOffice before this; if I ever switch to Linux, I'll keep it in mind.
This has never happened. Their intention is to retain customers on Office 365 and Azure AD subscriptions to keep large corporations on their books.
A large portion of people are moving away form documents and using things like markdown which is a sensible move. Another sensible move is towards LaTeX. Calc and presentations though is a sore point.
I think the days are numbered for office applications on the desktop, sadly. There is certainly much less interest in it now than there was a decade ago, maybe this is true for the laser printer also, are the two in tandem?
Do we need a spreadsheet? Isn't that an anti-pattern where we'd just be better off with sqlite and a perl/python script to pipe to gnuplot? I know one of things I hated greatly was having to do the same graph fiddling over and over again. It is probably better to have the graph/calculation run on demand.
'member when the reveal that MS buried system information in word documents shocked people as it allowed for tracing authors? Regardless of editing, opening the document on another computer grow the file.
I can have a certain amount of sympathy for MS doing that, because if your proprietary file format includes things like "take a dump of whatever the app happens to have in memory in some magical region or other", it's an uphill battle to get anything rigorous out of it in the first place. It doesn't satisfy one of the main goals of an open standard, though: that anyone should be able to offer a complete alternative implementation, purely by reference to the standard.
So no, not like that.
Their XML-based format existed for a few years before it was made into an open standard, so the alternative would be a standard that didn’t describe the format of the zillions of documents ‘out there’.
Also, chances are nobody at Microsoft itself did know the exact effect of many of the more obscure flags.
So, you either get a clean start, or you get a standard that ‘all’ existing documents can be converted to without change/loss of formatting (‘all’ in quotes because there likely are truly old documents starting life, say, as WordPerfect documents converted into “WP compatible MS Word .doc”, edited a bit, converted to “MS Word .docx”, edited a bit more, converted into open office XML whose layout changed over time)
If you want the former, use https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument.
I think spreadsheets are still needed, just more flexible ones like Simon Peyton Jones elastic sheet defined functions:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jH2Je6wUvPs
Perhaps calc implementing that first would be a competitive advantage.
The communication wasn't ideal, which the OO people said in the issue, but to call it "questionable" ... meh. Try making a living from 100% no-restriction open source software like this and let me know how it goes.
Google docs is more than enough for everything I’ve ever thrown at it.
Please correct for your sampling bias.
I could go on at length about all the stuff I didnt like about Word (especially collaborative editing on sharepoint, there have been some disasters), but at least it feels like a professional tool vs. the proof-of-concept feel of Google docs
For individual developers I’m also not convinced a spreadsheet is an improvement over sql + maybe some python scripts where you would use macros/charts.
I do not get why people think cloud is good. I am pro-privacy, and cloud is not exactly the embodiment of it. I do not want my documents to leave my hard drive, especially not in plain-text. If I want that, I just upload it somewhere or something.
So yeah, no way will I ever use Google Docs. Offline only.
LibreOffice is more than enough for everything I have ever thrown at it. :)
To be fair, when you install the Google Drive client on your computer you get copies of your files on your computer.
I trust my hard drive availability a lot more than I trust my internet availability.
I don't trust Google to maintain Docs, or my Google account, for the rest of my life.
I dislike when applications unexpectedly change. Cloud apps are both more likely to do this, and don't have the option of reverting to a previous version.
Usually documents created in Word and imported into OpenOffice inevitably have to push the last 1 line onto the next page and mangle all the alignments. Often because someone created the doc in Arial and it loads it as Ubuntu Sans for me and Helvetica for a Mac user or some such.
For more serious usage, I'd probably look for a desktop solution, since that's just so much quicker (Google Docs is really slow), but for casual usage it's pretty good.
I haven't figured out what a reasonable cutoff is, but trying to work with a 60k words manuscript that Libre Office has no problem with was too painful.
Which was annoying, as I do prefer Google Docs for most uses.
Also, a lot of the keyboard shortcuts missing if you want to work fast. And if I'm in Excel then I do want to work fast, otherwise I'd fire up R or Python.
You can of course export and import them in other formats. But that's not the same.
Nonetheless it is still usable. When we have more scale, we'll probably just implement a subset of ODS as an import for a custom spreadsheet program that I've been working on in my more-free time (looking to make explicit loops/tables of intra-row and previous-row dependent expressions, enabling lazy sequences [or just sequences with length defined by downstream users] and more straightforward static compilation w/ LLVM or similar).
ODS is pretty bad, especially the way LO writes it. For example LibreOffice adds like 50 styles to your ODS files, even empty ones, every time you save; and one of them is called "Default", even though ODS has an explicit mechanism for default styles that LibreOffice recognizes. I could go into all the levels of hell in LibreOffice-generated ODS files (not to say others don't have their own flavour of hell). LibreOffice, and I suspect most ODS generating programs, routinely generate schema-invalid ODS files for a good reason (boolean value cells with integer cached values, which are essential).
I think my new legacy-optional spreadsheet can be pretty killer, and I hope to bring it to the masses at some point.
With explicit cycles, most of that work can be avoided.
Furthermore, explicit row iteration means that you can attach reductions to the generator based on the range (i.e. you have a GEOMEAN and a SUM with a statically known range), which often means you don't need to store the results of the iteration, and that also you don't have to compromise between AOS/SOA storage for reductions that can be run with the generator.
Static primitive, option, and union types are also a goal. You can think of standard Excel/Calc values as a tagged union Option type.
Also relying on Windows or macOS to edit our core sheet is kinda out of the question. None of our developers even run windows, and the majority don't even run macOS. Two of us came from a company that did that, and the Excel virtual machines were always finicky there.
Opening ONLYOFFICE and using it for one minute, to me it's immediately better than LibreOffice. This is the first FOSS Office I may actually desire to use when I have to do some document writing.
It has a better default font, a much nicer, comfortable-feeling and inviting-to-use interface, and it saves to a more useful format like DOCX by default.
LibreOffice puzzles me as to why they choose such bad-looking defaults when the options are there to make it better.
My perspective is one that matters in FOSS. This is not just about advanced technical things with power users. It's about casual users too. It's about Linux having something actually comparable to MS Word. It's about the entire FOSS ecosystem.
If LibreOffice want their software to be used more, then they need to make it actually look and feel good - out of the box - and not just as a configurable option.
I mean this with the greatest respect. I'm a FOSS advocate. Part of furthering FOSS should be that it looks and feels nice, and not just that it's FOSS with a GPL license.
Ehhh, kind-of. I'd put a HUGE asterisk on that, as you need to A) dig through the settings and tick a vague scary "ENABLE EXPERIMENTAL FEATURES" checkbox, then B) apply a random style called "Notebookbar" to get the ribbon UI.
Fine, if you're a linux tinkerer, go nuts. If you are trying to find a FOSS option for your parents, you are a literary (but not a technical) professional, or you want to keep your tech and writing work in different silos, ONLYOFFICE seems much, much better at this moment.
Will probably see some sort of hybrid electron version of office in the future though, which will shift from the classic version and be more transparent between web and offline.
Softmaker on the other had does support RTL. They still have a long way to go to be at the level of Microsoft office, but they are the best Linux office suite that I found
I thought a bit about the phrase "planned for future versions" and I felt like I could see where there was a sort of miscommunication. If someone said: "Future versions of this product", I think it could be reasonably understood to mean: "any/all future versions" which could mean: "the (next and all subsequent) version"
The most natural meaning to me, and the one that I believe was intended is that they want it in a/some future version. And then I thought it this was simply because languages can vary in how they specify noun definiteness and indefiniteness? For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_nouns_and_adjectives#St...
I get that, and they have every right to handle it the way they see fit. If they don't want to invest into it, that's perfectly fine. It would just have been such a different experience if someone would have said "thanks for the effort, looks great, unfortunately we don't have the resources at this point". Would have been a 20 second investment. Instead they keep whimping people off, and the 100k thing just makes it completely ridiculous. It clearly shows where their priorities are, and where they aren't.
1: https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DocumentServer/commit/3dc18d95...
IMO unsolicited contributions and contributor entitlement (not to be confused with user entitlement) is a major issue in open source. Don't start working on a huge feature unless you've gotten the green light to do so, or prepare to be rejected. In fact, prepare to be rejected even if you've gotten the green light. Doubly so if you can't even write the code without help. It doesn't matter if you're doing work for free; unwanted work just waste both parties' time, and it's emotionally draining on both sides when the work is eventually rejected. Also, if you're just a random guy without a track record of solid contributions to the project, your chances of implementing an important feature "right" is not good. Ramp up your involvement with small features first. Build trust.
Personally, I'm no stranger to huge unsolicited contributions throughout my open source career. PRs that made changes everywhere, made the wrong architectural decisions, included tons of irrelevant commits and sometimes even changed existing coding style just for the hell of it. What should I say to the contributors? Often times it would cost me less time to rewrite the feature than guide them to fix their contributions. Often times it's not even a feature I would include.
A reminder that open source maintainers don't owe you anything, not even time to review your PR. Video conferencing to help you write your unsolicited PR is a huge stretch by any standard.
(As for "promises", it is indeed on the roadmap, under "planned for future versions": https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DocumentServer/blob/19e3a5d/Ro... Projects should totally have their own pace and priorities rather than blindly "listen to the community", and I've seen my own feature requests implemented after being on the roadmap for five years in software I use, so again, nothing inappropriate here.)
The other side of this equation is: if you get forked then expect either that your software will be fragmented, or the form will take over from you.
If the software is under a free license, and you won’t accept contributions, then the corollary to the assertion that you cannot expect your PR to be accepted is: don’t get upset when a competing fork of your project takes away your market share.
https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/166141/how-to-change...
They started in Latvia in 2009 yet it is a fully Russian company.
https://github.com/orgs/ONLYOFFICE/people are all Russian yet they are based in Latvia(Russians nationality is about 25% in Latvia).
https://www.onlyoffice.com/blog/ru/ their blog does not offer Latvian language.
This homogeneity would be normal if they were working toward Russian market but even then you'd expect to see a token Latvian or some other nationality.
Normal 25 person IT company in Latvia working with west would have perhaps 10 Latvians, 8 Russians, an Estonian, a Lithuanian and someone from the west and perhaps someone from east (India or Pakistan) - all speaking English.
Ascensio only job offerings for sales managers (towards Western market no less!) were in Russian (which is borderline illegal in Latvia)
The only rational explanation is that OnlyOffice owners have set a comfortable culture for their workplace and see no need to change it.
Why would we be unhappy with it? Seems like at least some version of it is FOSS (GNU GPL or AGPL on all the repos I'm seeing).
I ain't familiar with it, though. I've also been reasonably happy with LibreOffice, so I haven't been motivated to look all that hard for alternatives.
Try making a table in Excel and pasting it into Powerpoint.
EDIT: In fact there is already a Zotero plugin available [1]
0: https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/sdkjs-plugins
1: https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/plugin-zotero
FYI, it looks like the code is released under the AGPL 3.
The problem with OnlyOffice is non-community-oriented development and the predatory licensing model where they hold all copyrights and dual-license their code AGPL+proprietary, while forbidding others do the same (since they hold the copyrights), therefore putting themselves at the centre of their universe.
Compare that with the healthy community around LibreOffice where nobody holds copyrights for all of it, so the copyleft actually protects all involved parties from unfair competition and makes them cooperate for the common good.
For OnlyOffice, the open source license is just a marketing trick and a source of occasional free patches.
According to the recent discussion [1] it's not all that peachy for sustainable LibreOffice development either.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23793942
> Compare that with the healthy community around LibreOffice where nobody holds copyrights for all of it, so the copyleft actually protects all involved parties from unfair competition and makes them cooperate for the common good.
This is a very good point, and very well said! I agree completely - from activist point of view. It really does benefit users the most.
BUT! It doesn't benefit developers and maintainers at all, which leads to the common problem of "it works for me" attitude. This is an understandable though regrettable situation. To put software to another level it takes lots of additional effort in areas which are usually not fun. Why would someone do it?
LibreOffice is a great case in point. While I use it regularly, it lacks in two important areas:
- 100% compatibility with MS Office
- UI is ugly and in places unintuitive
I can imagine that the first problem is not fun, and the second is difficult to solve with so many people involved. I don't believe LibreOffice will ever solve these two problems. Incentives matter.
> Open source development can't do good user interfaces for the same reason wikipedia can't write a novel with a coherent plot. The limitations of the development model do not allow for this. The old adage "too many cooks spoil the soup" is not a warning about lack of nutrition, it's a warning that aesthetic issues do not survive committees. Peer review does not produce blockbuster movies, hit songs, or masterpiece paintings. It finds scientific facts, not beauty.
From http://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html#selfhost
People who want to make some slides.
And why did you put it in scare quotes as if you’re not even convinced it exists?
https://www.freeoffice.com/en/
Unlike OnlyOffice, it's not open source, but it is an excellent product that I have used for some time now with no adverse results. Works well with HiDPI.
I have a deep respect for the people behind the LibreOffice project, but to me it still feels a lot like its predecessor: StarOffice from Sun Microsystems, a product that I did not like.
I have not tried Caligra Office or Abiword / Gnumeric lately, probably I should.
I'm not against reserving features for a paid version, but spell-checking? The thing that is implemented in all modern browsers and even basic editors like notepad++? The bare-bones markdown editor I use[1] has spell checking. Not shipping a major word processor of any sort without spell checking in 2020 makes me immediately cross it off my list.
[0]: https://www.freeoffice.com/en/freeoffice-comparison
[1]: https://typora.io/
Then switched language to Spanish, typed a mispelled word on that language and again, got a spellcheck error + suggestion.
As you can see, I do not think spellchecking is much of an issue in SoftMaker FreeOffice.
I can see a pattern in being superficial in their writings.
For instance a user in the thread mentioned all background colors can be applied in libreoffice, but in word online some are restricted.
Ux having those restricted colors grayed out by default with a hover note why seems perfect to keep compatibility and show where word online is wonky.
Hope this makes sense, will have to pay or in a better format to the issue tracker tomorrow.
Less is more.
Why is this on the front page ....
Likely because it was mentioned in passing in the most recent Linus Tech Tips video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwkiU6GG-YU&t=273
My CV evolved over the last 20 years as a word doc, and loading it in anything else explodes it into 2x the pages.
Yes, I could redo the whole thing, but other things in life are a higher priority.
I use word 2016 in crossover, which is stable...ish.
I will gladly try this.
Secondly, "better MS office compatibility" is really, really a non-constructive and large comparative. For example, a good post would have been to list exactly what goes wrong, or what are the most annoying bugs.
Most of the time, the developers can use posts like those to pin-point exactly what is wrong and fix it quite swiftly. Because it's not only an open source project that strives for compatibility, but it's also made by benevolent humans who don't necessarily have a very definite document of what should be implemented and how. So telling them "hey guys, this should work like this, can you please fix it" is miles better than just saying "hey, your product sux, onlyoffice is better compat with word, bye".
I'm sorry if this somehow comes out a bit offensive, it is not, it's just that sometimes we tend to forget that those developers won't necessarily have the use cases we do, and hence will never optimize for them if we don't report them, and that just dismissing the whole software in favor of another without citing detailed analysis helps neither.
Not knocking the developers, but it seems to me they have their own compatibility issues. In fact, a fair few of them. Which means that the blog review is... fascinatingly biased and anecdotal and glosses over the fact that any competing software to MS Office will have its own unique list of compatibility bugs.
I usually fix this with libreoffice by installing fonts that are metric-compatible with Microsoft ones.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Metric-compatible_fonts
https://www.libreoffice.org/
“I’m a science writer who uses Linux because it just functions better for me than Windows or macOS and because I’m an open source enthusiast. Given my profession, I have to frequently collaborate with people on other operating systems who almost always use either Microsoft Office or Google Docs.”
“After three years of trying, I can tell you that LibreOffice just doesn’t cut it. Either me or the other person will lose some formatting in the documents at some point. And as a document travels from one computer to another, things quickly become a mess.”