Why is LibreOffice still so bad?
It is interesting how LibreOffice has grown, yet no matter how much attention it gets (even professional contributions such as from Collabora) it remains buggy, jittery, and with an ugly and non-intuitive UI.
Many bugs are over 10 years old, and it doesn't seem to have any substantial progress in terms of stability, ease of use, or usability. LO development feels more of a 'let's experiment with adding this new feature', rather than a serious product development.
I wish there was a new open-source office suite in development, especially when languages like Rush are now available.
20 comments
[ 8.0 ms ] story [ 77.4 ms ] threadWe need a way to finance open source development. We need enough money for thousands of programmers . Fix that then we'll get all the fixes the software needs.
You have no idea the amount of effort, dedication or self-motivation required to produce software, therefore the discussion can never go past your personal beef with what it cannot do, versus what you feel it should be able to do.
You're bringing nothing to the table that is new or innovative to the discussion of quality in open source software, only a bash on a project that you feel should be better than it is, based on your non-existent experience of software development.
Discussing open source software isn't forbidden, but trashing the efforts of others when you're not offering to do something about it, with either effort or finance from yourself, I feel, is.
You want to see something better? Start writing it today, come back in six months and then report on how you found the experience, let's see how far you got. Perhaps you might be a little less critical of people's free, hell, even salaried, effort and time.
There's definitely something about walking a mile in another man's shoes for you to do here.
He's assumed that the _person_ or _people_ involved with implementing any of the hundreds of features in this software set out to deliberately do it wrong or to a poor standard.
He's assumed that writing software at any level is easy and happens without compromises. Spoiler: there are always compromises, and most of the time, they're between a rock and a hard place.
Rather than put effort into fixing or attempting to correct, even on an advisory level (filing a bug report perhaps?), he's bashing the software- but its _my_ responsibility to educate him that there's another way?
He's not bringing anything to the table that's new. He's not pushing the discussion forward on how we can make software better.
I wonder how the narrative changes if he posted that he fixed just one tiny bug, or improved the app's navigation- and was able to remark that it was painful and provided a kernel of an idea for how we can improve it? Or that it was easy and he's now working all of his spare time to improving the project further?
Maybe he should start writing the 'new open-source office suite' and let us know how we could have done x, y, z features differently with his new found vast experience in writing software. Or maybe spend a million dollars and see how much software development that buys- 5, 10, 20 developers for a single year, what would this new office suite be like?
You don't get to bash for free, without someone bashing you back.
Right now, I use 'OnlyOffice' an open-source office mannagement. It works really great (better than libreoffice, in my opinion). It has no particular bugs which will hamper production.
The reason for that behavior is probably very deep flaws in the layout code, and no single person can hold that algorithm in head, so this is never going to be fixed unless somebody goes and thinks very deeply, and works on it for months or a year exclusively.
The real issue I suspect is - who needs to create "documents" any more? I use Calc without any issues to do spreadsheet stuff, but have never needed to share one with anyone else. Writer, not for years. People often work on things they want to use, so getting commitment might be getting more difficult.
My question is, assuming you are not a business, what do you use LibreOffice for?
Um, lots of people? MS-Office is still heavily used.
The bigger issue is who needs to create "documents" AND prefers open source software BUT not command line utilities.
As a student, I write school papers regularly. I also use LibreOffice to write my Resume/CV when I apply for a job.
I can't say it's the most elegant software I've used but I don't have these problems you're referring to. Microsoft Office has a certain amount of polish but has its own bugs, and I always felt that the UX was implemented in a kind of inconsistent way. I can't say I have a preference for one suite versus another.
I agree with you that I wish there were additional office suites, but that's only because I wish there was more competition in the space in general. I'm not sure any (either?) of the major offerings I really love.
LO Writer as a word processor feels good enough to me. LO Writer as an editor for Word docx files feels unpolished, but I don't work with docx anyway. I think this applies to all the LO software when working with corresponding Office files.
Just like me, perhaps the developers of LO feel it's good enough? Perhaps their default OS and environment provide a smooth experience? Perhaps they don't work with Office files much?
[0]: https://www.howtogeek.com/788591/how-to-make-libreoffice-loo...
I don't consider LibreOffice to be bad. Quite the opposite.