While true and a comment I support, it is worth noting that offline versions of Microsoft Office are and have been just fine, including the latest version of 2024 just updated this week.
The offline app licensing system is explicitly designed to only require refreshing the status regularly, each successful refresh will keep the state for six months even it it fail to refresh during that period. After the six months there comes the one month grace period (basically reminding the user to get online or contact their IT) where there's a warning banner but it still work. After the grace period it will disable saving.
The super-complicated app that fail when an online service fail in Microsoft's offering is Notepad, at least in one botched update where failed Copilot apparently crash Notepad entirely instead of letting it run without Copilot.
It's not even really particularly true, at least the implied criticism. My work uses M365 and Microsoft Office worked fine, both online and offline versions. Email stopped working, but AFAIK Open Office doesn't make an open source email server.
If LibreOffice were good enough already, it would already be popular. It's the same with GIMP. On paper it's a Photoshop alternative, but we've all struggled with it. These projects need to take the same route as Blender did. Originally it was a clunky open source alternative, but it went through a complete UI transformation and now blows the competition away.
A major barrier to the improvement of giant FOSS replacements like GIMP and LibreOffice is that the people who develop it and the people who use it have become very used to all of its quirks. It's extremely hard to identify the rough edges in a UI without an external perspective.
Blender is a little different because every 3D modeling program is odd in its own way, and the new UI was close enough that it was easy to learn after the transition (I do still use the legacy keybinds though).
But Blender is very niche hobby software. To "succeed" (if we define success as capturing a significant user share from closed source spyware), Libre and GIMP need to offer workflows that are close to what the average non-coder technical person expects. Maybe that isn't valued by the teams, or maybe they don't have enough resources to make it happen, but the end result is a reputation of jank.
I dislike vibe coded clones because of concerns about the engineering quality. But the reason they're making waves when traditional FOSS hasn't is that the UX is leagues ahead.
I don't think this is entirely accurate at this point. It has pretty wide adoption in the educational space, and a number of well-known studios have adopted Blender into their workflows.
The Blender development fund wouldn't be topped-up to the tune of $3 million/year if it were purely funded by hobbyists.
> […] the people who use it have become very used to all of its quirks.
Oh definitely. The way some people seem oblivious to all of Word's faults and weirdness― …Oh! You weren't talking about Microsoft Word!
Software having some quirks is fine. Most people would be fine with LibreOffice if they were taught the rudiments of word processing (that; not using Word, but actual word processing) and never came into a situation where they had to use Word or Google Docs.
The difference between all those tools is that LibreOffice will still do its thing in the future. Just as it has done for a long while, while Word will have forced some new subscription model on you and force-fed you some AI-integration, and Google will have done some similar googley shit.
I use blender a bit. I still cant figure out the hotkeys. Its the most unpleasant to use software i know of. If the alternatives werent outrageously expensive, I wouldnt touch it
After 5 years of KDE, I now got Gnome on my office laptop since 3 days. I'm cursing quite a lot on it. All my hotkeys are failing, everything is in the wrong place, and the whole UI feels wrong and broken.
Now partially it is because Gnome is oversimplified, but a big thing is just that I have to unlearn a lot of habits. So I won't switch to KDE for at least a month, as I need to get out of my comfort zone.
On Mac, all key mappings are still wired for PC. In the Save As dialog, Alt-Shit-Left to select the last word of the filename doesn't work, the Home key doesn't work, the Cmd+C doesn't copy, nothing works like on Mac.
Basically the keyboard is all wired weirdly in LibreOffice for Mac.
In my opinion, the user interface of modern MS Office is absolutely horrible.
I have used a lot of old MS Office versions, and until 20 years ago I thought that its user interface was very good.
Then there was a gap of about a decade when I did not need MS Office at work and I also had no reason to update my personally purchased MS Office Professional (which I was running on Linux, using Crossover, where it was more performant and more stable than on Windows; Crossover is a paid derivative of Wine, which ensures a better support for MS Office and for other professional applications).
After that gap, when I encountered again MS Office, I was shocked by how awkward its UI had become meanwhile.
Today I prefer very much the UI of LibreOffice, which is similar to the old MS UI, instead of the modern MS Office UI.
There are a lot of details that I dislike in the LibreOffice UI, but even so, I consider the MS Office UI much worse.
Because there was a time in the past when I was a heavy MS Office user, when using the modern MS Office I am aware about a great number of commands that exist, but I am no longer able to find them in the MS Office menus.
In the old MS Office, those commands were grouped in a way that was logical for me, so it was easy to find them even when I did not know where they were, because I had not used them before. But in the modern interface many commands are not where I would expect them to be, so there have been many cases when I had to do a random search through all menus, to locate them after a long time.
For years I used a custom plugin that restored the regular file menus in lieu of the ribbon. I still can't find anything in the ribbon in excel. Is it in the home tab, formatting, or data? Guess I'll look in each. Every time. Something about it that after so many years can't internalize it.
When was the last time you have used LibreOffice? The newer versions are heavily inspired by the office workflow. Maybe the design is a bit boring but it's not bad.
Note that LibreOffice now has an option to enable a ribbon interface rather than a menu interface. I think it asked which one I wanted last time I installed it. I really don't like ribbon interfaces, but I guess people do actually want them so it's good that they got one too.
As an occasional user of GIMP, yes it does not quite have the final level of UX polish.
For example, moving a text layer (with 'pick layer') requires the cursor to be over the painted part of the glyphs to move that layer, if you miss then the background is moved instead. All that is required is a picking region around the glyphs and it would be fine.
Right, so I tend to have to 'move the selected layers' when moving text, but then I'm bouncing around the layers in the layers tab instead of picking whats in front of me.
Meanwhile the 'align and distribute' tool does the right thing when picking text layers - so the solution is there, just not everywhere!
I consider LibreOffice Writer superior to old MS Word versions, and old MS Word versions superior to new MS Word versions.
In my opinion, the quality of MS Word peaked some time in the early 2000s.
So today, given the choice between LibreOffice and MS Word, I would always choose LibreOffice, even if MS Word were free, and despite the fact that LibreOffice Writer has some annoying bugs that have not been fixed for many years, but I find easier to work around those bugs than to cope with the user interface of modern MS Word.
On the other hand, I agree that MS Excel is clearly superior to LibreOffice Calc. Nonetheless, there already are decades since I switched to LibreOffice Calc and I did not need the extra features of MS Excel. For things beyond the capabilities of Calc, I use a real database, though that would probably not be the best solution for a typical office worker.
What I read from your comment is that youre proud of being stuck in the past. For whatever it's worth (to you, the viability of libreoffice) you're wrong that a multi decade old ui is better than today's.
And the whole "I'm proud of being a curmudgeon " is exactly the problem being identified by others in this thread. It's like you weren't even reading it.
Computers are tools used to achieve end results. The end results desired from a document editor are the same today as they were 30 years ago, and 70 years ago.
That's incredibly uncharitable interpretation of what the words in the comment say.
Consider this: Word Processing, and Word Processor UX was a solved problem from his perspective 20 years ago (he is far from alone in this opinion). Quite honestly, I have no idea what Word today is doing for me that the Word I was using 2 decades ago wasn't already doing.
It isn't curmudgeonly to say that a product has reached maturity, and does not need changes. This happens a lot outside of the computing realm; a screwdriver from 50 years ago is basically the same as a modern one. A mechanic using his grandfather's screwdriver isn't "proud of being a curmudgeon" they are just using a perfectly good tool that doesn't need updates.
Might be, but there is probably a reason other desktop ui features got much wider adoption than that.
I understand millions of people are able to use ms word. I just can't work with the UI. It even makes me angry and aggressive. And that's not an easy thing to achieve.
That's interesting, I thought the Ribbon UI was one of the only improvements I've noticed over the years of using ms office. Luckily LibreOffice asks on first startup which UI you prefer.
It's fairly likely that your (reasonable) complaint is that you don't know where the buttons are anymore. I edit dozens of somewhat complex documents and don't really spend much time thinking about the interface.
A big thing that came with the roll out of OOXML, along with the controversy, is that all of the weird serialization corruption bugs went away.
Yes, the problem is that I no longer know where the buttons are.
But years ago, when using old versions of MS Word, I also did not know where the buttons were and I also did not bother to read a manual or help.
Yet I could find easily any unknown menu or button. And nothing has changed with me. I still start using many programs that I have never used before, and in those I can easily find where the unknown buttons are. That is why I believe that the MS Word UI has become much less intuitive than in its old versions.
Moreover, I do not understand why they had to change the UI, because nothing that I have seen in the new versions appears to be an improvement, but just a wild shuffle of the locations of various settings and commands.
Audacity has gone through this transformation. Tantacrul (designer, MS Paint 3D, and musician) made a video about how he directed the rewrite of the UI for version 4:
The main problem is that if you get sent any slightly complicated word document, it doesn’t display properly. Equally if you create something using it and have to send it to someone who uses Word, then it doesn’t work properly for them. For non-work things, I find Google Docs and spreadsheets do everything I need and I don’t have MS Office on my personal machine. YMMV.
While Gimp has some UI issues, as someone who learned Gimp first, I don't "struggle" with it. It's very effective, and while you can call it a distant 2nd to Photoshop, anything else would be a distant 3rd to Gimp.
I don't do photoediting any more, but Gimp + plugins was great. In those days, it wasn't unusual for Gimp to get some new capability before Photoshop (e.g. Liquid Rescale, various denoising algorithms). The academics would often demonstrate their new algorithm using Gimp plugins.
I must admit it was strange to get used to it. If you need to create professional looking documents, it's necessary to adjust line height, be able to work with tables etc. That being said, once you need to look up your favorite functions with Google.
Also LibreOffice (former OpenOffice) had PDF export a decade before Word. This seems to be a ridiculously essential feature. Last but not least, it's way more comprehensive than Google Docs.
Please don't equate #installed with quality. If LibreOffice came bundled with the only OS sold by most vendors, and was effectively required by government and corporates, then LibreOffice would have the most installs.
One of the main use cases I hear for "AI" is people using it to get around Word or Excel. How many times to you hear "I couldn't get it to do xx, so asked Chat" (were xx is some basic formatting etc function)? If we need "AI" to use basic office tools, those tools are seriously damaged.
Any tech lead who has sat at the table for hours, while the Microsoft Sales Rep lies to senior management, knows that LibreOffice has been good enough for at least the past ten years.
> On paper it's a Photoshop alternative, but we've all struggled with it.
Speak for yourself. I struggle with PS, not only because of their horrible payment model, und missing Linux support but because it kept changing every time I need to use it extensively. Didn't ever have this issues with Gimp which I happily use for decades now.
Same with libreoffice. Zero issues using that for all my office needs since basically as long as I can.
I think tcp/ip over smoke signals would be more efficient than ms teams. However management loves teams (mostly because they have assistants who deal with that crap for them).
This is why I stopped using Arch, just wait until you update and try to reboot and it doesn’t work, then you have to update again via mounting your disk through a liveusb installer.
It's also clearly not been optimized (UI) for Mac, it sticks out like a sore thumb. And some things, like settings is like 10fps when moving the window.
I'd love to like LibreOffice, but they need some Mac UI/UX people if they ever want mainstream Mac users.
- There are a lot of icons of various colors that clutter the screen for no reason. Most of these icons are too obscure; I need to hover them to understand what they do
I don't think MS Word is more intuitive. It's a trade-off between functionality and usability.
As a Linux user I (have to) use both Google Docs and LibreOffice.
Aside from collaborative editing, Google Docs is like an online version of Windows WordPad (not Notepad). It supports only a subset of MS Word but just enough for daily use. It refuses to open docs with advanced formatting -- my most recent example is a legal pleading.
LibreOffice supports more MS Word features, but is less polished and buggy. I occasionally find certain operations break the layout and a Ctrl-Z doesn't restore it.
I'm a developer, and I use computers in a way that gives normal people (including developers) the heebeejeebies. However my use of office stuff is relatively rare and extraordinarily basic - I would say pretty close to the majority of users' usage. There are no problems with libreoffice for that kind of usage. In some respects for people not hunting pointless features it's usability is better.
I have some legal and administrative issues at the moment that require me to share office docs fairly regularly, as well as editing PDFs for filling in forms. I have had no collaboration problems at all with either of these activities exclusively using libreoffice. At one point I tried out the online versions (google docs / office 365 online) and it was a disaster.
Is Office compatibility a solved problem? Haven't used LibreOffice or OpenOffice for years but I was always met with slightly different formatting, incompatible Office quirks et cetera. I know they have their own document format which works fine but the biggest problem is (was?) interoperability with majority of the rest of the professional (and academic) world on regular Office installations.
Software like this still under-estimates the strength of network effects and inertia. With 3 examples:
1) We have seen this effect with Mastodon. Even when Twitter / X was down, hundreds of millions of people waited for it to go back online and never stuck on Mastodon when they struggled to migrate, or even could not choose an instance.
2) GitHub, no matter how unreliable it is and will surely go down next week, tens of millions of developers continue to use it rather than actually self-hosting.
3) The exact same thing with Claude or ChatGPT going down several times a month. Users continue to use both of them instead of local models that don't phone home.
With the Microsoft outage, hundreds of millions of users will continue to use Outlook and the suite of Microsoft software including Teams; because all their emails and work is on there.
So they just cannot just migrate away from it to LibreOffice which they see that as a downgrade. It is far harder than it sounds due to inertia and most open source projects still do not get that in 2026.
My locally installed ms office 2019 also works 365d/y.
My softmaker office suite also.
Anyway, I do admit I mostly use libreoffice nowadays, except for 1) communication with customers, and 2) a few excels libre can't handle.
I still have to find a good alternative for (local installed) outlook, I'm trying out thunderbird, but I'm not sure it would be able to replace outlook. I still have to try whether it can handle a 50gb imap inbox, and besides lacks a few essential features.
May I ask what features you consider essential are lacking in Thunderbird? I'm not a heavy e-mail user (for now, hopefully ever), and Thunderbird seems very feature-packed to me.
The only thing I'm afraid about is Thunderbird wiping one's inbox [^1] [^2] (both by the same user with discussion underneath)
That reminds me that my yearly donation[0] towards LibreOffice's stewards, The Document Foundation, is coming up in December. It's a wholesome tradition where you wire them the amount of EUR/US$/XYZ that Microsoft demands for a year of a personal Office 365(-ish, eh?) subscription[1] as a tex-deductible donation that will make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. I hereby invite you to join in! :)
[0]: https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/
[1]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/buy/compare-all-microsoft-365-products (DO NOT REDEEM)
You should contact LibreOffice, explain what you're doing (and for how long you've been doing it), and propose for them to do it as an "official" thing, to have the same subscriptions as 365 but as recurring donations instead. It could be a cool donation campaign for them!
Word and word-like editors are all too complex. Personally I would love some libre quip-like or markdown based renderer with better image and table support
I support this in spirit, but in all honesty I never use it. I don’t use word either though. Nvim and on Windows Notepad. Micro is pretty good as well.
If I had to use a word processor daily at work I would just run into the woods and never come back.
As a fellow word processor escapee, I sort of figured word processors were just something you outgrew. I liked the markup language/renderer workflow so much better, No weird internal state that can't see fighting with you for control of the document. Something like word perfect's show codes is a good start for exposing that internal state, but you still can't edit it. So a markup language and an explicit transform step into the typeset document is the final form. But obviously that does not happen for every one and people just get really good at manipulating the hidden state that so infuriated me and start to love the infernal things.
I don't really like spreadsheets for mostly the same reason, Their "big bag of cells" data model really started to bother me. I found that relational databases have a data model that agrees with me and have largely replaced my spreadsheets with them. The user interface sort of suffers in comparison to something like excel, but at least my rows stick together. (better at whole data set manipulation, worse at single cell ad-hoc edits)
You know why they call them word processors right... Well have you ever seen what a food processor does to food.
Got any good recommendations for what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) markdown editors? I’d love something where I can easily preview my document while writing. I haven’t looked super hard, but the last time I looked a little, I didn’t see any obvious answer.
I haven't used in a while, but all my experiences with it in past were it "works". Any non-trivial work with csv's and it was crashing regularly... Hope it's better now
I have an opposite experience with regard to CSV handling in MS Office vs LO, libreoffice correctly splits very wide CSVs and gives many options for import, while MS Office gives up quickly and renders a whole line per cell
Yes, but. I haven't used Microsoft groupware, but my impression is that like Google there's a bunch of multi-player value.
An office where everyone uses local software, that has no idea there is a network share, feels like the eternal conundrum today: it's potentially a Linux on the desktop win. But in the meantime most people would rather not need to manage individual desktops. Cross-machine multi-player experiences are increasingly table-stakes. It doesn't have to be the cloud per se, but it's been multiple decades now of open source competing for the desktop, and it's really been struggling to skate to where the puck's going. It hasn't been on desktop in a while.
A sidebar here, but I think this is what makes atproto so compelling to me. Posts like "A Social Filesystem" talk to how atproto is common glue, and it takes a little imagining, but it's absolutely a substrate that could be used for multiplayer office (via internal-only atproto networks, or upcoming ATproto Spaces). https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46665839
> Based in Riga, Latvia, OnlyOffice owner Ascensio System SIA was a subsidiary of Russian-based New Communication Technologies[34] (not to be confused with the company The New Cloud Technologies, which develops an unrelated office suite named MyOffice (Russian: МойОфис)[35]). Due to EU economic sanctions targeting Russia, European organizations that used the commercial version of OnlyOffice were prohibited from doing so.[0]
I'm on LibreOffice 26.8 with the new ui, it is absolutely equivalent with zero geopolitical risk coming from the Atlantic or the Urals.
And if you need cloud integration there is UK based Colabora and now also LibreOffice Online.
194 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 60.2 ms ] threadThe super-complicated app that fail when an online service fail in Microsoft's offering is Notepad, at least in one botched update where failed Copilot apparently crash Notepad entirely instead of letting it run without Copilot.
How do you draw the line? There is at least one LibreOffice developer who also contributed to Dovecot.
With Microsoft, especially in the past few years, there is no such thing as "offline version"
In reality the office work will be replaced not by libre office, but something like claude work. It's an obvious direction.
Blender is a little different because every 3D modeling program is odd in its own way, and the new UI was close enough that it was easy to learn after the transition (I do still use the legacy keybinds though).
But Blender is very niche hobby software. To "succeed" (if we define success as capturing a significant user share from closed source spyware), Libre and GIMP need to offer workflows that are close to what the average non-coder technical person expects. Maybe that isn't valued by the teams, or maybe they don't have enough resources to make it happen, but the end result is a reputation of jank.
I dislike vibe coded clones because of concerns about the engineering quality. But the reason they're making waves when traditional FOSS hasn't is that the UX is leagues ahead.
I don't think this is entirely accurate at this point. It has pretty wide adoption in the educational space, and a number of well-known studios have adopted Blender into their workflows.
The Blender development fund wouldn't be topped-up to the tune of $3 million/year if it were purely funded by hobbyists.
Oh definitely. The way some people seem oblivious to all of Word's faults and weirdness― …Oh! You weren't talking about Microsoft Word!
Software having some quirks is fine. Most people would be fine with LibreOffice if they were taught the rudiments of word processing (that; not using Word, but actual word processing) and never came into a situation where they had to use Word or Google Docs.
The difference between all those tools is that LibreOffice will still do its thing in the future. Just as it has done for a long while, while Word will have forced some new subscription model on you and force-fed you some AI-integration, and Google will have done some similar googley shit.
Now partially it is because Gnome is oversimplified, but a big thing is just that I have to unlearn a lot of habits. So I won't switch to KDE for at least a month, as I need to get out of my comfort zone.
Most people don't use MS office by choice though so "goodness" isn't a particular relevant metric.
Not true. There's inertia and network effects in play that often prevent better products from succeeding against established ones.
Basically the keyboard is all wired weirdly in LibreOffice for Mac.
In my opinion, the user interface of modern MS Office is absolutely horrible.
I have used a lot of old MS Office versions, and until 20 years ago I thought that its user interface was very good.
Then there was a gap of about a decade when I did not need MS Office at work and I also had no reason to update my personally purchased MS Office Professional (which I was running on Linux, using Crossover, where it was more performant and more stable than on Windows; Crossover is a paid derivative of Wine, which ensures a better support for MS Office and for other professional applications).
After that gap, when I encountered again MS Office, I was shocked by how awkward its UI had become meanwhile.
Today I prefer very much the UI of LibreOffice, which is similar to the old MS UI, instead of the modern MS Office UI.
There are a lot of details that I dislike in the LibreOffice UI, but even so, I consider the MS Office UI much worse.
Because there was a time in the past when I was a heavy MS Office user, when using the modern MS Office I am aware about a great number of commands that exist, but I am no longer able to find them in the MS Office menus.
In the old MS Office, those commands were grouped in a way that was logical for me, so it was easy to find them even when I did not know where they were, because I had not used them before. But in the modern interface many commands are not where I would expect them to be, so there have been many cases when I had to do a random search through all menus, to locate them after a long time.
Libre has such a simple and clear UI just as we all got used to decades ago.
... further... MS Office's look is, IMO, hideous now. So. YMMV whilst LibreOffice's just look "old", which is ... a perennial problem.
For example, moving a text layer (with 'pick layer') requires the cursor to be over the painted part of the glyphs to move that layer, if you miss then the background is moved instead. All that is required is a picking region around the glyphs and it would be fine.
Meanwhile the 'align and distribute' tool does the right thing when picking text layers - so the solution is there, just not everywhere!
In my opinion, the quality of MS Word peaked some time in the early 2000s.
So today, given the choice between LibreOffice and MS Word, I would always choose LibreOffice, even if MS Word were free, and despite the fact that LibreOffice Writer has some annoying bugs that have not been fixed for many years, but I find easier to work around those bugs than to cope with the user interface of modern MS Word.
On the other hand, I agree that MS Excel is clearly superior to LibreOffice Calc. Nonetheless, there already are decades since I switched to LibreOffice Calc and I did not need the extra features of MS Excel. For things beyond the capabilities of Calc, I use a real database, though that would probably not be the best solution for a typical office worker.
And the whole "I'm proud of being a curmudgeon " is exactly the problem being identified by others in this thread. It's like you weren't even reading it.
Consider this: Word Processing, and Word Processor UX was a solved problem from his perspective 20 years ago (he is far from alone in this opinion). Quite honestly, I have no idea what Word today is doing for me that the Word I was using 2 decades ago wasn't already doing.
It isn't curmudgeonly to say that a product has reached maturity, and does not need changes. This happens a lot outside of the computing realm; a screwdriver from 50 years ago is basically the same as a modern one. A mechanic using his grandfather's screwdriver isn't "proud of being a curmudgeon" they are just using a perfectly good tool that doesn't need updates.
So perhaps they are not wrong and newer doesn't always mean better.
I understand millions of people are able to use ms word. I just can't work with the UI. It even makes me angry and aggressive. And that's not an easy thing to achieve.
Would you agree that a "new" TV that requires an internet connection is worse than a ten year old TV that just works?
Would you agree that decades of UI research are discarded by supposedly "new" and "modern" computer interfaces?
A big thing that came with the roll out of OOXML, along with the controversy, is that all of the weird serialization corruption bugs went away.
My mileage varies.
Edit: perhaps I’m conflating serialization with synchronization bugs or something.
But years ago, when using old versions of MS Word, I also did not know where the buttons were and I also did not bother to read a manual or help.
Yet I could find easily any unknown menu or button. And nothing has changed with me. I still start using many programs that I have never used before, and in those I can easily find where the unknown buttons are. That is why I believe that the MS Word UI has become much less intuitive than in its old versions.
Moreover, I do not understand why they had to change the UI, because nothing that I have seen in the new versions appears to be an improvement, but just a wild shuffle of the locations of various settings and commands.
https://youtu.be/QYM3TWf_G38
The problem is the lack of integration into a wider ecosystem, that's what MS provides.
I don't do photoediting any more, but Gimp + plugins was great. In those days, it wasn't unusual for Gimp to get some new capability before Photoshop (e.g. Liquid Rescale, various denoising algorithms). The academics would often demonstrate their new algorithm using Gimp plugins.
Also LibreOffice (former OpenOffice) had PDF export a decade before Word. This seems to be a ridiculously essential feature. Last but not least, it's way more comprehensive than Google Docs.
Speak for yourself. I struggle with PS, not only because of their horrible payment model, und missing Linux support but because it kept changing every time I need to use it extensively. Didn't ever have this issues with Gimp which I happily use for decades now.
Same with libreoffice. Zero issues using that for all my office needs since basically as long as I can.
I'd love to like LibreOffice, but they need some Mac UI/UX people if they ever want mainstream Mac users.
2. The yellow help information appears directly behind cursor which makes it hard to see.
3. In print popup, "print current page" option is not available, we have to provide page numbers instead every time.
Just a few observations.
Fixed for 27.2: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=173496
- There are a lot of icons of various colors that clutter the screen for no reason. Most of these icons are too obscure; I need to hover them to understand what they do
As a Linux user I (have to) use both Google Docs and LibreOffice.
Aside from collaborative editing, Google Docs is like an online version of Windows WordPad (not Notepad). It supports only a subset of MS Word but just enough for daily use. It refuses to open docs with advanced formatting -- my most recent example is a legal pleading.
LibreOffice supports more MS Word features, but is less polished and buggy. I occasionally find certain operations break the layout and a Ctrl-Z doesn't restore it.
I have some legal and administrative issues at the moment that require me to share office docs fairly regularly, as well as editing PDFs for filling in forms. I have had no collaboration problems at all with either of these activities exclusively using libreoffice. At one point I tried out the online versions (google docs / office 365 online) and it was a disaster.
Not 100% compatible, but its become rather usable, for most use cases.
Definitely not as problematic as 10 years ago.
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Feature_Comparison:_Libr...
1) We have seen this effect with Mastodon. Even when Twitter / X was down, hundreds of millions of people waited for it to go back online and never stuck on Mastodon when they struggled to migrate, or even could not choose an instance.
2) GitHub, no matter how unreliable it is and will surely go down next week, tens of millions of developers continue to use it rather than actually self-hosting.
3) The exact same thing with Claude or ChatGPT going down several times a month. Users continue to use both of them instead of local models that don't phone home.
With the Microsoft outage, hundreds of millions of users will continue to use Outlook and the suite of Microsoft software including Teams; because all their emails and work is on there.
So they just cannot just migrate away from it to LibreOffice which they see that as a downgrade. It is far harder than it sounds due to inertia and most open source projects still do not get that in 2026.
My softmaker office suite also.
Anyway, I do admit I mostly use libreoffice nowadays, except for 1) communication with customers, and 2) a few excels libre can't handle.
I still have to find a good alternative for (local installed) outlook, I'm trying out thunderbird, but I'm not sure it would be able to replace outlook. I still have to try whether it can handle a 50gb imap inbox, and besides lacks a few essential features.
The only thing I'm afraid about is Thunderbird wiping one's inbox [^1] [^2] (both by the same user with discussion underneath)
[^1]: 2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18807723#18808520
[^2]: 2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44492682#44519053
Does that mean you're asking for the donation to be in Lean?
This is the year where you can have all your data private, you processor is good enough.
Software is not about or pretty the UI is, it's a tool.
If I had to use a word processor daily at work I would just run into the woods and never come back.
I don't really like spreadsheets for mostly the same reason, Their "big bag of cells" data model really started to bother me. I found that relational databases have a data model that agrees with me and have largely replaced my spreadsheets with them. The user interface sort of suffers in comparison to something like excel, but at least my rows stick together. (better at whole data set manipulation, worse at single cell ad-hoc edits)
You know why they call them word processors right... Well have you ever seen what a food processor does to food.
I wonder if that has to do with anything..
An office where everyone uses local software, that has no idea there is a network share, feels like the eternal conundrum today: it's potentially a Linux on the desktop win. But in the meantime most people would rather not need to manage individual desktops. Cross-machine multi-player experiences are increasingly table-stakes. It doesn't have to be the cloud per se, but it's been multiple decades now of open source competing for the desktop, and it's really been struggling to skate to where the puck's going. It hasn't been on desktop in a while.
A sidebar here, but I think this is what makes atproto so compelling to me. Posts like "A Social Filesystem" talk to how atproto is common glue, and it takes a little imagining, but it's absolutely a substrate that could be used for multiplayer office (via internal-only atproto networks, or upcoming ATproto Spaces). https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46665839
But I also use it. It's the best office suite for Linux.
I'm on LibreOffice 26.8 with the new ui, it is absolutely equivalent with zero geopolitical risk coming from the Atlantic or the Urals.
And if you need cloud integration there is UK based Colabora and now also LibreOffice Online.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnlyOffice