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Comment by nextos | Hacker News Reader

I agree Linux requires some polish, but have you tried e.g. LibreOffice lately? It's very good.

I have a small deployment of Linux machines running GNOME and the typical office suite applications, including LibreOffice. I'm using NixOS to ensure everything runs extremely controlled versions of software. It's rock solid.

Furthermore, the users are really technologically illiterate. And they like the UI. They have no issues.

I think the big problem is usually that people expect a perfect replacement for MS Office. They try to open DOC (not DOCX files) in LibreOffice. And it's not perfect. It can't be perfect, as it's playing a very hard catch up game on ill-defined file formats.

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> I think the big problem is usually that people expect a perfect replacement for MS Office.

Nobody owes it to LibreOffice to use it when a superior alternative exists. DOC support is minutiae - there are certainly people who do use it, but intentionally switching away from the default (DOCX) while Office moans at you about reduced functionality seems like a huge degree of dedication to a file format. Two huge reasons why LibreOffice is currently not good enough for me:

* The UI is functional and tolerable. It's not pleasant to stare at all day. Menus, toolbars and floating windows are fine if you hail from the 90s. Mozilla are a shining example to other OSS projects of what users expect in 2018[1]. Make it work, make it right, make it fast. OSS needs to learn that there is another step: make it beautiful. And they like the UI. Do they love it?

* Advanced integration with Dropbox or what-have-you. Microsoft has Sharepoint. So far as I know, Office is the only thick-client suite to offer collaborative editing on top of file sharing. When you have dozens of users collaborating on a project this stuff is incredibly important. Email is not scalable - your users shouldn't be opening a DOC from an attachment in the first place.

There are 13000 reasons why Lower Saxony is switching away from OSS. Dismissing what the competition offers is dismissing those 13000 reasons and means that a project will never address those reasons.

Good enough is not good enough.

[1]: https://design.firefox.com/photon/welcome.html

If you extrapolate a bit you can see that we can get rid of governments and have private companies run our lives completely.

Public money should be spent on making FOSS better rather than making private companies richer thereby helping them kill FOSS.

FWIW, current releases of LibreOffice 6 can open and edit documents from SharePoint document libraries.

Also, I have not had trouble opening OOXML files (.docx, .xlsx) in LibreOffice.

The main problem with LibreOffice, from my point of view, is that there are many third-party applications that expect MS Office to be installed or use it exclusively for data import/export. For example, Autodesk Inventor can create a bi-directional link to Excel and export the list of parts of a model to Excel; ePlan, too. Our PDM system comes with an Outlook plugin that allows users to upload emails. Our ERP system can export stuff to Excel, but not to LibreOffice. The list goes on and on. For a large number of use cases, LibreOffice is perfectly cromulent as it is. But as long as all those third-party application rely on MS Office, it will remain dominant, regardless of the price or technical merits.

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