If you have to spend any money at all, you might as well spend the money that MS Office costs. Or else, the main competitor is not MS Office but Google Docs.
I've never really tried to use anything other than MS Office, because for my whole career I've been interacting with people on Windows using standard Windows/MSFT tools, and so any inconsistency / glitch in document exchange would automatically be my fault if I insisted on using LO or Apple's tools or whatever.
Plus, honest go God, Word and Excel are really, really good at what they do. Word got their more slowly, but once Excel ate Lotus 1-2-3, there really never was another competitor there, and Excel just kept getting more and more powerful. It's a wonderful tool.
(Now, there ARE people who learn Excel but refuse to go further -- into a true database, or into a proper business intelligent /reporting tool, or whatever -- and end up creating their own really janky versions of these things within Excel with macros and insane formulas hidden out in AA:5234 or whtaever; that's a problem for sure. But it's not so much an Excel problem as it is a problem with the lack of an obvious next-step ramp for those users.)
This is something of a general issue that was essentially created by the success of MS Office. With "everyone" using MS Office or something quite similar, there really wasn't a huge market or interest in a different program that was just an incremental step up.
There are exceptions but, for the most part, people tried to push MS Office to do things it wasn't really designed to do because the next step was jumping to some complex and expensive program from Adobe or whoever.
Since Power Query was first included by default in 2016, I've introduced tens of regular Excel users. Because there's no way to work cell by agonizing cell, there's a mental tension for a few minutes then usually the concept of working with fields and sets clicks into place so well you can practically hear it. Even if they never use PQ again, they often change how they use spreadsheets for the better. If you're really lucky they don't just start using PQ, they find the advanced editor and start doing some basic fiddling around. While it's fair to criticize M [0] as a niche language that only exists in a tiny corner of one company's data modeling features, it's also what finally motivated me to learn functional programming. That accessible step by step ramp from introduction to functional language data modeling in a common office tool is an underrated juggernaut of a feature.
How long is that career? Over my working life StarOffice/OpenOffice/OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice have been far more compatible (for relatively basic documents) with other versions of MSWord than MSWord has, I don't really have experience of cross-compatibility from the last 5 years or so though.
And no, what you say absolutely has not been my experience. Any rich formatting tends to get lost or munged, and support for stylesheets / templates between Office and non-Office platforms was woefully lacking.
If you're alone, sure, the free or Free option might be a good choice. But your time has value, so if you're collaborating with other people using true Office, just use Office. You'll be happier.
If MS made a Linux version I'd probably get that.
LibreOffice is at its best if you make the docs and edit them just in LibreOffice. It's great at making structured docs. Calc is pretty good too. The PowerPoint equivalent is the weakest of the bunch, crashing frequently.
However in the biz world you end up sharing docs and sheets with MS office users and that is where things start to go sideways. Complicated MS docs are not rendered well. Excel sheets are generally Ok. PowerPoint docs don't round trip at all well so I've given up even trying!
Or making a Linux store of essentially an apt server where everything has a pricetag. It shows up in your repository after you purchase it and then can update it like anything else... This isn't new ground these days
There's lots of ways to do commercial software with the existing infrastructure and I don't think the modern Microsoft cares as much as long as they are selling.
What about the web based Office 365? It should run fine on Linux, and clearly paid closed-source software isn't an issue for you if you would be willing to pay for traditional Microsoft Office.
> However in the biz world you end up sharing docs and sheets with MS office users and that is where things start to go sideways.
Office 365 should work swimmingly for this use case.
Subscription plans are stupid.
Office 365 is a continually updated and enhanced product. They won't provide those updates and enhancements to you forever because your £100 won't pay for them.
What you are asking for is their old downloaded/shrink-wrapped Classic Office product offering, which you can still get by paying a f themixed sum ($145 I think).
But even in the old days, your £100 bought you a single program with very few updates if any. If you wanted new features or even security updates (when this became a thing), you needed to purchase a new license, for another £100.
What if you don't want the new features or security updates? Well, perhaps it sucks, but the world of software is a far more complicated than it used to be and both the feature competition and security threats are steep, so no software vendor can afford to sit on and continually support an old version. Unchanging software isn't a product that becomes an antique like a 1959 Chevy. Rather it loses value over time as the world changes around it and it becomes less relevant.
Eventually, they will stop updating your purchased software, and if you want to have new features and security protections, you will need to pay again. In the long run, that cost will converge with that of a subscription.
This is why some people like open source software like Libreoffice as an alternative model, but as the OP highlights, it still needs an economic model to incentivize the enhancement of the software, and it would appear that the primary motivation of many users of the product is to not pay for an office software suite, not the higher ideal of a shared community software development model.
I can afford it, but if I had to pay £7.99 x 6 = £47.94 for every hour of productivity I extract from a piece of software, I'd go bankrupt very quickly. That's why I called subscription plans stupid: it's unreasonably expensive for the amateur (like me) slice of the market.
And being such a small time user, I don't care about the super new features of Office $CURRENT_YEAR. If I could buy Office for Linux 2020 for 100 pounds, I would, and it would be enough for me for the next decade, unless I'll move out of software engineering and go work as a lawyer or something.
Why would you pay for 6 months of subscription for every hour you use it? If it's just an hour of use, you just pay for 1 month, so 7.99. Is there a 6 month minimum?
> If I could buy Office for Linux 2020 for 100 pounds, I would, and it would be enough for me for the next decade,
I get that that would be a great deal for you, but why would MS want to support your £100 Office for Linux purchase with security and feature updates for 10 years? Why even develop and release that product? It's not like they lack for people who will pay their Office 365 subscription fee. It would make as little sense for them to do that as it would for you to sign up for that subscription.
So still much cheaper than MS :-)