OnlyOffice is an alternative to LibreOffice
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personal.jatan.space
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 is this on the front page ....
Likely because it was mentioned in passing in the most recent Linus Tech Tips video.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
EDIT: In fact there is already a Zotero plugin available [1]
Does Microsoft still have 95% market share?
Put your wood behind 1 arrow.
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/35197/meaning-of...
I can see a pattern in being superficial in their writings.
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.
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?
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.
“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.”
https://www.reddit.com/r/NextCloud/comments/fktqug/onlyoffic...
Collabora is the way to go if you plan on using it with Nextcloud.
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.
Try making a table in Excel and pasting it into Powerpoint.
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.
> 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.
- 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.
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.