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Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

I think the main "drawback" of LibreOffice is that it is not widely used. If you receive a docx document and it formats funny, or vice versa (common on LibreOffice and not entirely their fault), it's on you for using weird software, or penny-pinching on a MS Office license.

If it becomes common, people just accept the minor incompatibility and move on. It will also get better as funds and attention flow to these projects.

As far as I'm concerned, LibreOffice lacks no features I would remotely consider using.

It's like when Windows was the sole mainstream OS, it wasn't an excuse "oh but I'm on Mac and can't run this". Now Macs are mainstream, and Linux is not, it's still in a "weird nerdy" corner. But not so if it just gets more widely used (it's happening, just slowly).

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> If it becomes common, people just accept the minor incompatibility and move on

If LibreOffice becomes more popular people will receive an odt document, MS Office will format it funny and it will be their fault for using weird software.

I think the situation parent writes about is more likely (and more informative). Namely that there are places with two major-enough platforms such that everyone has to accommodate both (e.g. browsers).

>>LibreOffice lacks no features I would remotely consider using.

Yup. I use it all the time just fine, and set the default format to .XLS and .DOC (not the X versions which are bogus MS bastardizations of XML anyway) and I've had no interchange problems.

Over the last decade or so, I occasionally see some Excel feature that might be switch-over-worthy, but then the whole MS setup is so much of a hassle I don't bother — NO I'm not interested in a monthly subscription, NO I'm not interested in online-only or Online-First, HELL NO I'm not interested in a Microsoft Account — I just want a package I can install locally and run when needed.

Then, the next version, LibreOffice has that feature.

So, great move by Schleswig-Holstein and also very strategic - right to repair, right to not be held over a barrel by a monopoly, etc..

Let's hope it catches on.

(And now that I'm writing about this, I realize I haven't sent LibreOffice a donation in too long, so I'm off to do that now...)

> set the default format to .XLS and .DOC (not the X versions which are bogus MS bastardizations of XML anyway)

I don't like the proprietary nature of OOXML formats either, but why are the older formats like .xls and .doc better than them? At least I can unzip a .docx file to extract the media and get the text and formatting in a machine-readable structure, all without the help of an office suite at all.

I mostly find the XLS/DOC formats more compact and they seem a bit more compatible with transferring to Excel vs the X version, but that is just a rough impression, not the result of any explicit testing. I'll give it another look - thx for the tip!

> If you receive a docx document and it formats funny, or vice versa (common on LibreOffice and not entirely their fault), it's on you for using weird software, or penny-pinching on a MS Office license.

But the funny thing is that Libreoffice has better compatibility with documents composed with older versions of Word than newer versions of Office do. When MS Office loads up an old MS Office document badly, people gripe about Microsoft. When Libreoffice loads an old MS Office document badly, people gripe about whoever made the decision to install Libreoffice.

> LibreOffice lacks no features I would remotely consider using

That right there is EXACTLY the problem with LibreOffice. You see no problem with it. Other programmers see no problem with it. Programmers convert their grandmother to using it and their grandmother doesn't even notice. Success! Right? Wrong.

It's missing a lot. Just not the things a programmer would notice.

Here's a simple example:

I have a document with multiple languages in it. Sometimes multiple languages in the same sentence (it's a guidebook for translating between two languages). When I open it in Word, it detects where one language starts and another ends. It provides spell-checking for both languages automatically.

LibreOffice? I had to dig through the config panels to enable this feature, and even then, it was on a global basis. Not per-document. If I type a word in language B into some random document now, but it's really a word in language A with a typo, now LibreOffice will silently accept it. Maddening.

In France I've always seen OpenOffice and then LibreOffice being used in schools & administrations, and it never was an issue

You are right that Microsoft Office, Google Apps, and Libre Office are all fine for 98% of all users' needs.

Microsoft office does more. If I were to produce a book with proper front matter and index, glued together from multiple chapter documents, I would choose Word. But Microsoft Office does not work collaboratively as well as Google Apps, which were born cloud-based. Microsoft Office is laggy and fails completely with large numbers of collaborators (i.e. 20+ simultaneous editors). But these use cases are for 2% of users.

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