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Comment by CharlesW | Hacker News Reader

> If I look at the horrible experience, which is Google docs or MS Office 365, especially their word processing parts, they lack behind soooo much compared to a tool like Libreoffice. You cannot even properly use styles…

As a reasonably serious user of Office 365 and someone who's desperately wanted to like LibreOffice, I'm not sure what you could mean by "properly use styles". I'm guessing this is specifically a critique of the Word web app, but the native Office apps also do "online, live collaboration", and it all generally just works. Even Apple's overlooked suite feels more mature (and offers a dramatically better user experience) than LibreOffice.

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LibreOffice is great, but it's not comparable to commercial desktop word processors.

However, it's far, far better than any browser-based one I've used.

Depends on what you want to do... I find LibreOffice fine because if I want to create documents that are actually complex I'm going to reach for InDesign or LaTeX. I don't find something like Microsoft Word really much better for anything I'd want to do with it than LibreOffice.

This is what I've arrived at too.

If I just want to make notes, I'll use Org or Markdown in plain text. These can also be converted to HTML for web.

If I want to print something with lots of text, nothing beats LaTeX.

If I am making something design intensive, I'll use Scribus or some other desktop publishing software.

I guess regular people think of word processors as the Swiss army knife here: does everything, not particularly well, but worth only having to learn one software?

Libre office is pretty much the only game in town on Linux. Well excepting the web based office suites. I really like it, especially for csv files which it works great for.

I tried Gnumeric for a bit. When sorting, the formats stay in the cells they were, but the content moves.

That said, AbiWord is a serious lightweight contender to Writer.

FreeOffice works great on Linux. Same as on Windows and the Mac.

(https://www.freeoffice.com/en/)

There is also OnlyOffice: https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE which I have not personally tried yet.

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