Comment by YouWhy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by YouWhy | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

There are really two, almost entirely separate, points there - one is about missing interpretability of LibreOffice, and the other is about the author's inability to install Microsoft Office on Linux.

I'd like to articulate a case why supporting the the author's use cases is likely uneconomical.

With respect to the LibreOffice interoperability with Microsoft Office: the author works in publishing, which requires almost pixel-perfect equivalence between how a document is displayed between them and their collaborators. Faithfully reproducing almost 40 years of evolution in the layout engine (some of which co-evolution with the Windows OS and the font system) necessitates a development program of mind-boggling proportions. It is absolutely no surprise to me that no entity, either commercial or open source can finance such an endeavor. (Even Microsoft does not exhibit 100% interop between the native Office and the cloud Office 365)

A similar argument applies to being able to install Office on Linux, with the added nuance that the major driving force behind Wine etc are game distributors, whereas Office compatibility is not a major priority, especially given the VM and Office 365 alternatives.

I agree with your point about interop on the level of file formats. We are talking decades of undocumented cruft at this point in the Office file formats - the MS implementations are so complex in a random and haphazard way that it's questionable whether they could ever be fully reverse engineered.

Running Office on Linux, on the other hand: I think the issue here is simply a lack of vision. Getting to where we are with Proton and Linux gaming today required Gabe Newell as an exceptionally gutsy and ambitious lunatic billionaire to just say, ok, we could spend what it takes and go the last mile here, and it happened. I'm quite certain that a similarly dedicated effort (actually a much smaller one) could get Office running perfectly on Linux, and that would be a huge win for anyone who was ambitious enough to try and claw the lucrative enterprise desktop market away from Microsoft. There's just no one out there yet who's been wealthy and crazy enough to go for this one.

The average person thinks all kinds of stuff is impossible when it's not, another great example is how everyone thought Gabe Weinberg had no chance of competing with Google, fast forward to today and DuckDuckGo makes $100M/yr and is probably going to benefit immensely when the govt's anti-trust remedies against Google kick in, no matter what they end up being. The world is Gabe's oyster and he's just a guy who had balls bigger than everyone else's, found a good angle and stuck with it.

> Faithfully reproducing almost 40 years of evolution in the layout engine (some of which co-evolution with the Windows OS and the font system) necessitates a development program of mind-boggling proportions.

I wonder what copyright would say about a machine learning approach attempting to exactly duplicate MS Office layouts ...

> I'd like to articulate a case why supporting the the author's use cases is likely uneconomical

Does that apply to desktop linux too?

> I'd like to articulate a case why supporting the the author's use cases is likely uneconomical.

You describe the use case as publishing, but really it’s interacting with others in a professional capacity. It’s much broader than just publishing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com