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Comment by ryaniscool | Hacker News Reader

I'm no Microsoft fanboy but LibreOffice is hideous and the compatibility has not kept up even after the MS Office formats moved to xml. Also, most of my interactions with Office Documents nowadays are through the online tools. I don't even have to install a binary on my computer anymore.

These enterprises should invest a fraction of what they used to spend on Microsoft Office into a development effort to modernize LibreOffice. Last time I tried to use it, it seemed like it was on life support in relation to Microsoft Office.

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While LibreOffice has a ton of things that should be improved, I hope that it will never suffer a "modernization" that will make it more similar to the recent versions of MS Office.

In my opinion, MS Office has been improved steadily during the decade ending in 2003/2004, then it has stagnated, then it has been degraded continuously until today.

The UI of LibreOffice is ugly, but it is easy to do with it what you need. The UI of MS Office has become extremely convoluted for any of the more sophisticated tasks.

What I mean by modernization is to have online viewers/editors so I don't have to install a virus delivery vehicle on my computer to create and edit a document. It's not specific to LibreOffice but I'm very hesitant to install binaries on a computer nowadays. Especially ones that open user-created files. These present attack vectors for bad actors.

Also, the content creation is stuck in 2004 as well. It works perfectly fine if you're creating an IEEE-formatted research paper or similar wall of text but if you're creating something you want to give to customers or to look professional and nice, it's literally the last program you'd want to use to accomplish that. There's no nice way to say it.

Hideous? It looks just like any word processor to me. A dated look, yes, but I wouldn't call it ugly.

What needs modernizing precisely? IMHO the UI for most things in libreoffice's word processor is simple and easily found. Can't say the same of word these days.

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