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Comment by AnIdiotOnTheNet | Hacker News Reader

Just the other day there was a thread comparing start times for LibreOffice, where 3 seconds was considered good. Three seconds on modern hardware is a damned eternity. How much does LibreOffice do that Word 5.0 doesn't, really? Yet the latter would probably start inside an emulator faster than the former does natively.

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LibreOffice and its predecessors (OpenOffice and StarOffice) have always been considered bloated for as long as I could remember, which is nearly 20 years. While I'm very grateful for having a free, open source office suite, I've always found OpenOffice and LibreOffice to be rather clunky no matter what platform I'm using. This is especially true on macOS where a lot of the UI elements of LibreOffice don't fit in with regular Mac applications, although thankfully things have progressed from the days of having to run the even-slower NeoOffice on Mac OS X Tiger, which used the Java runtime (I remember it taking up to 15 seconds to load on my 1.83GHz Core Duo MacBook back in 2006). It might have to do with how LibreOffice decided to handle its UI elements. Writing cross-platform software is hard, and it often results in making compromises that affect conformance with specific platform UI guidelines and performance (consider how controversial Electron apps are with some users, for example).

But even with LibreOffice's clunkiness, I still use it at home. While I am partial to Apple Keynote for presentations, I prefer LibreOffice Writer and LibreOffice Calc to Apple Pages and Apple Numbers, respectively. And whenever I'm on a Linux or FreeBSD machine, LibreOffice is available for me to use, while iWork and Microsoft Office are not options.

> How much does LibreOffice do that Word 5.0 doesn't, really?

It has to support and parse a billion more formats. Including the fact that MS word file formats are in some cases literal dumps from word's memory (iirc).

Rendering things properly is also a difficult problem to solve. Look how difficult it has been for much of the 21st century, to get a webpage uniform across all major browsers, and then realised that you not only have to display the same across all major browsers, but also be 30 years backwards compatible.

On a modern OS (like anything in the last 25-odd years that has demand paging) that code isn't even loaded into RAM before it's used in many situations.

While that is an additional load if you deal with those formats, the root of things like startup and runtime bloat lie elsewhere.

Well one should also consider, that a really large amount of code and complexity is that current applications properly do i18n.

> support and parse a billion more formats

> Rendering things properly

These should not affect startup performance though.

When do you want to incur the overhead? Do you want a user to wait once for 40 seconds, or wait 10 extra seconds for something to load/save because you're loading shit on the fly. It's a question of trade-offs.

Mostly loading fonts and things.

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