Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway123x2 | Hacker News Reader

MS Office was so much more functional and nicer to use than libreoffice when I last checked.

That is possible.

But apparently, people in Germany are looking for software based on attributes that reach beyond the elemental metrics like "nice to use" or "supports corporate integration".

They might care more about the ability to audit the software's behavior and to easily make changes where necessary. They might also like to contribute patches back to the original LibreOffice community because they know that they themselves will benefit from more people reviewing their work and making it better as a result.

Does a German state have the ability to audit software or contribute patches?

And what would the patches be for? What use-cases do they have that are so unique that they need custom software?

Devil's advocate here. Recently my employer (large corporate) went all in on (as it is now called) Microsoft 365: Teams, SharePoint online, OneDrive etc.

While I have no illusions about Microsoft's business model and motives, the truth is that "it just works" and makes collaboration very easy.

Create a team in Teams, add a document which everyone can edit (if needed at the same time), click a button, share it with someone outside the team, have a meeting with them, click a button, save the meeting video to OneDrive, click one more button and you're collaborating on a whiteboard. And all this works fully synchronized on my phone too.

As far as I can see (from their terrible website) LibreOffice does not offer this at all. Maybe Germany, known for being "digitally outdated" by 5-10 years, will suffer no consequences from that and their basic workflow is still "type document - print it - sign it - fax it". But it will be a sad day for my productivity when I am forced to switch to LibreOffice.

Consider OnlyOffice or the version offered by Collabora with on-line features. I really don't know how good these options are but they exist.

we're using this for document management in a large European research project. It sort of works but has its quirks. The UI is not really smooth, and the whole system could be more stable. I once lost a day's work because of a bug in the writer component. That was quite discouraging.

> the truth is that "it just works" and makes collaboration very easy.

My org does that too for different reasons for years now. It just works is a lie. We also have a lot Apple devices for all our external employees. That doesn't 'just' work as well.

Sadly I have to deal with SharePoint integration which a lot of MS services are based on. Digitally outdated has a complete new dimensions here, even if you add half baked services like Flow on top of it. There are far more modern alternatives than what MS brings to the table, there are countless alternatives that are better to control and easier to adapt.

You could use teams on Linux and while the office integration is nice, it isn't essential at all. This "collaboration" in the MS cloud is a nightmare to archive or access and some of the APIs are in a beta phase. We killed our fax a long time ago...

The big question is: Is the aim to have the best possible software integration? Or is it about freedom from MS and contributing to open source?

If it's software integration, MS is hard to beat. It comes at the price of total dependence.

If it's about freedom then going full open source is great. But the cost in efficiency is huge, since the OSS alternatives will never be as streamlined as MS's stuff. not having to spend money on licenses is great but a lot of extra footwork will be required to get the job done.

And Germany is unable to find and pay programmers to make Libre Office better ?

Salaries are part of the problem; there is a very rigid salary structure in Germany's civil service. The salary band in which programmers would fall is OK but not overly attractive. There is very little headroom to pay talented developers a salary that could compete with what they get elsewhere.

This. At home I use Ubuntu I tried Libreoffice few months ago, for anything non trivial it just sucks compared to Office, years behind. I don't know what kind of documents this German state creates, maybe for them Libreoffice feature are good enough. And I'm just talking about document creation feature, whole Office 365 collaboration ecosystem is huge and on Windows PCs it works just fine, at least most of the time.

I really would like them to succed, we really need a real MS Office competitor, but it's very hard, MS can be a powerful opponent[0][1]

[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-i... [1] https://www.neowin.net/news/munich-germany-realizes-that-dep...

What did your check consist of? I’m asking because I know people who’ve been using both Word and LibreOffice for many years to write huge amounts of technical documentation and their experience is that LibreOffice is much more reliable with longer and more complex documents. When a certain document size or complexity is reached, Word apparently starts to behave erratically and even crashes occasionally. They’d prefer LibreOffice any day but some customers require Word.

The thing that costs 7$/user/month(home version)+119$ for Windows 10 Home is better than the thing that is free, Gee, I wonder why is that? Everyone should use the thing that costs a lot of money for it to just make sense.

Over 15 years you would be paying 1260$(paid 7 per month) for the office. 119$ for windows.

If I can afford to pay for the better experience and I want it badly enough, I will. That's how markets work.

I didn't check the latest LO version but I agree. LO shines on import export but the UI lags, the functionalities are limited. Even macros are weird compared to VBA which is sad.

FOSS community needs to gather up on this.

And what's worse, lot of functionaly that appears to exist turns out to be broken when you actually try to use it. Basic things like pivot tables, conditional formatting or automatic data import at regular intervals (from a file) are ridiculously broken in LO, and have been so for many years. Feels as if no-one's actually using it beyond a simple document viewer.

10$ the most used button is export as pdf

Reply on news.ycombinator.com