LibreOffice 7.3
blog.documentfoundation.org
blog.documentfoundation.org
But as a user who uses it completely independently of MS Office, just for my documents, the peace of mind I have knowing I am using a powerful multiplatform open source software which won't betray me is priceless.
I know my documents are safe and I can move between OSes at my will. This kind of freedom is essential for me and I am grateful for that
icons still blurry on macOS retina display. Chronic bug unsolved since aeons
Also due to one-process for all architecture, if one document crashes, it crashes all other documents with it.
I'm not sure why these sorts of things turn into flamewars so often.
LO needs more general QA testing and more dev time invested towards macOS the neglected OS. All this needs to be financed and things are not so easy finding solutions for this decade old problem.
And TBH the different UIs aren't really that big of a deal, they're just different arrangements of action buttons and menus, that is only a tiny fraction of the engineering effort that you'd need even for the word processor part and it isn't like they change their UI all the time.
I keep reading people saying it's stable for them, but I've was using it already when it was called OOo, before we had docx support, before docx even existed.
And it always has been this buggy.
I donate to the project, I report bugs, I keep advising people to use it.
But still, either I'm incredibly unlucky, or people are just ignoring all the crashes and became blind to them.
Which is a phenomenon I'm seeing a lot in the FOSS world: power users just don't see the bugs anymore because they work around them to easily and effortlessly, almost automatically. It doesn't help getting the software to a better state, nor does it inspire confidence to the new comers we oversell stability to.
So really, really, like the last 10 times you used LO, are you sure there was no problem at all?
I became lazy in reporting bugs because it takes so much time.
I do have a big difference of stability depending of the OS and app though. Windows LO is more stable than Linux LO, and Draw is more stable than Calc, which is more stable than Writer.
The document recovery has saved me in all of those cases.
But even without that, it's more about your workflow being turned sub optimal that hurts.
When I open VSCode, Inkscape or Thunderbird, I don't have to think about loosing my data. That makes things smoother :)
That's why I'm still using LO and not MSO, despite the fact it's now more stable.
On Chocolatey that's `libreoffice-still`.
In that case the crashes are probably caused by bugs that are difficult to reproduce on the developer computers.
I have been using LibreOffice daily for many years, since almost immediately after it forked from OpenOffice. It continues to have various annoying behaviors, which I consider bugs (however less than those that I consider bugs in MS Office), but it never crashes on any of my computers.
However, I compile LibreOffice from source, on a Gentoo Linux.
The fact that LibreOffice never crashes in this particular configuration, does not give much information about how it might behave on Fedora or Ubuntu, because LibreOffice uses a very large number of external libraries and the crashes could depend on their versions.
Besides the dependence on the Linux distribution, there might be a dependence on the available memory. I do not have any computer with less than 32 GB RAM. Maybe the crashes are possible only on computers with less installed memory.
I am pretty sure that we do not use the same typefaces, as I do not use any of the typefaces that are distributed as default in Linux, but I use some commercial typefaces, which I have purchased separately.
I believe that the only way for such elusive bugs to be solved is that whoever experiences the crashes should attempt to create a reproducible crash and file a bug report.
no problems with 7.3 so far
I have been using OpenOffice or LibreOffice for two decades now, on Windows, MacOS, and Linux, and I don't think I've had a single crash or freeze. Ever.
Some financial models, but not often. I am also a massive Excel fan, and do not aim to replace it.
Writing simple documentation and letters with TOC and macros in header footer.
This is one thing I really like about LO. People familiar with older MS Office can be comfortable in it, but it can also be changed for people more familiar with or preferring the "ribbon" UI.
As for the unintuitive UI, it is a complex product that is designed to meet a multitude of needs. In that respect, it is not all that different from Microsoft Office. (If anything, I find it to be slightly more intuitive than Microsoft Office since the means of achieving some things in Microsoft's product is downright quirky.)
It really is amazing. The best trick in Writer is to use the "Styles" sidebar and apply document-wide styles to the document like you would in CSS. This makes layout in large documents a breeze.
If you don't like the UI, there's "View > User Interface..." where you get to choose between 7 different UI layouts.
It would just be easier to start from scratch with simpler goals (i.e. not an MS Office competitor) rather than re-engineer an extremely complicated codebase.
I've been using Linux since 2005. Back then I used to use AbiWord, which was really excellent. Unfortunately, it's more or less dead now.
These days where possible I use markdown. When I need more, I'd rather use Google Docs (if on Linux) or Microsoft Office (if on my work Mac).
Of course having so many different UI variants is also added complexity...
I have watched developers of the project discuss what they are working on and seen their various presentations on things they've improved over the years. Some of the flaws cause all sorts of performance issues that have recently been fixed. It will get better and better with each passing year so long as they continue to receive funding.
LO is one of the best opensource projects in my opinion.
It is unfortunate that FOSS graphic design software (outside of blender) is no where near my opinionated standards. Just imagine if the Affinity designer / publisher software was on linux or became opensourced due to some legal issue. What a world that would be.
It's a behemoth, no doubt, and I'm glad it's around, but man is it clunky. For years it had pretty bad rendering on high DPI screens, the icons don't really match modern OSs (yeah that's nitpicky I know), and good luck theming it because any theming it supports has proven to me to be very inconsistent. While I wouldn't call LibreOffice slow, it's not as snappy as it should be.
I kind of wish someone would blow it up and start over while keeping the one great thing about LibreOffice... the 90's style hierarchical UI navigation as opposed to everything being buttons and ribbon bars.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
First, there's no such thing as something you should "never" do, especially when it comes to code. Our problems are so abstract that few if any tools should be off-limits.
Second, the author leaves out any examples of where rewrites succeeded. Windows NT was effectively a rewrite and is the grandfather of every version of Windows that came after Windows ME. Game engines and websites are rewritten all the time to varying degrees of success. OBS was a full rewrite and they're killing it. Slack did a rewrite and, whether you like them or not, they've been very successful.
Some of what he says makes no sense IMO, like:
> [...] when you start from scratch there is absolutely no reason to believe that you are going to do a better job than you did the first time.
Perhaps there's no reason to believe that you will certainly do a better job, but surely much of the time there are lessons to be learned even if the old team is entirely gone. When I'm brought on to new projects, I can pretty quickly tell what's dysfunctional, why that is, and what parts can at least benefit from serious cleanup.
He goes on:
> [...] you probably don’t even have the same programming team that worked on version one, so you don’t actually have “more experience”. You’re just going to make most of the old mistakes again, and introduce some new problems that weren’t in the original version.
What the author is doing here is making the same logical fallacy that he attempted to point out in the opposite position, except he's actually making it here. He's assuming that the team rewriting a hypothetical codebase are going to make most of the same old mistakes again. While that's definitely possible, is it really so certain? Can no one learn lessons from code regardless of whether they themselves wrote it?
A full rewrite was a bad idea for Netscape at a time where the market around the web was brand new and moving ridiculously fast. It's the circumstances that lead to the Netscape rewrite being a disaster. Not all software is subject to those issues, commercial or not, and not all software teams are the same.
LO can barely keep the lights on and has well capitalized competitors at all sides. A ground up rewrite is not gonna happen unless someone with deep pockets shows up. No doubt any new product will be created by youngsters that despise 90s pragmatism, local data model, and lack of telemetry. Meaning it won’t be a product for me.
> No doubt any new product will be created by youngsters that despise 90s pragmatism, local data model, and lack of telemetry. Meaning it won’t be a product for me.
*sigh* Yes.
Although LibreOffice has one thing going for it in that regard... which is that it seems less likely that youngsters would even be interested in creating a word processor to replace the legacy LibreOffice. Many of them may not even know what LibreOffice is. Unless the word "blockchain" became attached to it (don't get any ideas, kids!), word processors are boring. If a rewrite ever happens, maybe there's at least a slight chance the engineers will be some coding veterans with wizard beards.
I haven't tried it yet with the new version but in the past it's always failed miserably. (To be clear, the same thing happens with Word in exporting to other formats too.)
I just wish conversions with equations was more seamless in general.
Event: hang Duration: 1095.52s Duration Sampled: 1.00s (process was unresponsive for 1095 seconds before sampling) Steps: 10 (100ms sampling interval)
Hardware model: MacBookPro16,2 Active cpus: 8 Boot args: chunklist-security-epoch=0 -chunklist-no-rev2-dev chunklist-security-epoch=0 -chunklist-no-rev2-dev
Time Awake Since Boot: 1800s Time Since Wake: 1700s
And it still gets confused by footnotes from .docx files. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Though, I would love to see some (minor) UI refresh.
Every time I am forced to use MS Word, on the other hand, I lose the will to live.
Never had a crash on Windows or Linux yet.
https://www.reddit.com/r/libreoffice/comments/aoqmvr/libreof...
In short, you can probably ignore it and continue.
It can do some basic editing, but is far less complete compared to MS Office.
Anyways, its PDF editor is great.
Warning loading document SomeDocumentFinalVFUpdatedActuallyFinal.xlsx: The data could not be loaded completely because the maximum number of columns per sheet was exceeded.At some point in your life a crash is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, so you might as well pay Microsoft and Adobe for the peace of mind.
* The language for a document is not intuitive (it is under Tools> Options > Language Settings> Language, then tick "for current document only")
Classical desktop office suites became quite convulted decades ago.