It's not dead. I use it. Not that I dev for it though.
2) I did use it on Ubuntu sometime in college (around 2016 for class) and I just didn't like the feel of Libre. OpenOffice still had a lot of feature parity with Excel without buying Excel, so I got that instead.
It's been available for Windows for years. The first option on the drop-down menus says "Windows (64-bit)"[0]. 90% of their 10 million worldwide users in 2011 were on Windows machines[1].
[0]https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download/
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice#Users_and_deployme...
On the download page, just above the "Download" button, there is a dropdown to select the installer. There should be "Windows (32-bit)" and "Windows (64-bit)" there along with the Linux and MacOS installers.
I wouldn't say features are missing, if anything it sounds like Libre is way more fleshed out than OpenOffice. That said, I still prefer the (relatively) legacy UI in Open Calc than the slightly more modern UI in Libre Calc, just a personal preference. It doesn't seem that much more advanced, and after all these years an ODS spreadsheet still looks like a spreadsheet. Other people noted the security posture of Libre though, which is a great point.
I'd also be curious about something: suppose you used LibreOffice for a week or so for working on your personal spreadsheets. What percentage of your work time would you waste either searching for the new location for the old command, or learning the new command that maps to the old one?
I'd love to read a case study where someone has documented this with a UI change in FOSS.
But I'd assume lot of OpenOffice users today are just legacy users who use it just because they're familiar with the brand and that's what they've always used.
1) editing documents I wrote some time ago. There was a time some months ago when LO would warn you when opening an older oOo doc about changes in the format. I saw this with drawings and Impress files. (I need to see if this still happens with latest LO).
2) one of my employers has oOo on their standard desktop image alongside MS Word and all. So I want the same as them for their documents
3) I know the menus and the little UI glitches well in oOo having used it since StarOffice days. LO is (entirely reasonably) refactoring stuff and therefore changing the ways some features work (drawing tools I recollect)
4) gives the impression of running snappier on an ancient laptop that I use. LO does seem to need a full DE (e.g. Gnome/KDE/xfce)
...if oOo life support was switched off, I'd shrug, move all the documents over to LO, and move on I suppose.
Can anyone point to an actual security breach that is traceable to OpenOffice? That would focus minds perhaps.
LibreOffice seems to do just fine for me here without a DE. I wonder if there's something I'm missing that I don't realize?
Perhaps so you can open all of those .docx files that people send to you?
To these people, there are no benefits in upgrading.
(Also, I've spent a lot of time teaching my parents not to open office documents attached to emails, as that has become a popular way for people to spread malware.)
Playing devil's advocate: if Word 97 (or something even older like wordperfect) does all you need, why should you upgrade?
Things are different, of course, when you have to interoperate with other people (in the word processor case, mainly by reading files written by other people); not only do security fixes become more relevant, but also newer versions of the software have greater compatibility (in the word processor case, not only there was a lot of work on libreoffice towards better compatibility with Microsoft document formats, but also AFAIK newer libreoffice versions write by default using a newer version of the OpenDocument formats, so if you have an outdated word processor, you might have difficulty reading files written by other people using these newer versions).
they're the ones I've learned to work with, and since I don't use them professionally, they're still sufficient for my needs.
I don't have to re-learn the UI with every other release, and they all run fine with 1 core and 2 GB of RAM allocated, on any machine
Sounds great actually. Unless I've missed something new, IIRC CS5 is the peak and still unparalleled. Somehow Adobe ruined it.
One of the biggest features of LibreOffice over OpenOffice is compatibility with Microsoft Office files.
OpenOffice can open Microsoft Office files but doesn't support as many features as LibreOffice does.
OpenOffice can't save in the newer Microsoft Office formats (docx, xlsx, etc) but LibreOffice can.
Also, LibreOffice now has a ribbon-like interface. To enable it, click View > User Interface and choose Tabbed.
https://www.cnet.com/culture/george-r-r-martin-writes-with-a...
It depends on your point of view. IIRC, LibreOffice is actually a fork/continuation of the go-oo project (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Go-oo&oldid=10809...), which is older and already existed before Oracle bought Sun.
What happened later is that LibreOffice was rebased on top of the re-licensed Apache OpenOffice, to take advantage of the more compatible licensing. But it had been forked (as go-oo) from OpenOffice much earlier.