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Comment by mumblemumble | Hacker News Reader

The companies I work at are all using either Google Docs or Office 365. The collaboration benefits are pretty immense, and can save people a lot of synchronization and communication effort. Most my colleagues see oldschool desktop document editing software as obsolete and frustrating to work with.

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For Office 365 I totally see how it renders LibreOffice like local monolithic obsolete.

On Google Docs though, it's limited enough to hit some roadblock every now and then. Last time it was a gigantic csv that took forever to render as a spreadsheet. Other times it was formatting problems that made the document unusable. It's rare, but happens enough to warrant an alternative local office suite to deal with the exceptions.

It's just not shipping by default, I don't think they're removing it from their repositories, so you can still install it if you want

I think that's an optimistic read of their short and vague statement. Someone has to do the work of packaging it and if they're stepping back (for both RHEL and Fedora), who will do the work?

The volunteers who maintain thousands of other packages?

The LibreOffice project themselves package up .rpms for their project and distribute them.

Even as casual user who once in a while wanted to open and manipulate csvs in libreoffice I was hitting issues and it even straight died on me couple times. I dropped the attempts to use it after couple days

Yeah. Cloud office tooling has won, at this point. There will always be a handful of (mostly spreadsheet) users who insist on doing things locally, but at this stage that is emphatically a small minority. And of that market, LibreOffice has captured essentially none of it.

If you're collaborating with other people (with some narrow exceptions), the idea of sending around point-in-time snapshots of documents feels horrifying. And, to your point, LibreOffice is from an era when providing a plausible alternative to Microsoft desktop products was a big deal. It really isn't at this point. Mainstream users use cloud-based options and specific power users use Microsoft Office.

> the idea of sending around point-in-time snapshots of documents feels horrifying

The idea that Google has every startup’s term sheet, plans, budgets, is really strange to me. USA can so easily spy on every other country’s data.

Am I the last dinosaur? Are all the other concerns dead?

No, you are not. This is truely strange.

I can understand giving away grocery lists to the world, but not this.

I mean, at Google scale the investors in global capital all know each other and invest in each other’s funds anyway.

And most customer lists are on Salesforce. ADP has everyone's salary data. At the end of the day, the safe thing is to just disconnect all your computers from the internet. But that's not very practical so you decide how much of your company's time and energy you want to devote to reducing potential security exposure while your competitors are just taking advantage of available online services (with some level of security due diligence).

Fortunately you can work on shared cloud documents while still having more features and the faster response of local applications. I often work with local Excel or Powerpoint apps on cloud documents while another colleague is working on the same document. If I need to share the document, I just add someone to the share list. If someone emails me a document to work on I switch it to a cloud document and then share it back to them to try to change their habits of sending out discrete copies of documents.

Cool which one of those is libre?

Exactly. These SaaS solutions are way less (speech) free, with anything you write being a accessible to various powerful entities depending on legal jurisdiction you reside in.

A few years ago, Google Docs restricted access to a family member's documents for 'suspected copyright infringement'. When asked about this, I could not find an infringement, and even if there was one it may have been permitted under the exception to copyright afforded to 'educational establishments' in the 1988 Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act here in Britain (the relative was a teacher).

Thus, another problem is the SaaS providers ignoring the legal jurisdiction you reside in, and restricting technically rights you have legally!

Furthermore, Libre Office is not the slickest software, nor do they listen to their users. For about a decade people have been asking, Wth do you mean, I can't select multiple images in a doc and move them?! The team's response remains, You're not supposed to do it that way, you must first smush all your images down into one, then import and move that. This prescribes a waterfall model of doc creation; they're admitting Writer discourages experimentation and stifles creativity. Just a rotten UX and a rotten attitude. They should get better or get lost.

I would get mad over this stuff 10 years ago but it feels a bit strange to complain about libreoffice`s broken ux in 2023.

People who claim libreoffice can replace office remind me a bit of people who claim gimp can replace photoshop, or inkscape could replace illustrator. Laughable

inkscape is good though. I've never used illustrator, so I have no idea if it could replace it, but it's not fair to lump inkscape in with gimp

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