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Comment by sega_sai | Hacker News Reader

I have been using Libreoffice/OpenOffice continuously pretty much for last 20 years (mostly Impress/presentation part for teaching/presentations). And the number of bugs, crashes, issues with video etc occasionally gets very annoying. I was hoping over the years things would improve, but I don't quite see that unfortunately. If I could get something to replace LibreOffice that is not online and works on Linux I would pay for it.

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The other parts aren't much better either. Calc is unbearably slow on large spreadsheets.

It's always been a janky and stuttery experience and the massive improvements in computer performance (CPU, SSD etc) have never managed to bring it up to par, you can see how much faster Word loads even on a simple document compared to Writer. It's been that way since before it became open source: Star Office made you look at its splash screen for a decent while back in the day.

There has been a lot of work on performance in Calc. Do you have a concrete example of such slowness nowadays, or has it been a while since you last opened a large spreadsheet?

Also longtime user of OO/LO just because that's what's available on Linux, even though it's clunky. I've been particularly disappointed with things like typesetting control in LO Writer, printing management, and PDF handling. When I'm doing something where the details really matter, I still usually resort to commercial tools on Windows.

Serious question: Why don't you use LaTeX to prepare the presentations?

A few things I could think of: the templates for presentations are less varied, less diverse, could look repetitive. With Office, you can make the most crazy designs.

That's it. LaTeX generates PDF presentations that work everywhere and look very nice, they even have navigation buttons on the corner.

I wonder if we could teach ChatGPT to create LaTeX presentation designs.

I use LaTeX to write papers, so I am comfortable enough with it, but I tried beamer several times, and it just doesn't fit my personal flow of how I write presentations/lectures. I want to manually move things around, add figures. I don't won't to do all the LaTeX voodoo for that. Also, although I know know how to add movies to beamer, it's a PITA, I'd like to just be able to insert them.

Try out SoftMaker Office or WPS Office.

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