The biggest blocker to LibreOffice adoption? LibreOffice (2023)

There are really two, almost entirely separate, points there - one is about missing interpretability of LibreOffice, and the other is about the author's inability to install Microsoft Office on Linux.

I'd like to articulate a case why supporting the the author's use cases is likely uneconomical.

With respect to the LibreOffice interoperability with Microsoft Office: the author works in publishing, which requires almost pixel-perfect equivalence between how a document is displayed between them and their collaborators. Faithfully reproducing almost 40 years of evolution in the layout engine (some of which co-evolution with the Windows OS and the font system) necessitates a development program of mind-boggling proportions. It is absolutely no surprise to me that no entity, either commercial or open source can finance such an endeavor. (Even Microsoft does not exhibit 100% interop between the native Office and the cloud Office 365)

A similar argument applies to being able to install Office on Linux, with the added nuance that the major driving force behind Wine etc are game distributors, whereas Office compatibility is not a major priority, especially given the VM and Office 365 alternatives.

> With a free price tag, it could easily do that. But, it first needs to provide the required functionality, and today, it stubbornly refused to that, for ideological reasons.

Very confused by the article, even after re-reading it. The author keeps bringing up ideology throughout the article, but is there any arguments or evidence given that this is a factor? The simplest explanation to me is that OOXML is a de-facto proprietary format, and implementing full compatibility with it is simply a large technical undertaking that LibreOffice doesn't have the resources to effectively achieve right now. They even hint at that themselves: "From what I've been able to decipher, no non-Microsoft Office program implements the full specification and follows it to the letter."

Lots of things that just don't smell right here. First of all, every experience I've had trying to get GDocs to play ball with DOCX has led to the same misery that comes with LibreOffice. It works fine until you use an unsupported font, or tables, or precise image layouts, etc etc etc.

DOCX is a proprietary format. Perfect support is categorically impossible. A best-effort attempt is the best we'll ever get, and IME LibreOffice tries a lot harder than other office suites do.

Also, for what it's worth... you know what GDocs and Word won't open? A document written in WordStar on a TRS-80 in 1983. You know what will open that document? LibreOffice. LibreOffice checks all the boxes for my spreadsheet/document writing needs, and it has also been an irreplacable tool in my data archival efforts.

In this modern age of .md and similar files why not try for "blue water sailing" and instead create an office suite which specifically plays to only open standards?

A word processor which supports the same style options as Google Docs and used pandoc to import/export would be as much as most users need.

That said, I'd really like to see an office suite put together out of the various opensource tools which try to approach documents/graphics in new and striking ways:

- LyX --- a "What You See Is What You Mean" document processor, it can offer quite professional capabilities (when I was doing STEM composition, the book which came in as LaTeX exported from LyX was the cleanest and most straight-forward manuscript I ever worked on)

- PySpread --- (or maybe Flexisheet if someone can get it to a usable state) Way more than most folks need, this Pythonic spreadsheet where every cell can be either a Python program or the output of a Python program could revolutionize what folks do w/ spreadsheets and data

- Jupyter Notebooks --- almost a de facto standard, getting wider adoption would be a good thing

- ipe --- https://ipe.otfried.org/ --- this, or TikzEdit or maybe xasy for Asymptote would be more drawing tool than most users would ever want, and able to make anything anyone really needs

Microsoft really doesn't want anyone to reliably copy their formats. Their standard is purposefully complicated and convoluted, it was almost rejected by ISO for this reason and it took heavy lobbying before it passed (I know of this personally as the ISO vote went through national ISO bodies).

I've worked with the Java implementation for writing Office files, the Apache POI. The internal package names for these classes are "hssf", "hwpf" and so on. It's not very obvious why until you Google it and, well, "hwpf" stands for "horrible word processor format", "hssf" is "horrible spreadsheet format" and so on. Implementing these things is often difficult for good reason, and sometimes for not so good reasons, but this is the first time I've encountered developers expressing such direct hostility towards what they were trying to implement.

One of the biggest blockers is the stubbornness of Apache Foundation that fails to admit that OpenOffice is effectively dead and simply redirect to the LibreOffice site, along with the announcement that OpenOffice is deprecated.

I dont know.

I am a "heavy" calc and writer user. I use them daily in my office job.

I dont need much macros (the ones I created for excel do with for calc) so it works.

I do get formatting issues with files every often but with next release, its usually fixed.

I have been using of before it was libreoffice so I know.

Yes, it does crash sometimes but that is getting less and less obvious now.

I encourage you to give it a spin. Its not half as bad as it sounds

The biggest blocker to LibreOffice adoption is that the general purpose office suite is dying a slow death.

When you think about it, unless you’re working at a very small business or on home stuff, most things you do with it should live elsewhere.

If you’re writing up some documentation for a business process, that should live in a system designed for that purpose where documents can be linked together and integrate with other systems. Examples include Confluence or Notion.

If you’re using Calc/Excel to handle some accounting or some other kind of quantitative organization, there’s probably a specialized system that you should be using, or just using a CRUD application.

If you’re doing HR stuff like performance reviews you need a system that can enforce tight read permissions and enforce a workflow.

The list goes on and on. The general business office suite only exists to catch general purpose processes that fall through the cracks where a better solution doesn’t exist, and every day that goes by eliminates another one of those use cases.

The second biggest blocker is that LibreOffice isn’t in your browser. It’s a slow-installing slow-loading clunky old desktop application.

The third biggest blocker to LibreOffice adoption is the dogshit ancient-looking UI. It looks nothing like a native application on any platform which constantly reminds you you’re using the knockoff of the Real McCoy.

And the final hurdle is that it has a dorky name.

> Dedoimedo writes his book in LibreOffice, but then must use Microsoft Office for when he wants to talk to the publishers.

Are these publishers using antiquated versions of MS Office from before it added ODF support?

I agree a big blocker to LO adoption is LO, but not for the reasons mentioned here. It's true that for many purposes it's hard to get around MS Office simply because people specifically want it and will accept no alternatives.

But aside from that, LO is full of bugs and missing functionality. I use Impress regularly and I constantly encounter awkwardness and pain. There is no sure-fire way to set fonts for an entire document. Things are distributed across styles and master slides and those don't seem to cover all cases. Audio or video clips inserted into slides often don't play correctly, with various glitches or sound cutting out early.

I agree it would be nice to have better import/export with MS formats, but I'd settle for a LibreOffice that provided a bug-free core of functionality, even if that was somewhat smaller than the big proprietary tools.

The big point that the article is trying to make is bookended by these quotes: "... there's a standard, things ought to be simple. So you could, theoretically and perhaps even practically, use non-Microsoft software to get the job done!". "... it[LibreOffice] stubbornly refused to that, for ideological reasons."

This feels at odds with my experience of the LibreOffice community and maintainers in general, and also appears to misunderstand the detail of the OOXML standard. I think the blockers to full pixel-level replication of Office documents have more to do with the sheer complexity of the formats involved and the obscure way some of the features are described, which AFAIK often involves just saying "do this the way Word does it" instead of describing the behaviour in a completely implementation agnostic way. As a Mac user, I am very familiar with the minor differences in rendering between Mac and Windows version of Office 365. Most people will know there are differences in rendering between the web versions and the desktop versions, too. And these implementations were written by the same organisation with people who presumably had access not only to the specification but also the actual source code and libraries that were used for the "primary" Windows implementation.

For me to agree with this article's premise, I'd need to see an example of even one implementation of OOXML support that meets the author's standards.

I’m not sure what this guys point is. He first says that he can’t stand on ideology, he Needs to Het Things Done. Then he says LO needs to implement OOXML fully.

Which is cute, because not even Microsoft implement OOXML fully.

LO is an incremental development model. Every point release increases compatibility. Case in point: EMF+ files had massive gaps. A guy called Bartovs has now implemented a huge chunk of functionality now.

Now we have implemented Smart Art. Floating tables. You name it, it gets improved every point release.

But what I don’t see is him writing quality bug reports. Fit to start somewhere.

I'm very sympathetic to the article although I dont know that it's correct in every technical respect. One would hope that LO on a standard, popular distro like Ubuntu or Mint should just work, and look polished and professional, but it doesn't, at all: the fonts are janky, the UI has weird artifacts, etc. I suppose this is what you get when the renderer and the font engine and the OS and the app arent all from the same place.

Then when you layer on the problems with Office file compatibility, it becomes unwise to use it. As for the n=1 anecdotes that LO is fine for them, great, but years in corporate has left me with great awe and respect for the myriad ways people use Word. It really is insanely powerful. I think only LaTeX beats it. As for Excel, nothing comes remotely close.

I dont mind being the only LO/Linux user in the office. I do mind, very much, that I might risk my job because LO decided to chew up a colleague's Office format file when I opened it. You never want to be that kind of outlier.

I will say that it's maybe not entirely LO's fault. I have a Macbook and a PC, and 365 on Mac is also strangely janky and ugly, whereas 365 on Windows is a joy. (Mac 365 has very odd layout and rendering standards, which are glaring for apps like Outlook, for example.)

My 2¢: I agree formats (in)compatibility is by far the major showstopper in adopting LO. MS Office formats indeed rule, like it or not • Starting with v7.4, back in August 2022, LO is giving formats compatibility the attention they deserve (https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2022/08/18/libreoff...) Maybe it's too little, too late, and it doesn't look aligned with the state of 'Microsoft Office compatibility' wiki page (https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Faq/General/012#Microsof... • I am no expert, but how formats with ISO are so hard to implement is beyond me I consider OO and its other remaining forks a waste of effort. Aligning their combined forces with LO, however, could make a huge difference in the formats compatibility effort. Then again, this is the plague (and beauty) of open source projects…

Yep, even skipping that world is monopolised by World/Excel, LibreOffice is self-blocking it's own adoption.

I just use it to print long long ago prepared documents so I mainly use "print dialog". And in last ~2 years they degraded that dialog usage at least two times:

- by moving count of pages to print below dialog window so you need to scroll it

- by forcing user to click on document to focus before ^P shortcut starts to work

And how many other things stopped to working in user-friendly way in last years ? Maybe none, maybe it's a lot.

So, to me, LO is sabotaging this software package. LO is fundation just like Mozilla and I suspect they work same agenda: keep collecting money and keep product second or 3rd class. IMO.

MS is happy. Google is happy. LO.Mozilla fund employee are happy. Spy agencies are happy.

Fake no-monopolies can do NOT improve a much.

What's everyone's opinion on OnlyOffice? It seems to have a much more polished UI than LibreOffice.

https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DesktopEditors

Personally I am looking forward to an end to end encrypted office suite from Proton: https://proton.me/blog/docs-proton-drive

I don’t really care about it being compatible with Microsoft’s convoluted formats. Maybe it needs to be able to export into those formats, but I also think the world is ready to move on from Office. Most of its features are unnecessary in practice.

I read posts like this and thank Buddha that I, for the last couple of decades of my working life, didn't work in an environment that necessitated using MS products.

If your publisher requires word documents (or _any_ word processor format), you need to find a better publisher. I can understand if they prefer word for the text-copy, which is then pulled into a typesetting app. But to use that as the pre-press format is a terrible workflow. This isn't a limitation of LibreOffice, it's a limitation of not being competent in pre-press typesetting and publishing software.

If people want to use it then they can use it. If they don't want to then leave them alone. This is what's great about FLOSS. You use what you want to.

Personally I see NO CASE for WYSIWYG suite, so well... For the the case is why wasting time and energy to learn and use such software instead of invest time, in time, at school, to learn LaTeX, R/Python etc and then profit for life.

Commercial IT evolution is really damaging the society but well, those who want to know if something else exists could find answers easily enough...

(2023)

Macintosh apps have great compatibility as do Google.