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Comment by orionblastar | Hacker News Reader

I use LibreOffice instead of Microsoft 365. It is free and can load and save DOCX files. Plus I use LibreOffice in GNU/Linux so it is cross-platform and compatible.

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In the web side of things, collabora has gotten so much better as well, see by yourself: https://demo.filestash.app/login?type=tmp&next=/view/tmp.doc...

Maybe it just isn't optimized for Safari, but it was very sluggish the moment I opened it on my M4 Pro MacBook, which isn't promising.

I tend to write in markdown. If someone needs a Word Doc/docx whatever format they're using these days, I use pandoc to generate it. If someone sends me a docx file, I can read it with my choice of software without paying the MS tax. On the very rare occasion someone sends me a docx file that they need me to edit and send back to them, I'll do it with whatever is handy and if they complain I messed up their formatting or whatever I can blame Word bugs.

LibreOffice is excellent. An alternate to it is OnlyOffice, which is a bit more polished (and Enterprisy) and has a free option too - https://www.onlyoffice.com/download-desktop.aspx

LibreOffice is awful on macOS. Also, file compatibility with MS Office is still problematic. Onlyoffice is indeed a better choice.

I own a MS Silver Partner (int al). They (MS) are a handy place to stuff things for a while until something better comes along and I have lots of options. It takes a while to scale!

At the moment, dumping VMware is taking quite a lot of my time too.

I went to the trouble of looking up what that Silver Partner thing is. It means you're paying more than $1k to MS annually. You "own" a subscription? What does it do for you?

I still don't understand the rest of your comment.

> What does it do for you?

It means you can put "Microsoft Partner" on your sales and marketing communications and some people will throw money at you just for having that on your shingle. In some cases businesses won't contract with anyone who doesn't have partner status.

It means you can resell Microsoft products with some reasonable level of margin. To be a Silver or Gold partner direct with Microsoft (vs 'indirect' partners through a distributor like Ingram) you're probably collecting that margin on US$10,000+ per month, possibly much more.

And it doesn’t run on iPhones, iPads and I just can’t use it on the web like I can with GSuite, Office or even Apple’s iWorks

does libreoffice actually work with doc/docx well?

I remember I tried this years ago, and it broke all the formatting that other window users see.

It works better than Microsoft's, that's the issue.

Office purposefully doesn't follow its own documents' standards, and renders with particular quirks, so that one gets the experience you report.

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