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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

The issue with nearly all of these software suites is compatibility.

It is ironic, that libreoffice solves this the best, by being truly cross platform and not requiring special software to be purchased on the receiving end: yet it is the momentum of Microsoft Word that would instead hamper adoption of other word processors.

I am thinking about this, because the reason I would choose not to use Pages, is so that I can share my documents to other companies or even people in my company who may not have a Mac.

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That's an excellent reason, to be sure. But here we're talking about an app to "just write", like opening a file and start pounding out an article or something. For someone who wants to do that, on a Mac, and who wants basic formatting and word-processory WYSIWYG-edness, I'd recommend Pages.

For someone who wants that I’d recommend LibreOffice as it does all of that as well.

Just not as natively, quickly, or ergonomically.

No idea how that’s true, there is nothing Pages does differently when it comes to opening a file and “just writing” that LibreOffice doesn’t do. If you honestly get hung up that LibreOffice doesn’t look like it was developed by Apple within the last 5 years then you are always being disingenuous when comparing the software in the first place.

This uh... "discussion".. would make an excellent blog post, comparing Pages/Word and LibreOffice on a mac, based on merits such as:

* Install UX (how difficult, what pop-ups).

* First time user experience.

* Launch speed.

* Consistency with OS (such as using native file dialogs, hotkeys).

* Export Options (perhaps compatibility too).

* Spellchecker (especially if the OS is configured in another language than US english and the processor can detect it).

* Input latency.

I wonder if there would be more, though of this list I think LibreOffice would do very fairly compared to Pages.app and MS Word for Mac.

> If you honestly get hung up that LibreOffice doesn’t look like it was developed by Apple within the last 5 years then you are ultimately being disingenuous

Disingenuous? More like realistic.

I mean this ultimately boils down to “is inconsistent with the design of the rest of the computing experience.” People who care about good, consistent design and can afford to pay for it are Apple’s core market.

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