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Comment by dizhn | Hacker News Reader

In true hackernews fashion I'll mention their competitor as my personal preference. Their editors are IMO much faster and slicker. I have very light document needs and this other open source software suite serves me very well. Although I appreciate libreoffice, I never did like using it.

https://www.onlyoffice.com/

https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE

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For non tech savvy people at my workplace we go for OnlyOffice because it looks more familiar when coming from Microsoft Office. However, sooner or later they try to open a very big spreadsheet and it just chokes completely. When that happens we switch them over to LibreOffice which usually handles it without issue.

OnlyOffice has better compatibility with Microsoft Office formats in most cases.

LibreOffice has been developed with Open Document Format as its first-class citizen. In my experience, it can't render the layout correctly for most docx forms created with tables.

For example, this is a form I filled a few months ago for my college's paperwork: https://imgur.com/tv5GDZa

I'm sure you're right. Has not been an issue for us at all though. Probably because we are not really dealing with documents very much.

Depends when you got used to office probably. To me Libreoffice looks more like office than office does nowadays.

To me, Abiword was the best clone of the best version of Word. To bad it is more or less abandonware.

That reminds me of switching to sublime's parser wrt a huge MySQL file, that was a while back though 2019 I think

Yeah, it looks more like post-2007 Office with the Ribbon; LibreOffice, like its predecessors, looks more like classical Office 95/97.

Are these concerns valid?: https://forum.cryptpad.org/d/232-onlyoffice-concerns-vendor-...

I believe it's understood that OnlyOffice devs are (mostly) Russian. And that in todays world Russian software companies have to go through hoops to be able to send/receive invoices/contracts/etc.

Some parts of their portfolio are not FOSS, these are the components in the commercial edition (the hosted/embeddable version of onlyoffice).

I have customers running OnlyOffice and we've never seen anything suspicious in our security tooling.

So I believe it comes down to your opinion/mindset around the whole Russia thing.

Recently, I have also switched to OnlyOffice due to their document compatibility and nicer UI. However, on my machines, it's actually generally slower than LibreOffice. The UI is nicer, but it feels sluggish. Similarly to how Vivaldi feels less responsive than other Chromium forks.

@jospoortvliet did a comparison of the two projects that's very much worth a read.

https://blog.jospoortvliet.com/2020/06/collabora-vs-onlyoffi...

I've tried to like LibreOffice for years, but man, it's just so ugly. And no, I’m not asking for a ribbon interface (I think that's awful too), but the UI looks like it’s stuck in the past.

Growing up on windows 98 and xp I still don't understand what people like about modern looking apps

Yes, 400M downloads are like 400M acceptances of mediocrity and awful design. It’s always been so slow too in my opinion.

You can improve a Linux distro by simply not including LibreOffice.

Sigh.

Most FOSS projects are basically incapable of updating their UI since the user base tends to be a collection of people most resistant to any change.

You’d almost be better starting a project from scratch than trying to fix libreoffice.

Like most open source projects unfortunately.

OnlyOffice seems very online-centric, but has desktop apps available. Are those desktop apps offline-capable, or do they require some online component to function?

No online access required.

I'm not sure if having a broken navigation menu at the top because of Disconnect or uBlock is a good sign, but their product seems like a decent alternative.

I've been using it for about a year now and for personal stuff its fine. Just some sheets and the occasional document and there haven't been any issues with formatting and such that tend to pop up when moving between MS and others. It runs with a single window too, where all docs and sheets are open, I like that.

I think the interesting advantage is that you should be able to host it.

I sincerely congratulate the hard work of any open source office alternative and the small army of developers and contributors that make it possible. That said, I too agree the OnlyOffice UI/UX is light years ahead of the competition when compared to commercially successful options like Microsoft Office.

New product with fewer features and less compatibility vs old product which is mature and has a full bug tracker

It's anecdotal, but I have a similar feeling about OnlyOffice. It has better compatibility with Word than LibreOffice and has an easier-to-use, modern interface resembling Word 2010/2013.

After switching to OnlyOffice I never looked back.

Does OnlyOffice still not support RTL languages?

I believe they finally added it in an update last year

The github page lists programming languages that include shell, php, and typescript. Blah! - it's an amalgamation of stuff, not a coherent piece of software. And the official website offers commercial stuff. Nowhere do I see a license, so I'm assuming it's quite far from GPL.

When you learn to make decisions on principles, LibreOffice will be the obvious choice.

When you learn to read properly, you'll see that the AGPL 3 license is prominently displayed on all of their repos, and those languages are only listed because they have SDK's for each of them. The core repo is clearly written in C++.

https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/

Their Android app is also the best open source alternative I've found thus far.

> Part of the source code are located in private repositories. You can't compile the project without them.

https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/documents-app-android/issues/3...

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