LibreOffice downloads on the rise as users look to avoid subscription costs

I tried using Numbers across my Mac and iPad. It has some show stopping sync bugs there which result in it completely destroying documents. Then when you try and recover previous versions you get a lesson in Apple's commitment to things other than the facade on the front of their stuff: not a lot. The document versions thing sometimes doesn't even work and if it does it's so slow it's unusable. Probably backed with some low tier S3 stuff. Also the formula editor is painful at best.

TeXshop on the Mac is however rather nice.

I sometimes wish Claris Works 5 was still around. It was small and fast, did everything I actually needed when writing documents or letters and nothing I didn't need, and had a clean, uncluttered UI that made sense.

I agree, but Numbers is sooo slow! When opening a huge file it is unusable.

I also like the Pages/Numbers/Keynote suite. Of course, I'm not a heavy user of office apps at home, so large or complex documents aren't something I'm encountering day-to-day. If I needed to build such a beast, I would probably lean on the 'old standbys' like LaTeX and the like. LibreOffice is still a great platform and one I reach for if an oddly formatted document comes to me, but it's not something I'm using for crafting from scratch.

Have used Pages/Numbers/Keynote for years, alongside MS Word/Excel/Powerpoint, and always found the former to have better or nicer workflows for most tasks, and especially for page layouts. (Excel is however superior for very large or complex spreadsheets.) Highly underrated software.

I also use the iWork suite because that's what I have, and I despise Numbers

Pages and Keynote are fine but I can't for the life of me figure out how to do anything with Numbers. It looks beautiful and I want to like it but as you say it's (too) different from Excel, at least for me.

Would you not say it’s sort of a stretch calling Apple software free, which only works on (anything but free) Apple hardware?

> iWork... It's good enough

I would argue it is not just good enough but better than Office for normal consumers. For 99% of my usage and SMEs, Page is insanely better at layout. Numbers are much better for simple chat, formulas and comparison. Keynote.... well i haven't touched powerpoint for 20+ years so I dont know.

The only thing Office is better is when you need slightly complex formulas in Excel or some enterprise that has been using Excel for so long you need to use it to guarantee absolute 100% compatibility. For business Excel usage is still king. And will continue to be for at least another 10 - 15 years if not more.

Do you have any good alternatives to Photoshop that are open source? And that are not GIMP.

Nothing against GIMP, I just found it too hard to learn coming from photoshop.

I'm looking for a simple editor that can do color adjustments, crop/resize images, and add text.

You actually can still buy Office. It's quite expensive though.

I suppose it always was.

https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkID=2113574&CLCID=0x10...

Isn't it dogmatic to think so. Sometimes it makes sense to rent tools.

> I have no interest in renting my tools.

While I appreciate the sentiment, the world where you could use the same software for many years without updates is gone. These days developers have to invest significant time and effort into making sure the software just runs on the constantly updated operating systems and platforms — which costs money on an ongoing basis. Expecting your software to be updated regularly without paying regularly makes no sense.

So either you intend to run that exact binary that you downloaded (because that is the tool you bought), or the ongoing costs need to be covered somehow. Some companies do it through subscriptions and some play a game of "no, you don't have to update, but here is this new shiny (more bloated, too) version that we produce every 2 years, you can get it for $50 and OWN IT FOREVER (well, until the next shiny comes along in 2 years time". But it's a game, and the drawback is that there is incentive for bloating software instead of just maintaining it and fixing bugs.

I would also like to throw in Lightworks into the “very good Premiere alternatives”. If you are ok with exporting 720p, the free version is pretty capable but if you want higher export resolution it cost money.

It has a subscription option, but also a “buy outright” option, and it’s often on sale for half price for the permanent license, ends up costing around ~$200 and it works on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

I think it’s very good, though I am not a professional video editor by trade.

I really enjoy the affinity suite.

Wishing there was a capable Lightroom alternative.

While those producing tools for living might not have an interest on keeping offering them free of charge.

Eventually that guy/girl in Nebraska is going to look elsewhere.

Resolve is cool for pro users for others who basically just want to do small edits with straightforward software chrck out kdenlive

This could be checked by someone with access to country level sales numbers (or download numbers for libreoffice). Absent that, the recent price rise to pay for AI that most people don't need (since there are currently free of charge options elsewhere) is a more plausible explanation at a time when cost of living is a big topic in multiple countries.

LibreOffice comes with six icon themes. Do you mean every single one of them is childish or only a particular one?

>I wish I could get import OpenOffices icons into LibreOffice.

I haven't tried it, but I think it's quite possible: https://documentation.libreoffice.org/assets/Uploads/Documen...

It's a scale. While straight up writing TeX is not for must, there's also stuff like LyX and TeXmacs.

I’d be grumble to go back to Libre Office which I used for years but it was the company standard. Mostly just use Google Workplace these days. )As does my former employer.) I find Google does a good job of including features most people need 95%+ of the time and does a good job of those.

These people need an multimodal AI assistant that does geometrically correctly OCR of the page s screenshot and then determines the appropriate number of spaces and sizes for the spaces to accurately right-align the text.

I dare to say Word is so poorly designed that there are so many ways to screw up formatting... that bad behaviors (like right aligning text with spaces) are inevitable.

For 90% of documents, software like Word was a mistake and you should be using google docs level of detail or markdown or so. And for the rest you want publishing software, not Word :(.

For some government and commercial interactions, printing things out is the only way to get something done

While I sometimes hangout with non-Engineering folks, I see following activities:

- preparing various letters, reports, audits, notices, terms/contracts etc. by modifying or using very specific templates and Office tools are very well entrenched for fixed templates

- Financial reports, analysis on excel(yes, most professionals are trained and feel comfortable there, same as how we feel good in terminal/console), building specific forms with constraints and checks, data sharing, special report of field data collection and audits, technical specifications/spec-sheets, quick complex calculations, think MS Excel as best candidate which everyone and there pet dog learned since elementary school

- Presentation, brochures, special fliers, quick reports, course reference/speech deck, lecture slides, product marketing/sales docs are mostly being handled by PowerPoint

Of course, we have numerous best-alternatives which can all replace these or “why not google docs”, but these people are trained on these specific ms office tools since dawn of civilization when people stopped cave painting and stone tablet based accounting in favor of computers. While we tech folks love to pickup and learn new tools, the other 99.99999% people see diminishing return adapting new tools. And lets be real, who wants to mess with the official template in some new tool that purchasing and procurement will not ever care about and scold the applicant back into the MS Office tools that already comes pre installed and licensed from their IT vendor?

Kids' school "teaches" it, meaning the kids have to memorize where to click to do X in various Microsoft products. So you're stuck with Microsoft if you want decent grades for your child.

Google docs are fine for anything non-private and stuff that can go to the cloud.

I usually use Google docs for stuff like language learning for convenience and libreoffice for financial spreadsheets, work related stuff, and anything I don't want to be snooped by Google systems.

I use LO Writer for my resume, and Calc for my taxes.

This has been the story for 20 years now. It's a case study in what happens when a product has a guaranteed revenue stream and the company has 0 incentive to innovate or improve anything. However, managers still need to have "launches" and leave their grimy fingerprints on the UI so they can pat themselves on the back and advance a rung on the career ladder. From a would-be user's perspective it appears this dynamic is the sole driver of changes to MS office.

Onlyoffice is awesome, if you’re buying recycled keys you may as well just MAS it since they’re both technically against TOS.

It's so impressively underhandedly sneaky how Microsoft named their ODF-competitor format “Office Open” just as the OO.o hype peaked with OO.o 2.0 having ODF as its native format, when MSOffice finally had a viable and popular competitor for like the first time ever lol

https://www.openoffice.org/press/2.0/press_release.html (2005-10-20)

https://news.microsoft.com/2005/11/21/qa-microsoft-co-sponso... (2005-11-21)

I'd recommend switching, OpenOffice is basically abandonware. There's been security issues that were reported over a year ago that have gone unaddressed. If you look at OpenOffice's git repo (https://github.com/apache/openoffice), the vast majority of the commits are from two people who solely focus on manually fiddling with the code formatting and fixing typos in the comments.

LibreOffice is vastly more stable and has more features and compatibility fixes that OpenOffice. I recommend using it.

It's extremely risky to keep using OpenOffice. Apache has marked its security status as "Amber" with "three issues in OpenOffice over 365 days old and a number of other open issues not fully triaged."

It's also worrying that The Apache Foundation continues to promote and distribute OpenOffice despite unfixed security issues and zero updates to the software. So many people in the FOSS world have called on them to finally retire it, put it in the Attic and keep up a good reputation for FOSS - but they won't do it. It still gets hundreds of thousands of downloads despite being unfixed.

It's irresponsible of The ASF IMO.

I don't want to start any wars either, but I think people should make informed choices.

By choosing OpenOffice, you should be aware that you are at an increased risk for attacks. One of the consistent problems with OpenOffice over the past years has been that they have often not published security fixes for many months, sometimes critical ones, for vulnerabilities that were publicly known.

(Due to the shared codebase, obviously, many security issues affect both LO/OO, yet, with the difference that LO usually fixes them in a timely manner.)

When most OpenOffice devs called Oracle's bluff, left, and LibreOffice was released, I switched right away and never regretted it.

Thanks for the replies re OO's security issues, they're lighting a fire under me to make the move.

Gnumeric may be the answer for you. It was the answer for me. It's amazing how quickly both excel and libre office documents shit the bed and produce outright wrong behavior once they hit a few MB of data and/or a few dozen plots. Not to mention the fiasco of all the genetic information corrupted by excel's boneheaded auto complete (which they STILL haven't fixed afaik).

I have gnumeric documents with hundreds of plots containing fits etc that I view in 4k without any lag or delays whatsoever. The plotting options can also be made suitable for publication much more easily. All the important functions are there.

My main complaint about spreadsheets in general is the fitting options are still in the stone age compared with software like ROOT using minuit, where you can easily do a proper chi squared minimization with arbitrary functions where error bars of all points are correctly used. However, it seems only the sciences use such features as apparently there is no demand from the business world (or other MS customers) for spreadsheet tools supporting thought or analysis beyond a 5th grade level.

Microsoft has had decades and millions of dollars to make excel usable, and should be embarrassed about how their flagship productivity software is rightfully seen as unfit for purpose by people doing rigorous work. Seeing nontrivial information in a scientific talk rendered in the telltale excel style is visual shorthand for "the real analysis hasn't been done yet" or "I don't know what I'm doing and won't be able to answer questions about uncertainties."

Have you tried Google Sheets? Its not open source, but its free and gets the job done.

XLOOKUP was implemented last year. Submit a bug report with an example document and the perf issue can be looked into. Calc's performance is being improved constantly.

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/BugReport

I stopped buying Office after 2003. Past then they added the Ribbon UI which ruined it for any productive workflow where you want to use styles and reviewing tools.

Been using LibreOffice Write ever since, which helpfully has pretty much the 2003 UI. The only thing I think it could use is that nifty Jetbrains "search anywhere" feature.

Given that most of our civilization is run using these tools, it boggles the mind how they are still so limited.

Why is there a limit of nine levels of headings in Word? Why does it feel less usable on my i9 with 32GB of RAM once you hit 200+ pages? Why is the "collaborative mode" still way, way, way behind Google Docs functionality circa 2012? I feel like the core functionality has stagnated since Office 2003.

Fortunately they are, but TDF's budget is still rather small when considering the scale of the project. TDF is looking to expand its dev team. There's a lot of activity going on with volunteers and interns, but we need more senior devs to tackle the trickier renovations.

Can you explain why you think so? it's not self-evident.

That would do it. If Windows got rid of their basic document editor, and enough affected muggles got into desperate enough situations to discover Libreoffice, they will tip each other off through social networks quickly.

Strategies taking advantage of the ignorance of users (or voters) are faltering in the age of user-generated content. You can't sell an operating system without a document editor without running the risk of people finding the free one that is nearly as good (or in the case of Wordpad, is far better.)

MS won't like what happens in offices 10 years from now if they let students use Libreoffice for their schoolwork instead of Wordpad (eventually replaced with Word.) They'd better be working hard to get "student" copies of Office into kids' hands, even if they have to pay them to take it.

Only office works quite well: https://www.onlyoffice.com/office-for-android.aspx

Note that OnlyOffice is a Russian clone of MS Office. Its Russian branding P7 is still sold to Russian government and military. They didn't stop business with Russian government and opened offices in Latvia and Singapore to continue West presence. The clients are not fully open source either. You cannot independently build it. It is quite shady.

There is WPS from China with similar issues.

So your options are limited. LibreOffice sucks ass with any serious document. On Windows GUI bugs are annoying as hell. KDE's Calligra is slowly rotting.

I made the exact search as you did and decided to get a perpetual MS Office license. No other way around unfortunately.

It works fine for most use cases, but Google Docs and Sheets features pale in comparison full desktop base apps.

Not if you don't have internet access.

It has the worst commenting and track history I've seen. My company went to Google docs about 5 years ago and I have steadily walked the work product of engineers go downhill because of it.

Microsoft deactivates pirated versions of Office and tells you to buy a copy.

massgrave.dev has worked well for me

There is an extensive Python extensions module that could do it.

https://dev.blog.documentfoundation.org/2023/11/25/libreoffi...

You could try https://github.com/balisujohn/localwriter

I think you can, I believe in you.

You can mount your cloud drive, and open those files with LibreOffice or OnlyOffice, I certainly do so with Google Drive