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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

Poor French civil servants. Being forced to use LibreOffice is a demotivating and frustrating experience. F.ex. Writer is like MS Word 1997, but shabbier. If you're paying an employee more than minimum wage, don't kill their productivity and motivation by feeding them sub-par tools.

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While it is true that LibreOffice still cannot compare to Microsoft Office (esp. Excel which I think is an impressive piece of software), I think LibreOffice fills the French civil servants' needs fine. It's not like they're consultants or bankers making the most out of Excel or Powerpoint, and the savings are significant. With the debt we have, these kinds of moves go in the right direction.

Frankly, I find your comment insulting. Why would a civil servant be expected to perform any less than a consultant or a banker? After all, many civil servants do the job a consultant could also do, albeit at a lower cost. I'm not talking about the people picking up the trash, I'm talking about the people designing city expansion policy, the people writing requirements for government IT systems and the people drafting laws.

Admittedly civil servants in many countries have the image of doing these jobs less passionately than someone working in business would, but this does not change what is expected of them.

Cutting on the productivity on an expensive workforce very seldomly leads to actual cost reduction.

I didn't mean to be insulting and surely didn't say civil servants "perform less" than consultants. I don't think that performance can be measured by the amount of time you spend on desktop software :)

Let me clarify my point: most people (civil servants being only one example among others) don't use even 10% of MS Office capabilities (esp. on Excel, I've never seen anything but basic formulas, no array formulas, no macros and so on). For these people using a tool that performs reasonably well on these 10% is not a stupid choice.

Of course, MS Office is better than LibreOffice. But LibreOffice is absolutely no shitty software and most of the time it gets the job done.

As a French civil servant I can say it doesn't fill our needs. We have difficulties to work with documents we receive sometimes created with LibreOffice, sometimes Microsoft Office. Documents are full of errors from bad imports and exports. I know many people loosing tons of time trying to fix the documents. An average French civil servant has many documents to write every month.

I agree, document conversion is one hell of an issue. But it doesn't bite everytime you open a MS Office document (at least it very rarely happens to me). I think that the lost productivity is made up for in terms of savings, which we do need.

We can hope that this issue gets solved if more heavily invested in. The "10% of savings go towards developing free software" rule is promising.

Here comes the FUD.

For most users, MS Word 2003 is like MS Word 1997, except that it takes a much more powerful system to run it. Most people never use any feature of Word that wasn't there in 1997.

2007 is different because of the ribbon, I'll grant, but preference for the ribbon is far from universal.

They could donate some of the savings to LibreOffice to improve the interface

Which is what they plan to do. Either through donations of cash or through manpower.

"He also wants them to reinvest between 5 percent and 10 percent of the money they save through not paying for proprietary software licenses, spending it instead on contributing to the development of the free software."

I'm amazed this is getting downvoted. I didn't expect LibreOffice's lack of quality to be a controversial fact. I though it was accepted as the status quo. After all, everyone agrees that Gimp is inferior to Photoshop, although it can be used fine in certain scenarios if you are willing to fight with it. LibreOffice is absolutely dreadful, much worse in comparison to Word than Gimp in comparison with Photoshop.

I find LibreOffice to be good enough for all my needs.

> everyone agrees

So let's see some examples then.

Why is LibreOffice "absolutely dreadful"?

So let's see some examples then.

In GIMP, where are the layer groups? The nondestructive editing?

These are basic tools to a professional workflow.

And don't get me started on CMYK. You cannot do prepress without CMYK support; GIMP was going to get it Real Soon Now for the past ten years and it's still not there.

The reason for why no CMYK and why no non-destructive editing is that GEGL development took way longer than expected. Now that more and more of the GIMP core is converted to GEGL I am confident GIMP will eventually get these features.

GIMP is the story of what happens when you wait with new features until "the right solution" is completed. Not that I really blame them since they have very few developers.

If you're doing professional work, you should stump for a professional tool. Otherwise it's like complaining that your family car, though ideal for its purpose, is a load of crap because it can't take pallets.

Excel.

pivot tables and VBA sucks (you may NOT comment on what a horrible language VBA is. )

So the reason why LibreOffice sucks is: Excel?

I didn't ask which of the programs in the Microsoft Office suite is better than the programs in the LibreOffice suite, I asked why LibreOffice sucks.

Also LibreOffice has Python.

As a long time Linux user, I have to say this is sadly true. I actually like Google Docs better than LibreOffice although it has less features.

Everyone doesn't agree that GIMP is "inferior" to Photoshop. They serve different markets. GIMP doesn't have as much manpower to put into the super high-end features, like tightly integrated RAW editing, but then people aren't paying 700 bucks per copy of GIMP either. GIMP does have features that Photoshop doesn't have (like a Python scripting interface) that makes it better for some use cases. For generic bitmap editing, either one works just fine, though GIMP is better for the casual user in most cases as it allows you to save your 700 bucks and put it toward something important.

LibreOffice is much the same, but I think the gap is actually much smaller. Microsoft Office does have some niche features that are not replicated by LibreOffice, and Microsoft has made their formats for annotations and other features that should be simple sufficiently complex to make import/export difficult, but LibreOffice in my experience is faster and has more of the features that I like and use (at least more accessible; apparently someone has said Office now includes direct PDF export, so that's nice). I use LibreOffice even if I'm using a computer with Microsoft Office installed. As with GIMP, in some specific cases, Word may be required, but in most cases LibreOffice works just fine and saves you hundreds of dollars.

The exception here is probably Calc v. Excel, because it seems true in my experience that Excel has many more features for power users than Calc.

Having used both Word 97 and LibreOffice Writer, the latter is definitely not 'shabbier'. It's just kicking a popular target.

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