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Comment by vkaku | Hacker News Reader

People are better off using LibreOffice on a Linux desktop

As a daily Linux user and enthusiast, I detest statements like this. You did not read the article not the problem that those companies have and your only solution is "Use LibreOffice" without any actual interest in what their problem is or what an actual solution to their problems is. People like you push newbies away from Linux.

Using LibreOffice does not give you web sharing, nor permission systems, nor automation workflows, nor easy to use access controls, nor so many other things.

Also, libreoffice is just unequivocally worse than MS Office - it is actively painful to use their spreadsheet, for example.

What features, besides macros which I haven;t used, are you finding worse in Libre Office than in MS Office?

I am using Libre Office for me household budget, and keeping track of cooking recipes. It is much better than MS Office because:

1. In Libre I can tell at a glance what my active cell is;

2. On my wife’s laptop at least, Office installed a DRM service that basically makes impossible to work on personal files on her work computer.

3. MS office insists each time I save a file to put it on OneDrive. Then I have to clock around to find the local folder and eventually save it locally. Libre just saves it locally from the first try,

Nope. I actually care enough to make this statement. Using such subscription products and then getting rug pulled isn't something easy for non technical users.

So just start with sovereign, better governed products with clear transparent pricing and better affordability to begin with.

Data interchange formats are more important than ever, and having programs that don't do too many things is just as important.

Not everyone starts thinking about Google Docs or WebDAV to begin with, and actually ... LibreOffice does a decent job here.

https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/shared/guide/...

Don't bring up imaginary problems on Linux that people don't have. Losing access to accounts on a computer or a cloud service due to skunky companies is totally happening today though.

As another linux user, as in for everything, desktop, home & work, not just servers at work, for decades by now... they were correct. This kind of statement is counterproductive. It might not be thoughtless, but if not then it's the result of poor quality thought, so lack of thought would actually be the lesser insult.

Again, you're clearly showing you know nothing about running actual IT for actual companies.

Oh Boo Hoo. IT departments for Non Profits that aren't actually like OpenAI. Right.

Yes, I'm a CTO for one.

Running Non Profit and managing infrastructure for pennies, is a real problem these non profits / small companies face.

If a multi trillion dollar company won't afford to burn a few million a month, good luck getting any of these folks to buy and host their Sharepoint for cheap.

This is not just a technical problem, and you know it. These people need real solutions, and asking for them to have an IT department isn't practically economical for them.

The solution isn't telling them to use a linux desktop.

It actually is. Don't concentrate compute and data risks in a few vendors centralized who currently don't do a good job of hosting them nor saving them well.

It obviously costs money to run cloud storage and compute, do use whatever is available at hand first.

Microsoft is forcing people to use OneDrive on Windows and Office 365 by default, not realizing that it doesn't want to pay for dealing with all of this.

The centralized model is already failing, these providers are storing data they can't decide about and people are being forced to pay for features they don't need to use at all. None of these things help your case.

Statements like this immediately reveal that the commenter has never once seen a real live corporate IT department

I was a Financial Analyst at Amazon and Starbucks for about 15 years total. Excel was my favorite tool. I used to say that if my employer would not pay for Excel I would pay for it out of me own money.

Almost 20 years later in 2026 I migrated all my personal stuff to Linux and Libre Office. I am amazed how much better this is than the Windows + Office setup my wife uses.

Just today I helped my wife with an Excel file. I can’t believe what garbage Excel is in 2026. For reference- I tried to use the Formula -> Show Dependent Cells feature. This feature showed NO dependent cells - even though these were in the row below. What a piece of garbage Excel became.

I was shocked when I imported a 1.5M row dataset into Office365 Excel and found that it had silently cropped my data to 1048576 rows. One million items is a ridiculously low limit for a modern computer, and deleting 1/3 of my data without any warning is unacceptable. 20 years ago Excel could handle 1.5 million rows without breaking a sweat but this webpage version isn't real Excel.

So I used Gnumeric instead and it worked fine.

Excel has a limit of 1M rows now just like it 20 years ago.

The 2003 version had a 64k row limit.

I agree with what you write though: limit could be increased + webpage version is pure garbage.

Right. Well funded corporate IT environments losing access to their data because Microsoft screws them over. Perfect. That's not what I'm reading here.

looks like theyre also doing MDM on their org's devices.

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