LibreOffice 7.0 Is The Version Now In Development With Its Skia + Vulkan Support

[Xaero_Vincent]

Judging by your post, you don't actually use Office. None of the options you mentioned have even a fraction of the features that the actual desktop Microsoft Office Suite has. They are little more than viewers with minor editing capabilities.

True. When I need to use an Office suite, I'll typically go with Google Docs or LibreOffice. Microsoft Office has nothing I need nor want to give Microsoft money for it.

That said, with all the hate I'm seeing towards LibreOffice here, I decide to try out the 5 day trial version of Office Professional 2019 and it works alright on the Linux desktop. You just need to configure a *reverse* WSL2 type setup and make simple app launcher scripts for the office apps on your machine and you're good to go.

[Sonadow]

I have been using LibreOffice for 9 years and it's amazing it can manage to be a complete piece of sh!+ all this time.

Writer is a complete and utter joke being able to use only one CPU thread at any time. Load up an ODF with 5 pages of images and watch how unusable it becomes. And two days ago, I was using LO 6.4 to write a site inspection report, so I put the building blueprints on the document, used LO's crop feature to remove the unneeded portions of the image, drew route lines on the blueprints for the various installations and saved it as an ODF. When i reopened it:

1. The cropped image uncropped and stretched itself
2. My drawn route lines were scattered all over different pages
3. The image and text wrapping went completely haywire

I ended up drawing my route lines on the blueprints with an image editor, rewriting my entire report from page one and finishing it in one sitting so that it could be exported safely to PDF. This never happened on any version of Word that I have used since the days of Word 97.

Impress is another piece of trash that can't even remember its own formatting to save its life. I drew up a three-slide presentation to show my boss a planned installation, and after saving it as an ODP the text boxes decided to move around by themselves even after I had placed them in fixed positions from the beginning.

Now using MS Office for Web and life is so, so much happier. Now waiting for the day Microsoft will add the ability to create TOCs and Drawings in Word for Web so that I can stop using image editors for making impromptu drawings.

[Neuro-Chef]

Wrong, it is dominating because LibreOffice breaks formatting of many Microsoft Office documents and makes it impossible to collaborate with individuals and companies who create documents in Microsoft Office.

That is, as long as those individuals can't find the button to save as ODF, which actually is an open standard:

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument

In fact, most people don't need/use the special features set of whatever office suite anyway, so it's really only about using Outlook with an Exchange server. But oh, the buttons for text formatting in LO Writer look different from those in MS Word look different here! (Already forgot about when Ribbons where new, hypocrites? I did not..)

[betam4x]

How many versions of Microsoft Office do you need?

You can run 2 of the 3 versions of Office natively on Linux. Office for Android apps for natively with Anbox and there are even x86 APK variants available if you don't want to set-up Libhoudini to get the ARM versions working. There is also of course the free Web version of the apps as well. Fewer features, sure, but basically full compatibility with DOCX, PPTX, and XLSX files.

Nevermind the numerous commercial alternatives to LibreOffice like WPS Office and SoftMaker Office that provide better Office file format interopability and more features than LibreOffice.

Judging by your post, you don't actually use Office. None of the options you mentioned have even a fraction of the features that the actual desktop Microsoft Office Suite has. They are little more than viewers with minor editing capabilities.

[betam4x]

Libre is sooo behind office. Its sad but I wish Libre got the resources it requires to make it competitive. There's not a slight chance it can compete with ms word or power point, lack of features, templates and even this decade's appearance.

Its blocking my family to moving to Linux actually. They just need office and work with files other people send as docx , pptx etc

I find that those that bash office have never actually used it or just simply hate Microsoft. I personally do not find any office program to even be in the same league. LibreOffice can't even render or preserve formatting of my resume, for example.

[ferry]

Libre is sooo behind office. Its sad but I wish Libre got the resources it requires to make it competitive. There's not a slight chance it can compete with ms word or power point, lack of features, templates and even this decade's appearance.

Its blocking my family to moving to Linux actually. They just need office and work with files other people send as docx , pptx etc

Not really, LibO looks like MS Office used to, when it was still useful. This decades appearance (the ribbon) is just an ever changing button bar that makes it impossible to find the feature you are looking for, except when you know where it is (i.e. you should be able to find the Bold button). The craziness started with Intellisense, the menu bars that were hiding features you don't use often. And then, as you can't find them never use them. Thankfully LibO didn't go this way.

Then when you use it for a longer period (like in my case almost 30 years since MS Word 1.1,writing technical and scientific articles, reports and books) you will find the file formats change all the time, and MS Word can't read it's own format. Thankfully there are ISO standards to resolve this problem, Open Document and PDF. And LibO's support of Open Document is much better than MS Words.

If you really know what your talking about you will find LibO does what Office does, but better (bugs aside) and on more platforms.

[Mez']

Wrong, it is dominating because LibreOffice breaks formatting of many Microsoft Office documents and makes it impossible to collaborate with individuals and companies who create documents in Microsoft Office.

That's ridiculous. They reverse engineered something that had no standard for a long time. And now that MS formalized a standard, it is well known even their own office suite doesn't respect that standard.

You just take this problem from the wrong end.

[Mez']

Libre is sooo behind office. Its sad but I wish Libre got the resources it requires to make it competitive. There's not a slight chance it can compete with ms word or power point, lack of features, templates and even this decade's appearance.

Its blocking my family to moving to Linux actually. They just need office and work with files other people send as docx , pptx etc

I beg to disagree. For using them both on a regular basis (MSO more regularly though as I'm forced at work), I feel like I can finish a proper document much faster with LO. Sure, you get the job done as well with MSO, but you spend more time on formatting than on the content itself.

When I read documents from my colleagues, you can really sense that they usually stopped bothering early on to try to get the formatting right (as a basic example, bullet points are often misaligned throughout the document, either on Word or PPT). Although "Format Painter" is helping, it's still a mess on MSO.

From my experience, the more advanced and complex the document, the easier it is with LO. Either on Writer or Impress at least.

[Neuro-Chef]

Libre is sooo behind office. Its sad but I wish Libre got the resources it requires to make it competitive.

You can help making those resources available

http://libreoffice.org/donate/

[Mez']

Intuitiveness typically comes from whatever you learned first. MS Office is objectively intuitive, but, you're not going to think that way if you're so used to other tools. My main gripes about Office is how resource-intensive it is, the fact the ribbon bar is horizontal rather than vertical, and poor Linux functionality.

But for everyday use, LibreOffice is more than good enough.

From my point of view, MS Office is objectively non-intuitive. It makes me angry and frustrated every single day, and many of my (typical Windows) colleagues. And I learned it first.

If only I was allowed to use LO at work.