LibreOffice 7.0 Alpha 1 Released With Its Skia + Vulkan Rendering

[angrypie]

I've seen a lot of specious arguments defending eleven years' worth of wasted energy on TDF's part. but this is the first time I've seen the argument, "LibreOffice doesn't have to be compatible with Microsoft Office, because Microsoft Office isn't compatible with Microsoft Office." Good one!

All indicators point to a glorious career as a politician, or a spokesman for TDF.

I'll bite.

Microsoft breaks backwards compatibility on purpose, so you're forced to upgrade if you want to edit their poorly obfuscated file formats, and they've been doing this since forever. If you're going to feign ignorance, at least try not to sound like a retard.

[ryukafalz]

I've seen a lot of specious arguments defending eleven years' worth of wasted energy on TDF's part.

Eleven years of wasted energy? First of all, that's highly disrespectful to the developers, many (most?) of whom are volunteers. Second... no? The output of that energy is an extremely high quality suite of software that works great if you're collaborating with other LibreOffice users and honestly works pretty well even if you've got MS Office users in the mix too.

This is like saying someone who's worked on Linux apps for 11 years has been wasting their time because they don't run on Windows.

[RahulSundaram]

I've seen a lot of specious arguments defending eleven years' worth of wasted energy on TDF's part

TDF is a non-profit foundation established in 2012. It hasn't even existed for eleven years and most of the Libreoffice developers don't work for them

[bug77]

There is no version that can guarantee absolutely perfect rendering merely because Microsoft Office itself doesn't guarantee that and does in reality change how it renders between versions. There are definitely cases where LibreOffice has better compatibility than Microsoft's latest version. If you want fidelity, you should use a format designed for that such as PDF

Sadly, this is true. It has been true for 20 years. Ever since OpenOffice started displaying Microsoft Office documents, Microsoft started changing rendering left and right. Even their first version of OOXML contained stuff like "should render like in Excel".

So yeah, it's a bummer, but it's not because open source efforts have stalled or anything. Me, I just turn to Google Docs or draw.io and export to PDF.

[caligula]

Why the fuck would you send your CV or proposal as a word document? Obviously you send it as a pdf.

Exactly. If you're going to print it, use PDF (or TIFF). If it will be available online, consider HTML/CSS/JS or even markdown.

[leandrolnh]

I'd like to see a revamped GUI, preferably with more modern ribbon-like interface. IMO the ribbon interface is very intuitive and easy to navigate.

The current experimental implementation of it in LibreOffice is just subpar.

[staalmannen]

While reading about the docx compatibility I agree that for LO it has basically the same compatibility as between MS office versions. On the other hand has odt become a defacto LO format, where compatibility in other open source office suits is limited (for example calligra, abiword). More collaboration there would be nice.

[AnAccount]

LibreOffice has had eleven years now, in which to get the one thing that matters--file compatibility with Microsoft Word / Office--absolutely correct. Eleven years!

Is this version absolutely compatible with Microsoft Office now? Can you send your résumé / curriculum vitae--which better look absolutely perfect to that prospective employer offering THE dream job? Or how about that 200-page proposal to land that big contract? You can bet your bottom dollar that your competitors will go to any lengths to make sure the person(s) reading THEIR proposals don't have to slog through any file-incompatibility problems. You might just as well misspell the name of the person you're sending it to...and I've seen that happen, too.

If someone sent me their CV as a Office Document they just wasted their time, since it shows that they do not have a basic understanding of fileformats and their purpose. I agree that office compability might be an issue for collaboration, but for sending documents for others to read... no, you should not use it for that.

[microcode]

If this helps reduce the number of UI backends maybe that's a good thing. I feel like the focus should be on quality. At work, I need two versions of LibreOffice: the "still" version because the "fresh" version doesn't recalculate completely unless I hard recalc, and the "fresh" version because the "still" version crashes instantly when I use the find bar.

I'm a professional software developer, I've used C++ professionally, and even I don't have the patience to rebuild with symbols and report or tracdown the find bug. I wrote a spreadsheet compiler at work that translates our LibreOffice spreadsheets to lisp, and even I don't want to look at LibreOffice's eight piles of tightly coupled pseudo-forth interpreters to figure out why recalc is giving up half way.

Office software is extremely complicated, but a spreadsheet doesn't need to be this bad.

[bug77]

You are misunderstanding the program. LibreOffice is an office suite like msoffice. It offer some kind of compatibility in opening proprietary and other formats. Most of us don't need such mastodontic programs. If you want msoffice buy msoffice. There are a lot of office suites that are cheapy, and alot that are free. You have the freedom to choise.

Not true, this is not only about what one needs.
Remember what happened when the city of Munich moved to OpenOffice? It was good enough for them, but eventually they were forced to switch back because other authorities were sending them MS Office documents and were opening municipality's documents using MS Office.