Or just employees got fed up with the "almost but not quite there" compatibility, and unpolished functionality, and wanted to return to MS Office.

I've got a CS degree, have used Linux since 1998, used and developed for several commercial unices, and have used Open Office since it was Sun's. I still prefer MS Office.

Since LibreOffice 4.5ish I have preferred both writer and calc. Feels more robust and consistent + a lot snappier (incl. starttime).

I only use it for collaborative editing of docx and xlsx.

Were you using it for documents in English?

Because I don't know about German specifically, but with some languages, Libre office is very buggy.

Star division was german, I'm quite sure it works well with german.

( star office -> open office -> libre office )

not in this case. people coming from office 2003 have a hard time with 2010 or higher. it had a lot of things to do with smartphones which are problematic in the windows environment aswell. also germany builds more and more web interfaces for administrative work.

It's it? I try to use open source software as much as possible but Office365 is just significantly better than the alternatives. I wish it wasn't true but it is.

And it's not even that expensive. £8/month/person. Slack is £5/month/person and that's just for chat.

Considering an average employee probably costs at least £3000/month it's a bit silly to worry about these small expenses.

Slack has many competitors. You can replace it.

Does MS Office have real competitors? Google Docs is very casual compared to MS Office. LibreOffice needs a lot of work.

My money was on Corel Office for Linux (with solid products like Wordperfect and Quattro Pro), but Microsoft bought a large share of Corel and it was mysteriously discontinued.

Slack has competitors but none of them are as good. At least none of the free ones - I've tried them all. Zulip is closest but it has a weird threading model (it's more like Usenet).

It's quite surprising given how relatively simple it is.

I disagree wrt office 365 (except for the collaborative editing in the browser feature). I dont recognize the price either - more like 22£ (unless its exchange only).

Cost accumulates at scale.

Office 365 includes the "real" offline office apps. Prices here: https://products.office.com/en-gb/compare-all-microsoft-offi...

That's true, there was cronyism. For example, they used the worse, slower KDE instead of better options like MATE because KDE has a considerable European (and even German) legacy. I imagine they took many decisions like that.

Take a computer that used to run Windows 2000 and install KDE on it, it's no wonder people got pissed and they had to revert their decision.

I still use KDE (4.x) on CentOS 7, with older hardware.

It's not quite as as snappy as XFCE, or probably MATE, but it's still easily good enough to get the job done.

On CentOS, being a stable platform, KDE itself is also really stable. (important to me, as I have better things to do that screwing around just keeping a desktop updated)

KDE is not worse than MATE. A full featured desktop environment with software suite compared to a fork of GTK 2.

> a fork of GTK 2

For strict accuracy, MATE is not a fork of GTK2, but of GNOME 2. MATE did originally use GTK2, though without forking it, and it has since switched to GTK3 (while still keeping the GNOME 2 "look").

MATE is a fork of GNOME 2, which is a full featured desktop environment as well. MATE runs orders of magnitude faster and is much more stable than KDE. Especially on the old workstations where they installed LiMux.

I'm not going to say that the project failed entirely because of technical reasons, but at first glance it really looks like they took bad decisions. It's hard to defend a move where you end up with worse software and a worse experience for users, no matter how much money you save.

There's barely any development on the GitHub. And also it seems like there are few contributers.

Whilst KDE is a much bigger project that is actively developed.

If that's your indicative of the quality of a project then I understand your position.

First, being abandoned for new development is a great indication of the quality of a project.

Second, you haven't given us any arguments for your "indications of quality" regarding MATE and KDE.

Third, like Gnome, KDE has a huge legacy in FOSS, and is a great project in itself based on a top notch GUI backend. Some of its code even went on and become the basis of the modern web (KHTML -> Webkit -> Blink -> Node -> now also Edge), other tools like KDevelop, Krita, etc are among the best in class in what they do.

What are you, some teenage Linux nerd, with a "favorite" desktop to promote in flame wars?

And I who thought the KDE/Gnome wars was over.

MATE is not a GNOME project. When GTK3 was made and the decision to build Gnome Shell was made, the MATE project was started to fork GTK2 and the old shell.

Orders of magnitude faster? 100 times faster? Gonna need to see some numbers before I believe that.

It's obvious you're being provocative on purpose but I don't see this leading to any fruitful discussion. Maybe try a more constructive approach next time.

The LiMux project started in 2005, so the KDE version used back then would be KDE3. That was not really worse in performance than GNOME2 (or today MATE), although comparing it to Windows 2000 would not be easy.

> Take a computer that used to run Windows 2000

out of a museum, or a skip perhaps

>and install KDE on it

Then put Windows 10 on it, or any other fully featured modern GUI OS. And we have proved what? Computers from 18 years ago don't run modern OS's very well, but can run ok with an OS specifically pitched as 'lightweight'.

On the other hand I have a PC right here on my lap that is 10 years old that is running Kubuntu problem free.