Also, you might moan about cloud lock-in, but collaboratively editing documents in Office 365 is a vast improvement over emailing documents around and clumsy manual version management[0]. I would never go back.

[0] Incidentally, collaboration is the one advantage that GDocs used to have over Microsoft Office, but that's long since gone. Office is so much more capable than GDocs that I find it baffling that people still choose the latter. The only thing Google does better, at least in some ways, is email: becuase Gmail's search is better, and it doesn't bog down overall in the many ways that Outlook does. Teams, as much as it pisses me off on a daily basis (and it really does), is still far better and more reliable than Hangouts.

While I tend to agree, the premise here is mainly 'is a poster child' and not 'is at least as good or better than alternatives'. Just looking at LibreOffice without comparing it, it is quite impressive what it can do. And even when comparing it, in a way it is still fairly impressive if you look at the resource thrown at it vs MS Office.

Pretty much the same goes for Audacity actually: go back 2 decades (well, a bit less) and compare it with the closed-source alternatives which existed back then and for anything but the simplest features it just wasn't usable. But it's steadily getting better and overall: indeed fairly impressive even though it is probably still quite behind professional packages.

That's not to say when LibreOffice is viewed on its own merit's it's not a worthwhile product. And it might well be the best option on Linux... but Linux is a tiny minority of the desktop market.

On Audacity I tend to agree with you. I keep it installed even though I also have Ableton simply because, as a basic sample editor, or where I need to do a format conversion, or a quick top and tail, or some normalisation, it's actually the better tool for those kinds of jobs.

You can even use it as a multitrack recorder and sequencer at a push, but it definitely starts to fall apart as compared to commercial offerings at that point.

Still, as a sample editor, it's a great tool.

I stand corrected, I did misread that.

Maybe LO is a touch more difficult to use, but in functionality, I would choose it every time over MS Office. Especially the Office 365 versions suck. They are sooo buggy. One example: Move your selected cell in online MS Excel quickly using 2 arrow keys, like down + right or up + right. Sometimes it will simply delete cell content. wtf.

With Libreoffice lacking a proper Outline Mode (no, the Navigator doesn't count), I find style-powered document structuring difficult to do in Libreoffice whereas I pretty much live in Microsoft Word's Outline Mode.

That's what most of the complaints I see about LibreOffice (and many other free software alternatives) end up being, and while I understand why that makes it difficult to switch that's not really a fault of LibreOffice.

I think the desktop versions are a different story though, if you have access to those.

This is not a good argument against cloud lock-in. All of that could be done and still allow perpetual local use.

> While Office 2013 and onward have full read/write support for ISO/IEC 29500 Strict, Microsoft has not yet implemented the strict non-transitional, or original standard, as the default file format yet due to remaining interoperability concerns.

From the very Wiki article you linked. I guess this means, that when you implement the standard to its fullest, you can still have issues opening MS Office documents, because they themselves do not adhere to the standard.

Both workflows suck compared to git.

Gimp only gained a reasonable amount of dynamic range sometime in the past few years. Photoshop had it close to _thirty years ago_. And the GUI is ... hostile, to put it lightly. I'd love for Gimp to be a contender but I don't see it happening any time soon. Though I can finally use it for some stuff, the Photoshop envy is strong.

And LibreOffice? Oy. It's "ok....ish" for solo work (in that it doesn't actively set my computer on fire) but every time I've attempted to use it in a group setting (coworkers, friends, lawyers) I've had to apologize and fire up MSOffice. I HATE being beholden to evil cloud lock-in but at least Google Docs works. LibreOffice just mutilates formatting and brings shame. :/ Perhaps a mercy killing of Star.. no.. Open... no... LibreOffice would free the shackled developers for more fruitful pursuits.

(I really like Abiword for solo stuff, when I need more than plain text. Limited scope and it actually achieves what it tries to do.)

I think you're immensely right about infrastructure tho -- the "war" is over, F/OSS won. And that pipeline for new developers is a great point too! Plus the fact that F/OSS development is now often funded by for-profit companies who hire employees to do what they need done, and we all benefit. I get to have LLVM, BoringSSL and who knows how many thousands of security fixes for free, yay.

I can't speak to Blender and Krita, I have no experience with them. Maybe they're great and the industry standard in their field.

Affinity beats Gimp for my type of work at the moment, but it’s cheap enough. I hope GIMP takes a page out of blenders book.

Libreoffice is fine as well, no more need for Office365

Godot is another rising star, 3.3 is great and 4.0 is going to be a leap forward. It uses the Blender model and makes money with Patreon and the like. The user community is absolutely fantastic.

Right clicking with different tools gives completely different outcomes. It's very difficult to use.

I used Gimp for about 10 years and it never felt natural. I figured out Photoshop in less than a half hour.

I see it a bit differently. I think the tech is as good as, but the UX...not so much.

The problem as I understand it is that, even if a bunch of aspiring UX developers decided to donate their time to these projects, there wouldn't be any extra developer time to implement the new UX. So you have a catch-22 where UX improvements don't get merged, because the people with the UX expertise don't really know how to code, meanwhile the bad UX persists, because the people with the coding expertise either don't know or don't care about UX (or in some cases they actually think the current UX is good).

It was a GUI, developed by people that hate GUI. What could possibly go wrong?

Some of the new Linux desktops are really nice. They were obviously designed by people that like GUI.

I agree with this statement but disagree with the next one. Modern Linux GUIs still feel like they were designed by people who don't like GUIs. The only difference is that they now seem to be designed by the same people who design GUIs for more mainstream software... who hate GUIs but love pretty screenshots.

LibreOffice vs Microsoft Office discussions invariably prompts someone to mention how much they hate the ribbon interface, usually by mentioning how bad the ribbon from Office 2008 was, as if it hasn't improved at all in the intervening 13 years. I think time has proven that that the ribbon really is a far better interface than the traditional button icons and text menus for office applications. But there are people who still adamantly refuse to accept that just like there were adamant diehards for DOS-based WordPerfect.

Most of my opinion is based on "over the shoulder" observations.

Also, X11 is ghastly. Anything looks good, compared to that.

The issue I find with many OSS projects is that they just kind of copy the features of the professional counterparts instead of focusing on the UX/workflows for each use case. The result is that they remain only kind of poor imitations.

Lately however, I find more and more OSS projects that break out of this pattern. Krita for example has really focused of drawing and animation. While it doesn't have all features of the Photoshop (eg. it can't compete with PS in photography editing or design), it has surpassed PS in many ways for drawing and animation. Powerful and exotic brush engines, perspective tools, proper animation timeline with onion skinning... All of these Krita features are worse or missing in PS.

Blender, since UI redesign in 2.80, has also seriously upped their game and is becoming more viable solution with each release. MuseScore is another OSS project that is on good path to become competitive with professional products soon.

I can't say that for Audacity, Gimp and LibreOffice yet. Maybe some day. Worst offender IMO is LibreOffice. MS office has so many questionable design choices, that LibreOffice could really stand out, if they would deviate further from MS office in regards to UX and workflows.

One thing I find good OSS has in common is innovative funding of the project. They have all found a way to gather funds to pay at least some full time developers, while offering the software for free to end users with source code avaliable. Firefox has a deal with Google for offering it's search engine as default. Krita has had some interesting Kickstarter campaigns, Blender has managed to get funding from some big studios, MuseScore has paid online service etc. Offering paid support or offering another paid product that relies on OSS are also popular ways to gather funds. Anyone knows, if there is any resource on ways how open source projects fund development? They are really interesting business models, where developer are getting paid for their work and the product they create benefits many more people (as anyone can afford it) that in closed source projects.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a miracle that it exists and is free (and Free), but the amount of work and expertise that has gone into Office has to be respected and it is just not possible to duplicate without a lot more money and time for LibreOffice.

I don't understand what's so difficult about writing basic word processing software with an autosave-esque function that doesn't disappear one's thoughts on a digital whim.

Ooh-kayyy...

Losing data is unacceptable.

There, FTFY. HTH.

But GIMP, I would say they are decades behind and honestly it seems to be actively hostile to users.