I don't know, back in my day you could get at least discounts on updates for your paid software.

I don't remember which, but Excel doesn't do one of them. Oh, did he say _LibreOffice_ is missing features. Well, probably it does too.

do you really need them in a day and age where you have an llm subscription is a different question

You would rightfully be upset, and it might even be a bad business move but you aren't "entitled" to anything but what is shoved onto your plate like gruel in a Dickensian workhouse cafeteria

The idea that you can release a shoddy product full of bugs and then expect people to pay you for the privilege of fixing your shitty product only exists in software.

In no other industry would that be okay. Automakers, for example, issue recalls when their products have safety defects, and then they fix them on the company's dime. Remind me again who's acting entitled?

But why? I still use Office 2016 and I haven't yet come across a document it wouldn't open. What am I missing out on?

It's not like you get security updates if your subscription has lapsed.

I have to assume a large portion of the community here are paid software engineers or adjacent, how do you think your employer is able to pay you? By selling software...and software updates.

Fact is, there's a lot of "unnecessary" and innovation-deterring in the "own nothing; subscribe to everything" model you're espousing.

On the flip-side, yes, we do love being paid to continue doing our thing.

So. It's a balance.

The equivalent comparison would be expecting BMW to update your car after you have already bought it. It is perfectly reasonable that once you have bought the car, any updated parts have to be bought and installed separately.

But if you don't want to pay for that, your car works as before. That's what the GP is suggesting.

No, I don't open rando word docs

Even though other implementations of the spec are lacking (looking at you Koffice) the fact that a spec exists is data security. Especially in an age where LLMs are getting cheaper and alternative (or custom) implementations might become feasible to produce.

The super-complicated app that fail when an online service fail in Microsoft's offering is Notepad, at least in one botched update where failed Copilot apparently crash Notepad entirely instead of letting it run without Copilot.

How do you draw the line? There is at least one LibreOffice developer who also contributed to Dovecot.

With Microsoft, especially in the past few years, there is no such thing as "offline version"

In reality the office work will be replaced not by libre office, but something like claude work. It's an obvious direction.

I quite like that Libreoffice let's me disable the confusing "strip" layout that MS Office pushes on everyone.

it's not about styles, it's UX, stupid encoding questions, every time you open it, not able to handle big enough spreadsheets, and tons of problems like this.

Also changing document formatting is a pain, i do not want to do it manually , i want ai to do it for me.

On styles, office packages are more often an external communication tool, send a doc, report, to a customer, prospect etc, How can you make the doc ascetically good, if entire office package tools looks like from 90s, scroll is lagging, etc.

Why do you think CLIs and TUI are making a huge comeback.

Web applications were prettier but so bloated and so slow.

1. Terminals finally got some design attention and became beautiful.

2. The apps within those terminals are now easily able to inherit that beauty.

It is most definitely still possible to create an ugly CLI/TUI, but it is harder to do so under the constraints imposed on them as compared to when you have free rein over a GUI. For every CLI/TUI we're seeing these days someone has also created a GUI that does the same thing, but the GUI UIs are ugly compared to the equivalent CLI/TUI options.

A world-class designer can make a GUI great, but the vast majority of designers are average at best. Restricting their design freedom increases the chances that they'll create something decent than if they had full freedom to exhibit their lack of design skill.

Updates are coming in frequently for all the *Craft apps, and I really like that it's possible to brew install them across many macOS on a moment's notice, so I definitely recommend trying it. However it should not be used for absolutely critical work unless you can verify the functions you need are fine.

But yeah, I think on the whole they're doing great, and actually being quite conservative about the claims they make.

Blender is a little different because every 3D modeling program is odd in its own way, and the new UI was close enough that it was easy to learn after the transition (I do still use the legacy keybinds though).

But Blender is very niche hobby software. To "succeed" (if we define success as capturing a significant user share from closed source spyware), Libre and GIMP need to offer workflows that are close to what the average non-coder technical person expects. Maybe that isn't valued by the teams, or maybe they don't have enough resources to make it happen, but the end result is a reputation of jank.

I dislike vibe coded clones because of concerns about the engineering quality. But the reason they're making waves when traditional FOSS hasn't is that the UX is leagues ahead.

I don't think this is entirely accurate at this point. It has pretty wide adoption in the educational space, and a number of well-known studios have adopted Blender into their workflows.

The Blender development fund wouldn't be topped-up to the tune of $3 million/year if it were purely funded by hobbyists.

But when I say "niche hobby software," I'm talking about the relative scale of the user base.

Every working adult who touches a computer in 2026 is using office software. Photo editing is so common that "Photoshop" has become a verb. These two use cases are behemoths compared to 3D modelers.

Oh definitely. The way some people seem oblivious to all of Word's faults and weirdness― …Oh! You weren't talking about Microsoft Word!

Software having some quirks is fine. Most people would be fine with LibreOffice if they were taught the rudiments of word processing (that; not using Word, but actual word processing) and never came into a situation where they had to use Word or Google Docs.

The difference between all those tools is that LibreOffice will still do its thing in the future. Just as it has done for a long while, while Word will have forced some new subscription model on you and force-fed you some AI-integration, and Google will have done some similar googley shit.

Most people don't use MS office by choice though so "goodness" isn't a particular relevant metric.

Not true. There's inertia and network effects in play that often prevent better products from succeeding against established ones.

Basically the keyboard is all wired weirdly in LibreOffice for Mac.

In my opinion, the user interface of modern MS Office is absolutely horrible.

I have used a lot of old MS Office versions, and until 20 years ago I thought that its user interface was very good.

Then there was a gap of about a decade when I did not need MS Office at work and I also had no reason to update my personally purchased MS Office Professional (which I was running on Linux, using Crossover, where it was more performant and more stable than on Windows).

After that gap, when I encountered again MS Office, I was shocked by how awkward its UI had become meanwhile.

Today I prefer very much the UI of LibreOffice, which is similar to the old MS UI, instead of the modern MS Office UI.

There are a lot of things that I dislike in the LibreOffice UI, but even so, I consider the MS Office UI much worse.

Because there was a time in the past when I was a heavy MS Office user, when using the modern MS Office I am aware about a great number of commands that exist, but I am no longer able to find them in the MS Office menus.

In the old MS Office, those commands were grouped in a way that was logical for me, so it was easy to find them even when I did not know where they were, because I had not used them before. But in the modern interface many commands are not where I would expect them to be, so there have been many case when I had to do a random search through all menus, to locate them after a long time.

For example, moving a text layer (with 'pick layer') requires the cursor to be over the painted part of the glyphs to move that layer, if you miss then the background is moved instead. All that is required is a picking region around the glyphs and it would be fine.

    pick a layer or guide
    move the selected layers

In my opinion, the quality of MS Word peaked some time in the early 2000s.

So today, given the choice between LibreOffice and MS Word, I would always choose LibreOffice, even if MS Word were free, and despite the fact that LibreOffice Writer has some annoying bugs that have not been fixed for many years, but I find easier to work around those bugs than to cope with the user interface of modern MS Word.

On the other hand, I agree that MS Excel is clearly superior to LibreOffice Calc. Nonetheless, there already are decades since I switched to LibreOffice Calc and I did not need the extra features of MS Excel. For things beyond the capabilities of Calc, I use a real database, though that would probably not be the best solution for a typical office worker.

And the whole "I'm proud of being a curmudgeon " is exactly the problem being identified by others in this thread. It's like you weren't even reading it.

Consider this: Word Processing, and Word Processor UX was a solved problem from his perspective 20 years ago (he is far from alone in this opinion). Quite honestly, I have no idea what Word today is doing for me that the Word I was using 2 decades ago wasn't already doing.

It isn't curmudgeonly to say that a product has reached maturity, and does not need changes. This happens a lot outside of the computing realm; a screwdriver from 50 years ago is basically the same as a modern one. A mechanic using his grandfather's screwdriver isn't "proud of being a curmudgeon" they are just using a perfectly good tool that doesn't need updates.

So perhaps they are not wrong and newer doesn't always mean better.

I understand millions of people are able to use ms word. I just can't work with the UI. It even makes me angry and aggressive. And that's not an easy thing to achieve.

Would you agree that a "new" TV that requires an internet connection is worse than a ten year old TV that just works?

Would you agree that decades of UI research are discarded by supposedly "new" and "modern" computer interfaces?

A big thing that came with the roll out of OOXML, along with the controversy, is that all of the weird serialization corruption bugs went away.

My mileage varies.

https://youtu.be/QYM3TWf_G38

The problem is the lack of integration into a wider ecosystem, that's what MS provides.

I don't do photoediting any more, but Gimp + plugins was great. In those days, it wasn't unusual for Gimp to get some new capability before Photoshop (e.g. Liquid Rescale, various denoising algorithms). The academics would often demonstrate their new algorithm using Gimp plugins.

Also LibreOffice (former OpenOffice) had PDF export a decade before Word. This seems to be a ridiculously essential feature. Last but not least, it's way more comprehensive than Google Docs.

All software can suffer from that, but thats what you wanted so idk why this falls back onto Libre Office

  https://www.collaboraonline.com/
  https://www.onlyoffice.com/

I'd love to like LibreOffice, but they need some Mac UI/UX people if they ever want mainstream Mac users.

2. The yellow help information appears directly behind cursor which makes it hard to see.

3. In print popup, "print current page" option is not available, we have to provide page numbers instead every time.

Just a few observations.

As a Linux user I (have to) use both Google Docs and LibreOffice.

Aside from collaborative editing, Google Docs is like an online version of Windows WordPad (not Notepad). It supports only a subset of MS Word but just enough for daily use. It refuses to open docs with advanced formatting -- my most recent example is a legal pleading.

LibreOffice supports more MS Word features, but is less polished and buggy. I occasionally find certain operations break the layout and a Ctrl-Z doesn't restore it.

I have some legal and administrative issues at the moment that require me to share office docs fairly regularly, as well as editing PDFs for filling in forms. I have had no collaboration problems at all with either of these activities exclusively using libreoffice. At one point I tried out the online versions (google docs / office 365 online) and it was a disaster.

    sudo apt purge libreoffice*
    sudo apt install libreoffice-gtk3

Never had an issue with a Word doc, at least not in the past 5 years or more.

Not 100% compatible, but its become rather usable, for most use cases.

Definitely not as problematic as 10 years ago.

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Feature_Comparison:_Libr...

We have seen this effect with Mastodon. Even when Twitter / X was down, hundreds of millions of people never stuck around when they struggled to migrate or even choose an instance on Mastodon.

GitHub, no matter how unreliable it is and will surely go down next week, tens of millions of developers continue to use it rather than actually self-hosting.

The exact same thing with Claude or ChatGPT going down several times a month. Rather than swapping a model, users continue to use both of them instead of local models that don't phone home.

With the Microsoft outage, hundreds of millions of users will continue to use Outlook and the suite of Microsoft software, because all their emails and work is on there. So they just cannot just migrate away from it to LibreOffice.

It is far harder than it sounds due to inertia and most open source projects still do not get that in 2026.

My softmaker office suite also.

Anyway, I do admit I mostly use libreoffice nowadays, except for 1) communication with customers, and 2) a few excels libre can't handle.

I still have to find a good alternative for (local installed) outlook, I'm trying out thunderbird, but I'm not sure it would be able to replace outlook. I still have to try whether it can handle a 50gb imap inbox, and besides lacks a few essential features.

The only thing I'm afraid about is Thunderbird wiping one's inbox [^1] [^2] (both by the same user with discussion underneath)

[^1]: 2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18807723#18808520

[^2]: 2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44492682#44519053

    [0]: https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/
    [1]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/buy/compare-all-microsoft-365-products (DO NOT REDEEM)

Does that mean you're asking for the donation to be in Lean?

This is the year where you can have all your data private, you processor is good enough.

Software is not about or pretty the UI is, it's a tool.

If I had to use a word processor daily at work I would just run into the woods and never come back.

I don't really like spreadsheets for mostly the same reason, Their "big bag of cells" data model really started to bother me. I found that relational databases have a data model that agrees with me and have largely replaced my spreadsheets with them. The user interface sort of suffers in comparison to something like excel, but at least my rows stick together. (better at whole data set manipulation, worse at single cell ad-hoc edits)

You know why they call them word processors right... Well have you ever seen what a food processor does to food.

I wonder if that has to do with anything..

An office where everyone uses local software, that has no idea there is a network share, feels like the eternal conundrum today: it's potentially a Linux on the desktop win. But in the meantime most people would rather not need to manage individual desktops. Cross-machine multi-player experiences are increasingly table-stakes. It doesn't have to be the cloud per se, but it's been multiple decades now of open source competing for the desktop, and it's really been struggling to skate to where the puck's going. It hasn't been on desktop in a while.

But I also use it. It's the best office suite for Linux.

I'm on LibreOffice 26.8 with the new ui, it is absolutely equivalent with zero geopolitical risk coming from the Atlantic or the Urals.

And if you need cloud integration there is UK based Colabora and now also LibreOffice Online.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnlyOffice

“ What a fascinating bug!! My wife has complained that open office will never print on Tuesdays!?! Then she demonstrated it. Sure enough, won't print on Tuesday. Other applications print. I think this is the same bug. Here is my guess:

Print to a postscript file. Observe the line: %%CreationDate: (Tue Mar 3 19:47:42 2009)

Change "Tue" to anything else: %%CreationDate: (XTue Mar 3 19:47:42 2009)

Save the file and it prints. Tools like evince work because they simply omit the "CreationDate" tag to begin with.

Now something odd happens when my cups script (I am using the Brother MFC420CN) copies the file to a temp file. Some of the code is rearranged, not sure how or why, but it uses a command called "file" to identify the file as "PostScript". This check would work on the original file you printed, but by the time it runs the check on the temp file, it misidentifies. Normally it would return:

   PostScript document text conforming at level 3.0

   Jan 22 14:32:44 MET 1991\011Erlang JAM file - version 4.2

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161...

But now, I really want to know why my office suite needs to tell my printer what day of the week it is.

If the printer is smart enough to make use of that kind of information, then isn't it also smart enough to sort that out on its own? If so, then it seems superfluous.

0: https://yosefk.com/blog/all-means-are-fair-except-solving-th...

And the whole CreationDate field is optional in PostScript[1], anyway.

[1]: https://www.adobe.com/jp/print/postscript/pdfs/PLRM.pdf

this seems like a post-rationalization. when an app generates a file to send to another service, it's usually a good practice to timestamp that. unless you're severely bandwidth-constrained, putting a timestamp in your protocol almost always solves more problems than it creates. "we shouldn't include a timestamp because it might at some point trigger a date-math bug" is just not how software gets built.

the fact that the software can still print without including a timestamp doesn't mean it's not worth including.

If not, then: I'm not sure that the distinction means anything. :)

OK but although I love the file utility, why does OpenOffice and/or CUPS rely on it to... print a file that ends with the .ps extension?

It's kinda begging for troubles.

Like I get that sometimes you have to do what you have to do, but sniffing should be a last resort.

https://ask.libreoffice.org/t/why-does-libroffice-starts-so-...

https://ask.libreoffice.org/t/startup-time-open-libreoffice-...

https://ask.libreoffice.org/t/why-does-libreoffice-feel-slug...

Fortunately, I get to do what I want with that rig, so 95% of the spreadsheetin' I do on it are on Calc. Excel is only there for the rare compatibility issues and checking the occasional Calc-generated .xlsx that I have to pass on to others.

But I can confirm that it is a problem specific to the Windows variant, because on Linux it starts instantly.

Sometimes when programs start slowly on Windows it is not their fault, but some antivirus garbage scans them every time, because they are not whitelisted, so it delays their startup.

If they chose Libreoffice, while their company may have been working today, it wouldn't be able to work with most other companies anyway, and crucially every minor user error will be blamed on the CTO for not choosing Microsoft

Is LibreOffice all the average home user needs? Absolutely. Enterprise? Not even close, and enterprises would rather license one expensive, shitty bundle than have to cobble together superior solutions from multiple vendors or FLOSS products.

Every month TDF should take a batch of X volunteer microsoft office users who have never used LibreOffice.

Their most senior developers should be forced to sit with these email jockeys as they attempt to do their office work exclusively in LibreOffice.

External perspective is the blocker. That's how you make it competitive.

The LibreOffice folks should not be posting so recklessly. They are reeling after falsely claiming they don't use AI and then were suddenly revealed to be doing the opposite.

or are the parts of office that are broken the ones that libreoffice doesn’t even offer?

(*) Well, unless some dork decides to do xyz because of abc due to the shape of the starts in relation to the moon.

Editing huge documents multi-author with versioning and locking turned on. Incompatible styles and fonts and bullet schemes. Broken headers and footers and footnotes and tables of content and indices. Authors who didn't understand or use correctly any of the above.

Sort-of databases. Spreadsheets used as databases. Interminable migraine-inducing slideshows.

Those were the days!

A. Your local application run on your local platform; downloaded and installed by you/local IT staff; maintained, updated, and bug diagnosis/resolution done by you/local IT 40 hrs/week, who have very little expertise or resources, by vendor tech support maybe slightly better, or (if you luckily get their attention) by vendor engineers with almost zero direct access to your systems.

B. Hosted application run at highly resourced data centers with power, redundancy, etc. far beyond what most users can imagine; operated, updated, and fixed 24/7/365 by the actual application engineers with direct access to the system. It does add an Internet connection, which is a point of failure, between you and the application.

In almost every case, B is the answer to uptime. There are other reasons not to use hosted systems (customization needs, licensing costs, highly confidential data, unreliable Internet connection, etc.) but uptime isn't one of them.

Anyone who says 'system 1 is down right now and system 2 is up, so system 2 has better uptime' is not even trying.

A bicycle will never run out of fuel, and is, in a way, more reliable than an airplane. You probably don't want to do London to NYC on a bicycle.

If you don't have online collaboration features, think of documents in terms of q4_financials_v13_final_fixed_with_legal_disclaimers_really_fucking_final (14).xlsx files instead of proper CRDTs synched with a central server, and don't have to worry about how to make your files work on computers (and mobile devices!) that don't have your software installed on them, yes, you will be more reliable. In 2026, those are table-stakes features that most of your users want, and if you don't provide them, you aren't really in the same league as your competitors.

Microsoft Office is no longer just a suite of apps for reading and writing local files. It hasn't been for many years, because a suite of local files is not what you want if you wish to collaborate in real time and own more than one device. Libre Office apparently didn't get the memo yet (maybe the memo used MS Word features which they haven't yet gotten around to implementing)?

On a more serious note, I am deeply saddened that they do not understand this, and seem to believe themselves superior on such a deep level. They are making a great product for the last decade. We do need more digital sovereignty and open source competitors to Microsoft and Google, but if those competitors don't even realize what features the products they're supposedly competing against now have... they have no hope of ever being competitors!

I think I would enjoy jokes like this stunt a lot... if it weren't for all those people taking them so seriously.

LibreOffice wouldn't have magically made me receive emails and give me access to the team calendar and meetings. Because that is not what it does. And essentially all services that provide these two services can have outages.

The joke could be so funny without all of those nonsensical discussions even in this thread...

I rarely have an offline only use. Even docs I write for myself is to be shared with others.

I don't think an LibreOffice supports that workflow.

https://www.libreoffice.org/media/screenshot_writer_hero.png

Can we judge a book by its cover?

You can write documents in anything, the cloud aspect is the hard part and there ain’t no LibreCloud