LibreOffice 400M Downloads, and Counting

For non tech savvy people at my workplace we go for OnlyOffice because it looks more familiar when coming from Microsoft Office. However, sooner or later they try to open a very big spreadsheet and it just chokes completely. When that happens we switch them over to LibreOffice which usually handles it without issue.

Are these concerns valid?: https://forum.cryptpad.org/d/232-onlyoffice-concerns-vendor-...

Recently, I have also switched to OnlyOffice due to their document compatibility and nicer UI. However, on my machines, it's actually generally slower than LibreOffice. The UI is nicer, but it feels sluggish. Similarly to how Vivaldi feels less responsive than other Chromium forks.

I've tried to like LibreOffice for years, but man, it's just so ugly. And no, I’m not asking for a ribbon interface (I think that's awful too), but the UI looks like it’s stuck in the past.

OnlyOffice seems very online-centric, but has desktop apps available. Are those desktop apps offline-capable, or do they require some online component to function?

New product with fewer features and less compatibility vs old product which is mature and has a full bug tracker

I'm not sure if having a broken navigation menu at the top because of Disconnect or uBlock is a good sign, but their product seems like a decent alternative.

@jospoortvliet did a comparison of the two projects that's very much worth a read.

https://blog.jospoortvliet.com/2020/06/collabora-vs-onlyoffi...

It's anecdotal, but I have a similar feeling about OnlyOffice. It has better compatibility with Word than LibreOffice and has an easier-to-use, modern interface resembling Word 2010/2013.

I sincerely congratulate the hard work of any open source office alternative and the small army of developers and contributors that make it possible. That said, I too agree the OnlyOffice UI/UX is light years ahead of the competition when compared to commercially successful options like Microsoft Office.

After switching to OnlyOffice I never looked back.

The github page lists programming languages that include shell, php, and typescript. Blah! - it's an amalgamation of stuff, not a coherent piece of software. And the official website offers commercial stuff. Nowhere do I see a license, so I'm assuming it's quite far from GPL.

When you learn to make decisions on principles, LibreOffice will be the obvious choice.

Their Android app is also the best open source alternative I've found thus far.

Does OnlyOffice still not support RTL languages?

I'm on linux but I also download from the website to get the latest updates; the distro repo versions are typically quite outdated.

In theory, the downloadable version lets you know when there's an update. In practice I'm using a little script [0] which I've integrated in my update manager to manage update-notifications for me.

[0] https://sr.ht/~tpapastylianou/misc-updater/

Draw is great, I use it to edit PDFs, though it doesn't always handle that very well, it's really nice when I need to do some simple stuff.

That would make sense, since that would ridiculously inflate those numbers. I bet I've installed Open/LibreOffice a couple of dozen times inadvertently.

it also excludes downloads Windows/Mac OS app stores though I don't know what percentage of Windows/Mac users would download it that way

Same, I am trapped in the MSFT ecosystem at work but for personal stuff LO is more than sufficient. Granted .doc(x) files don't always look perfect when I open them, but good enough for my limited needs.

IMO a local word processor is one of the fundamental pieces of a desktop experience so LO plays an important role. It's also not easy and sometimes thankless. In that way I view them somewhat similarly to Mozilla.

Same. Do you know some public and maintained (kept up to date) docker container for that usecase? I tried using https://github.com/vladholubiev/docker-libreoffice-pdf-cli and while it was exactly what I wanted, it hasn't been updated in ages, and its ancient version of LibreOffice rendered my docx docs wrongly. So I ended building my one-off updated version, but didn't publish it as I wouldn't want to be keeping it up to date as well.

I like to use pdf24 for this sort of thing. Fast and simple.

Ooo you got an unnecessary swipe at X in. Look at you!

Collabora Online may be what you are looking for. It's commercial, but it is LibreOffice (Collabora is a major contributor to LibreOffice). https://www.collaboraonline.com/writer/

There is plain LibreOffice Online, but it is apparently frozen at the moment: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/

I used both, LibreOffice calc for heavier data analysis than Google Sheets can handle. Google can also read LibreOffice's file formats easily.

Check out the onlyoffice links above for a remote floss alternative.

I think this is in reference to OpenOffice but the wording is rather confusing.

Apache is generally a collection of over-engineered abandonware.

I just happened to use Calc for the first time in a looong while yesterday. Pretty nice. Fast, conventional, no damn ribbon menus. Saved to office365 format for consumption by others and it was all flawless. It's always been functional, but what I saw yesterday felt pretty polished. Used whatever version is default with Ubuntu 24.04.

So, it's still being actively refined. I think you're maybe a bit too hard on LibreOffice and Apache.

Also, I'll mention something about Thunderbird. Because Snaps, I installed Thunderbird from the official site. I am amazed by this software. Thunderbird is legitimately a nice desktop email client. What amazing progress.

I wondered about updates for Thunderbird, thinking that since I'd done an out-of-band install, I wouldn't get updates. I was astonished to find it's been silently auto-updating itself with zero drama. Kudos.

This is also my take. I've installed many distros and nearly all of the (consumer) distros have LibreOffice installed by default. I have never explicitly downloaded it myself, and I've even uninstalled it a few times.