“
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
But there is another check that happens before the PostScript check. If it finds "Tue" at the fourth byte of the file, it identifies it as:
Jan 22 14:32:44 MET 1991\011Erlang JAM file - version 4.2
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.
Doesn't seem to me like it is telling the printer what day of the week it is because the printer needs to know so much as it is generating a PostScript file for the printer to use and is adding the creation date as either a convention or requirement of the format, and not the printer.
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.
if this bug was caused by a lack of a datestamp instead of the inclusion of one, you'd be here leaving comments about how silly it was they didn't include something as standard and widely useful as a datestamp, and that of course that was necessary.
Not a requirement, but indeed more of a convention or at least a possibility. Postscript files can be postprocessed or read by humans, and then this kind of metadata can be useful.
Exactly, it was using the file utility to determine what it was so it could print it correctly (by processing it if needed to a format the printer understood) and there was a bug in that.
This is one of those "VLC is slow to start because of a bug in Windows" things. It's VLC's responsibility to ensure their program runs properly on the OS people actually have. It's LibreOffice's responsibility to ensure that their files print on Tuesday irrespective of bugs in CUPS (which ships with the Mac).
That reminds me that my yearly donation[0] towards LibreOffice's stewards, The Document Foundation, is coming up in December. It's a wholesome tradition where you wire them the amount of EUR/US$/XYZ that Microsoft demands for a year of a personal Office 365(-ish, eh?) subscription[1] as a tex-deductible donation that will make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. I hereby invite you to join in! :)
[0]: https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/
[1]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/buy/compare-all-microsoft-365-products (DO NOT REDEEM)
You should contact LibreOffice, explain what you're doing (and for how long you've been doing it), and propose for them to do it as an "official" thing, to have the same subscriptions as 365 but as recurring donations instead. It could be a cool donation campaign for them!
If LibreOffice were good enough already, it would already be popular. It's the same with GIMP. On paper it's a Photoshop alternative, but we've all struggled with it. These projects need to take the same route as Blender did. Originally it was a clunky open source alternative, but it went through a complete UI transformation and now blows the competition away.
I consider LibreOffice Writer superior to old MS Word versions, and old MS Word versions superior to new MS Word versions.
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.
In the distant past I liked a lot MS Access, but I have no idea whether today it is still useful. I abandoned it many years ago, after I had some problems with the migration of data between different versions of MS Access and even more with the migration of data from MS Access to another database manager.
What I read from your comment is that youre proud of being stuck in the past. For whatever it's worth (to you, the viability of libreoffice) you're wrong that a multi decade old ui is better than today's.
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.
That's incredibly uncharitable interpretation of what the words in the comment say.
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.
Computers are tools used to achieve end results. The end results desired from a document editor are the same today as they were 30 years ago, and 70 years ago.
A major barrier to the improvement of giant FOSS replacements like GIMP and LibreOffice is that the people who develop it and the people who use it have become very used to all of its quirks. It's extremely hard to identify the rough edges in a UI without an external perspective.
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.
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; Crossover is a paid derivative of Wine, which ensures a better support for MS Office and for other professional applications).
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 details 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 cases when I had to do a random search through all menus, to locate them after a long time.
When was the last time you have used LibreOffice? The newer versions are heavily inspired by the office workflow. Maybe the design is a bit boring but it's not bad.
On Mac, all key mappings are still wired for PC. In the Save As dialog, Alt-Shit-Left to select the last word of the filename doesn't work, the Home key doesn't work, the Cmd+C doesn't copy, nothing works like on Mac.
Basically the keyboard is all wired weirdly in LibreOffice for Mac.
While Gimp has some UI issues, as someone who learned Gimp first, I don't "struggle" with it. It's very effective, and while you can call it a distant 2nd to Photoshop, anything else would be a distant 3rd to Gimp.
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.
The main problem is that if you get sent any slightly complicated word document, it doesn’t display properly. Equally if you create something using it and have to send it to someone who uses Word, then it doesn’t work properly for them. For non-work things, I find Google Docs and spreadsheets do everything I need and I don’t have MS Office on my personal machine. YMMV.
Octave is a similar old-school open-source replacement tool (to Matlab) that could benefit from similar investment. Though Octave's issues involve some ecosystem compatibility dynamics too, last I checked.
ArtCraft is great for this. They try to recreate proprietary apps 1 to 1 so there's no real innovation, but it creates a baseline for new open source projects that can be even better than the original.
Yep I’ve been using PhotoCraft and WordCraft along with others in the suite and honestly I haven’t found any features yet that they are missing. Basically drop-in replacements written in Rust. Each one is around 100mb and no bloat like the real versions. Adobe and Microsoft are in trouble.
Be careful with this with the knowledge that it's an ongoing vibe-coded effort. Wordcraft failed to detect spacing after paragraphs and I could not use "Remove spacing after paragraph", whereas it worked in Word.
Photocraft added extra transparent space around a copied transformed edit selection, whereas in Photoshop it copied the selection boundary exactly.
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.
Well, PhotoCraft and LightCraft are completely unable to deal with RAW files from Olympus/OM Systems cameras. That's a known limitation, on their Issues list.
But yeah, I think on the whole they're doing great, and actually being quite conservative about the claims they make.
As an occasional user of GIMP, yes it does not quite have the final level of UX polish.
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.
Audacity has gone through this transformation. Tantacrul (designer, MS Paint 3D, and musician) made a video about how he directed the rewrite of the UI for version 4:
While true and a comment I support, it is worth noting that offline versions of Microsoft Office are and have been just fine, including the latest version of 2024 just updated this week.
Yes, but they eventually stop receiving updates, so you have to spend another $250 to get the newer version. And if you bought, say, Office 2021 just before Office 2024 is released (by necessity, for a new employee, say) then it has a significantly shorter lifespan. And you HAVE to spend this money because it is impossible to convince people they don't need Microsoft Word.
I have been on HN since 2010, and I will never understand this sentiment of "we deserve free updates". Unless you were promised an update in the purchase agreement, you got what you literally paid for.
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.
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.
That seems different though. If you are paying a fixed cost for offline software, you are not entitled to updates for it, that seems like wanting to have your cake and eat it too.
That's how I feel about using MS Office. I have a text file somewhere of all the things I couldn't do with MS Office at my last gig, that I do regularly with LibreOffice.
I feel like the word processor as a product is fairly "finished." There's not much about it that'd you want to change year over year. Are there any new features to write home about?
I think the word processor, and the office suite have advanced features that would be better suited in a programming language. like mail merge or macros....
do you really need them in a day and age where you have an llm subscription is a different question
With a well-defined python API instead of the abomination that is VBA, you could dispense with all the fancy mail-merge and other stupid features and greatly simplify the word processor product. I think most people would be happy to pay $250, or whatever, for an offline office suite that worked and was free of serious/security-relevant bugs.
The idea that you can release a half-baked 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 serious defects, and then they fix them on the company's dime. Remind me again who's acting entitled?
I guess technically you aren't entitled to anything wrt software; They could charge you a monthly fee to use the v1.out.of.date and stop providing updates unless you start paying for v2.the.latest.
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
Forget the cost. Just having my data and documents in a truly open and documented format is value enough to use LibreOffice.
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 commercial software industry has gotten me to the point where I don't want updates anymore. Every time [company] updates their software, it's worse than it was before. It's got more telemetry. It's removed features. It needs a login now. It's moved things around in the UI. It's put things that used to be free behind payments. It's monetizing me. It's cramming ads and spam into it. It needs more memory and disk space to use. I deliberately don't update commercial software anymore. Y'all developers have poisoned the well.
Splitting hairs about what a version is won't recover the point that you simply cannot let complex software idle as installed most of the time, especially when big bad CVEs are being found all the time.
It's not like you get security updates if your subscription has lapsed.
It's less new features and more security problems. There are patches for office 2016 though, and your use case might have a low security risk if you're not opening that many files people send to you.
Not sure about Word or other apps, but in Excel there are many useful functions added in the later versions like XLOOKUP, LAMBDA, LET, FILTER, MAP, REDUCE, GROUPBY.
It's not even really particularly true, at least the implied criticism. My work uses M365 and Microsoft Office worked fine, both online and offline versions. Email stopped working, but AFAIK Open Office doesn't make an open source email server.
The offline app licensing system is explicitly designed to only require refreshing the status regularly, each successful refresh will keep the state for six months even it it fail to refresh during that period. After the six months there comes the one month grace period (basically reminding the user to get online or contact their IT) where there's a warning banner but it still work. After the grace period it will disable saving.
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.
Maybe someone can help but why does LibreOffice take 4-5 seconds to start on Windows? There are many reports of that [0] and otherwise I have zero problems with my system. This is the only application I use regulary which is actually noticeably slow to start. Even restoring a Firefox instance with hundreds of tabs and +20GB RAM committed is quicker (1s)
I have not used recently LibreOffice on Windows, so I do not remember if it was starting slowly.
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.
I don't think MS Word is more intuitive. It's a trade-off between functionality and usability.
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.
Edit: I'm a developer. I'm literally asking so it can get addressed. I've actually had a look at the defaults and I can see a few issues that look like they should be reviewed, but I'm interested in what is considered a show stopper.
It's all very well to complain that something is "ugly", but it's so subjective that it can't be actioned in any way. If the point was to just complain, I suppose that's one thing you can do, but if you would like to make something less ugly you need to actually be more specific.
My locally installed ms office 2019 also works 365d/y.
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.
May I ask what features you consider essential are lacking in Thunderbird? I'm not a heavy e-mail user (for now, hopefully ever), and Thunderbird seems very feature-packed to me.
The only thing I'm afraid about is Thunderbird wiping one's inbox [^1] [^2] (both by the same user with discussion underneath)
Aren't offline and online offices suites for completely different types of work?
Most of my usage of Google Docs is always in a collaborative work. I review docs and leave comments, live edit my team's docs, update a shared async stand-ups doc, etc.
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.
I support this in spirit, but in all honesty I never use it. I don’t use word either though. Nvim and on Windows Notepad. Micro is pretty good as well.
If I had to use a word processor daily at work I would just run into the woods and never come back.
As a fellow word processor escapee, I sort of figured word processors were just something you outgrew. I liked the markup language/renderer workflow so much better, No weird internal state that can't see fighting with you for control of the document. Something like word perfect's show codes is a good start for exposing that internal state, but you still can't edit it. So a markup language and an explicit transform step into the typeset document is the final form. But obviously that does not happen for every one and people just get really good at manipulating the hidden state that so infuriated me and start to love the infernal things.
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 haven't used in a while, but all my experiences with it in past were it "works". Any non-trivial work with csv's and it was crashing regularly... Hope it's better now
I have an opposite experience with regard to CSV handling in MS Office vs LO, libreoffice correctly splits very wide CSVs and gives many options for import, while MS Office gives up quickly and renders a whole line per cell
Word and word-like editors are all too complex. Personally I would love some libre quip-like or markdown based renderer with better image and table support
I hate all things MS (Windows, Office, AD, O365, Teams, Entra, InTune, Azure, VSCode, OutBreak, Exchange). But LibreOffice doesn't even begin to cover what I'm forced to use at work. When LibreOffice has a mail server, scheduling (rooms, meetings, people, etc.), device management (hopefully never), and all the things enterprises use it for, try again.
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.
Yes, but. I haven't used Microsoft groupware, but my impression is that like Google there's a bunch of multi-player value.
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.
A sidebar here, but I think this is what makes atproto so compelling to me. Posts like "A Social Filesystem" talk to how atproto is common glue, and it takes a little imagining, but it's absolutely a substrate that could be used for multiplayer office (via internal-only atproto networks, or upcoming ATproto Spaces). https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46665839
No, it is offline desktop software that doesn't depend on a cloud. That is the point and they should be rubbing it in because Office used to be like that and now it is not.
Doesn't matter. Nobody who chose Microsoft 365 for their business is being blamed for the problems today, and that's all they care about.
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
I see stuff like this I feel like every few months on HN. Word is not the product, it’s the portal to the product which is the M365 cloud. Being able to share, collaborate, search, etc.
You can write documents in anything, the cloud aspect is the hard part and there ain’t no LibreCloud
> Why do you think CLIs and TUI are making a huge comeback.
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.
You can see on reddit case what happens when you start adding the "beauty" factor instead of staying with the minimal interface. It may be surprising but for many hn looks good and the only thing it could have is the dark mode - which can be bring with userscripts.
For presentations internally i switched to https://bento.page/ , my agents doing all kind of great CSS animations.
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.
try to open sreadsheets, especially wide/big one, and you will love it even more. I literally have to do non intuitive moves and fall back into gdrive or claude docs.
I pity the poor souls still wrangling documents with any of the Office Suites. Those awkward conglomerations of word processing and desktop publishing systems. Those systems that would let you embed a video in a spreadsheet in a document, with links to update it when you opened it. Hosted on network drives of NFS, SMB and SharePoint, with broken locking, network hangs, BYTE-ME order problems and BOMs.
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.
I am so sick of OSS advocates constantly trying PR stunts like this.
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!
So do offline versions of MS Office. Irrelevant and out of touch statement.
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.
Software like this still under-estimates the strength of network effects and inertia. With 3 examples:
1) We have seen this effect with Mastodon. Even when Twitter / X was down, hundreds of millions of people waited for it to go back online and never stuck on Mastodon when they struggled to migrate, or even could not choose a instance to sign up on.
2) 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.
3) The exact same thing with Claude or ChatGPT going down several times a month. Users continue to use both of them instead of local models that don't phone home and stay up 100% uptime.
With the Microsoft 365 outage, hundreds of millions of users will continue to use Outlook and the suite of Microsoft software including Teams; because all their emails and work is on there.
So they just cannot just migrate away from it to LibreOffice which they see that as a complete downgrade. It is far harder than it sounds due to inertia and most open source projects still do not get that in 2026.
Is Office compatibility a solved problem? Haven't used LibreOffice or OpenOffice for years but I was always met with slightly different formatting, incompatible Office quirks et cetera. I know they have their own document format which works fine but the biggest problem is (was?) interoperability with majority of the rest of the professional (and academic) world on regular Office installations.
Compatibilty is probably 95% or greater. If you're a very demanding Excel user you might have some trouble (I never have; I do my taxes in LibreOffice using a spreadsheet designed for Excel and it's fine).
Never had an issue with a Word doc, at least not in the past 5 years or more.
That's embarassingly ignorant for an IT professional: Offline applications have 100% uptime? And what about the platform and infrastructure they run on? The question is, what has more uptime?:
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.
In other news, Gentoo has been working 24/7. Come to think of it, every distro has been working 24/7*. This will be The Year of LibreOffice! This time, finally, msft really shot themselves in the foot and the masses are gonna download and setup their own word processors and spreadsheets.
(*) Well, unless some dork decides to do xyz because of abc due to the shape of the stars in relation to the moon.
I've had similar things break when I was on Arch years ago. My wife was quite unhappy that she couldn't log in to use it (I think it was a graphics driver thing). Even though I usually like Fedora, I recently settled on Void for my personal workstation and I've been thoroughly enjoying it.
This is why I stopped using Arch, just wait until you update and try to reboot and it doesn’t work, then you have to update again via mounting your disk through a liveusb installer.
So? The operating system package manager breaking packages is a different type of problem to an online service being down. LibreOffice presumably did not break in Debian or Nix.
“ 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:
But there is another check that happens before the PostScript check. If it finds "Tue" at the fourth byte of the file, it identifies it as: So it's not a problem w/ openoffice.org, cups, or the brother printer drivers. It is a bug in the `file` utility, and documented at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/file/+bug/248619. ”https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161...
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.
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.
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.
Does that mean you're asking for the donation to be in Lean?
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.
In the distant past I liked a lot MS Access, but I have no idea whether today it is still useful. I abandoned it many years ago, after I had some problems with the migration of data between different versions of MS Access and even more with the migration of data from MS Access to another database manager.
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.
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.
Not true. There's inertia and network effects in play that often prevent better products from succeeding against established ones.
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; Crossover is a paid derivative of Wine, which ensures a better support for MS Office and for other professional applications).
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 details 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 cases when I had to do a random search through all menus, to locate them after a long time.
Basically the keyboard is all wired weirdly in LibreOffice for Mac.
... further... MS Office's look is, IMO, hideous now. So. YMMV whilst LibreOffice's just look "old", which is ... a perennial problem.
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.
Most people don't use MS office by choice though so "goodness" isn't a particular relevant metric.
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.
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.
The problem is the lack of integration into a wider ecosystem, that's what MS provides.
https://youtu.be/QYM3TWf_G38
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.
do you really need them in a day and age where you have an llm subscription is a different question
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.
I don't know, back in my day you could get at least discounts on updates for your paid software.
In no other industry would that be okay. Automakers, for example, issue recalls when their products have serious defects, and then they fix them on the company's dime. Remind me again who's acting entitled?
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
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.
It's not like you get security updates if your subscription has lapsed.
No, I don't open rando word docs
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?
How do you draw the line? There is at least one LibreOffice developer who also contributed to Dovecot.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Edit: I'm a developer. I'm literally asking so it can get addressed. I've actually had a look at the defaults and I can see a few issues that look like they should be reviewed, but I'm interested in what is considered a show stopper.
It's all very well to complain that something is "ugly", but it's so subjective that it can't be actioned in any way. If the point was to just complain, I suppose that's one thing you can do, but if you would like to make something less ugly you need to actually be more specific.
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
But I also use it. It's the best office suite for Linux.
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.
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.
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.
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 sit with them as they attempt to do their office work exclusively in LibreOffice.
Then take notes about their experience and revise/enhance the products accordingly.
They should do this 365 days a year for as long as it takes.
External perspective is the blocker. That's how you make it competitive.
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.
A sidebar here, but I think this is what makes atproto so compelling to me. Posts like "A Social Filesystem" talk to how atproto is common glue, and it takes a little imagining, but it's absolutely a substrate that could be used for multiplayer office (via internal-only atproto networks, or upcoming ATproto Spaces). https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46665839
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
You can write documents in anything, the cloud aspect is the hard part and there ain’t no LibreCloud
In reality the office work will be replaced not by libre office, but something like claude work. It's an obvious direction.
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.
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.
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 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 wonder if that has to do with anything..
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.
1) We have seen this effect with Mastodon. Even when Twitter / X was down, hundreds of millions of people waited for it to go back online and never stuck on Mastodon when they struggled to migrate, or even could not choose a instance to sign up on.
2) 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.
3) The exact same thing with Claude or ChatGPT going down several times a month. Users continue to use both of them instead of local models that don't phone home and stay up 100% uptime.
With the Microsoft 365 outage, hundreds of millions of users will continue to use Outlook and the suite of Microsoft software including Teams; because all their emails and work is on there.
So they just cannot just migrate away from it to LibreOffice which they see that as a complete downgrade. It is far harder than it sounds due to inertia and most open source projects still do not get that in 2026.
Github is far more than a git repository. You’re almost never using it for just git. The real value is the ecosystem.
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Feature_Comparison:_Libr...
Not 100% compatible, but its become rather usable, for most use cases.
Definitely not as problematic as 10 years ago.
Never had an issue with a Word doc, at least not in the past 5 years or more.
https://www.libreoffice.org/media/screenshot_writer_hero.png
Can we judge a book by its cover?
or are the parts of office that are broken the ones that libreoffice doesn’t even offer?
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.
(*) Well, unless some dork decides to do xyz because of abc due to the shape of the stars in relation to the moon.
All software can suffer from that, but thats what you wanted so idk why this falls back onto Libre Office