“
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
I can't figure out why anyone would need to detect the file type at all. Surely there should be some way for that to be passed into cups (and forwarded on, as necessary) out of band, by the program that created or opened the file and knows what its type is.
Why would a tool that runs any program sent to it on a device it doesn’t know about be that concerned about being sent an invalid program?
An attacker might send a file that orders for millions of dollars of pizzas, using the fax hardware built into the printer (I’m not sure you can buy postscript printers that can fax today, but you can buy printers that can fax even today)
I'm having trouble understanding your question in the context of the discussion, so I will talk about the topic generally instead.
Imagine a server allows you to upload images. It has a system designed for images only. It will behave unpredictably maybe even dangerously with another file. The server checks that the file ends with .jpg. it checks that the file is a valid jpeg. All clear. Upload allowed. But 5 steps later some tool looks at the image file and notices it's a valid zip file (creating files with multiple valid interpretations is something people have succeeded in doing it's not always so hard). It runs this check before the image check. The next step in the processing chain wants an image but it has been told it's dealing with a zip file. So it unzips the file to see if it contains an image. But it was a zip bomb. The server goes down.
If the printer endpoint of the USB device receives a file that orders millions of pizzas, it will print the file (or print a PS error, or print the plaintext contents of the file), not order pizzas.
If the user mistakenly "prints" to the fax device, the file will be printed at the destination fax machine, at the number the user typed, not the number in the file, and it will print, not order pizzas (unless the pizzeria accepts fax orders, which would be a prank, not an attack).
“FaxOptions Dictionary This dictionary contains parameters that direct fax transmissions from a PostScript language program. Refer to “Fax Parameters” on page 29 for further information about FaxOptions defaults and the keys found in this dictionary”
Google tells me this is what you needed in your PostScript file to send a fax:
CUPS depends on, and is a dependency for, half the OS for some reason. At least under Ubuntu, if you've got a machine you're planning to decommission, try:
`sudo apt purge libcups*`
NB, don't do this on a system you're planning to keep operational, this will autoremove half the OS if allowed to run.
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.
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.
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.
A datestamp is a privacy risk. If it's optional, don't include it. If it's not optional, it's a spec bug! It should be optional. Or even better, removed entirely.
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).
So, Windows gets a pass for being sloppy coded? Give me a break. Every software must fulfill their contract with every consumer rather than consumer have to work around producers quirks. "All means are fair except solving the problem"[0]
Can be useful to distinguish when a print job was submitted from when it was actually received by the printer. That distinction matters when printers go offline and jobs get queued.
Yes. Many printers have a web interface where you can see active jobs, job history, timestamps, and document information. Some even have a physical control panel that lets you inspect this information directly from a touchscreen.
Are you sure? I would be more surprised if it did not come from there, if the field was present at all. You're already processing the PostScript... Might as well use the metadata.
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.
It's fairly likely that your (reasonable) complaint is that you don't know where the buttons are anymore. I edit dozens of somewhat complex documents and don't really spend much time thinking about the interface.
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.
Yes, the problem is that I no longer know where the buttons are.
But years ago, when using old versions of MS Word, I also did not know where the buttons were and I also did not bother to read a manual or help.
Yet I could find easily any unknown menu or button. And nothing has changed with me. I still start using many programs that I have never used before, and in those I can easily find where the unknown buttons are. That is why I believe that the MS Word UI has become much less intuitive than in its old versions.
Moreover, I do not understand why they had to change the UI, because nothing that I have seen in the new versions appears to be an improvement, but just a wild shuffle of the locations of various settings and commands.
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.
That's interesting, I thought the Ribbon UI was one of the only improvements I've noticed over the years of using ms office. Luckily LibreOffice asks on first startup which UI you prefer.
Might be, but there is probably a reason other desktop ui features got much wider adoption than that.
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.
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.
After 5 years of KDE, I now got Gnome on my office laptop since 3 days. I'm cursing quite a lot on it. All my hotkeys are failing, everything is in the wrong place, and the whole UI feels wrong and broken.
Now partially it is because Gnome is oversimplified, but a big thing is just that I have to unlearn a lot of habits. So I won't switch to KDE for at least a month, as I need to get out of my comfort zone.
I use blender a bit. I still cant figure out the hotkeys. Its the most unpleasant to use software i know of. If the alternatives werent outrageously expensive, I wouldnt touch it
> […] the people who use it have become very used to all of its quirks.
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.
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.
For years I used a custom plugin that restored the regular file menus in lieu of the ribbon. I still can't find anything in the ribbon in excel. Is it in the home tab, formatting, or data? Guess I'll look in each. Every time. Something about it that after so many years can't internalize it.
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.
Note that LibreOffice now has an option to enable a ribbon interface rather than a menu interface. I think it asked which one I wanted last time I installed it. I really don't like ribbon interfaces, but I guess people do actually want them so it's good that they got one too.
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.
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.
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.
Right, so I tend to have to 'move the selected layers' when moving text, but then I'm bouncing around the layers in the layers tab instead of picking whats in front of me.
Meanwhile the 'align and distribute' tool does the right thing when picking text layers - so the solution is there, just not everywhere!
Please don't equate #installed with quality. If LibreOffice came bundled with the only OS sold by most vendors, and was effectively required by government and corporates, then LibreOffice would have the most installs.
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.
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.
I must admit it was strange to get used to it. If you need to create professional looking documents, it's necessary to adjust line height, be able to work with tables etc. That being said, once you need to look up your favorite functions with Google.
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.
Any tech lead who has sat at the table for hours, while the Microsoft Sales Rep lies to senior management, knows that LibreOffice has been good enough for at least the past ten years.
> On paper it's a Photoshop alternative, but we've all struggled with it.
Speak for yourself. I struggle with PS, not only because of their horrible payment model, und missing Linux support but because it kept changing every time I need to use it extensively. Didn't ever have this issues with Gimp which I happily use for decades now.
Same with libreoffice. Zero issues using that for all my office needs since basically as long as I can.
One of the main use cases I hear for "AI" is people using it to get around Word or Excel. How many times to you hear "I couldn't get it to do xx, so asked Chat" (were xx is some basic formatting etc function)? If we need "AI" to use basic office tools, those tools are seriously damaged.
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:
I think tcp/ip over smoke signals would be more efficient than ms teams. However management loves teams (mostly because they have assistants who deal with that crap for them).
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.
Yes, security is important. Either the developer/company is benevolent or incentivized to provide security patches for free, or they may offer a paid security update package. The US Govt was paying for patches to XP for many years: https://time.com/3935855/us-navy-microsoft-windows-xp/
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.
Kinda. I think the prevailing sentiment is more of a manufacturer recall where BMW has realized a flaw that leads to a safety issue or a critical functionality and issues a recall to resolve it.
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.
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.
i'm more concerned about the security of my operating systems, not my office suite. Like the other person, i also used office 2016 and it meets all my needs just fine. Honestly, i don't care about security updates for my word processor.
It's all about how you use it and your risk tolerance. If you only ever open files you created, only ever importing images you created, there's probably no risk? But if you're ever opening files you receive from others, I think there's reason to be suspicious.
For example, a lot of websites let you upload pictures in bulk to crop or resize them. I've used a lot of these myself. It's not impossible to imagine that a malicious website like this could embed something in an image that exploits security holes on an unpatched word processor to download ransomware or something.
I'm not even a security person and I usually don't really care about this kind of stuff. But since it's easier and easier to publish exploits for software now, I think I need to start taking it more seriously.
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.
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 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)
Same here. 12 core processor, NVME, clean OS, enough memory to make Altman furious, and Excel still starts slower than Calc did when I was running it off spinning rust and a Core 2 Duo.
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.
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.
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)
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.
- There are a lot of icons of various colors that clutter the screen for no reason. Most of these icons are too obscure; I need to hover them to understand what they do
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.
I'm a developer, and I use computers in a way that gives normal people (including developers) the heebeejeebies. However my use of office stuff is relatively rare and extraordinarily basic - I would say pretty close to the majority of users' usage. There are no problems with libreoffice for that kind of usage. In some respects for people not hunting pointless features it's usability is better.
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.
It's also clearly not been optimized (UI) for Mac, it sticks out like a sore thumb. And some things, like settings is like 10fps when moving the window.
I'd love to like LibreOffice, but they need some Mac UI/UX people if they ever want mainstream Mac users.
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
TDF doesn't have offices where developers work (all remote) - actually until recently they didn't have even have developers. All they have in Berlin is a mailbox.
> Based in Riga, Latvia, OnlyOffice owner Ascensio System SIA was a subsidiary of Russian-based New Communication Technologies[34] (not to be confused with the company The New Cloud Technologies, which develops an unrelated office suite named MyOffice (Russian: МойОфис)[35]). Due to EU economic sanctions targeting Russia, European organizations that used the commercial version of OnlyOffice were prohibited from doing so.[0]
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.
Yet why doesn't anyone use it? Because it's not compatible with office which ~all businesses use. Even if you are a Linux user and live on FOSS, if you work for a company you need office suite compatibility.
I haven't seen an MS Office doc that I couldn't open in LibreOffice or was imported incorrectly in years, and same for the inverse. When was the last time you really tried?
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.
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
LibreOffice is great and in general open source should be encouraged, but when I tried to used it I just didn't understood why that and GIMP had worse UI than the alternatives. As open source i'm sure you could customize it, so its on purpose, but it definitely pushes away the mass of people imo.
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.
Got any good recommendations for what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) markdown editors? I’d love something where I can easily preview my document while writing. I haven’t looked super hard, but the last time I looked a little, I didn’t see any obvious answer.
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
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.
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.
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.
I use open office suites since Sun released one so it's quarter of century now ? Possibly I use it in less then average user mode :)
But:
- why you want your own mail server ? Certainly, email aka SMTP corporate server should be unavailable for [all?] suits.
- scheduling ? Do it really need to be done from Word or Excel and not from... some scheduling app ??
- what you mean by device management ? Sharing stuff among laptops, workstations, projectors ? Such thing, theoretically, belong to office but do not realy belong to documents editors package, it's operating system job. Or some not yet invented app, but for sure not a job for editors package
- Teams ?
- what else is needed for serious enterprise experience ?
But, sure, open office suites are just Office 95 clones, not enterprise packages. Now available via Web interface... Hackers approve.
And LibreOffice is quite ugly and somehow have feel like web page with bad response time. Tables editing is a lot nicer in Emacs/Org mode with Latex export.
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.
> 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.
The beauty factor is the facade for their full on enshittification plan. By the way I quite literally get angry when an app spends time with a bolted on dark mode instead of quite literally any basic feature. I see it all the time. The app barely works but the feature they (and a ton of users) are happy about is dark mode or a new theme.
Of course it is and it's not just reddit but literally any piece of software nowadays. It's not just about the way interface is designed but how overall application looks like and with what features keeping you in it comes.
Our local Amazon equivalent here got recently a partial mobile app redesign. Application went by gamification path and it got: "challenges", worthless coupons, affiliated links program to pester your friends with. Plus, independent "notifications" in form of a banner for those stubborn users who refused to agree for "personalization". And there's also information about how much you "saved" subscribing to extra delivery service without which it's impossible to get your package on time.
All of this pointless shit but for more than 20 - twenty years no user is able to change their account handle.
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.
Office doesn’t open Access on weekends. On the web, absolutely not, unless you pay at the Windows to gain Access. (Disclosure: we make Rutba Office, free. Its ‘Data Files’ app imports .mdb and .accdb tables without Access installed, and has its own forms, no macros.)
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
This is like comparing the US Navy with someone's kitchen coffee pot. Yeah, an enterprise cloud platform is going to have issues your word processor doesn't have. Not sure how that's a flex for the word processor.
I love hating Microsoft like all the rest of you, but... this is not very smart. Afaik, Office also works 365 days a year (I guess until MS introduces a cloud dependency for application boot).
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!
> I am so sick of OSS advocates constantly trying PR stunts like this.
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...
(It also doesn't give me cloud storage, the reason why I have a personal O365 subscription. The office apps access is purely incidental and gets essentially zero use.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, OpenOffice wouldn't print on Tuesdays:
“ 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...
> It is a bug in the `file` utility
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.
Assuming file type by name rather than by contents opens a whole 'nother can of worms.
I can't figure out why anyone would need to detect the file type at all. Surely there should be some way for that to be passed into cups (and forwarded on, as necessary) out of band, by the program that created or opened the file and knows what its type is.
Tbf magic bytes are also not that helpful here
Content injection vulnerability is bad, and that's the core of what sniffing does. Failing randomly like in this case is mild in comparison.
Like I get that sometimes you have to do what you have to do, but sniffing should be a last resort.
Why would a tool that runs any program sent to it on a device it doesn’t know about be that concerned about being sent an invalid program?
An attacker might send a file that orders for millions of dollars of pizzas, using the fax hardware built into the printer (I’m not sure you can buy postscript printers that can fax today, but you can buy printers that can fax even today)
I'm having trouble understanding your question in the context of the discussion, so I will talk about the topic generally instead.
Imagine a server allows you to upload images. It has a system designed for images only. It will behave unpredictably maybe even dangerously with another file. The server checks that the file ends with .jpg. it checks that the file is a valid jpeg. All clear. Upload allowed. But 5 steps later some tool looks at the image file and notices it's a valid zip file (creating files with multiple valid interpretations is something people have succeeded in doing it's not always so hard). It runs this check before the image check. The next step in the processing chain wants an image but it has been told it's dealing with a zip file. So it unzips the file to see if it contains an image. But it was a zip bomb. The server goes down.
That's not how a printer with a fax/modem works.
If the printer endpoint of the USB device receives a file that orders millions of pizzas, it will print the file (or print a PS error, or print the plaintext contents of the file), not order pizzas.
If the user mistakenly "prints" to the fax device, the file will be printed at the destination fax machine, at the number the user typed, not the number in the file, and it will print, not order pizzas (unless the pizzeria accepts fax orders, which would be a prank, not an attack).
> That's not how a printer with a fax/modem works.
It is how at least one of them works, and how I assumed all of them work. http://www.whoopis.com/howtos/laserwriter16-600/LaserWriter_...:
“FaxOptions Dictionary This dictionary contains parameters that direct fax transmissions from a PostScript language program. Refer to “Fax Parameters” on page 29 for further information about FaxOptions defaults and the keys found in this dictionary”
Google tells me this is what you needed in your PostScript file to send a fax:
And I don’t think Apple was unique in having fax support in their PostScript. https://web.mit.edu/PostScript/Adobe/Documents/5001.DSC_Spec... mentions faxing, too (but doesn’t appear to say how to accomplish it)CUPS depends on, and is a dependency for, half the OS for some reason. At least under Ubuntu, if you've got a machine you're planning to decommission, try:
`sudo apt purge libcups*`
NB, don't do this on a system you're planning to keep operational, this will autoremove half the OS if allowed to run.
these types of bugs are epic. often due to people trying to mix and match date and int math
This was one of the funniest humor stories in software history. You can find some submissions about the topic here:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
But "Tue" is not at the fourth byte of the file in your example
Thank you for sharing such a brilliant bug.
That's really neat.
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.
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.
Other things were reported to successfully be printed on Tuesdays, so that inclusion (or at least, this form of it) is empirically unnecessary.
And the whole CreationDate field is optional in PostScript[1], anyway.
[1]: https://www.adobe.com/jp/print/postscript/pdfs/PLRM.pdf
>so that inclusion empirically unnecessary
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.
Maybe we should think about building software in a way that only adds stuff that is truly necessary.
I have. I don't like it. I'd rather have the ability to debug, redundant checks, etc. than only what's truly necessary.
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.
A datestamp is a privacy risk. If it's optional, don't include it. If it's not optional, it's a spec bug! It should be optional. Or even better, removed entirely.
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).
It's important that software behaves well on systems with bugs. (All systems have bugs.)
So, Windows gets a pass for being sloppy coded? Give me a break. Every software must fulfill their contract with every consumer rather than consumer have to work around producers quirks. "All means are fair except solving the problem"[0]
0: https://yosefk.com/blog/all-means-are-fair-except-solving-th...
Can be useful to distinguish when a print job was submitted from when it was actually received by the printer. That distinction matters when printers go offline and jobs get queued.
Is it possible or practical to examine a printer's internal queue for jobs that might include this (completely optional) CreationDate field?
If not, then: I'm not sure that the distinction means anything. :)
Yes. Many printers have a web interface where you can see active jobs, job history, timestamps, and document information. Some even have a physical control panel that lets you inspect this information directly from a touchscreen.
Right. But none of that comes from the CreationDate field of a postscript job.
Seems you learned a lot about printers since asking your question.
By the way, it's mentioned in a number of printer manuals, so it's definitely used, e.g.: https://www.scribd.com/document/899003124/Magicolor-2200-use...
Which part of that manual relates to a CreationDate field within a postscript print job?
I'm not seeing it.
Page 156.
I see it now, thanks.
It appears that only gets used for header/tailer pages, though (also page 156).
Are you sure? I would be more surprised if it did not come from there, if the field was present at all. You're already processing the PostScript... Might as well use the metadata.
I'm sure that every print queue I've ever used didn't appear to care a lick about the content beyond acceptance. It's a buffer, not a processor.
This is up there with the "wifi only works when it's raining" story
I miss Joe Armstrong.
Sure, Ubuntu bug from 2008 (!) exposed in an abandoned project must be super relevant for LibreOffice in 2026.
I think it was intended to be a humorous anecdote playing off of the original joke, and not an indictment of LibreOffice or any other OSS.
LibreOffice is based on OpenOffice. OP was also (almost certainly) being tongue-in-cheek.
reminds me of the "email fails over 500 miles" bug lol
clickable: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=500+mile+email&utm_source=chat...
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! :)
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!
That's a bit too close to begging for me to get the warm and fuzzies by helping.
Does it matter if and how they ask, or how you feel about it? Help is help
You say tex-deductible I sure think you meant LaTeX-deductible...
Wouldn't LaTex deductible be something like a math proof?
Does that mean you're asking for the donation to be in Lean?
One can dream!
Well, office 365 also includes email (sorta), word (1GB of ram per window), excel, teams (ugh), and shared file storage (kinda works)
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.
It's fairly likely that your (reasonable) complaint is that you don't know where the buttons are anymore. I edit dozens of somewhat complex documents and don't really spend much time thinking about the interface.
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.
Yes, the problem is that I no longer know where the buttons are.
But years ago, when using old versions of MS Word, I also did not know where the buttons were and I also did not bother to read a manual or help.
Yet I could find easily any unknown menu or button. And nothing has changed with me. I still start using many programs that I have never used before, and in those I can easily find where the unknown buttons are. That is why I believe that the MS Word UI has become much less intuitive than in its old versions.
Moreover, I do not understand why they had to change the UI, because nothing that I have seen in the new versions appears to be an improvement, but just a wild shuffle of the locations of various settings and commands.
> OOXML, along with the controversy, is that all of the weird serialization corruption bugs went away.
My mileage varies.
Edit: perhaps I’m conflating serialization with synchronization bugs or something.
[flagged]
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.
not everything new is necessarily better. What i read from your comment is that you take the word "new" to be synonymous with "better".
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?
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.
I can't use the ms office ribbon ui. Guessing by the fact no other modern desktop software I'm using copied it, it's probably not just me.
So perhaps they are not wrong and newer doesn't always mean better.
That's interesting, I thought the Ribbon UI was one of the only improvements I've noticed over the years of using ms office. Luckily LibreOffice asks on first startup which UI you prefer.
The two big cad packages Solidworks and Inventor both use ribbon type menus. I think it works ok for this purpose.
Might be, but there is probably a reason other desktop ui features got much wider adoption than that.
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.
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.
> But Blender is very niche hobby software
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.
Yes, it is used in a professional capacity.
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.
It's either "niche hobby" or "embraced by professionals".
He seems to be saying that 3D modeling is a niche industry specific application, compared to photo editors and office suites.
Either I'm taking to see the contradiction or this is a false dichotomy.
After 5 years of KDE, I now got Gnome on my office laptop since 3 days. I'm cursing quite a lot on it. All my hotkeys are failing, everything is in the wrong place, and the whole UI feels wrong and broken.
Now partially it is because Gnome is oversimplified, but a big thing is just that I have to unlearn a lot of habits. So I won't switch to KDE for at least a month, as I need to get out of my comfort zone.
I use blender a bit. I still cant figure out the hotkeys. Its the most unpleasant to use software i know of. If the alternatives werent outrageously expensive, I wouldnt touch it
> […] the people who use it have become very used to all of its quirks.
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.
> If LibreOffice were good enough already, it would already be popular.
Not true. There's inertia and network effects in play that often prevent better products from succeeding against established ones.
Let's be honest though, the UI is absolutely dreadful.
Are you talking about MS Office?
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.
For years I used a custom plugin that restored the regular file menus in lieu of the ribbon. I still can't find anything in the ribbon in excel. Is it in the home tab, formatting, or data? Guess I'll look in each. Every time. Something about it that after so many years can't internalize it.
This so much. Whoever thinks UI of MS Office is any good, must be windows washed in my eyes.
Libre has such a simple and clear UI just as we all got used to decades ago.
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.
Note that LibreOffice now has an option to enable a ribbon interface rather than a menu interface. I think it asked which one I wanted last time I installed it. I really don't like ribbon interfaces, but I guess people do actually want them so it's good that they got one too.
In what way? The ribbon in MS Office is far worse, it's horrible. I've both LibreOffice and Office on my machine and Office sits there unused.
What specifically don't you like?
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.
The magic of capitalism is that it can pay for superfluous fluff like "make the toolbars look slightly different". Just costs $120/year!
... further... MS Office's look is, IMO, hideous now. So. YMMV whilst LibreOffice's just look "old", which is ... a perennial problem.
I agree that LibreOffice has ways to go. But the secret is that MS office is just worse in every single way except mind share.
Most people don't use MS office by choice though so "goodness" isn't a particular relevant metric.
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.
It's not just LibreOffice. Microsoft's 365 web apps don't display desktop documents properly either.
I hear this all the time, but never experienced this. At worst, someone assumed I would have their Windows-only font.
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.
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.
Not sure if this hurts or help the case for the gimp but that behavior is a tool option for the move command. It also temporarily toggles with shift.
Right, so I tend to have to 'move the selected layers' when moving text, but then I'm bouncing around the layers in the layers tab instead of picking whats in front of me.
Meanwhile the 'align and distribute' tool does the right thing when picking text layers - so the solution is there, just not everywhere!
Please don't equate #installed with quality. If LibreOffice came bundled with the only OS sold by most vendors, and was effectively required by government and corporates, then LibreOffice would have the most installs.
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.
They have an official early alpha status for a reason.
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.
You could convert them to DNG first
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.
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I must admit it was strange to get used to it. If you need to create professional looking documents, it's necessary to adjust line height, be able to work with tables etc. That being said, once you need to look up your favorite functions with Google.
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.
I use LO Calc on my home and work computers, and my work computer comes with Excel installed. shrug
Any tech lead who has sat at the table for hours, while the Microsoft Sales Rep lies to senior management, knows that LibreOffice has been good enough for at least the past ten years.
> On paper it's a Photoshop alternative, but we've all struggled with it.
Speak for yourself. I struggle with PS, not only because of their horrible payment model, und missing Linux support but because it kept changing every time I need to use it extensively. Didn't ever have this issues with Gimp which I happily use for decades now.
Same with libreoffice. Zero issues using that for all my office needs since basically as long as I can.
Man you must be easy to lie to if you think the only thing which drives decision making around purchasing and deployment is quality of software.
One of the main use cases I hear for "AI" is people using it to get around Word or Excel. How many times to you hear "I couldn't get it to do xx, so asked Chat" (were xx is some basic formatting etc function)? If we need "AI" to use basic office tools, those tools are seriously damaged.
Been happily using both for a long time. GIMP for 20 yr and LibreOffice for 8 yr. Granted my use cases are not professional.
Wow, so all the marketing and sales budgets for office have been wasted? MSFT will be relieved to drop them from next year's books.
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:
https://youtu.be/QYM3TWf_G38
I actuslly prefer libre office to office 365. Its apple numbers that has the really nice ux imo, and neither competes on that front
> If LibreOffice were good enough already, it would already be popular.
The problem is the lack of integration into a wider ecosystem, that's what MS provides.
GIMP is excellent, but you have to tinker around with it to get results. I have used GIMP to edit mg artwork for three exhibitions so far.
Its popular enough for me, I use Libre exclusively when not using google docs
I think tcp/ip over smoke signals would be more efficient than ms teams. However management loves teams (mostly because they have assistants who deal with that crap for them).
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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.
Unfortunately that often also includes security updates, which are a horrible idea to skip.
Yes, security is important. Either the developer/company is benevolent or incentivized to provide security patches for free, or they may offer a paid security update package. The US Govt was paying for patches to XP for many years: https://time.com/3935855/us-navy-microsoft-windows-xp/
I'll counter with "Why aren't you paying your subscription for your BMW's heated seats?"
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.
That is not what GP is suggesting.
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.
Kinda. I think the prevailing sentiment is more of a manufacturer recall where BMW has realized a flaw that leads to a safety issue or a critical functionality and issues a recall to resolve it.
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.
It costs nothing to update to the newest LibreOffice.
The cost is all the features you are missing.
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.
Please share it!
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
Like? Wouldn't be surprised if those features don't matter for the 95th percentile.
Like loading or saving CSV files and choosing the separator character.
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.
> That seems different though. If you are paying a fixed cost for offline software, you are not entitled to updates for it
I don't know, back in my day you could get at least discounts on updates for your paid software.
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.
>> so you have to spend another $250 to get the newer version
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 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.
i'm more concerned about the security of my operating systems, not my office suite. Like the other person, i also used office 2016 and it meets all my needs just fine. Honestly, i don't care about security updates for my word processor.
It's all about how you use it and your risk tolerance. If you only ever open files you created, only ever importing images you created, there's probably no risk? But if you're ever opening files you receive from others, I think there's reason to be suspicious.
For example, a lot of websites let you upload pictures in bulk to crop or resize them. I've used a lot of these myself. It's not impossible to imagine that a malicious website like this could embed something in an image that exploits security holes on an unpatched word processor to download ransomware or something.
I'm not even a security person and I usually don't really care about this kind of stuff. But since it's easier and easier to publish exploits for software now, I think I need to start taking it more seriously.
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.
Because you no longer get any security updates.
Some security updates, some features, and if you're unlucky and run MacOS - the ability to save files.
Not to mention, old versions of MS Office are not compatible with the new versions of paper they sell today. Technology moves forward, after all.
I have office 2003. Works fine.
No, I don't open rando word docs
Why do you need the newer version?
No one "needs" new features, but everyone needs security updates.
Microsoft doesn't stop shipping security updates after a new version is released.
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.
New and better WordArt templates, of course.
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.
Yes, I made an assumption, arguably unfounded, that MS365 had been affected by the recent issues.
> AFAIK Open Office doesn't make an open source email server.
How do you draw the line? There is at least one LibreOffice developer who also contributed to Dovecot.
Is the outage so bad you actually can't launch excel.exe if you have a 365 license?
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.
It's a technical debt to MS and will be phased out.
I guess you haven't been following the news. Users who purchased office 2021 Mac version discovered that edit feature was disabled after the product reached its end of life, and there are tutorials of "fixing" it: https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1xf6o5f/fixed_how_.... similar to Office 2019: https://youtu.be/KRnno9VIZx0
With Microsoft, especially in the past few years, there is no such thing as "offline version"
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)
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...
I wish Microsoft office was anywhere near as quick if I'm honest. But no I don't know any way to improve startup time.
My work Mac is really fast IMHO, but Excel will take ages to launch.
Same here. 12 core processor, NVME, clean OS, enough memory to make Altman furious, and Excel still starts slower than Calc did when I was running it off spinning rust and a Core 2 Duo.
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.
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 prefer them working on other stuff (office interop, stability, i18n, a11y, etc.). 4-5 secs suffices
Microsoft Defender tends to slow down everything else on the system; just ask VLC
Why not ask an agent to investigate? give it the source code for extra context and let it loose, it would have something in a couple of hours.
Does it matter? Are you in such a rush that you need your document program to open in under 4 seconds? What difference does this make?
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)
[^1]: 2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18807723#18808520
[^2]: 2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44492682#44519053
Thunderbird does very poorly with both large inboxes (e.g., 20000+ emails) and large email messages (10+ MB). Search is also super slow.
I have LibreOffice installed but it’s so ugly and non-intuitive that I prefer to import my documents in Google Docs.
If Libreoffice looks weirdly ugly and you're on a debian-based distro, try installing `libreoffice-gtk3`.
Often people will somehow get the generic `vcl` backend installed.What specifically is ugly?
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.
1. Many icons are low res on windows 10, 150% scale, 1440p monitor. https://shady-questionable-CSRF-trojan@is.gd/N90OJc?forgery....
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.
> 3. In print popup, "print current page" option is not available, we have to provide page numbers instead every time.
Fixed for 27.2: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=173496
- The page is not centered on the screen
- There are a lot of icons of various colors that clutter the screen for no reason. Most of these icons are too obscure; I need to hover them to understand what they do
Depending on your system gtk/Qt/whatever it is icon/font/etc. setup you and GP may have very different aesthetic experiences.
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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.
I'm a developer, and I use computers in a way that gives normal people (including developers) the heebeejeebies. However my use of office stuff is relatively rare and extraordinarily basic - I would say pretty close to the majority of users' usage. There are no problems with libreoffice for that kind of usage. In some respects for people not hunting pointless features it's usability is better.
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.
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google docs isn't ugly?
Not particularly! LibreOffice is, in my opinion, quite a bit uglier.
It's also clearly not been optimized (UI) for Mac, it sticks out like a sore thumb. And some things, like settings is like 10fps when moving the window.
I'd love to like LibreOffice, but they need some Mac UI/UX people if they ever want mainstream Mac users.
If I am honest that sounds like a perfect task for AI. Fork it and modernize the user interface.
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
LibreOffice is centered around the document foundation (TDF) in Berlin, correct?
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.
TDF doesn't have offices where developers work (all remote) - actually until recently they didn't have even have developers. All they have in Berlin is a mailbox.
Then they should do screenshares with users.
I don’t see the point in this: word and excel were working today. I don’t think LibreOffice provides email accounts and Teams equivalent, right?
Any software suite not providing a Teams equivalent is at an advantage IMO
I’ve been using OnlyOffice in Ubuntu and it’s so much better, I don’t miss Office at all
Seconding OnlyOffice. Much better experience and compatibility than LibreOffice, and works natively on Linux.
Pretty sure it's a wrapper for the Web version. Not native.
But I also use it. It's the best office suite for Linux.
> Based in Riga, Latvia, OnlyOffice owner Ascensio System SIA was a subsidiary of Russian-based New Communication Technologies[34] (not to be confused with the company The New Cloud Technologies, which develops an unrelated office suite named MyOffice (Russian: МойОфис)[35]). Due to EU economic sanctions targeting Russia, European organizations that used the commercial version of OnlyOffice were prohibited from doing so.[0]
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
Yet why doesn't anyone use it? Because it's not compatible with office which ~all businesses use. Even if you are a Linux user and live on FOSS, if you work for a company you need office suite compatibility.
I haven't seen an MS Office doc that I couldn't open in LibreOffice or was imported incorrectly in years, and same for the inverse. When was the last time you really tried?
Within the last month or two, on Word in the browser.
Throw in LibreAD or LibreEntra and you got something!
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.
Self-hosting anything is not trivial. You have to maintain your own infrastructure and backups.
Github is far more than a git repository. You’re almost never using it for just git. The real value is the ecosystem.
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
Collabora here. Plays nicely with DOCX and XLSX
LibreOffice is great and in general open source should be encouraged, but when I tried to used it I just didn't understood why that and GIMP had worse UI than the alternatives. As open source i'm sure you could customize it, so its on purpose, but it definitely pushes away the mass of people imo.
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.
Assuming you have a classic desk job, how do you report to your teams / higher-ups / clients etc ?
Connectwise, email and phone. But my job is anything but classic or desk.
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.
Got any good recommendations for what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) markdown editors? I’d love something where I can easily preview my document while writing. I haven’t looked super hard, but the last time I looked a little, I didn’t see any obvious answer.
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https://xnotme.com/LibreOffice/status/2121205272479998268
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
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.
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I've been rediscovering desktop software. Especially those that have a CLI I take the era of mediocre SAAS, selling people infinite subscriptions .
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.
I love Open Source, but LibreOffice does not work well most of the time. Never use it as an example of good Open Source.
From many indicators, it seems like the cloud is only going to become more insecure and unstable the next year.
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.
Libreoffice has become quite good last years.
Not 100% compatible, but its become rather usable, for most use cases.
Definitely not as problematic as 10 years ago.
Yes and no
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Feature_Comparison:_Libr...
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.
No.
LibreOffice is all anyone really needs. Although I wish its UI were a bit polished by 2026 standards.
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.
Interesting...
I use open office suites since Sun released one so it's quarter of century now ? Possibly I use it in less then average user mode :)
But:
- why you want your own mail server ? Certainly, email aka SMTP corporate server should be unavailable for [all?] suits.
- scheduling ? Do it really need to be done from Word or Excel and not from... some scheduling app ??
- what you mean by device management ? Sharing stuff among laptops, workstations, projectors ? Such thing, theoretically, belong to office but do not realy belong to documents editors package, it's operating system job. Or some not yet invented app, but for sure not a job for editors package
- Teams ?
- what else is needed for serious enterprise experience ?
But, sure, open office suites are just Office 95 clones, not enterprise packages. Now available via Web interface... Hackers approve.
And LibreOffice is quite ugly and somehow have feel like web page with bad response time. Tables editing is a lot nicer in Emacs/Org mode with Latex export.
Can you guys start a cloud company?
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.
LibreOffice doesn't have a mail client. Apples and oranges.
And it's not a proper substitute for Microsoft Office. Just saying.
every time i open libre office, i do think that micrsoft is paying them lots of money to stay that ugly.
In reality the office work will be replaced not by libre office, but something like claude work. It's an obvious direction.
It it can do the job, i'll take ugly.
Why do you think CLIs and TUI are making a huge comeback.
Web applications were prettier but so bloated and so slow.
> 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.
Maybe I'm the odd one out, but I usually don't spend my time editing documents caring about how pretty/ugly the editor is.
I quite like that Libreoffice let's me disable the confusing "strip" layout that MS Office pushes on everyone.
Yes I feel the same way. I even prefer it, it maybe looks a little dated but it's a denser UI and doesn't waste as much space on my screen.
Curious comment indeed made on a website not particularly known for a beautiful design
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.
The beauty factor is the facade for their full on enshittification plan. By the way I quite literally get angry when an app spends time with a bolted on dark mode instead of quite literally any basic feature. I see it all the time. The app barely works but the feature they (and a ton of users) are happy about is dark mode or a new theme.
Of course it is and it's not just reddit but literally any piece of software nowadays. It's not just about the way interface is designed but how overall application looks like and with what features keeping you in it comes.
Our local Amazon equivalent here got recently a partial mobile app redesign. Application went by gamification path and it got: "challenges", worthless coupons, affiliated links program to pester your friends with. Plus, independent "notifications" in form of a banner for those stubborn users who refused to agree for "personalization". And there's also information about how much you "saved" subscribing to extra delivery service without which it's impossible to get your package on time.
All of this pointless shit but for more than 20 - twenty years no user is able to change their account handle.
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.
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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.
Who cares? I use software to do a job, not to have pretty graphic design elements.
In other news, Claude outages today.
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.
Those were the days!
Office doesn’t open Access on weekends. On the web, absolutely not, unless you pay at the Windows to gain Access. (Disclosure: we make Rutba Office, free. Its ‘Data Files’ app imports .mdb and .accdb tables without Access installed, and has its own forms, no macros.)
I don't think most users of Word have ever experienced it not be 'working' in the past two decades either...
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
There is, kinda at least: Collabora
I don't see how that is any different than paying Microsoft
Maybe check your vision then. For starters you dont have to pay anything, its free and open source.
Doesn't seem so from the website
This is like comparing the US Navy with someone's kitchen coffee pot. Yeah, an enterprise cloud platform is going to have issues your word processor doesn't have. Not sure how that's a flex for the word processor.
I love hating Microsoft like all the rest of you, but... this is not very smart. Afaik, Office also works 365 days a year (I guess until MS introduces a cloud dependency for application boot).
Office 365 should rename to Office 363 at this point
but are desktop apps broken what?
or are the parts of office that are broken the ones that libreoffice doesn’t even offer?
Didn't micro-soft just recently attempt to layoff or buyout ~60,000 people?
I wonder if that has to do with anything..
Apart from the 1 minute wait opening a Calc spreadsheet if your network printer is turned off.
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!
> I am so sick of OSS advocates constantly trying PR stunts like this.
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...
(It also doesn't give me cloud storage, the reason why I have a personal O365 subscription. The office apps access is purely incidental and gets essentially zero use.)
of all the things, why post on twitter? you can't read any replies there
Likely LibreOffice is posting somewhere else too. The submitter here could have found other websites to submit, I think.
I still can't use it to print addresses on an envelope.
I didn't know they have a cloud offering
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And enables cloud collaboration?
WordCraft is more like Word and is just as free. Just saying.
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.
This is the application screenshot greeting visitors on the official LibreOffice homepage:
https://www.libreoffice.org/media/screenshot_writer_hero.png
Can we judge a book by its cover?
Well it runs definitely. Works though...?
it works so well, you have to export your docs to Microsoft Word format in order for them to have any value.
Now that we are all wielding AI, would we finally have it render the documents the same way as Office 364.2?
Define "works"
Microsoft Works?
libre office has saved the group of us developers in the fintech space who refuse to pay for m365 slop
lol
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.
It's pretty good. No complaints!
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I couldn't launch LibreOffice for like, 3 days, earlier this year after a botched ArchLinux upgrade that moved some libraries it needed.
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.
That's what Flatpak is for. It runs smoothly and independently of the distribution.
Thats a thing though with Rolling release models.
All software can suffer from that, but thats what you wanted so idk why this falls back onto Libre Office
Thats not really the fault of LibreOffice, is it now? Thats like me complaining about not being able to use my oven after I blew my fusebox
I can't quite put my finger on it, but I feel like there's maybe something else in this sentence that might be a greater source of your issues
Isn't it the same for this Microsoft Office outage?
Yeah LibreOffice isn't wrong to throw shade but no matter how soft their wares are, they shouldn't throw them in glass houses.
That sounds like an ArchLinux problem rather than a LibreOffice problem?
And I doubt the root cause issue here is with Microsoft Office Suite
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.
It's a bad look to kick someone when they are down (literally and figuratively). Every company has outages.
Should kick them even harder when it's them that they pushed online-always for software that should've been, and was for long time, offline-capable.
Office is fully offline capable.
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.
Office still is like that. It runs fine offline.
Only if you have the offline license, at a different price point from the online license.
The licence doesn't matter. Office 365 comes with all the desktop applications. You can use them fully offline.
I imagine most people are using the cloud versions now