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The LibreOffice Story
An anonymous reader writes: Jono Bacon in his latest column writes about the story of LibreOffice and how it rose out of the ashes of StarOffice and OpenOffice.org. Bacon also touches on why he feels LibreOffice is such a key piece of Open Source for communities across the world. Jono says: "To look at LibreOffice today and compare it to Microsoft Office can be tempting. Sure, LibreOffice does not provide the same level of features and finesse Microsoft's suite may boast, but when I think of the before and after vanity shots of the suite back in 1999 and today, what the community has accomplished is phenomenal. Developing LibreOffice has been hard, technically challenging, and at times demotivating work, and contributors' efforts can be seen by millions of users across the world."
No, I am not that convinced. Alas. Look at some basic bug reports, and how bugs reports are treated, and you'll find some abhorrent situations. Where it could shine, it didn't. Like surpassing MS Office.
First item: the silly image formats supported by MS Offce (only), to create a market for real formats, like SVG, EPS. LibreOffice simply dropped support, had a good number of bug reports some two years ago, and still pending.
It did much better than OpenOffice in colourful gadgets and widgets to please the eye of the casual user, yes, but did not focus on real technical improvements.
Equation editor. It is just okay, but not beyond. Still the same as OpenOffice. Does it import MS formulas? Does it offer a real WYSIWYG, or does one have to continuously click forth and back? The latter.
Did I write a number of bug reports to help out? Yes, I did. What I got was UNCO, or outright rejection, like 'try the most recent version, we think it has been solved'. How to try the most recent version if it isn't in the pools of my distro? And worse: When I tried, it hadn't.
All this makes me sad, because contrary to some other posters, I feel very confidently that LibreOffice is more consistent, better to handle, and overall the better alternative already today! And I can speak from some experience, since I was responsible for the layout of two books that you can buy on Amazon, and it did a great job. Also better than MS Office which tends to break any page layout with automatic page breaks of a floating text wherever it likes, depending on the version (2003, 2007), the underlying Windows version, and the mood of the day. Yes, with the same dictionary and same hyphenation. The author was at the end of her wits when MS Office had some 30+ pages with this, while in *Office all 511 pages were identical for author, and the two proof readers.
It is a pretty safe bet that your family and friends are just using Microsoft Office as an excuse to avoid talking about Linux.
That wouldn't make a lot of sense, since my family and friends don't know what Linux is.
Most of the people I encounter can barely use the basic functionality of Microsoft Office, which is something that LibreOffice has covered.
It's true enough, but honestly, it needs to be prettier. I know it's superficial and stupid, and everyone here will say that LibreOffice shouldn't bother trying to look "pretty" or that it's already "pretty" enough, but here's the thing: I've always had terrible luck getting people to use LibreOffice. My impression is that there's no particular reason in terms of functionality, but it looks to them like it's a cheap knock-off of an old version of Microsoft Office. On both Windows and Mac, the icons seem a bit out of place, the UI takes up too much screen real-estate because things are kind of spread out, the default fonts and formatting are less attractive, the dialog boxes don't look native to the OS, and I don't even know what else people are reacting to. I think some people are confused by the way that it's sort of all one single application, but also a bunch of different applications, depending on how you launch it...?
Anyway, I can't get people to use it, even when it's exactly the tool they need. I've had an easier time getting people to use Apple's Pages/Sheets, and not for technical reasons, but because the app is prettier, the templates are prettier, and it feels easier to make a pretty document. At least, that's what I think the difference is.
But suggesting that aesthetics matter has always been blasphemy here at Slashdot.
There is one crucial feature that isn't covered perfectly: absolute compatibility with MS Office.
Not even MS Office has that, and that doesn't seem to matter. No, that is not where the problem lies. The compatibility only has to be good enough, and for pretty much everything it is.
Quite often it is even better than MS Office. I have used Libre Office to rescue documents which MS Office stopped loading because something broke in them. And that did not sway people enough to even make them try out Libre Office. Compatibility is a non-issue. It's all inertia.