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LibreOffice Turns Five
An anonymous reader writes: Italo Vignoli, founding member of The Document Foundation, reflects on the project's five-year mark in an article on Opensource.com: "LibreOffice was launched as a fork of OpenOffice.org on September 28, 2010, by a tiny group of people representing the community in their capacity as community project leaders. At the time, forking the office suite was a brave -- and necessary -- decision, because the open source community did not expect OpenOffice.org to survive for long under Oracle stewardship."
The project that was OpenOffice.org does still exist, in the form of Apache Open Office, but along with most Linux distros, I've switched completely to LibreOffice, after some initial misgivings.
1) Libre is preferable to Open - it has more developers and because of how it's licensed it can adopt all the changes Open makes - not so the other way around.
2) Compatibility with .docx sucks. Compatibility with Excel is _terrible_.
3) I don't trust LibreOffice to output documents that won't embarrass me in front of my boss. People will say "PDF", but bosses always want to edit things.
I'm sure it's a useful office suite - it frustrates me no more than MS Office does when I have to use it. And some of its tricks like opening PDF documents for editing (in Draw) are very useful.
But I keep a Windows VM for various programs, and Office is one of them. Bottom line is, the only code that's good at being compatible with MS Office is.... MS Office.
If I had my way we'd do everything as version controlled Markdown, but I'll never get my way.
1) Are there any genuinely significant differences between them that make one preferable to the other?
Mostly that LibreOffice seems to have the more vibrant development effort behind it. OpenOffice seems to stagnate by comparison. I'd recommend trying both (they're free after all) but LibreOffice will fit most people's needs better I think. I think LO is a bit more feature rich today.
2) Do either of them properly open those f*cking .DOCX files?
Usually but no guarantees. The more complex the document the worse the chances of it working well. That said, I've standardized our company on LibreOffice and it's been quite a while since I've had to drag out a copy of Word to view a document.
3) Do either of them save as .DOCX or .DOC, since that seems to be what most employers and recruiters insist on sending/receiving?
Yes they can do it and it does DOC fairly well in most cases. Just don't get too fancy with the formatting. I usually send PDFs to employers however.
I wouldn't even consider OpenOffice at this point. LibreOffice is where all the big development happens. However there is still a risk that it will mess the formatting of Word docs. I personally plan to just purchase the fresh Office 2016 and live a relaxing life.