LibreOffice is great, but it has some glaring issues that keep it out of the mainstream. In my experience it can’t handle multiple monitors with different scaling, comments on 365 don’t import, formulas in sheets break, etc.
Some of these issues come from Microsoft, but other FOSS office suites like ONLYOFFICE have overcome them so it’s doable.
I get the sense their tech stack is very rigid so that may be why iteration is slowed.
OnlyOffice compatability with MS is much, much better than LO.
However, I think LO is focused on compatibility with the spec rather than MS - so its an ideological thing. Not much comfort if you want comments in documents I guess.
Yeah I mean at the end of the day it’s a work tool.
I had a situation a few weeks ago where a Microsoft user sent us a PowerPoint of screenshots full of comments from the client about what to change. People on MacOS couldn’t see the comments in their software and I couldn’t see it on Ubuntu Studio using LibreOffice either. ONLYOFFICE had them but they were still hard to find in the UI.
The desktop scaling one just does my head in too. Feel like on Linux I should have more options and utility and I probably could figure something out if I tinker with it. But who has the time ey
This. As much as I want LibreOffice to succeed (AND I WANT LIBREOFFICE TO SUCCEED SO SIT DOWN YOU IN THE BACK), having converted actual work projects over to LibO and maintain them has been hell, to say the least.
2026 and tables and text boxes still explode the document into confetti if you look at it funny. Hours of frustratingly reconstructing documents, or reloading progress saves because moving a text box one pixel over makes things explode.
LibO needs QA and maintenance fixes, badly. If you don’t want LibO to use AI models to bug hunt, then enlist and help fix it. Development in turning LibO from a messy desk project to something actually useable efficiently has taken literal decades already.
LibreOffice is great, but it has some glaring issues that keep it out of the mainstream. In my experience it can’t handle multiple monitors with different scaling, comments on 365 don’t import, formulas in sheets break, etc.
Some of these issues come from Microsoft, but other FOSS office suites like ONLYOFFICE have overcome them so it’s doable.
I get the sense their tech stack is very rigid so that may be why iteration is slowed.
OpenOffice hasn’t released a major version since 2013.
My team uses LibreOffice exclusively, and extensively. It’s fine.
Ah my bad, I meant ONLYOFFICE*
So many offices 😅
Oh sure.
OnlyOffice compatability with MS is much, much better than LO.
However, I think LO is focused on compatibility with the spec rather than MS - so its an ideological thing. Not much comfort if you want comments in documents I guess.
compatibility with a standard does not mean much if nobody implements the standard
Yeah I mean at the end of the day it’s a work tool.
I had a situation a few weeks ago where a Microsoft user sent us a PowerPoint of screenshots full of comments from the client about what to change. People on MacOS couldn’t see the comments in their software and I couldn’t see it on Ubuntu Studio using LibreOffice either. ONLYOFFICE had them but they were still hard to find in the UI.
The desktop scaling one just does my head in too. Feel like on Linux I should have more options and utility and I probably could figure something out if I tinker with it. But who has the time ey
This. As much as I want LibreOffice to succeed (AND I WANT LIBREOFFICE TO SUCCEED SO SIT DOWN YOU IN THE BACK), having converted actual work projects over to LibO and maintain them has been hell, to say the least.
2026 and tables and text boxes still explode the document into confetti if you look at it funny. Hours of frustratingly reconstructing documents, or reloading progress saves because moving a text box one pixel over makes things explode.
LibO needs QA and maintenance fixes, badly. If you don’t want LibO to use AI models to bug hunt, then enlist and help fix it. Development in turning LibO from a messy desk project to something actually useable efficiently has taken literal decades already.