Comment by user____name
6 days ago
I recently tried a bunch of Office packages and was surprised by just how bad they've gotten over the years. It just feels like a downgrade from what we had in prior decades. Especially LibreOffice just had the most abysmal performance imaginable. The older versions were much better in my experience.
Most likely it depends on what you want to do. I used LibreOffice a lot (mainly Calc). A lot of areas were surprisingly buggy, but in some important areas it had more advanced features than Excel and performance was great.
One thing I learned was, that there is no compatibility. You can load some files from Excel, but to get something done, it's better to start a new file from scratch and import the data from csv. As soon something is more advanced (like configuring an axis of a diagram) it's all different.
Most important - CSV-Import in Calc is something that works just fine in LibreOffice, while the CSV-import in Excel has always been hardly bearable.
If you have specific performance issues and are able to share the associated documents, please log them at https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/.
Of course, we cannot always help, sometimes the slowdown is due to increased feature or stability or conformance, but often we can improve things greatly.
These might depend on some options chosen by whatever Linux distribution you have used.
As always, the behavior seen on some Linux distribution for some application may not match at all the experience on other distributions.
I always compile LibreOffice from sources (in Gentoo) and I have not noticed any performance problems, and most of my text documents or spreadsheets are quite large. It is true that currently I use it only on decent computers, but in the past I have used it even on several generations of Atom CPUs, from Pineview to Gemini Lake. Even on those there were no performance problems, at least not with Writer and Calc.