Comment by fbn79
2 days ago
The highest problem is the office suite. If you think Libreoffice/Collabora can replace Microsoft 365 without friction the project could be a success. Honestly I do not think so as of today.
2 days ago
The highest problem is the office suite. If you think Libreoffice/Collabora can replace Microsoft 365 without friction the project could be a success. Honestly I do not think so as of today.
I think many office suite use cases can be covered by simple, less feature rich software. Not everyone needs dozens of text formatting options. People use them because they are there but not making better documents necessarily.
I agree, but I'm curious if anyone has thoughts on why. Like, why is good collaboration in an open-source office software so unrealistic when way more complicated-seeming state synchronization happens in open source and indie games all the time?
Yeah, especially Excel.
LibreOffice Sheets doesn’t compete with Excel 2024, it competes more with Excel 2003. Granted, this is fine for a lot of (most?) people but it’s still not a “replacement” in my mind.
I ended up just building a Nix Flake to properly run Excel. At least then the operating system itself isn’t MS.
Where would you say the gaps are? As someone who has been in an environment of excel power users for several years, the quality of that program has declined YoY due to all the excess bloat that MS stuffs into that thing. The plugin/macro ecosystem is one aspect that comes to my mind.
Yeah, there’s no VBA support anywhere. LibreOffice has their own scripting thing, and it works ok but it’s not compatible with the VBA and VBA stuff broadly doesn’t work there.
Even without the VBA though, it’s missing basically any feature added in 2019 like Lambda and filter and dynamic arrays.
I wouldn’t consider myself a power user, I would say I am a “high level basic user”, and even I have noticed the shortcomings. And this is also coming from a dude who very much wants a FOSS thing to succeed over Microsoft.
I kicked Excel to the kerb in 2005 or something like that and have been a happy Apple Numbers and Wolfram Mathematica (and SPSS, PSPP, and R, and Python) user ever since.
Both Apple Numbers and Mathematica still depend on a proprietary software package from a for-profit company though.
I think the only way we can actually solve the problem is to get a FOSS product up to snuff with Excel. I use Julia if I need really elaborate number crunching, but I don’t view it as a substitute for Excel; the interactivity of spreadsheets is really useful, especially when you’re actively developing stuff.
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We really need investments from large public institutions in LibreOffice Sheets.
Agreed.
Valve is making desktop computers now; maybe the next thing they could improve is LibreOffice to try and appeal to businesses.
What version of Excel does your Nix Flake package out of interest? Is it current?
Yep! It actually made the front page of HN a few days ago :)
It supports Office 365 and Office 2024 Home works as of about two days ago.
I think it would require very little if any effort to get Home and Business working but the license for that was too expensive (though pull requests are welcome!)
Currently limited to stuff that can be activated on Microsoft’s website. I tried very hard and was ultimately unsuccessful at getting Office 2024 Pro Plus working from a gray-market key I bought on Groupon, because the MAK activation stuff appears to depend on a lot of stuff that Wine/Proton doesn’t implement. Again, pull requests are welcome if someone here figures out how to do it.
https://github.com/Tombert/office365_flake
I hate to agree. It's not just a battle against a deeply entrenched Microsoft tools suite, but also the ease of use and convenience of Google's tools, and how easily they enable collaborative work. Word and Excel have accumulated so much cruft that they are if anything an easier target to surpass.
But that's not all. Avoiding US based proprietary tools, in general, is going to be a challenge. The EU needs some kind of fund to create the next generation of productivity tools for this platform. Not just equivalent replacements. Requirements change and new tools need to be different.
Completely agree. Before that I would have add the Adobe Suite as well for a lot of people but it's less a problem now fortunately.
https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/ is the French government's office suite. I think this can work as long as the devs are responsive to users' needs.
They don't need to reimplement all of MS Office, just the parts they need to serve their constituency.
The challenge is engaging with external orgs. They will send you office docs and it creates friction when they cannot be reliably edited and returned. Even just opening them can be unreliable.
When you’re a government you can mandate the file formats (and versions thereof) you are willing to accept.
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I assure you the French government is large enough and obstinate enough that they will dictate to external parties what inputs they accept.
People can apparently imagine and accept future Recursive Super Intelligence and Datacenters in Space but can't imagine or accept a future where a free/libre Office Suite with support and funding from a motivated sovereign state can get close to Microsoft's offering