Comment by sega_sai
7 hours ago
I'd rather wish people put effort into LibreOffice. I'd hoped there would be significant improvements there as there is a huge scope of bug/compatibility fixes. But I guess it is not sexy enough.
7 hours ago
I'd rather wish people put effort into LibreOffice. I'd hoped there would be significant improvements there as there is a huge scope of bug/compatibility fixes. But I guess it is not sexy enough.
Yeah, this entire saga is really unfortunate. The narrative is really enticing (AI is obsoleting Adobe/Microsoft/other corporate software behemoths!) when the reality is it's a vibe-coded slopware that barely functions, according to anyone who has actually tried it, and there are other FOSS alternatives which are much more stable, mature, and deserve people's attention. I wonder how many people shouting "Claude vibed a Photoshop clone, Adobe is done!!" were even aware Krita or GIMP existed.
They're not really Photoshop like though.
https://www.photopea.com/
comes closer, though I think it's web only.
My kingdom for a fully local native version of Photopea. It's by far the best Photoshop alternative I've ever used.
im willing to bet its easier to generate a new office than it is to fix libreoffice
I'm willing to take the other side of that bet. Quoting this article [1]:
> The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they’ve been fixed. There’s nothing wrong with it.
LibreOffice has to be feature-per-feature, bug-per-bug compatible with a poorly-documented office suite that's been around for 35 years, so it's no surprise that they don't always get it right. I don't see a new office suite doing any better, unless they decide that compatibility with MS Word is no longer a priority.
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
OnlyOffice, despite being newer than LibreOffice, has better compatibility with office documents and is way ahead in terms of UI. Plus it runs on Linux.
1 reply →
If you want a new "office" that doesn't work, sure, but you don't need AI for that.
Do they even allow AI contributions? I'd love to contribute if they do.
Some people tell me why not donate instead, and the reason is the same as me giving people actual presents instead of gift cards: I take the time to choose and understand an issue, spend time on it, just like I spend time picking a present. Both are riskier than giving money directly, but the euphoria of having my PR get merged or present being appreciated is addictive :)
This is a really interesting possible difference. Legacy open source seems to be generally trending anti-AI (although I don’t know the exact stance of LibreOffice). These new vibe-coded Adobe/MS copies are obviously AI-friendly.
Time will tell which wins.
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/AI_policy
I'd rather not. LibreOffice is terrible and probably unfixable. It's certainly better than these vibecoded alternatives, but not where the effort should go. We need new leadership in the open source office space.
Just curious… why do you think that? We have been using LibreOffice in our company for 20+ years, exchanging files with customers and vendors who use MS Office in all its versions during this time. We never had a problem…
Lawyer, translator and professor here. I have an Office 365 subscription and I got native Word and other MS Office apps installed on my windows partition. But, since I use Linux on the desktop, and MS chose not to offer their office suite as Linux native apps, and they make it near impossible to use the Windows apps under Wine, I use LibreOffice.
And it works really well. I can use it and exchange documents with people using Word without problem in the enormous majority of the cases.
And the fact that LibreOffice is a real GUI app built using the WIMP paradigm instead of that stupid ribbon interface that forces me to use the mouse, is a very significant net positive for me.
People who say that LibreOffice has a bad UI or that is a bad piece of software are just more vocal.
It is not sexy enough.
It has atrocious UX. Crazy bloat from promising to support every one-off file format under the sun for the last 25 years.
Trying to get a PR commit committed is like dealing with an entire army of bureaucrats.
So I get it would be great (in theory) if people wanted to support this, but at the same time it’s too far behind —- and the team is too entrenched in bad UX decisions, ackward support mandates for obscure systems that in reality nobody ever really used.
And this is a hill I’ll die on… Permissive licenses > copyleft. If I fork your code, as long as I put your name in the credits, the code is mine to do whatever I want with. Past authors shouldn't get a say in what I build next. That's real open source.
Can relate to that. Nowadays it's much easier for me to fork a project and fix the bugs for myself rather than convincing the maintainers that my niche bug is worth a fix and the fix is worthy.