Live data from Hacker News

LibreOffice 7.3

blog.documentfoundation.org

81–90 of 97 posts

Re: LibreOffice 7.3

#81
post #48

I find LO to be very buggy and unintuitive in its UI. Equations are a pain, it forgets styling options, etc.. But as a user who uses it completely independently of MS Office, just for my documents, the peace of mind I have knowing I am using a powerful multiplatform open source software which won't betray me is priceless. I know my documents are safe and I can move between OSes at my will. This kind of freedom is ess…

Isn't the UI the same as MS Office circa 2003? Have you used 2003 era MS Office?

Actually, the UI can be changed to one of several different variants by selecting View > User Interface... It has 7 options to choose from. If you like the newer "ribbon" style UI, then select the "Tabbed" UI variant.

This is one thing I really like about LO. People familiar with older MS Office can be comfortable in it, but it can also be changed for people more familiar with or preferring the "ribbon" UI.

Re: LibreOffice 7.3

#82
post #68

I think LO is just too complicated. There's a reason Google Docs and Quip have done well, and it's because 99% of people don't need any of the complicated features LO offers. It would just be easier to start from scratch with simpler goals (i.e. not an MS Office competitor) rather than re-engineer an extremely complicated codebase. I've been using Linux since 2005. Back then I used to use AbiWord, which was really ex…

It isn't well known, but LibreOffice can be simplified to about the point of Google Docs by selecting View > User Interface and choosing Tabbed Compact as the UI variant. There are actually 7 UI variants that can be selected.

Of course having so many different UI variants is also added complexity...

Re: LibreOffice 7.3

#83
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't even use LO that much, and I'm panic saving in cycle every time I do because it crashes of me so often. Hell, it crashed on me this week, on a 5 pages doc with images, text, one table and a few titles. Nothing fancy. I keep reading people saying it's stable for them, but I've was using it already when it was called OOo, before we had docx support, before docx even existed. And it always has been this buggy. I…

I'm on Fedora 34 and LO kept crashing on me as well, sometimes seconds after I opened the application. I discovered that the version I had pre-installed with my OS was some clever application delivery format (Flatpak? I don't remember). I uninstalled this and reinstalled it from dnf, and it has been immaculately stable since. Not a a single crash or issue.

I had the same experience on Ubuntu. Flatpak and snap crashes, yet installing via deb’s is rock solid.

Re: LibreOffice 7.3

#84

As much as I still use LibreOffice, I can't help but feel that it's yesterday's software. Actually, that thought has gone through my mind for the last 15 years. It's a behemoth, no doubt, and I'm glad it's around, but man is it clunky. For years it had pretty bad rendering on high DPI screens, the icons don't really match modern OSs (yeah that's nitpicky I know), and good luck theming it because any theming it suppor…

Things you should never do: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

Interesting blog post, but I'm unconvinced.

First, there's no such thing as something you should "never" do, especially when it comes to code. Our problems are so abstract that few if any tools should be off-limits.

Second, the author leaves out any examples of where rewrites succeeded. Windows NT was effectively a rewrite and is the grandfather of every version of Windows that came after Windows ME. Game engines and websites are rewritten all the time to varying degrees of success. OBS was a full rewrite and they're killing it. Slack did a rewrite and, whether you like them or not, they've been very successful.

Some of what he says makes no sense IMO, like:

> [...] when you start from scratch there is absolutely no reason to believe that you are going to do a better job than you did the first time.

Perhaps there's no reason to believe that you will certainly do a better job, but surely much of the time there are lessons to be learned even if the old team is entirely gone. When I'm brought on to new projects, I can pretty quickly tell what's dysfunctional, why that is, and what parts can at least benefit from serious cleanup.

He goes on:

> [...] you probably don’t even have the same programming team that worked on version one, so you don’t actually have “more experience”. You’re just going to make most of the old mistakes again, and introduce some new problems that weren’t in the original version.

What the author is doing here is making the same logical fallacy that he attempted to point out in the opposite position, except he's actually making it here. He's assuming that the team rewriting a hypothetical codebase are going to make most of the same old mistakes again. While that's definitely possible, is it really so certain? Can no one learn lessons from code regardless of whether they themselves wrote it?

A full rewrite was a bad idea for Netscape at a time where the market around the web was brand new and moving ridiculously fast. It's the circumstances that lead to the Netscape rewrite being a disaster. Not all software is subject to those issues, commercial or not, and not all software teams are the same.

Re: LibreOffice 7.3

#85

LO has a lot of room for improvement. I am confident it will improve. I use it in a way that is pretty incredible and goes beyond the uses people are discussing on HN. I have watched developers of the project discuss what they are working on and seen their various presentations on things they've improved over the years. Some of the flaws cause all sorts of performance issues that have recently been fixed. It will get…

I am really curious how you are using LO?

Re: LibreOffice 7.3

#86

Libre office is great. I typically use markdown + pandoc where possible, but if I'm forced to open a .docx LO is a godsend.

Recently tried the markdown+pandoc route but couldn't get pdf rendering to look decent or for document links to work, or for a multitude of other things to work... Which is a shame because markdown is great for everything else

Re: LibreOffice 7.3

#87

Libre office and gimp to me both crash too often to be reliable for professional work. At some point in your life a crash is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, so you might as well pay Microsoft and Adobe for the peace of mind.

The thing is, Blender 3d shows that an open source project can compete with the big boys. I've not encountered any gimp crashes, although I don't use it in anger enough. LO writer on the other hand crashed several times for me yesterday.

Re: LibreOffice 7.3

#88

Libre office is great. I typically use markdown + pandoc where possible, but if I'm forced to open a .docx LO is a godsend.

Recently tried the markdown+pandoc route but couldn't get pdf rendering to look decent or for document links to work, or for a multitude of other things to work... Which is a shame because markdown is great for everything else

Are you using LaTeX as the rendering engine? I think that's the default in pandoc. It always produces great looking docs for me.

Re: LibreOffice 7.3

#89
post #28

Has anyone with Apple silicon given this a shot? I notice with this release they’re offering native support. I’m planning to give it a spin but I’m curious what others have noticed in converting from MS.

Great catch. I've been using it on a M1 mac with constant crashing after a few hours of idle use, will try upgrading!

Never had a crash on Windows or Linux yet.

Re: LibreOffice 7.3

#90
I always find people complaining about the UI in libreoffice so weird. It's simple and perfect. Not to mention if you don't like the default, it provides alternatives.

Every time I am forced to use MS Word, on the other hand, I lose the will to live.

Post reply on HN