The New Collabora Office for Desktop • Hacker News Board

Re: The New Collabora Office for Desktop

#31

Post by doubled112 » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 4:37 PM UTC

karel-3d wrote: post #14

nico wrote: post #4

This is probably great software. But the design, both of the site and the office software, looks so dated, it doesn’t even tempt me to try it

It is actually very, very janky and behaves like someone tried to reimplement ~15 years old Office UI in JavaScript. Not in a good way. I really, really want them to be successful, but I cannot pretend it's a pleasure to use at all.

When I tried it last, it was painfully slow. Have there been any improvements on the performance front lately?

Typing in a word processor should not have input lag in 2025. It wasn't just a little lag, but the type and watch it catch up kind of lag.

Re: The New Collabora Office for Desktop

#32

Post by abdullahkhalids » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 4:49 PM UTC

karel-3d wrote: post #2

Collabora vs LibreOffice branding is always quite confusing to me. How is this project related to LibreOffice and also to what used to be called LibreOffice Online? (And Collabora Office Classic. And Collabora Online)

On Wikipedia, there is a fairly complicated timeline chart of the various LibreOffice variants [1]. Same article also says

> Ecosystem partner Collabora uses LibreOffice as upstream code to provide a web-based suite branded as Collabora Online, along with apps for platforms not officially supported by LibreOffice, including Android, ChromeOS, iOS and iPadOS.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice#History

Re: The New Collabora Office for Desktop

#33

Post by esafak » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 4:57 PM UTC

tracker1 wrote: post #29

esafak wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The open source world needs more designers.

A lot of open-source doesn't have a process to integrate and follow a design strategy from a designer. A business can mandate that work be done to adapt/follow a given design strategy... for open-source it's often harder to do so... and even then you face the same or more resistance to change. It took basically a corporate control for Audacity to make its' difficult transition to a better design from its' mediocre on…

Good points. Designers need to be first-class citizens whose input is sought early on, not to attempt to make a purse out of the finished pig's ear. RFCs are a venue for this. Designers, for their part, need to share their ready-to-go libraries in all the popular frontend frameworks. The two could also collaborate on developing tools to automate design linting, similar to automated code review programmers use.

Re: The New Collabora Office for Desktop

#34

Post by TheAmazingRace » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 4:59 PM UTC

Honestly, OnlyOffice works extremely well for my purposes, and I install it on all my friends' PCs. It looks a lot like MS Office and is quite compatible with a variety of documents I've tried, in my experience.

Re: The New Collabora Office for Desktop

#35

Post by jonathanstrange » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 5:00 PM UTC

"Get a quote"

Okay, so what does it cost?

Re: The New Collabora Office for Desktop

#36

Post by homebrewer » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 5:05 PM UTC

esafak wrote: post #22

nico wrote: post #4

This is probably great software. But the design, both of the site and the office software, looks so dated, it doesn’t even tempt me to try it

The open source world needs more designers.

Looking at what they did to commercial software that used to have excellent, high density UIs, maybe they should stay where they are.

Re: The New Collabora Office for Desktop

#37

Post by scblock » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 5:05 PM UTC

I use Collabora online all the time (via Nextcloud) but I don't quite understand why I'd use this over LibreOffice on the desktop, which feels significantly more powerful than the online tool.

The few screenshots they show make this look similar to the existing online tool, which is fine for a lot of work, but like Word Online hits a wall with more complex documents.

Re: The New Collabora Office for Desktop

#38

Post by szszrk » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 5:06 PM UTC

jonathanstrange wrote: post #35

"Get a quote" Okay, so what does it cost?

That's a "I may afford you, but I don't have people budget for those dumb calls" button for me.

Re: The New Collabora Office for Desktop

#39

Post by tomtomistaken » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 5:06 PM UTC

TheAmazingRace wrote: post #34

Honestly, OnlyOffice works extremely well for my purposes, and I install it on all my friends' PCs. It looks a lot like MS Office and is quite compatible with a variety of documents I've tried, in my experience.

OnlyOffice is nice if you ignore the Russian background of it. I wouldn't trust it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyFromEU/comments/1j7zlf2/onlyoffi...

Re: The New Collabora Office for Desktop

#40

Post by eole666 » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 5:06 PM UTC

I briefly tried it : I don't see the point, there is no way to connect it to your online collabora instance or directly to Nextcloud or anything except your local files.

Just use LibreOffice at this point, at least it has native performances and is not an app bundled inside a browser.