81–90 of 156 posts
I wish there was a fund we could pool money into to make LibreOffice less ugly to look at. I'll happily donate to the cause.
That’s the nice thing about Open Source. Nothing’s stopping you from organizing this yourself.
Sometimes no amount or organising or doing the work yourself can move things forward appreciably.
It's a great way for Denmark to negotiate a better deal with Microsoft for the next round of licenses. No way they will stick with Linux. It's just too fiddly, requiring way more "IT people" running around configuring Samba shares and printer drivers. And LibreOffice is many many years behind MS Office, and it'll continue to be that way. Sorry for the pessimism but this was true in 2005, in 2015, and in 2025.
IIRC several German states went with nextcloud to make the transition a bit smoother. No idea about the effort when it comes to print servers, but on the other hand Denmark is quite digitized at this point and I would imagine printing papers is less of a thing there than in Germany.
>And LibreOffice is many many years behind MS Office, and it'll continue to be that way.
I believe you, but could you elaborate on what's missing?
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.
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.
Ofc I love this, as a LibreOffice exclusive user Document signing in Libreoffice on Linux has caused me nothing but trouble, and other critical features a government might want to have - any thoughts on this?
Even better would be if your company could sponsor some fixes, of course :-)
There is currently a very strong reason to migrate to Open Source: the big tech corps are pushing people into their clouds and this leads to new constraints on your planning because now you are subject to the software company's product lifecycle. So, if before you could run your old version of Oracle or whatever for as long as you wanted (if you could live without the support), now you have no choice. When the suppor…
The issues in this situation are always, 1. How much is compatibility with outside users and past documents necessary? No office application can successfully, reliably convert anything but relatively simple documents (have LLMs done better somehow?). Each conversion reduces fidelity and often integrity; send a few revisions back and forth and it can become a problem. Simply adding a small headache every time an outsi…
> 1. How much is compatibility with outside users and past documents necessary?
Not an issue, document compatibility is a solved problem and any issues experienced would be minor (e.g., a missing font or broken animation leading to slightly different presentation).
> 2. What is the system management story?
Corporate "system management" solutions are entirely broken on Windows, especially upgrade and software bundle management. It actively causes more harm and security issues than it solves, and needs to die.
It's dumpster fire of technologies that get stitched on top of each other, all conflicting and ultimately training all employees to ignore all signs of malicious intervention: How do you expect a user to sceptical of questionable popups/browser hijacking/similar, when your setup involves training users to ignore cmd.exe windows popping up randomly and to always interact with highly inconsistent, constantly changing and overall questionable popups appearing at any time of day asking you to do weird things (installing apps you didn't ask for, updating, rebooting, upgrading, often with countdown timers for making decisions)?
Should you have the ill-advised desire to bring the worst and most defective parts of Windows IT management to Linux, there's a handful of big vendors providing similar solutions there. So "not an issue", other than it being a terrible idea.
There is currently a very strong reason to migrate to Open Source: the big tech corps are pushing people into their clouds and this leads to new constraints on your planning because now you are subject to the software company's product lifecycle. So, if before you could run your old version of Oracle or whatever for as long as you wanted (if you could live without the support), now you have no choice. When the suppor…
With the CLOUD Act any US company can be compelled to give up data of their EU customers. Fancy government structures like AWS's sovereign cloud are unlikely to solve this. You just can't responsibly store data in a US cloud if you don't want the US to know what's in there. And not storing data in the cloud is getting more and more difficult. The US is not above spying on its allies, and it's questionable if the current administration even sees Europe as allies
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.
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.
The issues in this situation are always, 1. How much is compatibility with outside users and past documents necessary? No office application can successfully, reliably convert anything but relatively simple documents (have LLMs done better somehow?). Each conversion reduces fidelity and often integrity; send a few revisions back and forth and it can become a problem. Simply adding a small headache every time an outsi…
What is it with Microsoft shills everywhere? Everytime some subject like this headline comes up, people fetch some kind of dubious arguments like "muh deployment". This is actually trivial in linux, and even if not, the effort to implement a solution will be of use to future parties switching to FOSS. Why is it that people always want change to make something better, but screach when they actually have to improve som…
The issues in this situation are always, 1. How much is compatibility with outside users and past documents necessary? No office application can successfully, reliably convert anything but relatively simple documents (have LLMs done better somehow?). Each conversion reduces fidelity and often integrity; send a few revisions back and forth and it can become a problem. Simply adding a small headache every time an outsi…
What is it with Microsoft shills everywhere? Everytime some subject like this headline comes up, people fetch some kind of dubious arguments like "muh deployment". This is actually trivial in linux, and even if not, the effort to implement a solution will be of use to future parties switching to FOSS. Why is it that people always want change to make something better, but screach when they actually have to improve som…