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gedaliyah

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • To me, this would be like if VLC made an angry post about the evils of MP3 instead of just making a great player that can handle it (which they have). People still use VLC because we know that it will handle anything. Plus, they’ve kept the interface simple and intuitive, with most needed functions front and center, with lots of specialized features in menus and settings.

    LibreOffice is losing ground because they don’t take design seriously and instead of making interoperability a priority, they would rather complain about user preferences.






  • I’ve had a relatively good experience with OnlyOffice, although it has some issues.

    Personally I don’t see interoperability as an anti-open issue, but I can appreciate the stance. I think I have to investigate to understand how the Microsoft format diverges from the open standard for office XML files, or in what way the format remains proprietary. I had been under the impression that OnlyOffice follows the open standard.

    OnlyOffice does ape Microsoft Office in a lot of ways but I see that as a positive. Users are far more likely in my opinion to switch to something that looks and feels familiar.

    LibreOffice is hard to use. The menus and shortcuts are not well organized and the entire suite feels like a relic from the early 2000s. If they invested in a modern UI with less friction for users who are looking for MS alternatives, they wouldn’t be facing competition from projects like OnlyOffice. If they invested in feature parity for mobile users, they wouldn’t be losing potential users to those who offer it.

    They have an incredibly powerful backend with far more capability than the more junior OnlyOffice. Yet they fail to recognize why that just doesn’t matter to the majority of users. Most users just want to quickly author and edit files, share them with other users, and get on with the next task. LibreOffice has become overly fixated on niche features and optimizations that are very cool from a technical standpoint but are totally out of touch.

    By the way, LibreOffice also supports OOXML, so… do with that what you want.