This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I used OnlyOffice thinking 'Hey, this is a really similar alternative to MSO!' Then bugs with slide previews and their ordering happened in the middle of presentations and even worse, memory usage ground my laptop to a halt (electron apps open up with close to 1GB of memory, such as obsidian).
Libre office still hasn't crashed and the slide previews are accurate. The interface has always been a bit...unrefined even with the new tabbed layout but I can live with that.
I didn't even know this existed until a few days ago. Downloaded an AppImage to try it out and was able to make a decent pdf with minimal hassle.
Is this better than Apache open office?
In my opinion, yes. I use it almost daily at work and I have it on my PC just in case.
I ditched MS office for Libre long time ago, all I need it for is to open and view the occasional document anyways. For creating or editing documents I like Googles office suite better though
It's not just the subscription they want to avoid. Office has been steadily enshitified to the point nobody I know likes using it anymore.
Teams has decided it won't recognise like 50% of word docs anymore. So you can no longer edit them within teams and have to download them. If you simply read and scroll down it, the scroll glitches so bad for no reason. Ugh
Dropped the Word suite and used openoffice, then switched to libreoffice. Definitely a slightly clunkier feel to it, but avoiding yet more subscription, cloud based, internet connection needed, account needed software is becoming more and more important.
Been using openoffice for 15+ years, what made you switch to libreoffice?
Open office isn't getting much in the way of updates these days and is considered dormant and maintained by the Apache foundation. Libre-office is the office suite maintained by the document foundation and is where the bulk of developers moved over to.
We should all get Signal as well. If you don't have it you'll probably be surprised how many of your contacts do.
I’ve used Libre Office, but unpopular opinion, the formatting sucks. I just pirated word, never paying for that again
and word is better at formatting?
LaTeX is your friend
The formatting... The formatting that you can easily modify. Sigh. It takes two minutes, my friend.
Anyway, you do you.
I mean, you’re likely right and I probably didn’t give it a good enough shot. I just haven’t had the smoothest experience with it. It took me twice as long to make an ugly Resume on libre than the time it took for me to make a decent one on “free” word
Yup. I used Libra in college but getting the formatting right took longer than writing my papers. If I had to pay for a subscription to office I wouldn’t, and I don’t, I just prefARR’ my office apps.
I get that... dealing with hanging indentation was annoying.
You're keeping it entrenched.
Lack of quality replacement is keeping it entrenched. LibreOffice needs to step it up.
Have you tried OnlyOffice?
Does anyone know how to get endnote or a similar citation manager to work in Libre Office?
I've been using Zotero since I converted a few weeks back. It has some really useful plugins, so I would recommend adding this one first- it's like a store where you can easily browse and add them :))
I've using using it with Obsidian (there's a short guide you can find online), so while I'm writing an essay in Obsidian I can just hit a key shortcut and it lists every paper I've saved to Zotero. Then when I click one, it adds the citation. So useful
Zotero is the tool you want. It works perfectly.
Oh, that's fantastic! Thank you, I will give it a try!
If you ever figure it out I'd love to know, too. I relied entirely on Libre Office as an undergrad but missed this feature of MS Word. I currently use a combination of Scribbr and Purdue Owl but would prefer an offline and open source solution.
Copying my response from above for u!
I've been using Zotero since I converted a few weeks back. It has some really useful plugins, so I would recommend adding this one first- it's like a store where you can easily browse and add them :))
I've using using it with Obsidian (there's a short guide you can find online), so while I'm writing an essay in Obsidian I can just hit a key shortcut and it lists every paper I've saved to Zotero. Then when I click one, it adds the citation!
I've been using LibreOffice for years and it is fantastic -- although I have always had problems importing PowerPoints. Xcel and Word documents are fine, but PowerPoint is always a mess.
PowerPoints suffer from lack of smart objects, and in the case of using Linux, font conversion. But it's just that we've got to persevere with it. 😅
