That reminds me that my yearly donation[0] towards LibreOffice's stewards, The Document Foundation, is coming up in December. It's a wholesome tradition where you wire them the amount of EUR/US$/XYZ that Microsoft demands for a year of a personal Office 365(-ish, eh?) subscription[1] as a tex-deductible donation that will make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. I hereby invite you to join in! :)
[0]: https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/
[1]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/buy/compare-all-microsoft-365-products (DO NOT REDEEM)
While true and a comment I support, it is worth noting that offline versions of Microsoft Office are and have been just fine, including the latest version of 2024 just updated this week.
Yes, but they eventually stop receiving updates, so you have to spend another $250 to get the newer version. And if you bought, say, Office 2021 just before Office 2024 is released (by necessity, for a new employee, say) then it has a significantly shorter lifespan. And you HAVE to spend this money because it is impossible to convince people they don't need Microsoft Word.
That seems different though. If you are paying a fixed cost for offline software, you are not entitled to updates for it, that seems like wanting to have your cake and eat it too.
My locally installed ms office 2019 also works 365d/y.
My softmaker office suite also.
Anyway, I do admit I mostly use libreoffice nowadays, except for 1) communication with customers, and 2) a few excels libre can't handle.
I still have to find a good alternative for (local installed) outlook, I'm trying out thunderbird, but I'm not sure it would be able to replace outlook. I still have to try whether it can handle a 50gb imap inbox, and besides lacks a few essential features.
If LibreOffice were good enough already, it would already be popular. It's the same with GIMP. On paper it's a Photoshop alternative, but we've all struggled with it. These projects need to take the same route as Blender did. Originally it was a clunky open source alternative, but it went through a complete UI transformation and now blows the competition away.
A major barrier to the improvement of giant FOSS replacements like GIMP and LibreOffice is that the people who develop it and the people who use it have become very used to all of its quirks. It's extremely hard to identify the rough edges in a UI without an external perspective.
Blender is a little different because every 3D modeling program is odd in its own way, and the new UI was close enough that it was easy to learn after the transition (I do still use the legacy keybinds though).
But Blender is very niche hobby software. To "succeed" (if we define success as capturing a significant user share from closed source spyware), Libre and GIMP need to offer workflows that are close to what the average non-coder technical person expects. Maybe that isn't valued by the teams, or maybe they don't have enough resources to make it happen, but the end result is a reputation of jank.
I dislike vibe coded clones because of concerns about the engineering quality. But the reason they're making waves when traditional FOSS hasn't is that the UX is leagues ahead.
ArtCraft is great for this. They try to recreate proprietary apps 1 to 1 so there's no real innovation, but it creates a baseline for new open source projects that can be even better than the original.
Yep I’ve been using PhotoCraft and WordCraft along with others in the suite and honestly I haven’t found any features yet that they are missing. Basically drop-in replacements written in Rust. Each one is around 100mb and no bloat like the real versions. Adobe and Microsoft are in trouble.
Be careful with this with the knowledge that it's an ongoing vibe-coded effort. Wordcraft failed to detect spacing after paragraphs and I could not use "Remove spacing after paragraph", whereas it worked in Word.
Photocraft added extra transparent space around a copied transformed edit selection, whereas in Photoshop it copied the selection boundary exactly.
Updates are coming in frequently for all the *Craft apps, and I really like that it's possible to brew install them across many macOS on a moment's notice, so I definitely recommend trying it. However it should not be used for absolutely critical work unless you can verify the functions you need are fine.
Octave is a similar old-school open-source replacement tool (to Matlab) that could benefit from similar investment. Though Octave's issues involve some ecosystem compatibility dynamics too, last I checked.
I support this in spirit, but in all honesty I never use it. I don’t use word either though. Nvim and on Windows Notepad. Micro is pretty good as well.
If I had to use a word processor daily at work I would just run into the woods and never come back.
I haven't used in a while, but all my experiences with it in past were it "works". Any non-trivial work with csv's and it was crashing regularly... Hope it's better now
Word and word-like editors are all too complex. Personally I would love some libre quip-like or markdown based renderer with better image and table support
Software like this still under-estimates the strength of network effects and inertia. With 3 examples:
1) We have seen this effect with Mastodon. Even when Twitter / X was down, hundreds of millions of people waited for it to go back online and never stuck on Mastodon when they struggled to migrate, or even could not choose a instance to sign up on.
2) GitHub, no matter how unreliable it is and will surely go down next week, tens of millions of developers continue to use it rather than actually self-hosting.
3) The exact same thing with Claude or ChatGPT going down several times a month. Users continue to use both of them instead of local models that don't phone home and stay up 100% uptime.
With the Microsoft 365 outage, hundreds of millions of users will continue to use Outlook and the suite of Microsoft software including Teams; because all their emails and work is on there.
So they just cannot just migrate away from it to LibreOffice which they see that as a complete downgrade. It is far harder than it sounds due to inertia and most open source projects still do not get that in 2026.
Is Office compatibility a solved problem? Haven't used LibreOffice or OpenOffice for years but I was always met with slightly different formatting, incompatible Office quirks et cetera. I know they have their own document format which works fine but the biggest problem is (was?) interoperability with majority of the rest of the professional (and academic) world on regular Office installations.
Compatibilty is probably 95% or greater. If you're a very demanding Excel user you might have some trouble (I never have; I do my taxes in LibreOffice using a spreadsheet designed for Excel and it's fine).
Never had an issue with a Word doc, at least not in the past 5 years or more.
For presentations internally i switched to https://bento.page/ , my agents doing all kind of great CSS animations.
it's not about styles, it's UX, stupid encoding questions, every time you open it, not able to handle big enough spreadsheets, and tons of problems like this.
Also changing document formatting is a pain, i do not want to do it manually , i want ai to do it for me.
On styles, office packages are more often an external communication tool, send a doc, report, to a customer, prospect etc, How can you make the doc ascetically good, if entire office package tools looks like from 90s, scroll is lagging, etc.
try to open sreadsheets, especially wide/big one, and you will love it even more. I literally have to do non intuitive moves and fall back into gdrive or claude docs.
Yes, but. I haven't used Microsoft groupware, but my impression is that like Google there's a bunch of multi-player value.
An office where everyone uses local software, that has no idea there is a network share, feels like the eternal conundrum today: it's potentially a Linux on the desktop win. But in the meantime most people would rather not need to manage individual desktops. Cross-machine multi-player experiences are increasingly table-stakes. It doesn't have to be the cloud per se, but it's been multiple decades now of open source competing for the desktop, and it's really been struggling to skate to where the puck's going. It hasn't been on desktop in a while.
A sidebar here, but I think this is what makes atproto so compelling to me. Posts like "A Social Filesystem" talk to how atproto is common glue, and it takes a little imagining, but it's absolutely a substrate that could be used for multiplayer office (via internal-only atproto networks, or upcoming ATproto Spaces). https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46665839
I've had similar things break when I was on Arch years ago. My wife was quite unhappy that she couldn't log in to use it (I think it was a graphics driver thing). Even though I usually like Fedora, I recently settled on Void for my personal workstation and I've been thoroughly enjoying it.
This is why I stopped using Arch, just wait until you update and try to reboot and it doesn’t work, then you have to update again via mounting your disk through a liveusb installer.
But why? I still use Office 2016 and I haven't yet come across a document it wouldn't open. What am I missing out on?
My softmaker office suite also.
Anyway, I do admit I mostly use libreoffice nowadays, except for 1) communication with customers, and 2) a few excels libre can't handle.
I still have to find a good alternative for (local installed) outlook, I'm trying out thunderbird, but I'm not sure it would be able to replace outlook. I still have to try whether it can handle a 50gb imap inbox, and besides lacks a few essential features.
Blender is a little different because every 3D modeling program is odd in its own way, and the new UI was close enough that it was easy to learn after the transition (I do still use the legacy keybinds though).
But Blender is very niche hobby software. To "succeed" (if we define success as capturing a significant user share from closed source spyware), Libre and GIMP need to offer workflows that are close to what the average non-coder technical person expects. Maybe that isn't valued by the teams, or maybe they don't have enough resources to make it happen, but the end result is a reputation of jank.
I dislike vibe coded clones because of concerns about the engineering quality. But the reason they're making waves when traditional FOSS hasn't is that the UX is leagues ahead.
Not true. There's inertia and network effects in play that often prevent better products from succeeding against established ones.
Most people don't use MS office by choice though so "goodness" isn't a particular relevant metric.
Updates are coming in frequently for all the *Craft apps, and I really like that it's possible to brew install them across many macOS on a moment's notice, so I definitely recommend trying it. However it should not be used for absolutely critical work unless you can verify the functions you need are fine.
This is the year where you can have all your data private, you processor is good enough.
Software is not about or pretty the UI is, it's a tool.
If I had to use a word processor daily at work I would just run into the woods and never come back.
1) We have seen this effect with Mastodon. Even when Twitter / X was down, hundreds of millions of people waited for it to go back online and never stuck on Mastodon when they struggled to migrate, or even could not choose a instance to sign up on.
2) GitHub, no matter how unreliable it is and will surely go down next week, tens of millions of developers continue to use it rather than actually self-hosting.
3) The exact same thing with Claude or ChatGPT going down several times a month. Users continue to use both of them instead of local models that don't phone home and stay up 100% uptime.
With the Microsoft 365 outage, hundreds of millions of users will continue to use Outlook and the suite of Microsoft software including Teams; because all their emails and work is on there.
So they just cannot just migrate away from it to LibreOffice which they see that as a complete downgrade. It is far harder than it sounds due to inertia and most open source projects still do not get that in 2026.
Never had an issue with a Word doc, at least not in the past 5 years or more.
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Feature_Comparison:_Libr...
Not 100% compatible, but its become rather usable, for most use cases.
Definitely not as problematic as 10 years ago.
In reality the office work will be replaced not by libre office, but something like claude work. It's an obvious direction.
Why do you think CLIs and TUI are making a huge comeback.
Web applications were prettier but so bloated and so slow.
I quite like that Libreoffice let's me disable the confusing "strip" layout that MS Office pushes on everyone.
it's not about styles, it's UX, stupid encoding questions, every time you open it, not able to handle big enough spreadsheets, and tons of problems like this.
Also changing document formatting is a pain, i do not want to do it manually , i want ai to do it for me.
On styles, office packages are more often an external communication tool, send a doc, report, to a customer, prospect etc, How can you make the doc ascetically good, if entire office package tools looks like from 90s, scroll is lagging, etc.
I wonder if that has to do with anything..
An office where everyone uses local software, that has no idea there is a network share, feels like the eternal conundrum today: it's potentially a Linux on the desktop win. But in the meantime most people would rather not need to manage individual desktops. Cross-machine multi-player experiences are increasingly table-stakes. It doesn't have to be the cloud per se, but it's been multiple decades now of open source competing for the desktop, and it's really been struggling to skate to where the puck's going. It hasn't been on desktop in a while.
A sidebar here, but I think this is what makes atproto so compelling to me. Posts like "A Social Filesystem" talk to how atproto is common glue, and it takes a little imagining, but it's absolutely a substrate that could be used for multiplayer office (via internal-only atproto networks, or upcoming ATproto Spaces). https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46665839
All software can suffer from that, but thats what you wanted so idk why this falls back onto Libre Office