I use onlyoffice with nextcloud (at the time nextcloud docs + collabora was alpha level software that crashed the server) or when I need better Ms office compatibility
And then i use LibreOffice when I need better implemented features like CSV import or print dialog
I’ve been using LibreOffice for a number of years without issue. Literally takes care of all my word processing and spreadsheet needs. I don’t miss MS Office at all, which I use daily at work.
Because most employees can’t just install random software on their machines and because compatibility between Libre Office and Microsoft Office is nowhere near perfect. You don’t want to send your boss a file that ends up looking mangled on their screen.
What happens when you need to collaborate with other businesses who use O365? The business would also have to spend time updating any legacy documents, templates, spreadsheets and so on. Then you have the IT teams, who will need extensive training so that they can field the inevitable flurry of support tickets and calls. And that’s not getting into the support side of things - who do I go to if something breaks in LibreOffice?
I am an advocate for OSS, but there is a bigger picture here, and unfortunately it’s not always as simple as just switching over. I wish it was, believe me!
Y’know, this conversation doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, so I will leave it here: if it’s such an easy sell, every business in the world would have done it by now.
If that’s your view of it, then you truly do not understand how businesses operate (especially larger companies). “Hey this is free, let’s switch to this!” isn’t a pitch. There are so many factors to consider: service, support, contracts, deployment, on and on and on. It would be great if every business adopted OSS, but they’re not going to. And that’s not a failure of one employee to convince a Fortune 500 company, for example, that LO would be a cost-saving measure.
The point is that those “thousand” benefits for LO do not matter. That’s simply not how businesses run. It would be great if it were, but it isn’t. And your experience as an individual user with MS support is completely irrelevant with regard to business support.
Microsoft has some of the best technical support I’ve ever dealt with TBH. Meanwhile with LibreOffice your technical support is mostly forum diving yourself. If you have a big, competent, it department, maybe that’s a feasible thing, but I’ve never worked anywhere with that kind of capacity
Yes. We’re talking about Libre Office here. Its a very mature and accessible app. Not something that requires technical knowledge.
And, yes, if you’re on an annual contract then its even easier to convince management to cancel it for all users by default (with some exceptions as needed). Lots of money to be saved.
LibreOffice should receive more updates than OnlyOffice OpenOffice.
I switched my uncle from OnlyOffice OpenOffice to LibreOffice (for work) and he never complained.
Edit: I’ve confused OnlyOffice with OpenOffice.
Anyway, I have both LibreOffice and OnlyOffice. I always use LibreOffice but for one file (yes it is an excel spreadsheet) I need to use OnlyOffice 'cause Libre can’t open it.
I had issues with Onlyoffice taking ages to load documents with lots of pages while Libreoffice did it instantly as expected. So back to Libreoffice for me.
I use OnlyOffice and enjoy it. I do notice some fancy features missing but as I’m not a power user it doesn’t bother me. I’ve opened OnlyOffice docx files in MS Office and vice versa many times with no issues ever. I’ve also installed MS fonts on my Linux distro and they work in OnlyOffice. I don’t notice it pushing online features like somebody else said
Try both out as flatpaks if you’re on Linux and keep the one you like as I did :). I think both flatpaks come with the full suite.
I ended up sticking with OnlyOffice and feel it will probably work better for most people doing things like writing documents and spreadsheets with various formatting, tables, charts, formulas and equations.
I am mainly a Google docs user (and in the past MS office) as most people are and the OnlyOffice UI and workflow is much more comfortable if you’re coming from these products. Things work and look the way you would expect. LibreOffice UI feels very clunky and dated (even after trying different layouts). For example, charts look really bad by default in LibreOffice. OnlyOffice seems to work pretty much just as well as gDocs/MS office so far in my limited experience for most scenarios.
As part of my effort to reduce reliance on gDocs I am planning on setting up a self hosted Nextcloud office instance and it is based on OnlyOffice so it is more motivation for me to stick with it!
Unfortunately, I don’t think either is particularly great. LibreOffice looks horrendous, performs at or below average, and does not have fabulous compatibility with Microsoft Office formats. On the other hand, ONLYOFFICE has better compatibility but feels cheap and pushes web services.
If this is for personal use, I would go with LibreOffice. If you need to share documents with others using a common format, go with ONLYOFFICE.
I’m not sure if this is accurate OpenOffice appears to be abandonware with development stopped in 2011 while LibreOffice is the fork and still being developed.
LibreOffice literally looks exactly like MS Office in my computer, what are you talking about? It does take a little bit of configuration, but nothing you can’t find with a quick search
Yeah, I will admit that it looks much better on Linux than macOS. My other qualm is that it eats up my laptop battery, while Pages and Word use considerably less power
They are probably using the default installed theme, which doesn’t have scalable icons so everything is horribly pixelated. Not sure why it’s still the default, but as you said it’s pretty easy to change.
I think Collabora Onlineuses or is built on LibreOffice. It’s a subscription service but you can host it yourself for free (I think for personal use). I’ve not tried either. I’m pretty sure the Collabora team are big code contributors to LibreOffice. If I got anything wrong I hope someone will correct me.
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