YHK - yet another hacker news clone

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.

every time i open libre office, i do think that micrsoft is paying them lots of money to stay that ugly.

In reality the office work will be replaced not by libre office, but something like claude work. It's an obvious direction.

Throw in LibreAD or LibreEntra and you got something!

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.

And it's not a proper substitute for Microsoft Office. Just saying.

I couldn't launch LibreOffice for like, 3 days, earlier this year after a botched ArchLinux upgrade that moved some libraries it needed.

it works so well, you have to export your docs to Microsoft Word format in order for them to have any value.

I have LibreOffice installed but it’s so ugly and non-intuitive that I prefer to import my documents in Google Docs.

  https://www.collaboraonline.com/
  https://www.onlyoffice.com/

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.

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 an instance.

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.

With the Microsoft 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 downgrade. It is far harder than it sounds due to inertia and most open source projects still do not get that in 2026.

Define "works"

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.

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)

It's pretty good. No complaints!

I don't think most users of Word have ever experienced it not be 'working' in the past two decades either...

I've been rediscovering desktop software. Especially those that have a CLI I take the era of mediocre SAAS, selling people infinite subscriptions .

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.

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

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.

Didn't micro-soft just recently attempt to layoff or buyout ~60,000 people?

I wonder if that has to do with anything..

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

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.