LibreOffice was a failure to me, a heavy Word user. There are a ton of features you only learn you needed when you suddenly don’t have 'em anymore, making most everything a little harder / more laborious. Further, LibreOffice would crash several times per day, from trying to handle my multi-thousand page works-in-progress. Word has never crashed on me, doing the exact same work.
As much as I hate the subscription model, I gnashed my teeth and paid for Office, and it’s definitely worth the price to me.
Now that M3 Apple Silicon chips are out, older computers with the M2 and M1 chips can be found heavily discounted, and they’re still amazing computers. There’s going to be some good Black Friday deals coming up too. I purchased a new M2 Mac Studio and display through Apple’s refurbished store, saving about 20%.
I’ve been using it since it was Star Office from Germany, even before Sun bought it. (When I worked at Sun it was the office system to use.) Libre Office (I think Open Office got ruined by Oracle) works great for many things, but there has always been a compatibility problem.
Especially for the Power Point equivalent.
I use Libre Office for stuff I only see, especially spreadsheets, but use Office for stuff I’m sending outside. Never has crashed for me, but I’ve never tried to do anything that big.
I doubt I’ll be upgrading anytime soon. Less than a year ago, I acquired a pair of 2018-vintage MacBook Pros because my previous latest & greatest, the 2011-vintage MBPros, could not natively run the minimum required OS for VPN connections to the workplace. So far, the 2018 model can run the most modern MacOS, should I ever be forced to upgrade to that.
I honestly have zero interest in ever owning a computer that I can’t boot from anything other than an internal drive that’s hard-soldered in. Although I suppose when the time finally does come when I just can’t be compatible with anything, maybe I’ll buy an M37 AppleSilicon powered MacBook Pro and learn how to melt the solder and switch hard drives or something.
I still use the MacBook Pro 2011 for everyday personal use, I like it better than the 2018 edition.
I really hope I don’t need to upgrade soon, as there is nothing available that matches my 3+ year old laptop. It is a Dell Precision 5550 with a 15 inch 3840 \times 2400 display. I can not find a single other laptop out there with as good of resolution in 15 inches.
Dell’s replacement is a 16 inch laptop, that is twice as thick, heavier, and just a chunker in every dimension. I do not want that.
I’d love to get a Framework or System76 laptop, but none of those have good displays. “All you need is 1920 \times 1080” is for people whose idea of a laptop is something that has to be plugged into external monitors and keyboards.
The big issue is that my computer is now out of warranty, which could be a problem, as it needs to get it’s motherboard replaced every year or so. At some point the known issue charging problems will return, and then I’ll be forced to buy something that is worse.
About a year ago, I moved from a 9th gen i7 to 13th gen i7 and my RTX 3080Ti has plenty of life left. So no major upgrades on the horizon.
I was thinking about an RTX 4090 for local AI purposes but world events have caused the price of those to jump up so it’s unlikely that I’ll pursue it.
I occasionally use LibreOffice. It is fine. If what you need is a word processor or spreadsheet, then there is nothing wrong with them. The spreadsheet formulas are pretty much the same as Excel. The word processor can do all of the standard things, and even lots of advanced stuff. If the user is able to get past the fact it doesn’t say “Microsoft” at the top, and the menus, ribbons, etc. are different, then LibreOffice is fine.
If what you need is a completely faithful replacement for Word or Excel, then you won’t be happy. If you can’t handle things being different from what you’re used to, then you won’t be happy. And, of course, if there is some specific feature you need in MS Office that isn’t in LibreOffice, then you won’t be happy.
I’m a hardcore spreadsheet user. I bought ms office because i sometimes need compatibility with complex excel spreadsheets that include weird graphs and fancy pivot tables. I often use Google sheets if i need compatibility with another person who someplace else. And libre office works fine for simple stuff, but since i have ms and Google office products, i usually use those.
I am not a hardcore word processor user, and libre office is more then enough for my needs.
My homebrew is running pretty strong, but it’s about time to upgrade the graphics. My 1050Ti can’t quite cut it for the newest round of games, and hooking up a VR headset needs a 3060 at the minimum. And a 3060 is cheaper than a PS5 with PSVR2.
Just got a replacement work laptop and they don’t need my current one back, so I’ll probably use that to replace my old HP laptop that’s beginning to die.
I don’t do fancy graphs, but for the ones I do I like graphing in Libre Office more than Excel. Much simpler, I’ve found. I often import Excel data into Libre Office to do graphing.
Thanks for this. I have downloaded LibreOfffice but have not had the chance to poke around in it; these days, when I need to write something, I need to write in NOW and can’t try to figure out how to italicize or whatever (that I can do) in a new program. What specific MS Office feature might not be there? Just curious; my writing is pretty standard writing stuff.
The graphs get copied and pasted into Power Point presentations. The raw data comes from Excel.
But when I do need to trade things back and forth, I use Office. I spent a lot of time fixing up someone’s Open Office slides that needed to be presented with PowerPoint and looked miserable without a lot of editing.
I have never run into a compatibility issue with word processing, because i do fairly vanilla word processing. But the places I’d expect issues would be things like:
Footnotes and other references
Formatting tables
How themes interact with other formatting elements
Mail merge
And libre office may do all of those. But it might not do it exactly the way ms word does, and if you move a document back and forth between the two, weird stuff might happen.
I had the opposite problem: I had PowerPoint slides my colleague “translated” into LibreOffice and it got a little messy.
Inspired (or something) by this thread, I took a look at new iMacs and discovered they no longer make the 27" screen. And of course the ports are different from the ports I need to plug into. Dongles to the rescue, I guess. I have already oiled up my Olympia for personal correspondence, but am not keen on a book-length manually typed, carbon paper and onionskin manuscript with footnotes.
The only one I ran into for word processing is that the draft of a novel I wrote in Open Office only had dumb quotes, not the smart quotes (different for opening and closing a quote) in Word. I haven’t checked if the current Libre Office has the same problem.
I use track changes a lot, with comments, for a critique group I’m in and I’m not sure if that is compatible or not.
