Opensource @programming.dev Sunshine (she/her) @lemmy.ca 3 wk. ago

How Does LibreOffice Compare to OpenOffice?

I have heard they’re the main two choices for FOSS enthusiasts. What are their pros and cons?

I have used LibreOffice so far and I’m very impressed with the ui as it is much more visually appealing than IWork and Microsoft Office.

19 comments

In 2010, Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, which held the trademark for the OpenOffice.org project. The open-source community that developed OpenOffice.org was worried that Oracle would do bad things, so they set up a non-profit, The Document Foundation, and established the LibreOffice project. Most of the outside contributors moved over to contributing to LibreOffice instead.

A few years later, Oracle donated the OpenOffice trademark to the Apache Software Foundation, which is why Apache OpenOffice now theoretically exists. But yeah, it hasn't seen a non-bug-fix release since 2014. You simply want to use LibreOffice at this point...
- IIRC it wasn't just worry that Oracle would do bad, it was Oracle's slowness/reluctance at incorporating patches and fixes, and that they were making OpenOffice unnecessarily dependent on Oracle's Java.
- this is one of the few good .ml users ive seen.
  
  I hear there's some good .blahaj users out there somewhere too... 🤭
  
  They're a rare breed.
the same way a healthily developing young person compares to their parent in the paliative care ward, whose religious relatives won't agree to turn off the respirator because "look they still have a heartbeat".
- Dang the situation is sadder than I thought.
  
  You might be mixing up OpenOffice and OnlyOffice
  
  OpenOffice is dead
  
  OnlyOffice & LibreOffice are the two FOSS programs that people recommend.
  
  Personally I like OnlyOffice a bit better, but I keep them both installed and updated
OpenOffice is ancient and isn't really being developed anymore. It's in maintenance mode and hasn't gotten a real update in over a decade from what I can tell. Libreoffice trumps it in every way.

That said, I prefer OnlyOffice these days. It's a lot slower unfortunately (running on electron...) but it's much closer to MS office and has better document compatibility.
- Electron: 🤮
  
  This.
  
  Friends don't let friends Electron.
  
  Most users are stuck with crappy Electron apps because of the same forces that prevent users from switching to other platforms or services. [...] They exist because software markets are anticompetitive.
LibreOffice is awesome. OnlyOffice is pretty good too, and it integrates well into Nextcloud.

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