In true hackernews fashion I'll mention their competitor as my personal preference. Their editors are IMO much faster and slicker. I have very light document needs and this other open source software suite serves me very well. Although I appreciate libreoffice, I never did like using it.<p><a href="https://www.onlyoffice.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.onlyoffice.com/</a><p><a href="https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE">https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE</a>
This sounds like it doesn't count the use of libreoffice in Linux distros. I never download it for example. I suppose that 400mil downloads is probably from Windows and Mac users.<p>I used to consider it very heavy but my daughter's Raspberry pi runs it fine.<p>I use the Draw component the most. It is great for drawing boxes with text connected by arrows which is what my main use case is. Miro is better because it scales text when you scale a box and if Draw could do this I'd be in heaven.
Happy user for all personal stuff business stuff is all MSFT as I am just an employee. From time to time I donated some EUR, that is one of the projects that I think is essential as everyone needs to have a spreadsheet that they can edit locally and not share with some cloud monsters.
LibreOffice is such a great tool. I almost exclusively used it (LO Impress) for science presentations and lectures for more than 20 years (previously as Openoffice).
It has its issues, with things like videos, or really big presentations, or formatting changes between platforms, but most of the time it did the job. The fact that you can embed LaTeX in slides (through an extension) is a great thing. I don't think the end result ever looked as slick as alternatives, but if that is not your ultimate goal, it's fine.
> Then the upswing, when even the most fashionable users realised that desktop office suites would never die and would coexist with the cloud.<p>Libreoffice in combination with local ML/AI owns the future. Whats missing is to orchestrate an API for the vast and growing open source data science ecosystem to be more readily available to non-technical end-users.<p>When that happens it will be another "Sputnik moment" :-)
LibreOffice also can be used headlesslsy to convert other files to PDF locally. We use it via a container to first generate well-styled docx files (letters, invoices etc) and then convert those to PDFs.
I used it exclusively for my graduate theology studies - all my papers, presentations, and so on. Along with Zotero, I had everything I needed.<p>Just for fun, I did a few papers in LaTex, but I ran into a minor footnote formatting issue that I couldn't fix, so I didn't use it for my closure projects. LibreOffice was fine.
The only nontrivial thing I use a word processor for is "mail merge" with a spreadsheet to create mailing labels. I used to have to keep a Windows VM around to do that in Microsoft Office. But a couple of years ago, I tried LibreOffice and was happy to find it has progressed so much. Now it's easier to use LibreOffice for that task than to use the Microsoft tools. Kudos to the developers for their careful work getting stuff like that right.
So happy that it continues to grow in popularity. Draw is probably their best tool in the suite. Also related, people might be interested in using Xournal (<a href="https://xournalpp.github.io/" rel="nofollow">https://xournalpp.github.io/</a>) for PDF manipulations and pandoc (<a href="https://pandoc.org/" rel="nofollow">https://pandoc.org/</a>) for general document conversion.
LibreOffice is like X - it needs to be mothballed and a new paradigm needs to be brought into being.<p>The preferences and toolbars are simply a confusing, amateur hour disaster of no clear design vision, just people cramming their weird and obscure use cases in. Blessings to those who get use out of it, but there is hardly a more disappointing example of open source then this.
No discussion of LibreOffice would be complete without a reminder that the Apache Foundation continues to harm the open source community by pretending that Apache OpenOffice isn't dead as a doornail.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_OpenOffice" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_OpenOffice</a><p>Come on, Apache, admit what we all know to be true, and figure out a way to gently wind the OpenOffice project down.
Does anyone have any advice for someone that is curious about moving from Google to LibreOffice? I work in a collaborative environment where everyone immediately having access to the same data on different environments (including mobile) is desirable.
> First, rapid growth between 2011 and 2014 to 30 million downloads, despite the fierce hostility of the project created to kill LibreOffice.<p>Out of curiosity, what's the "fierce hostility" they're talking about?
For those wondering what happened in 2019:<p>> In 2019, a series of attacks on the download counter – no data is collected other than the click on the DOWNLOAD button – led to a barely credible increase
Related: It's Time To Let Go, Apache Software Foundation<p><a href="https://rocket9labs.com/post/its-time-to-let-go-apache-software-foundation/" rel="nofollow">https://rocket9labs.com/post/its-time-to-let-go-apache-softw...</a>