LibreOffice blasts OnlyOffice for working with Microsoft to lock users in

https://www.neowin.net/news/libreoffice-blasts-fake-open-source-onlyoffice-for-working-with-microsoft-to-lock-users-in/

62•XzetaU8•3h ago

Comments

Flavius•2h ago

The 'fake open-source' debate is interesting, but OnlyOffice is still the best free alternative for anyone coming from MS Office. LibreOffice has a great mission, but their UI feels dated and the formatting issues with DOCX/XLSX files are still a deal-breaker for me.

xvilka•2h ago

LibreOffice constantly works on improving the import of the DOC/DOCX/XLS/XLSX/etc formats, thus if something doesn't work for you, it's better to file a bug in their bugtracker[1].

[1] https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/enter_bug.cgi?format=gui...

cyber_kinetist•1h ago

The site is making ordinary users (other than developers) shy away from submitting bug reports. Come on, you need to make a whole account in Bugzilla for you to report bugs? The best thing would be to have a "Report bug" window directly in the program that lets the user send complaints without hazzle!

lmz•1h ago

The best thing for users maybe. A special kind of hell for the people investigating. And since there are numerous non paying users vs only so many people who have the skills to fix things...

nickserv•1h ago

It's incredibly useful to know what problems your users are facing. It doesn't necessarily mean fixing any one particular bug, rather should help prioritize future work.

braiamp•59m ago

Interesting that this is a take, because MS Office (and all MS products) don't include such button.

user205738•59m ago

Creating an account on bugzilla is much easier than on the same github, and it is also used in many projects, so registration makes sense.

stop50•2h ago

Openoffice had afaik not an big change in years and Libreoffice had quite a lot of changes that improved Msoffice support.

ZiiS•2h ago

I also missread Only as Open

2b3a51•1h ago

"...their UI feels dated"

How do you define dated in this context?

Personally, I quite like being able to use the CUA keyboard shortcuts to access menu items. I like consistency over decades but I appreciate that there are other ways of looking at this.

Flavius•1h ago

Take a look at these screenshots: https://libreoffice.en.uptodown.com/mac

It looks ancient, worse than office apps from 20 years ago.

barnabee•1h ago

Office apps from 20 years ago looked better than office apps now.

blackhaz•43m ago

And from 32 years ago as well - MS Office 4.0 as an example.

slyfox125•1h ago

It looks great using Plasma. If the comparison and "problem" is the lack of a "ribbon" menu, etc., then you are missing the whole point of Office alternatives: they are free, open source, but most importantly, they are usable. That is, they do not eschew usability and function for the sake of change, pure aesthetics, or a company's latest foray into some new gimmick.

Ultimately, the "classic" approach taken is because many users feel that the classic style is more usable and makes them more productive irrespective of their learned habits of the past 20-30 years.

mft_•1h ago

It looks awful and undiscoverable on a standard Mint/Cinnamon install.

Anyway, the point is surely that if LibreOffice really wants to attract users from Microsoft Office, then it should do everything possible to optimise that transition?

Offering the option of a UI mimicking the familiar MS Office layout is not a difficult engineering problem. And if it makes users significantly more likely to switch, it should be a high priority to implement.

Honestly, at this stage, thinking of Gimp, FreeCAD, LibreOffice, and Blender, it’s as though there’s a weird group psychology deliberately against offering even decent (let along best-in-class) UIs in the open source world. These are all apps with excellent fundamental underlying engines/tech which are handicapped hugely by their UI/UX. (Yes I know some of these have improved in recent years, but only after far longer without improvements.)

jamesnorden•53m ago

>Offering the option of a UI mimicking the familiar MS Office layout is not a difficult engineering problem. And if it makes users significantly more likely to switch, it should be a high priority to implement.

It's already there. It really feels like such criticisms are from people who haven't used it in 10+ years.

keyringlight•1h ago

LibreOffice also has a ribbon toolbars mode, it's 5 seconds to switch if you prefer it under View > User interface.

gzread•42m ago

Microsoft did usability studies on real people to determine the ribbon interface is better. This is back in the days when software companies cared about objectively verifiable results.

gerdesj•1h ago

"You are running version 7.0" - why not try some screenshots from this decade?

I have version 25.8.4.2 running here. It looks rather better and most importantly offers me the choice of a ribbon or not and many other choices rather than enforcing a single "opinionated" interface.

Flavius•32m ago

What do you mean by version 7.0? I'm running Version: 26.2.0.3 and it still looks dated after I did my best to configure the interface.

jamesnorden•55m ago

Maybe try installing a current version and seeing for yourself, there's multiple UI styles to chose from now, even one that is meant to mimic the MS "ribbon".

yason•53m ago

That looks exactly like an office app should look like. Basic interface patterns, clear distinctive visual areas and borders, all in the tradition of a classical graphical user interface. And yes, classical GUI more or less peaked in the early 2000's and it has generally been a downhill from there because the irresistible need of the industry for offering "something new" every few years.

2b3a51•36m ago

Well 'ancient' to me in the context of computer interaction means punched cards (mechanical punches!) and a card reader, upper case only, so these terms are relative I suppose.

I think this is a matter of choice and it is nice that there are choices. As other posters in this little sub-tree have suggested, there are people who value continuity over a period of time.

7bit•18m ago

> are relative I suppose. > A matter of choice

Congratulations on figuring this out. It's not like the commenter you replied to said, it "feels dated" ... Oh no wait, he did.

Mikhail_K•1h ago

> their UI feels dated

A big selling point for me. Needless reworking of familiar interfaces plagues MS Windows ecosystem and I'm glad LibreOffice is displaying healthy conservatism by not fixing what isn't broken.

throwaway270925•1h ago

Also free and great at MSOffice file compatibility is FreeOffice from SoftMaker:

https://www.freeoffice.com/

petepete•53m ago

Does Microsoft Office exist now? Looked like they've entirely rebranded it to Microsoft 365 Copilot App (according to office.com)

SebastianKra•1h ago

Link to the actual source: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/02/16/why-odf-...

manosyja•1h ago

OnlyOffice isn’t a „rival“ to LibreOffice as TFA says, because the former has been dead for a long time.

Edit: Further, the ooxml format was heavily criticised ~20 years ago, back when it was introduced. This is old news.

LiamPowell•48m ago

The last release was only 3 months ago and they have 30 git repos with commits in the last 24 hours.

Jaxan•28m ago

Maybe they are confused with OpenOffice?

ekianjo•40m ago

> dead

Surprisingly moving a lot for something dead

https://helpcenter.onlyoffice.com/docs/docs-changelog.aspx

Sophira•30m ago

Are you thinking of OpenOffice instead of OnlyOffice?

fweimer•48m ago

How does LibreOffice handle ODF standardization? If they want to add a new feature that result in changes how things are formatted visually, write they papers to update the ISO standard for ODF, working with other office suite implementers to achieve interoperability, wait a couple of years for the new standard with the changes getting published, and finally turn on the feature for users?

My impression is that this is more or less how ISO standards are supposed to work. Personally, I don't want to work in such an environment.

revolvingthrow•31m ago

I wish the excel clones were better. LibreOffice’s UI is extremely dated imo, to the point it doesn’t even let you make a damn table, but at least what’s there works correctly. OnlyOffice is not only missing some pretty basic functionality such as preferences (???), it also inexplicably deleted a single spreadsheet out of a multi-sheet file on two occasions on macOS and generally has some peculiar functionality and ux here and there.

markus_zhang•30m ago

Eh, I think as an open source solution you definitely want to grab as many users as possible by using the most popular office file format. And then maybe you can do something different.

TBH I don't think de-big-tech will ever succeed in a capitalistic world.

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LibreOffice blasts OnlyOffice for working with Microsoft to lock users in

Comments

Keep Android Open

Andrej Karpathy talks about "Claws"

I Verified My LinkedIn Identity. Here's What I Handed Over

Turn Dependabot off

I found a Vulnerability. They found a Lawyer

Facebook is cooked

Ggml.ai joins Hugging Face to ensure the long-term progress of Local AI

Wikipedia deprecates Archive.today, starts removing archive links

EU mandates replaceable batteries by 2027 (2023)

Understanding Std:Shared_mutex from C++17

CERN rebuilt the original browser from 1989 (2019)

Lean 4: How the theorem prover works and why it's the new competitive edge in AI

Acme Weather

Coccinelle: The Linux kernel's source-to-source transformation tool

LibreOffice blasts OnlyOffice for working with Microsoft to lock users in

What Is OAuth?

Gitas – A tool for Git account switching

Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company

Cord: Coordinating Trees of AI Agents

When etcd crashes, check your disks first

The bare minimum for syncing Git repos

Index, Count, Offset, Size

Large Language Model Reasoning Failures

Blue light filters don't work – controlling total luminance is a better bet

Show HN: Mines.fyi – all the mines in the US in a leaflet visualization

OpenScan

The path to ubiquitous AI (17k tokens/sec)

24 Hour Fitness won't let you unsubscribe from marketing spam, so I fixed it

Trump's global tariffs struck down by US Supreme Court

Across the US, people are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras