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 that I prefer to import my documents in Google Docs.

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.