[linguae]

LibreOffice and its predecessors (OpenOffice and StarOffice) have always been considered bloated for as long as I could remember, which is nearly 20 years. While I'm very grateful for having a free, open source office suite, I've always found OpenOffice and LibreOffice to be rather clunky no matter what platform I'm using. This is especially true on macOS where a lot of the UI elements of LibreOffice don't fit in with regular Mac applications, although thankfully things have progressed from the days of having to run the even-slower NeoOffice on Mac OS X Tiger, which used the Java runtime (I remember it taking up to 15 seconds to load on my 1.83GHz Core Duo MacBook back in 2006). It might have to do with how LibreOffice decided to handle its UI elements. Writing cross-platform software is hard, and it often results in making compromises that affect conformance with specific platform UI guidelines and performance (consider how controversial Electron apps are with some users, for example).

But even with LibreOffice's clunkiness, I still use it at home. While I am partial to Apple Keynote for presentations, I prefer LibreOffice Writer and LibreOffice Calc to Apple Pages and Apple Numbers, respectively. And whenever I'm on a Linux or FreeBSD machine, LibreOffice is available for me to use, while iWork and Microsoft Office are not options.