[TheRealGL]

Your post is shitting on the project.

You have no idea the amount of effort, dedication or self-motivation required to produce software, therefore the discussion can never go past your personal beef with what it cannot do, versus what you feel it should be able to do.

You're bringing nothing to the table that is new or innovative to the discussion of quality in open source software, only a bash on a project that you feel should be better than it is, based on your non-existent experience of software development.

Discussing open source software isn't forbidden, but trashing the efforts of others when you're not offering to do something about it, with either effort or finance from yourself, I feel, is.

You want to see something better? Start writing it today, come back in six months and then report on how you found the experience, let's see how far you got. Perhaps you might be a little less critical of people's free, hell, even salaried, effort and time.

There's definitely something about walking a mile in another man's shoes for you to do here.

[koenvdb]

Dude calm down, he literally states that he isn't a developer and is asking _why_ it is 'still so bad'. You could explain to him why it is really hard to properly implement things in a piece of software as vast as LibreOffice. Attacking him for even asking the question isn't the way to go imo.

[TheRealGL]

I'm not attacking him, merely setting some of his assumptions straight.

He's assumed that the _person_ or _people_ involved with implementing any of the hundreds of features in this software set out to deliberately do it wrong or to a poor standard.

He's assumed that writing software at any level is easy and happens without compromises. Spoiler: there are always compromises, and most of the time, they're between a rock and a hard place.

Rather than put effort into fixing or attempting to correct, even on an advisory level (filing a bug report perhaps?), he's bashing the software- but its _my_ responsibility to educate him that there's another way?

He's not bringing anything to the table that's new. He's not pushing the discussion forward on how we can make software better.

I wonder how the narrative changes if he posted that he fixed just one tiny bug, or improved the app's navigation- and was able to remark that it was painful and provided a kernel of an idea for how we can improve it? Or that it was easy and he's now working all of his spare time to improving the project further?

Maybe he should start writing the 'new open-source office suite' and let us know how we could have done x, y, z features differently with his new found vast experience in writing software. Or maybe spend a million dollars and see how much software development that buys- 5, 10, 20 developers for a single year, what would this new office suite be like?

You don't get to bash for free, without someone bashing you back.

[LEDThereBeLight]

For what it’s worth, I’m a developer who has worked on open source software and I agree with them, libre office is comically bad. It’s totally appropriate to talk about why, as long as you’re not expecting someone to go off and fix it all for you.