[exceptione]

KDE + any rolling distro is miles ahead of Windows. So, as a user of both, I read your question with a smirk.

If you would ask if LibreOffice is ready, I would say: yes and no. The UX of LO is worse than MS Office. LO is more feature rich in certain areas but it lacks the UX if you want to get a well-looking document with a minimum amount of work. Case in point: lack of acceptable Impress templates (they look from the year 1994), lack of document themes in Writer, lack of quick table style in Calc.

The UX/UI is in dire need for attention.

[a2128]

I've stopped recommending LibreOffice to anyone after I found out about OnlyOffice, its UI/UX is much better and I've personally been using it without running into any issues or limitations. I'm not a super big power user so I don't know if it lacks features that professionals need, but it's been perfect in my case

[ngrilly]

People are switching from MS Office to LibreOffice because MS Office is US-controlled. Who's controlling OnlyOffice?

[m_rpn]

Not sure who supports OnlyOffice, but i know it's on the north-east of the world. Apparently they have quite a bit of bots/shills in this page right now XD.

[BoxOfRain]

I've been using KDE for years now, I've recently put CachyOS with KDE on the new personal machine I just built and I've not been so impressed with a distro in ages. It's rock solid, minimal faff, very fast, and having got back into PC gaming after a long hiatus the playability of Windows games on Linux is amazing now. Even has a really good looking system theme (in my opinion).

I definitely agree LO and particularly its terribly dated UI is a greater barrier to desktop Linux adoption than the desktop environment itself.

[timbit42]

Have you tried any of the alternate UIs LibreOffice has such as the ribbon?

[mxuribe]

I agree that the UI/UX of libreofice is not the prettiest...but its fine for what i need it for: regular work-related document management, word processing sorts of tasks. But my partner? They LOVE libreoffice specifically BECAUSE its looks like older versions of MS Word! Their needs are basic and are easily met with the functionality of libreoffice and onlyoffice...but they prefer libreoffice especially for the look-and-feel. Caveat: we are of a particularly advanced age, hence we recall many decades of the different versions of MS Office and its app offerings. ;-)

[timbit42]

LibreOffice also has a ribbon interface.

[mxuribe]

Ah-ha, good to know....though my partner would have zero interest...and i careless about the UI/UX...but still is good to know especially for folks who *do* prefer a Ui/UX more similar to MS Word, etc. Thanks for sharing! :-)

[marcosdumay]

I'd say Writer is miles ahead from Word. To start with, it works and won't mangle your entire document because you added a line-break some place it didn't like.

But also, office suites are becoming anachronistic very quickly. Every time you use one nowadays, it's a symptom of some organization failure. (Ok, there are a few reasonable use cases for spreadsheets.) So the entire question is kinda of moot.

[exceptione]

> office suites are becoming anachronistic very quickly.

I hope you did not mean online offerings as an alternative?

In the tech world we are used to compile documents from plain text. But outside I don't see that. I see legal deeply entrenched into Word, with a bunch of macros. It looks masochistic to me, but I guess that is a matter of being entrenched.

[marcosdumay]

Online office suites are office suites.

If legal is deeply entrenched into Word, it means your company has a problem with legal. Complex rich text is really not an adequate format for legal documents, they should really be generating HTML through some system.

(When legal is deep into Word, there is almost always somebody that takes their results and turn them into HTML or PDF. The later group has 2 problems.)

[seb1204]

Changing infrastructure and software packages should not fail due to a missing or bad office template. Surely this can be made from scratch to suit the gov org and current standards/legislation within one work month by any skilled consultant. There are challenges yes, an office template should not be on the top list. Maybe I'm totally wrong...

[exceptione]

Step in the shoes of an average user. You have to create a good looking document. As usual, there is time pressure. You would have no idea where to look online for templates, let alone create it from scratch (master page, huh, what?). In powerpoint or word, just pick one template or theme and it looks slick.

Even when you import a template in Impress, you will find some weird bugs, like a slide insisting that it won't show the slide number. I found such random weird behavior that I wouldn't even know how to file a bug report for it, because they are impossible to reproduce.

----------------------------------------------

I know the stuff is built on top of some very ancient code. Sometimes I wish they would throw it all away and start from scratch in a modern managed, type safe language. It would be feasible if you forego backwards compatibility as I suppose a lot of the bugs have to do with trying to support the MS Office bugs. A consistent finding is that LO supports older office documents better than MS office itself.

[rurban]

> You have to create a good looking document.

Then any office product is horrible. I'm using emacs with markdown, and convert them to tex, pdf, blog posts automatically.

Tables look better. Images look better. Everything's looks better. And it's 10x easier to work with.

[exceptione]

Hey, you don't have to kill the average user!

I am sure your latex or custom pipeline produces better quality indeed. There has always been a gap between word processors and typesetting applications like Scribus and Indesign.

[sneak]

…unless you work all day in Excel, which many do.

There is no reasonable substitute or replacement for Excel.

There should be, but there isn’t.

[skinkestek]

Probably true if you’re an advanced user using a machine with American language pack.

Personally, I stick with LibreOffice. The biggest win? It doesn’t aggressively mangle my data by assuming everything is a U.S. date that needs “fixing.”

And don’t get me started on how Excel insists that, just because my employer gave me a Norwegian-language Mac, every formula should now be written in some half-baked, poorly documented pseudo-Norwegian formula language.

The one tool I do miss? Outlook.

[eisa01]

Just set your preferred UI language to English in System Settings - Language and Region and Excel will honor that

There's probably some similar system setting for the date format

[skinkestek]

> Just set your preferred UI language to English in System Settings – Language and Region and Excel will honor that

That might work - assuming IT policies don’t block it - but it could easily break a bunch of other things on my machine.

> There's probably a similar system setting for the date format

Maybe. But I’ve been a power user for 30 years (counting from my first full Windows restore), and I taught my first IT course in the late ’90s - so if there is an easy fix, I’m honestly kind of impressed with my own ability to miss it.

[rpdillon]

I commented elsewhere on the thread about this, and while I agree with the way you're framing this, I think there is a reasonable substitute for Excel for the vast majority of users. But I think there are power users that use the long tail of features, and for them, there is going to be no replacement. But I use spreadsheets as part of my job and personal life, and I've been using Google Sheets and Libre/OnlyOffice for years and years, and haven't touched Excel in more than 20 years.

But you gated your comment to those that work all day in Excel, and of course for those users, they're going to be needing Excel.

[eisa01]

Agree, LibreOffice at minimum need to implement the same alt-key ribbon shortcuts.

As those are not available in macOS Excel without 3rd party hacks, LO would actually beat MSO at something :)

[sgt]

I saw KDE a couple of years ago and it was not much better than KDE in 2005. It was visually more impressive, sure.

But what has really happened in the last 2-4 years to make it miles ahead of Windows?

[dsego]

Windows is only getting worse because of all the bloat like ads, telemetry, react ui, frequent updates (needs to restart like every other day), recall and so on. Software from 20 years ago feels snappier, even though they didn't add anything new.

[_bent]

Windows got worse

[sunbum]

Windows jumped back multiple miles.