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by pessimizer 241 days ago
Libreoffice is fine, better than we deserve. If they want it to be even better, maybe instead of throwing a few hundred million at MS, they could throw a few hundred million at Libreoffice. It's old as hell and kept up by charity.

The idea that Libreoffice is so bad that giving up your freedom to Google or Microsoft is unavoidable just shows your actual level of objection to being slaves to US companies is close to zero. You'll only be pried away from your dependence on the latest popular versions of US products kicking, screaming, and complaining the entire time. You wouldn't be satisfied with anything but a clone, and you'd complain that the clone lacked the most obscure features of the real thing.

And it's not just you, but a typical sort of aimless ridicule of FOSS product from people who feel guilty about not using them when their professed politics say they should. You'll talk a big game about independence, but your fictional pan-European office suite is far worse than Libreoffice, seeing as it doesn't exist. Couldn't be more feature-light.

1 comments

I disagree completely. If libre office would be fine, it would be popular. And, as said, most of the people I know avoid it like a plague.

Also, im not trying to ridicule FOSS as a whole. if anything I'm a financial supporter for several projects and organizations. It's not a lot of money, but it's every month. So, no, it's not this.

The proposal would be to fund something like collabora, build on top of libre office or do something greenfield, but all this money that was supposed to go to Microsoft should be redirected.

Decision that governments did are not based on the fact that libre office is good. It's based on 1) political reasons called digital sovereignty and 2) price. Maybe 3) being pissed at trump. They didn't do it because LO was good.

Some american products have no good alternatives, yet. Some do, like windows can be replaced with gnome, but mobile phones cannot. Probably you are not typing or reading this from a European os on your phone, yet alternatives exist. Just not good ones.

Microsoft Office clone is not what I want, but what I would accept. Let's say UI should be very similar to Microsoft Office or even better Google office. That's it. Make it in a desktop suite and we are all good.

But do not ignore the UI part of the app.

> Some do, like windows can be replaced with gnome, but mobile phones cannot.

> Probably you are not typing or reading this from a European os on your phone, yet alternatives exist.

Both Linux and Android are OSS, though admittedly the latter is becoming quite more a walled garden as we speak.