this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2024
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[–] [email protected] 18 points 10 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Unfortunately, I don't think either is particularly great. LibreOffice looks horrendous, performs at or below average, and does not have fabulous compatibility with Microsoft Office formats. On the other hand, ONLYOFFICE has better compatibility but feels cheap and pushes web services.

If this is for personal use, I would go with LibreOffice. If you need to share documents with others using a common format, go with ONLYOFFICE.

[–] BCsven 7 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

I'm not sure if this is accurate OpenOffice appears to be abandonware with development stopped in 2011 while LibreOffice is the fork and still being developed.

edit...ah Oracle OpenOffice vs Apache OpenOffice

[–] [email protected] 17 points 10 months ago

OpenOffice and OnlyOffice are two different things. We were talking about the latter.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

OpenOffice is not a thing anymore, stop keeping it in your brains XD

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (5 children)

LibreOffice literally looks exactly like MS Office in my computer, what are you talking about? It does take a little bit of configuration, but nothing you can't find with a quick search

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

They are probably using the default installed theme, which doesn't have scalable icons so everything is horribly pixelated. Not sure why it's still the default, but as you said it's pretty easy to change.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Yeah, I will admit that it looks much better on Linux than macOS. My other qualm is that it eats up my laptop battery, while Pages and Word use considerably less power

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Dont agree on looks etc, but yes Onlyoffice feels like that and I would prefer Libreoffice+Web integration too.

[–] GlassHalfHopeful 15 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

I've been using LibreOffice for a number of years without issue. Literally takes care of all my word processing and spreadsheet needs. I don't miss MS Office at all, which I use daily at work.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Because most employees can't just install random software on their machines and because compatibility between Libre Office and Microsoft Office is nowhere near perfect. You don't want to send your boss a file that ends up looking mangled on their screen.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Send them a PDF... unless explicitly required otherwise.

[–] GlassHalfHopeful 12 points 10 months ago (18 children)

Company computing assets are managed. One normally doesn't get to override IT policy without business justification.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago

LibreOffice

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago

LibreOffice unless MS Office comparability is the most important thing. Then maybe try ONLYOFFICE.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Both are good, but different focuses. OnlyOffice has fewer features, but extremely good MS Office cross-compatibility.

Libre Office has more features, but can run into compatibility issues when going back and forth between MS Office.

That being said, for the average user's needs, both are perfectly fine.

OnlyOffice is also able to be used in a cloud framework similar to Google docs, but to my knowledge Libre Office cannot do that.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

I think Collabora Online uses or is built on LibreOffice. It's a subscription service but you can host it yourself for free (I think for personal use). I've not tried either. I'm pretty sure the Collabora team are big code contributors to LibreOffice. If I got anything wrong I hope someone will correct me.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Oh nice, thanks for the info!

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago

I use OnlyOffice and enjoy it. I do notice some fancy features missing but as I'm not a power user it doesn't bother me. I've opened OnlyOffice docx files in MS Office and vice versa many times with no issues ever. I've also installed MS fonts on my Linux distro and they work in OnlyOffice. I don't notice it pushing online features like somebody else said

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

I was like "what the f" and then I read it

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

I use Libre Office. I have zero need if back and forth with enshitified MS Office.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

LibreOffice should receive more updates than ~~OnlyOffice~~ OpenOffice.
I switched my uncle from ~~OnlyOffice~~ OpenOffice to LibreOffice (for work) and he never complained.

Edit: I've confused OnlyOffice with OpenOffice.

Anyway, I have both LibreOffice and OnlyOffice. I always use LibreOffice but for one file (yes it is an excel spreadsheet) I need to use OnlyOffice 'cause Libre can't open it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

You're sure you're talking about OnlyOffice, and not OpenOffice. OpenOffice and LibreOffice are related. OnlyOffice is not.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

Ops, you're right. Sorry, I've answered on phone while on movement.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (3 children)

Is it possible to download just the word processor (libreoffice's) and nothing else?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Like abiword? Depends what you need

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Sorry. Im asking about word processor from libreoffice

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Not that I’m aware of.

And LibreOffice

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (2 children)

In Flatpak no, just the bundle for whatever reason. Pretty annoying, as I will never, never use Base of Draw.

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[–] supermair 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Try both out as flatpaks if you're on Linux and keep the one you like as I did :). I think both flatpaks come with the full suite.

I ended up sticking with OnlyOffice and feel it will probably work better for most people doing things like writing documents and spreadsheets with various formatting, tables, charts, formulas and equations.

I am mainly a Google docs user (and in the past MS office) as most people are and the OnlyOffice UI and workflow is much more comfortable if you're coming from these products. Things work and look the way you would expect. LibreOffice UI feels very clunky and dated (even after trying different layouts). For example, charts look really bad by default in LibreOffice. OnlyOffice seems to work pretty much just as well as gDocs/MS office so far in my limited experience for most scenarios.

As part of my effort to reduce reliance on gDocs I am planning on setting up a self hosted Nextcloud office instance and it is based on OnlyOffice so it is more motivation for me to stick with it!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

LibreOffice for local files, OnlyOffice for cloud

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

I had issues with Onlyoffice taking ages to load documents with lots of pages while Libreoffice did it instantly as expected. So back to Libreoffice for me.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

@t0mri I have both. and i use both in different situations. depends on the specific document.

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