LibreOffice actually works 365 days a year

Well, OpenOffice wouldn't print on Tuesdays:

“ What a fascinating bug!! My wife has complained that open office will never print on Tuesdays!?! Then she demonstrated it. Sure enough, won't print on Tuesday. Other applications print. I think this is the same bug. Here is my guess:

Print to a postscript file. Observe the line: %%CreationDate: (Tue Mar 3 19:47:42 2009)

Change "Tue" to anything else: %%CreationDate: (XTue Mar 3 19:47:42 2009)

Save the file and it prints. Tools like evince work because they simply omit the "CreationDate" tag to begin with.

Now something odd happens when my cups script (I am using the Brother MFC420CN) copies the file to a temp file. Some of the code is rearranged, not sure how or why, but it uses a command called "file" to identify the file as "PostScript". This check would work on the original file you printed, but by the time it runs the check on the temp file, it misidentifies. Normally it would return:

   PostScript document text conforming at level 3.0

   Jan 22 14:32:44 MET 1991\011Erlang JAM file - version 4.2

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161...

That reminds me that my yearly donation[0] towards LibreOffice's stewards, The Document Foundation, is coming up in December. It's a wholesome tradition where you wire them the amount of EUR/US$/XYZ that Microsoft demands for a year of a personal Office 365(-ish, eh?) subscription[1] as a tex-deductible donation that will make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. I hereby invite you to join in! :)

    [0]: https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/
    [1]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/buy/compare-all-microsoft-365-products (DO NOT REDEEM)

If LibreOffice were good enough already, it would already be popular. It's the same with GIMP. On paper it's a Photoshop alternative, but we've all struggled with it. These projects need to take the same route as Blender did. Originally it was a clunky open source alternative, but it went through a complete UI transformation and now blows the competition away.

While true and a comment I support, it is worth noting that offline versions of Microsoft Office are and have been just fine, including the latest version of 2024 just updated this week.

Maybe someone can help but why does LibreOffice take 4-5 seconds to start on Windows? There are many reports of that [0] and otherwise I have zero problems with my system. This is the only application I use regulary which is actually noticeably slow to start. Even restoring a Firefox instance with hundreds of tabs and +20GB RAM committed is quicker (1s)

https://ask.libreoffice.org/t/why-does-libroffice-starts-so-...

https://ask.libreoffice.org/t/startup-time-open-libreoffice-...

https://ask.libreoffice.org/t/why-does-libreoffice-feel-slug...

I have LibreOffice installed but it’s so ugly and non-intuitive that I prefer to import my documents in Google Docs.

My locally installed ms office 2019 also works 365d/y.

My softmaker office suite also.

Anyway, I do admit I mostly use libreoffice nowadays, except for 1) communication with customers, and 2) a few excels libre can't handle.

I still have to find a good alternative for (local installed) outlook, I'm trying out thunderbird, but I'm not sure it would be able to replace outlook. I still have to try whether it can handle a 50gb imap inbox, and besides lacks a few essential features.

I don’t see the point in this: word and excel were working today. I don’t think LibreOffice provides email accounts and Teams equivalent, right?

I’ve been using OnlyOffice in Ubuntu and it’s so much better, I don’t miss Office at all

Throw in LibreAD or LibreEntra and you got something!

LibreOffice is great and in general open source should be encouraged, but when I tried to used it I just didn't understood why that and GIMP had worse UI than the alternatives. As open source i'm sure you could customize it, so its on purpose, but it definitely pushes away the mass of people imo.

Yet why doesn't anyone use it? Because it's not compatible with office which ~all businesses use. Even if you are a Linux user and live on FOSS, if you work for a company you need office suite compatibility.

I support this in spirit, but in all honesty I never use it. I don’t use word either though. Nvim and on Windows Notepad. Micro is pretty good as well.

If I had to use a word processor daily at work I would just run into the woods and never come back.

https://xnotme.com/LibreOffice/status/2121205272479998268

Aren't offline and online offices suites for completely different types of work? Most of my usage of Google Docs is always in a collaborative work. I review docs and leave comments, live edit my team's docs, update a shared async stand-ups doc, etc.

I rarely have an offline only use. Even docs I write for myself is to be shared with others.

I don't think an LibreOffice supports that workflow.

I haven't used in a while, but all my experiences with it in past were it "works". Any non-trivial work with csv's and it was crashing regularly... Hope it's better now

I love Open Source, but LibreOffice does not work well most of the time. Never use it as an example of good Open Source.

Word and word-like editors are all too complex. Personally I would love some libre quip-like or markdown based renderer with better image and table support

I've been rediscovering desktop software. Especially those that have a CLI I take the era of mediocre SAAS, selling people infinite subscriptions .

This is the year where you can have all your data private, you processor is good enough.

Software is not about or pretty the UI is, it's a tool.

LibreOffice is centered around the document foundation (TDF) in Berlin, correct?

Every month TDF should take a batch of X volunteer microsoft office users who have never used LibreOffice.

Their most senior developers should sit with them as they attempt to do their office work exclusively in LibreOffice.

Then take notes about their experience and revise/enhance the products accordingly.

They should do this 365 days a year for as long as it takes.

External perspective is the blocker. That's how you make it competitive.

LibreOffice is all anyone really needs. Although I wish its UI were a bit polished by 2026 standards.

Can you guys start a cloud company?

I didn't know they have a cloud offering

LibreOffice doesn't have a mail client. Apples and oranges.

Yes, but. I haven't used Microsoft groupware, but my impression is that like Google there's a bunch of multi-player value.

An office where everyone uses local software, that has no idea there is a network share, feels like the eternal conundrum today: it's potentially a Linux on the desktop win. But in the meantime most people would rather not need to manage individual desktops. Cross-machine multi-player experiences are increasingly table-stakes. It doesn't have to be the cloud per se, but it's been multiple decades now of open source competing for the desktop, and it's really been struggling to skate to where the puck's going. It hasn't been on desktop in a while.

A sidebar here, but I think this is what makes atproto so compelling to me. Posts like "A Social Filesystem" talk to how atproto is common glue, and it takes a little imagining, but it's absolutely a substrate that could be used for multiplayer office (via internal-only atproto networks, or upcoming ATproto Spaces). https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46665839

And it's not a proper substitute for Microsoft Office. Just saying.

Doesn't matter. Nobody who chose Microsoft 365 for their business is being blamed for the problems today, and that's all they care about.

If they chose Libreoffice, while their company may have been working today, it wouldn't be able to work with most other companies anyway, and crucially every minor user error will be blamed on the CTO for not choosing Microsoft

Software like this still under-estimates the strength of network effects and inertia. With 3 examples:

1) We have seen this effect with Mastodon. Even when Twitter / X was down, hundreds of millions of people waited for it to go back online and never stuck on Mastodon when they struggled to migrate, or even could not choose a instance to sign up on.

2) GitHub, no matter how unreliable it is and will surely go down next week, tens of millions of developers continue to use it rather than actually self-hosting.

3) The exact same thing with Claude or ChatGPT going down several times a month. Users continue to use both of them instead of local models that don't phone home and stay up 100% uptime.

With the Microsoft 365 outage, hundreds of millions of users will continue to use Outlook and the suite of Microsoft software including Teams; because all their emails and work is on there.

So they just cannot just migrate away from it to LibreOffice which they see that as a complete downgrade. It is far harder than it sounds due to inertia and most open source projects still do not get that in 2026.

Is Office compatibility a solved problem? Haven't used LibreOffice or OpenOffice for years but I was always met with slightly different formatting, incompatible Office quirks et cetera. I know they have their own document format which works fine but the biggest problem is (was?) interoperability with majority of the rest of the professional (and academic) world on regular Office installations.

From many indicators, it seems like the cloud is only going to become more insecure and unstable the next year.

And enables cloud collaboration?

every time i open libre office, i do think that micrsoft is paying them lots of money to stay that ugly.

In reality the office work will be replaced not by libre office, but something like claude work. It's an obvious direction.

I pity the poor souls still wrangling documents with any of the Office Suites. Those awkward conglomerations of word processing and desktop publishing systems. Those systems that would let you embed a video in a spreadsheet in a document, with links to update it when you opened it. Hosted on network drives of NFS, SMB and SharePoint, with broken locking, network hangs, BYTE-ME order problems and BOMs.

Editing huge documents multi-author with versioning and locking turned on. Incompatible styles and fonts and bullet schemes. Broken headers and footers and footnotes and tables of content and indices. Authors who didn't understand or use correctly any of the above.

Sort-of databases. Spreadsheets used as databases. Interminable migraine-inducing slideshows.

Those were the days!

I am so sick of OSS advocates constantly trying PR stunts like this.

A bicycle will never run out of fuel, and is, in a way, more reliable than an airplane. You probably don't want to do London to NYC on a bicycle.

If you don't have online collaboration features, think of documents in terms of q4_financials_v13_final_fixed_with_legal_disclaimers_really_fucking_final (14).xlsx files instead of proper CRDTs synched with a central server, and don't have to worry about how to make your files work on computers (and mobile devices!) that don't have your software installed on them, yes, you will be more reliable. In 2026, those are table-stakes features that most of your users want, and if you don't provide them, you aren't really in the same league as your competitors.

Microsoft Office is no longer just a suite of apps for reading and writing local files. It hasn't been for many years, because a suite of local files is not what you want if you wish to collaborate in real time and own more than one device. Libre Office apparently didn't get the memo yet (maybe the memo used MS Word features which they haven't yet gotten around to implementing)?

On a more serious note, I am deeply saddened that they do not understand this, and seem to believe themselves superior on such a deep level. They are making a great product for the last decade. We do need more digital sovereignty and open source competitors to Microsoft and Google, but if those competitors don't even realize what features the products they're supposedly competing against now have... they have no hope of ever being competitors!

This is like comparing the US Navy with someone's kitchen coffee pot. Yeah, an enterprise cloud platform is going to have issues your word processor doesn't have. Not sure how that's a flex for the word processor.

I see stuff like this I feel like every few months on HN. Word is not the product, it’s the portal to the product which is the M365 cloud. Being able to share, collaborate, search, etc.

You can write documents in anything, the cloud aspect is the hard part and there ain’t no LibreCloud

I don't think most users of Word have ever experienced it not be 'working' in the past two decades either...

Office 365 should rename to Office 363 at this point

Apart from the 1 minute wait opening a Calc spreadsheet if your network printer is turned off.

Didn't micro-soft just recently attempt to layoff or buyout ~60,000 people?

I wonder if that has to do with anything..

of all the things, why post on twitter? you can't read any replies there

I love hating Microsoft like all the rest of you, but... this is not very smart. Afaik, Office also works 365 days a year (I guess until MS introduces a cloud dependency for application boot).

So do offline versions of MS Office. Irrelevant and out of touch statement.

The LibreOffice folks should not be posting so recklessly. They are reeling after falsely claiming they don't use AI and then were suddenly revealed to be doing the opposite.

Well it runs definitely. Works though...?

I still can't use it to print addresses on an envelope.

but are desktop apps broken what?

or are the parts of office that are broken the ones that libreoffice doesn’t even offer?

WordCraft is more like Word and is just as free. Just saying.