alt Hacker NewsIf 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.
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A major barrier to the improvement of giant FOSS replacements like GIMP and LibreOffice is that the people who develop it and the people who use it have become very used to all of its quirks. It's extremely hard to identify the rough edges in a UI without an external perspective.
Blender is a little different because every 3D modeling program is odd in its own way, and the new UI was close enough that it was easy to learn after the transition (I do still use the legacy keybinds though).
But Blender is very niche hobby software. To "succeed" (if we define success as capturing a significant user share from closed source spyware), Libre and GIMP need to offer workflows that are close to what the average non-coder technical person expects. Maybe that isn't valued by the teams, or maybe they don't have enough resources to make it happen, but the end result is a reputation of jank.
I dislike vibe coded clones because of concerns about the engineering quality. But the reason they're making waves when traditional FOSS hasn't is that the UX is leagues ahead.
> If LibreOffice were good enough already, it would already be popular.
Not true. There's inertia and network effects in play that often prevent better products from succeeding against established ones.
I agree that LibreOffice has ways to go. But the secret is that MS office is just worse in every single way except mind share.
Most people don't use MS office by choice though so "goodness" isn't a particular relevant metric.
The main problem is that if you get sent any slightly complicated word document, it doesn’t display properly. Equally if you create something using it and have to send it to someone who uses Word, then it doesn’t work properly for them. For non-work things, I find Google Docs and spreadsheets do everything I need and I don’t have MS Office on my personal machine. YMMV.
Octave is a similar old-school open-source replacement tool (to Matlab) that could benefit from similar investment. Though Octave's issues involve some ecosystem compatibility dynamics too, last I checked.
I must admit it was strange to get used to it. If you need to create professional looking documents, it's necessary to adjust line height, be able to work with tables etc. That being said, once you need to look up your favorite functions with Google.
Also LibreOffice (former OpenOffice) had PDF export a decade before Word. This seems to be a ridiculously essential feature. Last but not least, it's way more comprehensive than Google Docs.
ArtCraft is great for this. They try to recreate proprietary apps 1 to 1 so there's no real innovation, but it creates a baseline for new open source projects that can be even better than the original.
I use LO Calc on my home and work computers, and my work computer comes with Excel installed. shrug
Its popular enough for me, I use Libre exclusively when not using google docs
As an occasional user of GIMP, yes it does not quite have the final level of UX polish.
For example, moving a text layer (with 'pick layer') requires the cursor to be over the painted part of the glyphs to move that layer, if you miss then the background is moved instead. All that is required is a picking region around the glyphs and it would be fine.
GIMP is excellent, but you have to tinker around with it to get results. I have used GIMP to edit mg artwork for three exhibitions so far.
Been happily using both for a long time. GIMP for 20 yr and LibreOffice for 8 yr. Granted my use cases are not professional.
While Gimp has some UI issues, as someone who learned Gimp first, I don't "struggle" with it. It's very effective, and while you can call it a distant 2nd to Photoshop, anything else would be a distant 3rd to Gimp.
I don't do photoediting any more, but Gimp + plugins was great. In those days, it wasn't unusual for Gimp to get some new capability before Photoshop (e.g. Liquid Rescale, various denoising algorithms). The academics would often demonstrate their new algorithm using Gimp plugins.
> If LibreOffice were good enough already, it would already be popular.
The problem is the lack of integration into a wider ecosystem, that's what MS provides.
Audacity has gone through this transformation. Tantacrul (designer, MS Paint 3D, and musician) made a video about how he directed the rewrite of the UI for version 4:
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I consider LibreOffice Writer superior to old MS Word versions, and old MS Word versions superior to new MS Word versions.
In my opinion, the quality of MS Word peaked some time in the early 2000s.
So today, given the choice between LibreOffice and MS Word, I would always choose LibreOffice, even if MS Word were free, and despite the fact that LibreOffice Writer has some annoying bugs that have not been fixed for many years, but I find easier to work around those bugs than to cope with the user interface of modern MS Word.
On the other hand, I agree that MS Excel is clearly superior to LibreOffice Calc. Nonetheless, there already are decades since I switched to LibreOffice Calc and I did not need the extra features of MS Excel. For things beyond the capabilities of Calc, I use a real database, though that would probably not be the best solution for a typical office worker.
In the distant past I liked a lot MS Access, but I have no idea whether today it is still useful. I abandoned it many years ago, after I had some problems with the migration of data between different versions of MS Access and even more with the migration of data from MS Access to another database manager.