LibreOffice is an awesome piece of kit! On setup, they let you select the “tabbed” UI if you prefer something closer to MS office.
Collabora Office is another one that seems neat, have not used it before though. OnlyOffice has weird Russian ties and GPL incompatible licensing shenanigans, I would avoid them for the most part. WPS Office has the best compatibility with MS Office files on Linux I think, but it’s closed-source so not great either. There’s always running a VM / dual booting if you must use MS Office.
Honestly, MS office files have worked fine on LibreOffice, the only big issue I’ve found is that translucent images are a little broken when going from Impress to PowerPoint (all images share the same opacity for some reason?)
It’s never that MS Office files don’t work on LibreOffice (formatting is a little different but almost never broken), it’s always files exported from LibreOffice that MS Office misreads (because Microsoft can’t be bothered to follow standards are anti-competitive)
Can’t be bothered makes them sound lazy. It’s a deliberate method of squashing all competitors. If you can’t send a document to someone else who usrs MS Office and have it appear the same, then you’re going to need to use MS Office. Libre has been calling them out on this for years.
I haven’t used any of them in ages, I know Collabora is focused on their online suite. Looking at OnlyOffice’s website, they are positioning themselves as an “AI-first” office suite (the LLM tools have been changed to be optional and installed separately since a recent update, but still a bad look)
And WPS Office was always owned by a Chinese company and continues to be closed-source, so no changes there. Again, the same sort of “AI-first” stuff on their homepage, yikes
On setup it asks you to select one of four UIs, some of them are missing features. Once I spent almost an hour trying to solve a problem, but it turned out it was unsolvable in my UI. I changed the UI and found a solution in a moment.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the fact that OpenOffice exists, but their UI needs a lot of work
LibreOffice, not OpenOffice. I believe LibreOffice was forked from OpenOffice, and the latter hasn’t had any updates in ages.
I imagine that the UI you selected was the one of the “compact” or “single toolbar” options? It is a little confusing that some of the one functions disappear with those, it would be helpful if it was listed which ones were missing
You’re confusing OpenOffice (dead project pretty much, hasn’t seen updates in ages) with OnlyOffice (the Russian one with the licensing shenanigans and “AI first” stuff, UI is M365-like and very similar to the LibreOffice “Tabbed” UI)
LibreOffice is an awesome piece of kit! On setup, they let you select the “tabbed” UI if you prefer something closer to MS office.
Collabora Office is another one that seems neat, have not used it before though. OnlyOffice has weird Russian ties and GPL incompatible licensing shenanigans, I would avoid them for the most part. WPS Office has the best compatibility with MS Office files on Linux I think, but it’s closed-source so not great either. There’s always running a VM / dual booting if you must use MS Office.
Honestly, MS office files have worked fine on LibreOffice, the only big issue I’ve found is that translucent images are a little broken when going from Impress to PowerPoint (all images share the same opacity for some reason?)
Collabora Office has an overly permissive policy towards AI, and a lot of their commits are vibe-coded.
In my experience, MS Office files tend to have fewer compatibility problems on LibreOffice than on MS Office after the next update.
What?
It’s never that MS Office files don’t work on LibreOffice (formatting is a little different but almost never broken), it’s always files exported from LibreOffice that MS Office misreads (because Microsoft
can’t be bothered to follow standardsare anti-competitive)Can’t be bothered makes them sound lazy. It’s a deliberate method of squashing all competitors. If you can’t send a document to someone else who usrs MS Office and have it appear the same, then you’re going to need to use MS Office. Libre has been calling them out on this for years.
Oops yeah that is a good point! Amended the comment.
The three you mentioned in the second paragraph are slop fests now.
I haven’t used any of them in ages, I know Collabora is focused on their online suite. Looking at OnlyOffice’s website, they are positioning themselves as an “AI-first” office suite (the LLM tools have been changed to be optional and installed separately since a recent update, but still a bad look)
And WPS Office was always owned by a Chinese company and continues to be closed-source, so no changes there. Again, the same sort of “AI-first” stuff on their homepage, yikes
On setup it asks you to select one of four UIs, some of them are missing features. Once I spent almost an hour trying to solve a problem, but it turned out it was unsolvable in my UI. I changed the UI and found a solution in a moment.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the fact that OpenOffice exists, but their UI needs a lot of work
LibreOffice, not OpenOffice. I believe LibreOffice was forked from OpenOffice, and the latter hasn’t had any updates in ages.
I imagine that the UI you selected was the one of the “compact” or “single toolbar” options? It is a little confusing that some of the one functions disappear with those, it would be helpful if it was listed which ones were missing
I had thought that OpenOffice was the one that “looked modern and familiar” while libreoffice is the good one but lools older.
You’re confusing OpenOffice (dead project pretty much, hasn’t seen updates in ages) with OnlyOffice (the Russian one with the licensing shenanigans and “AI first” stuff, UI is M365-like and very similar to the LibreOffice “Tabbed” UI)