[Flavius]

The 'fake open-source' debate is interesting, but OnlyOffice is still the best free alternative for anyone coming from MS Office. LibreOffice has a great mission, but their UI feels dated and the formatting issues with DOCX/XLSX files are still a deal-breaker for me.

[2b3a51]

"...their UI feels dated"

How do you define dated in this context?

Personally, I quite like being able to use the CUA keyboard shortcuts to access menu items. I like consistency over decades but I appreciate that there are other ways of looking at this.

[Flavius]

Take a look at these screenshots: https://libreoffice.en.uptodown.com/mac

It looks ancient, worse than office apps from 20 years ago.

[maxloh]

LibreOffice on Windows still uses native Win32 controls. While you could call that a stylistic choice, even Microsoft has abandoned it for new apps.

This kind of UI is a dealbreaker for many new users, especially Gen Zers. How could open source conquer the world without attracting our youngest generations?

They should have bundled GTK like GIMP does. That would make the experience feel much less like it is from the XP era.

(I know these types of comments often get downvoted, but I challenge you to explain why you disagree.)

[Mikhail_K]

> their UI feels dated

A big selling point for me. Needless reworking of familiar interfaces plagues MS Windows ecosystem and I'm glad LibreOffice is displaying healthy conservatism by not fixing what isn't broken.

[xvilka]

LibreOffice constantly works on improving the import of the DOC/DOCX/XLS/XLSX/etc formats, thus if something doesn't work for you, it's better to file a bug in their bugtracker[1].

[1] https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/enter_bug.cgi?format=gui...

[cyber_kinetist]

The site is making ordinary users (other than developers) shy away from submitting bug reports. Come on, you need to make a whole account in Bugzilla for you to report bugs? The best thing would be to have a "Report bug" window directly in the program that lets the user send complaints without hazzle!

[throwaway270925]

Also free and great at MSOffice file compatibility is FreeOffice from SoftMaker:

https://www.freeoffice.com/

[petepete]

Does Microsoft Office exist now? Looked like they've entirely rebranded it to Microsoft 365 Copilot App (according to office.com)

[stop50]

Openoffice had afaik not an big change in years and Libreoffice had quite a lot of changes that improved Msoffice support.

[ZiiS]

I also missread Only as Open