Updated.

I have used Microsoft Office for many years and wanted to see how LibreOffice has come along in the meantime and it does not do as well as I would have hoped for on Windows. There is no included updater tool as in Firefox, so my old version stopped working completely (frozen UI) and the ancient hassle to download .exe files. Not a great start.

The dark mode switch causes buttons to be in the wrong colour looking like a buggy mess until a restart, but even then some of the icons and application colours were not applied correctly until I manually changed them so.

The ribbon view in Calc has its setting burger button on the right and it opens on another screen next to it?

What completely breaks it for me is the broken window resize. The ribbon tab titles are not rescaled and become inconveniently small. I then discovered the the compact grouped view and it made a better initial impression on me. Then I snapped the the window to the left and the UI is just cut off. Manually resizing it horizontally just breaks everything even more until the UI is empty and the rest is moved into the arrow.

The old school UI view meanwhile works and resizes, but it might be the slowest and laggiest UI on resize with goofy stretching I have seen in quite some time.

Also I really think the default theming and the 6 presets are questionable in fashion, but this is the least of its problems.

Wondering what happened to the development of LibreOffice? There are definitive improvements and probably there are even better under the hood changes, but why would such a large project ship such a bad experience? Was the core of the UI never touched the past 15 years? I have to to use an alternative.

EDIT: Resize runs better after forcing Skia Software renderer. Should not have to do that with an up to date AMD driver. Skia/Vulkan was the culprit. Disabling Skia leads to flicker on resize, so even more rendering bugs.

  • 🧟‍♂️ Cadaver
    12•6 months ago

    Try to use OnlyOffice. It’s the only viable alternative to MSOffice that I have found.

    • @MangoPenguinEnglish
      5•6 months ago

      OnlyOffice

      The downside is it’s an electron app so performance is utterly atrocious, it’ll straight up crash when opening a ~5000 row excel file.

      • @Aurix@lemmy.worldOP
        2•6 months ago

        I have tried Softmaker Office and unfortunately its font rendering/kerning is the worst, (printing unaffected). MS Word, LibreOffice are running around it in circles. I assume a high DPI display would minimize these woes in the future. I worked around it by using Roboto at 11 pt, makes it bearable. But aside from that it checks all the marks for an Office program. I wonder how far its spreadsheet program will take me. Cannot imagine it coming anywhere close to Excel for highly advanced usage.