this post was submitted on 09 May 2025
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Today I did my first advanced spreadsheet on LibreOffice after switching to Linux, and it handled itself pretty well. I had to search for some features on the web at first, but after I got it down, I felt comfortable using it. Also, LibreOffice's default menu layout is not pretty, but I can find all of the functions with just a click, unlike MS Office's ribbon menu where I had to click around to find what I was looking for. Sorry for bad English.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 hours ago

#775#298 060352 @ColdWater

[–] [email protected] 31 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I bring this up often because its so amusing to me.

Last year I did a lot of interviews with developers of popular Steam Deck and Linux programs. All went really well, and were quite fun to do.

One 'dev' (I use that term so loosely because I found out GPT is heavily used for their work) freaked out though when they saw my document I sent initially was an .odt file.

Knowing I am a pen-tester, they freaked out and told the public at large I was trying to hack them with a weird file type.

.odt

It still makes me laugh. Anyway, I swear by LibreOffice, I use it daily and love it so much!

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 days ago (2 children)

if a specific format isn't requested or required, and the formatted text document is not expected to be edited by the recipient--only read, possibly by computer, or printed, i would default to using a pdf.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago

That's funny! If someone was trying to infect my PC via e-mail, I would expect them to be sending pdf files.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Most of these were not on-the-spot interviews. They were very informal questions and answers.

So Writer felt appropriate to me - the questions were there, they can copy to paste elsewhere, or enter their own answers in the document.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 days ago (1 children)

It’s very good but M$ make every attempt to avoid making it interoperable with Word

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 days ago (1 children)

M$ loves locking users into their totally bulls*it ecosystem with deliberately broken "standards." LibreOffice, on the other hand, actually respects open formats like ODF and doesn't treat interoperability as a threat. Word still can't properly open documents it didn't create, unless you pay the vendor tax and pray the formatting survives....

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 days ago

I think they deliberately mess with the formatting text in exported to "word doc" format files from LibreOffice too.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 6 days ago

offtopic but your english is great :)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago

My first experience with it was that dark theme was bugged and the interface wasn’t intuitive

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 days ago

You can visually theme it so it looks differently

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Indeed, LibreOffice Calc is a near-daily fixture in my operational workflow. The insistence on proprietary, data-harvesting alternatives like Google Docs is… unnecessary. For Debian-based systems, the installation process is straightforward: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/ppa & sudo apt install libreoffice, referencing the official documentation at https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Install/Linux

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

(Is debian considered a "debian-based" distro?)

Debian users, ignore the above. Debian explicity warns against using ubuntu ppa

The correct way to get libreoffice in debian is just to apt install libreofffice... It's already in the main debian repos

https://wiki.debian.org/LibreOffice

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Yes. Its the obvious choice for desktop.

But if you want web, have you tried CryptoPad.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago

Collabora used to offer Libre Office online, now it’s their Libre Office fork

Rollapp lets you use LibreOffice online but I don’t think there is collaboration

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago

Yeah; it's pretty great. It lacks the excel functions, but if you know some python that is a total non-issue.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago (8 children)

I am so close to loving libreoffice but trackpad gesture scrolling is broken and it's kind of not optional on a laptop. With a mouse, I am a big fan.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

This works out of the box on KDE (should work on GNOME too), what desktop environment do you use?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

Cinnamon, Mint 22. It works, but badly. Two finger scroll does nothing for a second, then jumps to the destination. You don't see anything in between, which is not how that interaction is meant to go (I start the gesture, realise I overshot the top of page two, then adjust back up, read the top, then keep on scrolling - all without releasing the gesture).

This thread describes it well: https://www.reddit.com/r/libreoffice/comments/enf3p4/touchpad_scroll_speed/

edit: i started digging into this again. I think it's just sensitivity being way too high within LO. If I go one mm at a time it works as expected. But of course I want to browse docs as comfortably as I browse pages on firefox.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

That's my exact distro/de combo. Never had any issues with trackpad use that weren't also there with the win10 that came on the thinkpad. Which was just that it's prone to detecting even the lightest accidental taps and over reacting. Maybe it's device specific?

Edit: by device specific, I mean that it isn't every touchpad w/Libreoffice's issue, rather something that's wonky with some range of hardware and not others

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

Aha. This would make more sense - couldn't imagine this was happening on every laptop. Then I should add my device details to a github issue. Thanks for letting me know.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I do wish it had a self hosted docker though. I could see Proton mail and thunder mail adopting it that way, which would be neat.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

Is a self hosted docker different from this?

https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-libreoffice

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago
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