this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
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I get where you're coming from but I think you're overstating the impact in this day and age. If this had been 1995 it'd be a big deal. Now it's rediculously easy to install any alternative you like for free.
Libre Office is an entire free fully features office suite.
I'm less bothered about removing WordPad than I am about Microsoft advertising and pre-installing it's products in Windows - they force Edge on people, they push OneDrive and preinstall a preview of Office. That's the real problem - not losing WordPad.
At one point Anti-Trust / Anti-monopoly regulators globally punished Microsoft for pushing Internet Explorer to consumers and for a long time in Europe had to offer a choice of Browsers to download on new Windows installs. Now it's allowed to get away with abusing it's dominant position to force it's products on consumers.
Does liber office make .docx files and export to pdf?
Yes.
It does. It's fine as a replacement for Word, but no one has an answer for Excel. LibreOffice Calc is fine for a basic spreadsheet, but Excel is in a completely different universe than Calc with anything beyond that.
To be fair though, Excel is in a completely different universe than literally any other competing product.
I think calc is fine for a lot of use cases. I use it all the time. It is different though.
For advanced stuff I’d rather use Python anyway to be honest.
Excel has built-in Python support now. I wish I was joking.
Yes… processed on the cloud. Lol.
Do you know how both of those compare with Google Sheets?
Sheets is capable enough for the average person but a business is always going to want to use Excel because it's the industry standard.
I can't remember the last time I actually needed a spreadsheet for anything other than looking at a bunch of tabular data, but I'm a programmer so I'm not the standard spreadsheet user.
But then what do you use for database???
Probably a database.
Lol exactly
JSON files that get committed to a git repo, obviously. They're in a private repository in GitHub so that takes care of security and resiliency, two birds with one stone.
At first I was certain this was going to be sarcasm.
If you are an accountant, then it’s your beast of burden.
Accountant here. I prefer libreoffice calc.
Gotcha, that makes sense. Thanks for your reply!
Nothing compares to excel. There are spreadsheets, and there is excel. The world runs on excel, and for a damn good reason. Also, excel runs the world, literally.
So you’re telling me that Excel is very good at stuff?
Just use SQL. Even SQLite.
It wouldn't be as good as everyone says if it didn't.
Yes, and recent versions of MS Word can also read odt, so no need for docx just to work with Word users.
Yup
Nice 👍
I built a new PC two months ago and it's the first time I didn't get Office. Libre Office has everything I need and it's free.
I've wondered about free suites like these - how do they make money, do you know?
They don’t. Libre Office is maintained by a non-profit called The Document Foundation. They’re funded entirely by donations. I think they make enough to have some full time employees.
A lot of open source software is created by individuals or non-profits. The Mozilla foundation makes Firefox, for instance. They make money through donations and also Google pays them a ton of money to be the default search engine.
There are for profit companies that make or contribute to open source software. Such as Red Hat. They tend to make money by selling support for the software.
I don't think they make money. It's an open source project where people donate their time as far as I know.
EDIT: I forgot to mention you can donate to the project. Something has to pay for web hosting, I guess.
A bit of donations, a bit of unpaid people contributing just to help others.
Donations. Volunteers.
Or you know, google docs is a thing which is free and imo works better than word
Google docs is still trash though.
How so?
A web browser is not a word processor no matter how much they tart it up. If the thing isn’t saving a file to my local drive that is in a common format It’s not worth putting your effort into.
So many kids are going to grow up not having the concept where data lives and what the failure modes are.
How so? I think you can export in different formats?