Honestly, its gotta be the MS Office suite.
Yes if you’re just writing your own simple documents libreoffice/OpenOffice will work, but if you have to do anything more complex than a single page spreadsheet, text-on-white presentations, or 3 page MLA book reports… or, even worse, have to interact with documents and spreadsheets created by basically any other person on the planet, I’ve just never had a good consistent experience with any of the free options.
Disagree. Libreoffice is pretty capable for most use cases nowadays.
Compatibility is also pretty good with Microsoft formats despite Microsoft‘s best efforts.
OpenOffice is dead.
it’s pretty capable in term of most functionalities but you can’t get the formatting, e. g. word docs, exactly one-to-one with its MS office version counterpart. So it would be difficult to share to multiplatforms users.
And Microsoft intentionally introduce bugs in its files design so that certain functionalities will be extremely difficult to replicate.
unfortunately “pretty good” is not “guaranteed”, which is often what I need for both work and school. I tried to make myself use only libre options for like a week and just about every assignment I opened was broken in some way or another so I always ended up back in Word.
I’ll still use the libreoffice options if i’m, say, already logged into my Linux install and don’t want to bother going back to Windows. But since I get Office for free thru work and school, and so does everyone else, well… I just use it.
Not sure how it is nowadays, but back in 2018 Libreoffice Calc was struggling to handle even a single sheet of data entries, performance-wise, let alone multiple sheets.
I’m not expecting it to have every feature imaginable, but I do expect it to not freeze when processing even a relatively small dataset.
As someone that despises MS Office, LibreOffice is even worse. All I wanted to do was create a simple database of contact info, donation info, and reservation scheduling for a small nonprofit. Something I could do in minutes in Access. Let me tell you the database part of LibreOffice SUCKS. You can’t even import csv’s! Best you can do is copy paste cells into fields and Hope all the formatting and data types work. And connecting to other external data sources is an incredible pain. I found MS Office on sale for $35 and threw LibreOffice in the trash where it belongs.
If you have to interact with documents created by others it would be better to use open formats not proprietary shit designed to be not cross compatible
Eh, beamer is more than enough for most presentations. If your slideshow needs to be that flashy, you probably need more substance.
git puts track changes to shame.
You’re absolutely right about compatibility though.
If you’re using git to track document changes then you’re almost certainly in the tech industry and are quite familiar with the inner workings of your computer.
For 90% of people using computers right now, asking them to use git to do version management on their day to day work flow would be like asking me to fly a rocket ship to work.
I agree with the OP here, for what it does office is leaps and bounds ahead of any of the other software I’ve used to try to replace it and I always end up landing back on it.
Imo using a text based tool for presentations is really counterproductive because presentations should use as little text as possible.
For me currently, libreoffice impress is actually the best option because it has all the necessary features (wysiwyg style editing, svg support, latex equations, some animations).
I don’t need office much but when I do, I hate that I can never find what I’m looking for in that stupid ribbon. I also don’t know any good MS Access alternative.
Whatsapp. Everyone in India uses it. Its like the imessage situation in the US. So widespread.
Schools, college, friend groups, family groups all are on whatsapp.
How am I supposed to message people when the only messaging app they use is whatsapp and facebook messenger (which I don’t use)?
I guess the only easy alternative is to use SMS and email since everyone use it. But it is not safe.
I am always open to alternatives like Signal, Element,etc. But no one use them. I am not going to force people to use a messaging app.
Microsoft Excel
That’s what I came here to post. People always think that other software are actual options. If you are using drools rules then other software can’t even follow the xlsx standard properly enough to even allow drools to compile correctly. It sucks because I’d rather not have to get licenses for my whole team to use excel when there’s plenty of free options and we don’t even use it that much, but it’s just so far into another league it isn’t even close.
I mean, maybe, but that doesn’t really change anything. Excel is better for a lot of use cases and whether that’s due to terrible antitrust violations or not doesn’t really change the fact of the matter. I honestly would love to use Libre or Open office, and it’s literally the first thing I tried, it just doesn’t work for most of the things I would need it for.
MacOS instead of some Linux distro. Mostly because of the hardware that comes with it, making a neat integrated product.
Discord over Matrix. The range of features plus the style of the client. I like soundboard and emotes. its easy to setup a server and invite people.
You cannot setup servers on Discord.
While that is true, that’s also not what people mean when they say ‘servers’ in this context. No of course they’re not actual servers, but that’s what they’re called and I don’t think anyone is under the impression they’re actually servers
