Not the gp (and not IT/Tech based) but I have OpenOffice available because...
1) editing documents I wrote some time ago. There was a time some months ago when LO would warn you when opening an older oOo doc about changes in the format. I saw this with drawings and Impress files. (I need to see if this still happens with latest LO).
2) one of my employers has oOo on their standard desktop image alongside MS Word and all. So I want the same as them for their documents
3) I know the menus and the little UI glitches well in oOo having used it since StarOffice days. LO is (entirely reasonably) refactoring stuff and therefore changing the ways some features work (drawing tools I recollect)
4) gives the impression of running snappier on an ancient laptop that I use. LO does seem to need a full DE (e.g. Gnome/KDE/xfce)
...if oOo life support was switched off, I'd shrug, move all the documents over to LO, and move on I suppose.
Not OP, but I know sometimes I forget I want LibreOffice. Many years ago I worked for a computer store where I used to refurbish computers everyday with OpenOffice so open OpenOffice is still the brand that first comes to mind for me. I never get very far though because as soon as I see "Apache OpenOffice" I realise my mistake and search for LibreOffice.
But I'd assume lot of OpenOffice users today are just legacy users who use it just because they're familiar with the brand and that's what they've always used.
(not the poster) one of my problems with LibreOffice is that it sucks when you are not using English as your main language - little support for spell checkers, etc. At some stage open office used to be better in that respect!
OnlyOffice is far from being as comprehensive as LibreOffice. At least when I tried the spreadsheets, I ran into limitations even though I use spreadsheets very rarely.
1) No Windows release afaik. But please correct me if I am wrong -- I don't see a Win download on their page from a quick look on my phone.
2) I did use it on Ubuntu sometime in college (around 2016 for class) and I just didn't like the feel of Libre. OpenOffice still had a lot of feature parity with Excel without buying Excel, so I got that instead.
>1) No Windows release afaik. But please correct me if I am wrong -- I don't see a Win download on their page from a quick look on my phone.
It's been available for Windows for years. The first option on the drop-down menus says "Windows (64-bit)"[0]. 90% of their 10 million worldwide users in 2011 were on Windows machines[1].
On the download page, just above the "Download" button, there is a dropdown to select the installer. There should be "Windows (32-bit)" and "Windows (64-bit)" there along with the Linux and MacOS installers.
Others have already noted that the windows release is easily findable, so instead I will ask: what features are missing from LibreOffice that OpenOffice has? The former is a fork of the latter, and LibreOffice has undergone extensive further development where OpenOffice has stagnated.
After checking this thread, I downloaded Libre on Windows and played around with it a little, to refresh my memory. My main use case is just working with some personal spreadsheets in Calc, no complicated work stuff.
I wouldn't say features are missing, if anything it sounds like Libre is way more fleshed out than OpenOffice. That said, I still prefer the (relatively) legacy UI in Open Calc than the slightly more modern UI in Libre Calc, just a personal preference. It doesn't seem that much more advanced, and after all these years an ODS spreadsheet still looks like a spreadsheet. Other people noted the security posture of Libre though, which is a great point.
Just wanted to chime in that your reasoning here is 100% valid.
I'd also be curious about something: suppose you used LibreOffice for a week or so for working on your personal spreadsheets. What percentage of your work time would you waste either searching for the new location for the old command, or learning the new command that maps to the old one?
I'd love to read a case study where someone has documented this with a UI change in FOSS.
For me personally? 0%. I just do simple copy/paste, scatter plot, sort asc/desc... not a heavy user of hotkeys. I had some trouble finding the Chart button at first since the icon's different, but that was the only issue.
At one point, an exploitable security issue was unpatched for about 6 months. There was a small note on the site of how to work around it, but it wasn't very noticeable. And every download of it still had the unpatched issue in it until they finally had the resources to release an update. The main purpose of the update was to patch the issue out of the box.
openoffice came out years before libreoffice, so if you had learned to work with it at the time and you still find it sufficient, then why switch? I doubt libreoffice is 1:1 identical in terms of UI/hotkeys/etc
LibreOffice was forked from OpenOffice after Oracle bought it. The community switched over to LibreOffice, so it's not like OpenOffice has a longer history than LibreOffice. They have the same history for the first years before the fork, and OpenOffice essentially died as a community project after the fork.
What happened later is that LibreOffice was rebased on top of the re-licensed Apache OpenOffice, to take advantage of the more compatible licensing. But it had been forked (as go-oo) from OpenOffice much earlier.
Playing devil's advocate: if Word 97 (or something even older like wordperfect) does all you need, why should you upgrade?
Things are different, of course, when you have to interoperate with other people (in the word processor case, mainly by reading files written by other people); not only do security fixes become more relevant, but also newer versions of the software have greater compatibility (in the word processor case, not only there was a lot of work on libreoffice towards better compatibility with Microsoft document formats, but also AFAIK newer libreoffice versions write by default using a newer version of the OpenDocument formats, so if you have an outdated word processor, you might have difficulty reading files written by other people using these newer versions).
Hi! I'm making this comment via a work computer that has Office 2010 on it. It's not the same thing, sure, but it's a great example of how people are definitely still using old office-related software.
There are people who don't need to do that. Their use case may be writing the monthly newsletter for the local rabbit breeders club, or writing that novel they've been working on for decades now (and totally are going to finish any day now! I can relate, because I've got two or three of those saved somewhere).
To these people, there are no benefits in upgrading.
(Also, I've spent a lot of time teaching my parents not to open office documents attached to emails, as that has become a popular way for people to spread malware.)
Depends; has LibreOffice gained any features since the fork? I've had to use it on and off at my previous job and the experience was pretty poor, it ran slowly, dated UI, etc.
The fork happened in 2011, 11 years ago, so there are 11 years of refinement and new features. OpenOffice is in maintenance mode so there are no new features, only bug fixes.
One of the biggest features of LibreOffice over OpenOffice is compatibility with Microsoft Office files.
OpenOffice can open Microsoft Office files but doesn't support as many features as LibreOffice does.
OpenOffice can't save in the newer Microsoft Office formats (docx, xlsx, etc) but LibreOffice can.
Also, LibreOffice now has a ribbon-like interface. To enable it, click View > User Interface and choose Tabbed.
