"Yes, the equation editor for Linux is in our wish list but we don't have any specific date to share with you. I have forwarded this request again to our development team." --June 27th 2020[1]

I'll allow others to download and try out the package - nice Web page though.

[1] https://forum.softmaker.com/viewtopic.php?f=389&t=20201

Thanks for that, I've haven't looked beyond Libre in years. Trying it out on Debian11 now.

Make sure to enable the HiDPI mode which is not the default for some reason.

In what ways it it superior?

LibreOffice is a noble yet doomed project that tries to fix the unfixable: the incredibly slow, highly complicated and unaesthetic StarOffice originally developed by Sun, that later reincarnated in OpenOffice. Fixing that suite is so monumentally effort intensive that you would be better off rewriting it from scratch or porting features to a simpler suite like Abiword/Gnumeric, etc.

FreeOffice is the free version of SoftMaker Office. A performant, visually pleasing office suite that is closer to the state of the art in office suites. Running it does not transform your computer into a heating system.

Unlike WPS Office, another popular and free office suite (developed in China by KingSoft), SoftMaker is developed in the west by someone I can actually sue in a non kangaroo court in the EU if something goes wrong.

Is LibreOffice really that slow?

Sure, it takes a while to start up, but after that my experience has been that it's as performant as Microsoft Office or Google Docs (ie. pretty much instant for everything I've done with it). Just start it once and keep it running, and you won't really have to worry about performance.

As for aesthetics, it looks fine to me... just like any other generic office app... besides which, aesthetics take a distant third place behind functionality and performance for me.

As for suing, what are you doing that you have to even consider suing someone?

That never even entered my mind for any software that I've ever used in my life.

It is extremely sluggish on all my machines (both Windows and Linux with large amount of memory and cores).

I don't mind the start up performance, it's fine.

But scrolling is sluggish, drag and dropping is painful, opening mid-sized spreadsheets takes forever, and on most of my machines even just typing have a noticeable delay.

Even Google Docs feels noticeably faster and it's running on 12 more layers of abstraction so I can't really explain why is LO so bad...

Note: Disabling Skia or hardware acceleration completely does help with performance on some computers.

In modern hardware you may not perceive the difference but in older hardware the difference is more noticeable.