this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2025
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Crazy how much of the scenario person #2 has to already know about to come across like an asshole here.
IRL:
"It can be so frustrating to work with Microsoft Office sometimes."
"Why don't you just use LibreOffice? I switched five years ago and haven't looked back."
"Well, it lacks the functionality I need for my work, offers no support, and is fundamentally incompatible with my clients' workflow."
"Oh shit dude that sucks, guess it's not ready for the big leagues just yet. What's it missing that you need?"
[conversation ensues]
The main problem is that "what it's missing" is usually "it's not literally exactly the same down to the last pixel"
99% of people that make use of Microsoft Word for work do not do anything more complex than a bulletpoint list, if even that, and would be perfectly fine with libreoffice. In fact, they would like be better off because they wouldn't be dealing with it constantly trying to force everything on to OneDrive instead of attaching it to an email properly and causing all sorts of Random Access issues or the person they sent the document can't actually access it because they aren't part of the organization and other bs in office
Sometimes. Sometimes people do just want to have things be exactly the same, and that's unrealistic.
LibreOffice is not feature-complete compared to MS Office, though. Some people do regularly use collaborative editing as part of their workflow, and there's not support for that yet. Furthermore, LibreOffice does not yet fully support tracking changes, which can be integral to some users (as it is to the comic creator).
I largely agree that MS products are bullshit, but assuming people's issues and belittling their reasoning shore as hail ain't gonna make them switch. It's kinda the issue that this cartoonist is frustrated about. (Though they did have to portray the discussion pretty unrealistically to get that across.)
The biggest problem if your boss sends you a file that has anything more complex than text as formatting, opening in not-Word will make it look different.
At the least now you gave yourself the extra work of fixing the formating and then praying that then it looks the same for your boss, and at the worst you're going to get a call back asking why the file you sent looks like shit.
A lot of evangelists are unemployed of self employed.
Good point, I actually had a similar issue when opening a LibreOffice file in Word. I think that's more just the problem with having one standard for everything. That said, FOSS projects do need to work toward total compatibility with closed-source projects if they want to have a fighting chance of dominating the market. If LibreOffice really could just be a drag and drop replacement for MS Office, I don't think anyone would choose to use MSO.