“
What a fascinating bug!! My wife has complained that open office will never print on Tuesdays!?! Then she demonstrated it. Sure enough, won't print on Tuesday. Other applications print. I think this is the same bug. Here is my guess:
Print to a postscript file. Observe the line:
%%CreationDate: (Tue Mar 3 19:47:42 2009)
Change "Tue" to anything else:
%%CreationDate: (XTue Mar 3 19:47:42 2009)
Save the file and it prints. Tools like evince work because they simply omit the "CreationDate" tag to begin with.
Now something odd happens when my cups script (I am using the Brother MFC420CN) copies the file to a temp file. Some of the code is rearranged, not sure how or why, but it uses a command called "file" to identify the file as "PostScript". This check would work on the original file you printed, but by the time it runs the check on the temp file, it misidentifies. Normally it would return:
PostScript document text conforming at level 3.0
But there is another check that happens before the PostScript check. If it finds "Tue" at the fourth byte of the file, it identifies it as:
Jan 22 14:32:44 MET 1991\011Erlang JAM file - version 4.2
But now, I really want to know why my office suite needs to tell my printer what day of the week it is.
If the printer is smart enough to make use of that kind of information, then isn't it also smart enough to sort that out on its own? If so, then it seems superfluous.
Doesn't seem to me like it is telling the printer what day of the week it is because the printer needs to know so much as it is generating a PostScript file for the printer to use and is adding the creation date as either a convention or requirement of the format, and not the printer.
That reminds me that my yearly donation[0] towards LibreOffice's stewards, The Document Foundation, is coming up in December. It's a wholesome tradition where you wire them the amount of EUR/US$/XYZ that Microsoft demands for a year of a personal Office 365(-ish, eh?) subscription[1] as a tex-deductible donation that will make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. I hereby invite you to join in! :)
[0]: https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/
[1]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/buy/compare-all-microsoft-365-products (DO NOT REDEEM)
You should contact LibreOffice, explain what you're doing (and for how long you've been doing it), and propose for them to do it as an "official" thing, to have the same subscriptions as 365 but as recurring donations instead. It could be a cool donation campaign for them!
While true and a comment I support, it is worth noting that offline versions of Microsoft Office are and have been just fine, including the latest version of 2024 just updated this week.
Yes, but they eventually stop receiving updates, so you have to spend another $250 to get the newer version. And if you bought, say, Office 2021 just before Office 2024 is released (by necessity, for a new employee, say) then it has a significantly shorter lifespan. And you HAVE to spend this money because it is impossible to convince people they don't need Microsoft Word.
That seems different though. If you are paying a fixed cost for offline software, you are not entitled to updates for it, that seems like wanting to have your cake and eat it too.
I have been on HN since 2010, and I will never understand this sentiment of "we deserve free updates". Unless you were promised an update in the purchase agreement, you got what you literally paid for.
I have to assume a large portion of the community here are paid software engineers or adjacent, how do you think your employer is able to pay you? By selling software...and software updates.
It's not even really particularly true, at least the implied criticism. My work uses M365 and Microsoft Office worked fine, both online and offline versions. Email stopped working, but AFAIK Open Office doesn't make an open source email server.
If LibreOffice were good enough already, it would already be popular. It's the same with GIMP. On paper it's a Photoshop alternative, but we've all struggled with it. These projects need to take the same route as Blender did. Originally it was a clunky open source alternative, but it went through a complete UI transformation and now blows the competition away.
A major barrier to the improvement of giant FOSS replacements like GIMP and LibreOffice is that the people who develop it and the people who use it have become very used to all of its quirks. It's extremely hard to identify the rough edges in a UI without an external perspective.
Blender is a little different because every 3D modeling program is odd in its own way, and the new UI was close enough that it was easy to learn after the transition (I do still use the legacy keybinds though).
But Blender is very niche hobby software. To "succeed" (if we define success as capturing a significant user share from closed source spyware), Libre and GIMP need to offer workflows that are close to what the average non-coder technical person expects. Maybe that isn't valued by the teams, or maybe they don't have enough resources to make it happen, but the end result is a reputation of jank.
I dislike vibe coded clones because of concerns about the engineering quality. But the reason they're making waves when traditional FOSS hasn't is that the UX is leagues ahead.
I don't think this is entirely accurate at this point. It has pretty wide adoption in the educational space, and a number of well-known studios have adopted Blender into their workflows.
The Blender development fund wouldn't be topped-up to the tune of $3 million/year if it were purely funded by hobbyists.
But when I say "niche hobby software," I'm talking about the relative scale of the user base.
Every working adult who touches a computer in 2026 is using office software. Photo editing is so common that "Photoshop" has become a verb. These two use cases are behemoths compared to 3D modelers.
I consider LibreOffice Writer superior to old MS Word versions, and old MS Word versions superior to new MS Word versions.
In my opinion, the quality of MS Word peaked some time in the early 2000s.
So today, given the choice between LibreOffice and MS Word, I would always choose LibreOffice, even if MS Word were free, and despite the fact that LibreOffice Writer has some annoying bugs that have not been fixed for many years, but I find easier to work around those bugs than to cope with the user interface of modern MS Word.
On the other hand, I agree that MS Excel is clearly superior to LibreOffice Calc. Nonetheless, there already are decades since I switched to LibreOffice Calc and I did not need the extra features of MS Excel. For things beyond the capabilities of Calc, I use a real database, though that would probably not be the best solution for a typical office worker.
In the distant past I liked a lot MS Access, but I have no idea whether today it is still useful. I abandoned it many years ago, after I had some problems with the migration of data between different versions of MS Access and even more with the migration of data from MS Access to another database manager.
Octave is a similar old-school open-source replacement tool (to Matlab) that could benefit from similar investment. Though Octave's issues involve some ecosystem compatibility dynamics too, last I checked.
ArtCraft is great for this. They try to recreate proprietary apps 1 to 1 so there's no real innovation, but it creates a baseline for new open source projects that can be even better than the original.
Yep I’ve been using PhotoCraft and WordCraft along with others in the suite and honestly I haven’t found any features yet that they are missing. Basically drop-in replacements written in Rust. Each one is around 100mb and no bloat like the real versions. Adobe and Microsoft are in trouble.
Be careful with this with the knowledge that it's an ongoing vibe-coded effort. Wordcraft failed to detect spacing after paragraphs and I could not use "Remove spacing after paragraph", whereas it worked in Word.
Photocraft added extra transparent space around a copied transformed edit selection, whereas in Photoshop it copied the selection boundary exactly.
Updates are coming in frequently for all the *Craft apps, and I really like that it's possible to brew install them across many macOS on a moment's notice, so I definitely recommend trying it. However it should not be used for absolutely critical work unless you can verify the functions you need are fine.
As an occasional user of GIMP, yes it does not quite have the final level of UX polish.
For example, moving a text layer (with 'pick layer') requires the cursor to be over the painted part of the glyphs to move that layer, if you miss then the background is moved instead. All that is required is a picking region around the glyphs and it would be fine.
Maybe someone can help but why does LibreOffice take 4-5 seconds to start on Windows? There are many reports of that [0] and otherwise I have zero problems with my system. This is the only application I use regulary which is actually noticeably slow to start. Even restoring a Firefox instance with hundreds of tabs and +20GB RAM committed is quicker (1s)
My locally installed ms office 2019 also works 365d/y.
My softmaker office suite also.
Anyway, I do admit I mostly use libreoffice nowadays, except for 1) communication with customers, and 2) a few excels libre can't handle.
I still have to find a good alternative for (local installed) outlook, I'm trying out thunderbird, but I'm not sure it would be able to replace outlook. I still have to try whether it can handle a 50gb imap inbox, and besides lacks a few essential features.
No, it is offline desktop software that doesn't depend on a cloud. That is the point and they should be rubbing it in because Office used to be like that and now it is not.
I support this in spirit, but in all honesty I never use it. I don’t use word either though. Nvim and on Windows Notepad. Micro is pretty good as well.
If I had to use a word processor daily at work I would just run into the woods and never come back.
I haven't used in a while, but all my experiences with it in past were it "works". Any non-trivial work with csv's and it was crashing regularly... Hope it's better now
Word and word-like editors are all too complex. Personally I would love some libre quip-like or markdown based renderer with better image and table support
Doesn't matter. Nobody who chose Microsoft 365 for their business is being blamed for the problems today, and that's all they care about.
If they chose Libreoffice, while their company may have been working today, it wouldn't be able to work with most other companies anyway, and crucially every minor user error will be blamed on the CTO for not choosing Microsoft
> Why do you think CLIs and TUI are making a huge comeback.
1. Terminals finally got some design attention and became beautiful.
2. The apps within those terminals are now easily able to inherit that beauty.
It is most definitely still possible to create an ugly CLI/TUI, but it is harder to do so under the constraints imposed on them as compared to when you have free rein over a GUI. For every CLI/TUI we're seeing these days someone has also created a GUI that does the same thing, but the GUI UIs are ugly compared to the equivalent CLI/TUI options.
A world-class designer can make a GUI great, but the vast majority of designers are average at best. Restricting their design freedom increases the chances that they'll create something decent than if they had full freedom to exhibit their lack of design skill.
You can see on reddit case what happens when you start adding the "beauty" factor instead of staying with the minimal interface. It may be surprising but for many hn looks good and the only thing it could have is the dark mode - which can be bring with userscripts.
For presentations internally i switched to https://bento.page/ , my agents doing all kind of great CSS animations.
it's not about styles, it's UX, stupid encoding questions, every time you open it, not able to handle big enough spreadsheets, and tons of problems like this.
Also changing document formatting is a pain, i do not want to do it manually , i want ai to do it for me.
On styles, office packages are more often an external communication tool, send a doc, report, to a customer, prospect etc, How can you make the doc ascetically good, if entire office package tools looks like from 90s, scroll is lagging, etc.
try to open sreadsheets, especially wide/big one, and you will love it even more. I literally have to do non intuitive moves and fall back into gdrive or claude docs.
So do offline versions of MS Office. Irrelevant and out of touch statement.
The LibreOffice folks should not be posting so recklessly. They are reeling after falsely claiming they don't use AI and then were suddenly revealed to be doing the opposite.
Yes, but. I haven't used Microsoft groupware, but my impression is that like Google there's a bunch of multi-player value.
An office where everyone uses local software, that has no idea there is a network share, feels like the eternal conundrum today: it's potentially a Linux on the desktop win. But in the meantime most people would rather not need to manage individual desktops. Cross-machine multi-player experiences are increasingly table-stakes. It doesn't have to be the cloud per se, but it's been multiple decades now of open source competing for the desktop, and it's really been struggling to skate to where the puck's going. It hasn't been on desktop in a while.
A sidebar here, but I think this is what makes atproto so compelling to me. Posts like "A Social Filesystem" talk to how atproto is common glue, and it takes a little imagining, but it's absolutely a substrate that could be used for multiplayer office (via internal-only atproto networks, or upcoming ATproto Spaces). https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46665839
Software like this still under-estimates the strength of network effects and inertia. With 3 examples:
1) We have seen this effect with Mastodon. Even when Twitter / X was down, hundreds of millions of people waited for it to go back online and never stuck on Mastodon when they struggled to migrate, or even could not choose a instance to sign up on.
2) GitHub, no matter how unreliable it is and will surely go down next week, tens of millions of developers continue to use it rather than actually self-hosting.
3) The exact same thing with Claude or ChatGPT going down several times a month. Users continue to use both of them instead of local models that don't phone home and stay up 100% uptime.
With the Microsoft 365 outage, hundreds of millions of users will continue to use Outlook and the suite of Microsoft software including Teams; because all their emails and work is on there.
So they just cannot just migrate away from it to LibreOffice which they see that as a complete downgrade. It is far harder than it sounds due to inertia and most open source projects still do not get that in 2026.
Is Office compatibility a solved problem? Haven't used LibreOffice or OpenOffice for years but I was always met with slightly different formatting, incompatible Office quirks et cetera. I know they have their own document format which works fine but the biggest problem is (was?) interoperability with majority of the rest of the professional (and academic) world on regular Office installations.
Compatibilty is probably 95% or greater. If you're a very demanding Excel user you might have some trouble (I never have; I do my taxes in LibreOffice using a spreadsheet designed for Excel and it's fine).
Never had an issue with a Word doc, at least not in the past 5 years or more.
I've had similar things break when I was on Arch years ago. My wife was quite unhappy that she couldn't log in to use it (I think it was a graphics driver thing). Even though I usually like Fedora, I recently settled on Void for my personal workstation and I've been thoroughly enjoying it.
This is why I stopped using Arch, just wait until you update and try to reboot and it doesn’t work, then you have to update again via mounting your disk through a liveusb installer.
“ What a fascinating bug!! My wife has complained that open office will never print on Tuesdays!?! Then she demonstrated it. Sure enough, won't print on Tuesday. Other applications print. I think this is the same bug. Here is my guess:
Print to a postscript file. Observe the line: %%CreationDate: (Tue Mar 3 19:47:42 2009)
Change "Tue" to anything else: %%CreationDate: (XTue Mar 3 19:47:42 2009)
Save the file and it prints. Tools like evince work because they simply omit the "CreationDate" tag to begin with.
Now something odd happens when my cups script (I am using the Brother MFC420CN) copies the file to a temp file. Some of the code is rearranged, not sure how or why, but it uses a command called "file" to identify the file as "PostScript". This check would work on the original file you printed, but by the time it runs the check on the temp file, it misidentifies. Normally it would return:
But there is another check that happens before the PostScript check. If it finds "Tue" at the fourth byte of the file, it identifies it as: So it's not a problem w/ openoffice.org, cups, or the brother printer drivers. It is a bug in the `file` utility, and documented at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/file/+bug/248619. ”https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161...
But now, I really want to know why my office suite needs to tell my printer what day of the week it is.
If the printer is smart enough to make use of that kind of information, then isn't it also smart enough to sort that out on its own? If so, then it seems superfluous.
I don't know, back in my day you could get at least discounts on updates for your paid software.
I have to assume a large portion of the community here are paid software engineers or adjacent, how do you think your employer is able to pay you? By selling software...and software updates.
But why? I still use Office 2016 and I haven't yet come across a document it wouldn't open. What am I missing out on?
Blender is a little different because every 3D modeling program is odd in its own way, and the new UI was close enough that it was easy to learn after the transition (I do still use the legacy keybinds though).
But Blender is very niche hobby software. To "succeed" (if we define success as capturing a significant user share from closed source spyware), Libre and GIMP need to offer workflows that are close to what the average non-coder technical person expects. Maybe that isn't valued by the teams, or maybe they don't have enough resources to make it happen, but the end result is a reputation of jank.
I dislike vibe coded clones because of concerns about the engineering quality. But the reason they're making waves when traditional FOSS hasn't is that the UX is leagues ahead.
I don't think this is entirely accurate at this point. It has pretty wide adoption in the educational space, and a number of well-known studios have adopted Blender into their workflows.
The Blender development fund wouldn't be topped-up to the tune of $3 million/year if it were purely funded by hobbyists.
But when I say "niche hobby software," I'm talking about the relative scale of the user base.
Every working adult who touches a computer in 2026 is using office software. Photo editing is so common that "Photoshop" has become a verb. These two use cases are behemoths compared to 3D modelers.
In my opinion, the quality of MS Word peaked some time in the early 2000s.
So today, given the choice between LibreOffice and MS Word, I would always choose LibreOffice, even if MS Word were free, and despite the fact that LibreOffice Writer has some annoying bugs that have not been fixed for many years, but I find easier to work around those bugs than to cope with the user interface of modern MS Word.
On the other hand, I agree that MS Excel is clearly superior to LibreOffice Calc. Nonetheless, there already are decades since I switched to LibreOffice Calc and I did not need the extra features of MS Excel. For things beyond the capabilities of Calc, I use a real database, though that would probably not be the best solution for a typical office worker.
In the distant past I liked a lot MS Access, but I have no idea whether today it is still useful. I abandoned it many years ago, after I had some problems with the migration of data between different versions of MS Access and even more with the migration of data from MS Access to another database manager.
Not true. There's inertia and network effects in play that often prevent better products from succeeding against established ones.
Most people don't use MS office by choice though so "goodness" isn't a particular relevant metric.
Updates are coming in frequently for all the *Craft apps, and I really like that it's possible to brew install them across many macOS on a moment's notice, so I definitely recommend trying it. However it should not be used for absolutely critical work unless you can verify the functions you need are fine.
For example, moving a text layer (with 'pick layer') requires the cursor to be over the painted part of the glyphs to move that layer, if you miss then the background is moved instead. All that is required is a picking region around the glyphs and it would be fine.
https://ask.libreoffice.org/t/why-does-libroffice-starts-so-...
https://ask.libreoffice.org/t/startup-time-open-libreoffice-...
https://ask.libreoffice.org/t/why-does-libreoffice-feel-slug...
My softmaker office suite also.
Anyway, I do admit I mostly use libreoffice nowadays, except for 1) communication with customers, and 2) a few excels libre can't handle.
I still have to find a good alternative for (local installed) outlook, I'm trying out thunderbird, but I'm not sure it would be able to replace outlook. I still have to try whether it can handle a 50gb imap inbox, and besides lacks a few essential features.
If I had to use a word processor daily at work I would just run into the woods and never come back.
But I also use it. It's the best office suite for Linux.
This is the year where you can have all your data private, you processor is good enough.
Software is not about or pretty the UI is, it's a tool.
Every month TDF should take a batch of X volunteer microsoft office users who have never used LibreOffice.
Their most senior developers should sit with them as they attempt to do their office work exclusively in LibreOffice.
Then take notes about their experience and revise/enhance the products accordingly.
They should do this 365 days a year for as long as it takes.
External perspective is the blocker. That's how you make it competitive.
If they chose Libreoffice, while their company may have been working today, it wouldn't be able to work with most other companies anyway, and crucially every minor user error will be blamed on the CTO for not choosing Microsoft
In reality the office work will be replaced not by libre office, but something like claude work. It's an obvious direction.
Why do you think CLIs and TUI are making a huge comeback.
Web applications were prettier but so bloated and so slow.
1. Terminals finally got some design attention and became beautiful.
2. The apps within those terminals are now easily able to inherit that beauty.
It is most definitely still possible to create an ugly CLI/TUI, but it is harder to do so under the constraints imposed on them as compared to when you have free rein over a GUI. For every CLI/TUI we're seeing these days someone has also created a GUI that does the same thing, but the GUI UIs are ugly compared to the equivalent CLI/TUI options.
A world-class designer can make a GUI great, but the vast majority of designers are average at best. Restricting their design freedom increases the chances that they'll create something decent than if they had full freedom to exhibit their lack of design skill.
I quite like that Libreoffice let's me disable the confusing "strip" layout that MS Office pushes on everyone.
it's not about styles, it's UX, stupid encoding questions, every time you open it, not able to handle big enough spreadsheets, and tons of problems like this.
Also changing document formatting is a pain, i do not want to do it manually , i want ai to do it for me.
On styles, office packages are more often an external communication tool, send a doc, report, to a customer, prospect etc, How can you make the doc ascetically good, if entire office package tools looks like from 90s, scroll is lagging, etc.
or are the parts of office that are broken the ones that libreoffice doesn’t even offer?
The LibreOffice folks should not be posting so recklessly. They are reeling after falsely claiming they don't use AI and then were suddenly revealed to be doing the opposite.
I wonder if that has to do with anything..
An office where everyone uses local software, that has no idea there is a network share, feels like the eternal conundrum today: it's potentially a Linux on the desktop win. But in the meantime most people would rather not need to manage individual desktops. Cross-machine multi-player experiences are increasingly table-stakes. It doesn't have to be the cloud per se, but it's been multiple decades now of open source competing for the desktop, and it's really been struggling to skate to where the puck's going. It hasn't been on desktop in a while.
A sidebar here, but I think this is what makes atproto so compelling to me. Posts like "A Social Filesystem" talk to how atproto is common glue, and it takes a little imagining, but it's absolutely a substrate that could be used for multiplayer office (via internal-only atproto networks, or upcoming ATproto Spaces). https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46665839
1) We have seen this effect with Mastodon. Even when Twitter / X was down, hundreds of millions of people waited for it to go back online and never stuck on Mastodon when they struggled to migrate, or even could not choose a instance to sign up on.
2) GitHub, no matter how unreliable it is and will surely go down next week, tens of millions of developers continue to use it rather than actually self-hosting.
3) The exact same thing with Claude or ChatGPT going down several times a month. Users continue to use both of them instead of local models that don't phone home and stay up 100% uptime.
With the Microsoft 365 outage, hundreds of millions of users will continue to use Outlook and the suite of Microsoft software including Teams; because all their emails and work is on there.
So they just cannot just migrate away from it to LibreOffice which they see that as a complete downgrade. It is far harder than it sounds due to inertia and most open source projects still do not get that in 2026.
Github is far more than a git repository. You’re almost never using it for just git. The real value is the ecosystem.
Never had an issue with a Word doc, at least not in the past 5 years or more.
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Feature_Comparison:_Libr...
Not 100% compatible, but its become rather usable, for most use cases.
Definitely not as problematic as 10 years ago.
All software can suffer from that, but thats what you wanted so idk why this falls back onto Libre Office