Importing works fine, issues arise after one person exports from LibreOffice, another edits with MS Office, and they repeat a few iterations of that. I thinking changing an office suite is many times more difficult than changing an OS, and am kinda hopeless about interoperability, but I also hope Euro-Office gets major funding from countries to give it a try.
Yeah, and that would work, if Microsofts format actually could be considered a standard in any way. But it doesn’t. Some random Microsoft update breaks stuff, you fix it, but IT does not patch…so you have a lot of users telling their bosses “LibreOffice bad”. When you’re playing catch up with somebody who doesn’t want to be catched and is setting the pace…you’re going to lose ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
I guess you can only escape, if somehow governments were forced to only accept open standards. Internally and externally. You send a docx or whatever? Screw you, odf or bust. But it’s too niche of a topic to gain momentum for that.
Yeah, and that would work, if Microsofts format actually could be considered a standard in any way. But it doesn’t.
Win32, DirectX, etc. aren’t standard either and yet Wine/Proton are proper clean room reverse engineered solutions good enough that >95% of the time users don’t see any difference.
Microsoft update breaks stuff, you fix it
Problem is that even legacy documents are not properly read.
so you have a lot of users telling their bosses “LibreOffice bad”.
Collabora is a commercial enterprise. Collabora Office is FOSS just like Proton but just like Proton there is a company behind it that bets their income on proper compatibility. Difference is that Valve works on that compatibility and Collabora doesn’t.
Collabora need to get their act together and automate document round-tripping.
Yeah, because I never have to switch Proton or Wine versions or use some launch options or something. I bet if the average docx opener was as willing to tinker as the average Linux gamer, we would not have a problem.
Plus your Steam stuff is not fleet managed. That is what I mean: if your company IT (as we’re talking government agencies here) is not providing updates, the current version can be as good as you want, it doesn’t arrive at the user’s computer, thus the user hates it.
And, come on, legacy documents don’t render correctly? Guess what, try to open old Microsoft Office shit in new Microsoft office programs: that shit breaks, like, a lot. Not even Microsoft can stay Microsoft compatible 😅.
Yeah, because I never have to switch Proton or Wine versions or use some launch options or something.
95% of the time they don’t. And that’s the point.
And, come on, legacy documents don’t render correctly? Guess what, try to open old Microsoft Office shit in new Microsoft office programs: that shit breaks, like, a lot. Not even Microsoft can stay Microsoft compatible 😅.
Well, if Collabora Office was as compatible as MS Office, Denmark would have switched. But it’s not and denial won’t change anything. I have an old .doc (not .docx) file that my employer needs for a weird edge case and the only way I can open it under Linux is the Office.com web suite.
Again, Collabora is a commercial enterprise. They need to act like it and throw resources at massively improving file format compatibility, no matter how messy MS formats are.
95% of the time Microsoft formats render fine ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. You write “edge case” yourself. And when you’re in the field of providing compatibility you’ll see that Microsofi is hostile. And they hava a good business case to be that hostile, can’ t really blame them from said business perspective.
But the way forward is not playing catch. What institutions need to understand is that there’ll never be a drop-in replacement. Especially not, as people have learned the quirks of MS Office. That is why users blame an alternative office suit but when MS Office breaks once again it’s just how it is.
If companies, really any institutions want to break free of MS Office they need to really treat it as the complicaten change process it is. That means allocating resources for changing and adapting said edge cases. When you just go to randomly install some flavor of Libre Office for 38 employees, but everything else stays the same…yeah, you gonna fail big time, no surprise there. But you would fail anyway, even if we had perfect compatibility today. Because tomorrow the next MS update will break compatibility and your 38 users are the idiots of the institution again, until the next update drops.
95% of the time Microsoft formats render fine ¯_(ツ)_/¯.
Ask the Danes if that’s true. Apparently not so much.
You write “edge case” yourself.
In my case yes. In case of the Danish public sector it’s either not an edge case or 5% broken documents are way too much. I’m not a Dane in the public sector to tell which it is but it appears to be one of those two.
But the way forward is not playing catch.
Forward not, but it is to deal with countless of existing documents. There is no way around this fact. That’s like expecting Steam Decks to be successful by not providing compatibility with existing Windows games. Valve tried already with the first generation of Steam Machines / SteamOS 1.x & 2.x. Didn’t work.
Are native Steam Linux Runtime native games a better path forward than relying in Proton? Absolutely. Will there ever be a Linux version of Diablo 4? No.
A community project like LibreOffice can afford not to care much about legacy MS Office documents. A commercial enterprise that expects to get public contracts absolute cannot. And what’s so insane about this is that Collabora is actually the main contractor for Valve on SteamOS and yet they don’t transfer the business learnings from that to their own office suite.
However, this trial was terminated when elections took place earlier this year. A spokesperson confirmed that the experiment had concluded, and would not resume again. They also confirmed that no evaluation benchmarking Collabora’s performance against Microsoft Office had taken place either.
This was no “we evaluated, it did not work”. It was “we don’t like this. Hey, Bob, please tell us how it doesn’t work” - “Sure, I had this one document which rendered wrongly” - “see, it doesn’t work, now we can scratch the project”.
Importing works fine, issues arise after one person exports from LibreOffice, another edits with MS Office, and they repeat a few iterations of that. I thinking changing an office suite is many times more difficult than changing an OS, and am kinda hopeless about interoperability, but I also hope Euro-Office gets major funding from countries to give it a try.
Quote says that it literally does not. The “and vice versa” bit of the quote is about both directions not properly working.
Tests for that can be automated since 15 or so years ago. Doesn’t even need any Claude or something.
Yeah, and that would work, if Microsofts format actually could be considered a standard in any way. But it doesn’t. Some random Microsoft update breaks stuff, you fix it, but IT does not patch…so you have a lot of users telling their bosses “LibreOffice bad”. When you’re playing catch up with somebody who doesn’t want to be catched and is setting the pace…you’re going to lose ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
I guess you can only escape, if somehow governments were forced to only accept open standards. Internally and externally. You send a docx or whatever? Screw you, odf or bust. But it’s too niche of a topic to gain momentum for that.
Win32, DirectX, etc. aren’t standard either and yet Wine/Proton are proper clean room reverse engineered solutions good enough that >95% of the time users don’t see any difference.
Problem is that even legacy documents are not properly read.
Collabora is a commercial enterprise. Collabora Office is FOSS just like Proton but just like Proton there is a company behind it that bets their income on proper compatibility. Difference is that Valve works on that compatibility and Collabora doesn’t.
Collabora need to get their act together and automate document round-tripping.
Yeah, because I never have to switch Proton or Wine versions or use some launch options or something. I bet if the average docx opener was as willing to tinker as the average Linux gamer, we would not have a problem.
Plus your Steam stuff is not fleet managed. That is what I mean: if your company IT (as we’re talking government agencies here) is not providing updates, the current version can be as good as you want, it doesn’t arrive at the user’s computer, thus the user hates it.
And, come on, legacy documents don’t render correctly? Guess what, try to open old Microsoft Office shit in new Microsoft office programs: that shit breaks, like, a lot. Not even Microsoft can stay Microsoft compatible 😅.
95% of the time they don’t. And that’s the point.
Well, if Collabora Office was as compatible as MS Office, Denmark would have switched. But it’s not and denial won’t change anything. I have an old .doc (not .docx) file that my employer needs for a weird edge case and the only way I can open it under Linux is the Office.com web suite.
Again, Collabora is a commercial enterprise. They need to act like it and throw resources at massively improving file format compatibility, no matter how messy MS formats are.
95% of the time Microsoft formats render fine ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. You write “edge case” yourself. And when you’re in the field of providing compatibility you’ll see that Microsofi is hostile. And they hava a good business case to be that hostile, can’ t really blame them from said business perspective.
But the way forward is not playing catch. What institutions need to understand is that there’ll never be a drop-in replacement. Especially not, as people have learned the quirks of MS Office. That is why users blame an alternative office suit but when MS Office breaks once again it’s just how it is.
If companies, really any institutions want to break free of MS Office they need to really treat it as the complicaten change process it is. That means allocating resources for changing and adapting said edge cases. When you just go to randomly install some flavor of Libre Office for 38 employees, but everything else stays the same…yeah, you gonna fail big time, no surprise there. But you would fail anyway, even if we had perfect compatibility today. Because tomorrow the next MS update will break compatibility and your 38 users are the idiots of the institution again, until the next update drops.
Ask the Danes if that’s true. Apparently not so much.
In my case yes. In case of the Danish public sector it’s either not an edge case or 5% broken documents are way too much. I’m not a Dane in the public sector to tell which it is but it appears to be one of those two.
Forward not, but it is to deal with countless of existing documents. There is no way around this fact. That’s like expecting Steam Decks to be successful by not providing compatibility with existing Windows games. Valve tried already with the first generation of Steam Machines / SteamOS 1.x & 2.x. Didn’t work.
Are native Steam Linux Runtime native games a better path forward than relying in Proton? Absolutely. Will there ever be a Linux version of Diablo 4? No.
A community project like LibreOffice can afford not to care much about legacy MS Office documents. A commercial enterprise that expects to get public contracts absolute cannot. And what’s so insane about this is that Collabora is actually the main contractor for Valve on SteamOS and yet they don’t transfer the business learnings from that to their own office suite.
Have you read the article at all?
This was no “we evaluated, it did not work”. It was “we don’t like this. Hey, Bob, please tell us how it doesn’t work” - “Sure, I had this one document which rendered wrongly” - “see, it doesn’t work, now we can scratch the project”.