alt Hacker NewsThe highest problem is the office suite. If you think Libreoffice/Collabora can replace Microsoft 365 without friction the project could be a success. Honestly I do not think so as of today.
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Yeah, especially Excel.
LibreOffice Sheets doesn’t compete with Excel 2024, it competes more with Excel 2003. Granted, this is fine for a lot of (most?) people but it’s still not a “replacement” in my mind.
I ended up just building a Nix Flake to properly run Excel. At least then the operating system itself isn’t MS.
Completely agree. Before that I would have add the Adobe Suite as well for a lot of people but it's less a problem now fortunately.
https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/ is the French government's office suite. I think this can work as long as the devs are responsive to users' needs.
They don't need to reimplement all of MS Office, just the parts they need to serve their constituency.
I hate to agree. It's not just a battle against a deeply entrenched Microsoft tools suite, but also the ease of use and convenience of Google's tools, and how easily they enable collaborative work. Word and Excel have accumulated so much cruft that they are if anything an easier target to surpass.
But that's not all. Avoiding US based proprietary tools, in general, is going to be a challenge. The EU needs some kind of fund to create the next generation of productivity tools for this platform. Not just equivalent replacements. Requirements change and new tools need to be different.