Updated.
I have used Microsoft Office for many years and wanted to see how LibreOffice has come along in the meantime and it does not do as well as I would have hoped for on Windows. There is no included updater tool as in Firefox, so my old version stopped working completely (frozen UI) and the ancient hassle to download .exe files. Not a great start.
The dark mode switch causes buttons to be in the wrong colour looking like a buggy mess until a restart, but even then some of the icons and application colours were not applied correctly until I manually changed them so.
The ribbon view in Calc has its setting burger button on the right and it opens on another screen next to it?
What completely breaks it for me is the broken window resize. The ribbon tab titles are not rescaled and become inconveniently small. I then discovered the the compact grouped view and it made a better initial impression on me. Then I snapped the the window to the left and the UI is just cut off. Manually resizing it horizontally just breaks everything even more until the UI is empty and the rest is moved into the arrow.
The old school UI view meanwhile works and resizes, but it might be the slowest and laggiest UI on resize with goofy stretching I have seen in quite some time.
Also I really think the default theming and the 6 presets are questionable in fashion, but this is the least of its problems.
Wondering what happened to the development of LibreOffice? There are definitive improvements and probably there are even better under the hood changes, but why would such a large project ship such a bad experience? Was the core of the UI never touched the past 15 years? I have to to use an alternative.
EDIT: Resize runs better after forcing Skia Software renderer. Should not have to do that with an up to date AMD driver. Skia/Vulkan was the culprit. Disabling Skia leads to flicker on resize, so even more rendering bugs.
There is a package management in the OS called Windows Store, but LibreOffice charges money for it. Since it is such a popular software with likely some security exploits I don’t think it is very responsible to avoid this topic for so long.
The windows store is really just a single application repository though, not a full featured package management system e.g. one that updates the operating system itself or allows alternative repository sources.
Function. In this case it’s not just a matter of definitions because the windows options do not offer the same utility and convenience I’ve come to expect from a package manager for the last decade or more. It’s a bit like me asking for a chocolate chip cookie and someone handing me a handful of chocolate chips and a cup of flour and wondering why I look disappointed.
I expect a package manager to handle all of my packages, be they system or third party. I also expect to be able to add repositories from developers for apps I need to be more up to date than the default system versions. This functions to also allow applications to be managed that aren’t in the default repositories at all. I expect to be able to handle all updates with a simple command and be able to schedule those updates for when it suites my convenience, not when the operating system developers see fit. Those are the things I mean when I call something a package manager.
If you have to use Windows, the Chocolatey package manager knows about most great foss apps in the base config, including LibreOffice. You can first ‘choco install libreoffice’ and later ‘choco upgrade all’ to keep apps updated.
I rarely need to spin up my Windows vm, but after discovering Chocolatey it’s been much more pleasant keeping those apps updated. Same idea as homebrew for macOS; providing *nix-style pkg management. Enjoy!
