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I'm not saying that LibreOffice is perfect by a long shot but they don't have ads in your fucking word processor.
@intransitivelie "Excuse me but do you like xbox games?" MS just mindlessly jabbing that shit in there.(standard* desktop in the hospital I work at)
*IT Dept being led around the nose and isn't more than a C- grade, they do get to buy massive screens and rock the "3-monitors-per-computer-all-with-email and teams" but everyone who knows their shit seems to vanish in disgust
@intransitivelie incidentally, LibreOffice does have a nag ad, even in Debian
@mirabilos
Really? I've never encountered that on Windows. When do you see it? Maybe I'm just ignoring it automatically and not even realizing it. I'm disappointed but not surprised I guess.
@intransitivelie I'm guessing @mirabilos is referring to the top bar that occasionally pops up and says to please contribute, and which can easily be dismissed completely when it does show up.
I wish I could tell my LibreOffice that I already *am* contributing, so it doesn't need to ask me to.
If they had a way to track my contributions back to me and tie them to my LibreOffice profile on my computer, they would have an easier time doing it. But I'm pretty sure they don't.
@intransitivelie @mkj yes, that one. It’s recurring (as rare as I use LO I get it almost always) and the absolutely only one I have to endure on a FOSS desktop, so it stands out as particularily nasty; I’m sure Windows users wouldn’t even notice it.
@mirabilos @mkj
I'll be honest, either I don't notice it because of the aforementioned Windows nonsense, or I use LibreOffice so infrequently that the only top bar that ever shows up is the one telling me I really should download the latest version 
@intransitivelie @mkj that also counts as useless nagging on a FOSS desktop: software installation and upgrades are handled exclusively by the package manager, you do NOT get new versions if you’re on a stable release, only important bugfixes backported.
@mirabilos On Windows systems, as @intransitivelie indicates using, the normal way of upgrading third-party software is manually for each software product.
@mkj @intransitivelie yesssssss, I know, but that’s besides the point here because we were talking about LibreOffice, so the per-OS expectations may differ but can be talked about
@mirabilos @mkj
I don't really mind the reminder to update, I just wish it could be handled by the software itself in this case. One click and done, in other words. As it is, LibreOffice sends you to a download page in your browser and you download and install as normal. It's a small complaint and it's likely because of Windows rather than LibreOffice's choice in the matter.
Moral of the story: Windows is terrible.
@mkj @intransitivelie yeah, it is.
I don’t know enough about contemporary Windows to say details but I do know they disallow changing (including updating) a running program, so it at least needs to switch to a separate updater and terminate the main.
@mirabilos @mkj
It may also be about admin permissions and being unable to elevate a currently-running program to a higher permission level. LibreOffice is not the only program which handles things this way in Windows. As I said, minor complaint and I don't really blame LibreOffice for it. It sounds like in Linux updates happen more transparently using the package manager, but I imagine you can't update LibreOffice while it's running even so.
@intransitivelie @mkj you can, and for some prominent software like Firefox it results in crashes, but most will continue to run the old version until exited and started again with no trouble.
@mirabilos @mkj
On Windows, Firefox will keep running as long as you let it even if it wants to update, but it needs to kill the process to do the update. However, if you use multiple Firefox profiles, each with their own Firefox process, you can be running multiple versions at the same time, which causes everything to stop working until you close all the Firefox processes and restart them.
That's the only Windows program I can think of which allows me to get into that situation. All the others typically have only one parent process or kill all their processes before updating. VLC for example will let you have multiple VLC windows going, but if you do an update, they all close.
That's neat that you can update a program in Linux while it's still running. I wonder how it works behind the scenes to collect the trash after an update if it can't delete old versions immediately.
This stuff is fascinating. Thanks for sharing the Linux perspective!
@intransitivelie I’ve used LibreOffice from OpenOffice until the fork and ever since. It works darn well. The best designed office alternative I’ve used before is Apple Pages and Numbers – absolute work of art. But LibreOffice works on Mac, Windows and Linux, and working on .xlsx and .docx files has been seamless for me.
@Random_Seed
Honestly, I would probably keep using it even if it had ads because it'll open Microsoft Works documents that even Microsoft Word won't open. Yes, I have Microsoft Works documents from the 90s.
@intransitivelie And no AI crap I assume.
@queerthoughts
I hope not. I haven't run into it yet if it's there, but I confess that I don't do as much word processing as I used to.
@queerthoughts @intransitivelie not that I've been able to spot.
Although on Windows (work pc) it's got this weird thing going on where if you're in dark mode on your pc, it won't correctly render some in-doc elements and some stuff will literally just be invisible. Switching to a light theme manually doesn't fix all of it either and despite following online guides I can't get some of it to go into light mode at all.
No such issues on Linux, where I'm also using a system-wide dark theme.
@EchteNachtraaf linux is sooo much easier. Installed it for my mother a few years back, never need to help her out with issues anymore. It all just works. She was 74 when she first used Mint. @queerthoughts @intransitivelie
@EchteNachtraaf @queerthoughts
Huh. That's an odd quirk to say the least. Can I boost to see if anyone has any ideas? I've never encountered it myself on Windows, but it might be a setting or something I don't use.
@intransitivelie @queerthoughts yeah, sure.
I installed it just a few days ago on a new windows 11 work laptop. The laptop is set to dark theme, and I've changed all options related to the theme that I could find (in Libreoffice, that is, I didn't wanna bother changing the main theme) and tried a couple different ones. I gave up after finding a setting that was acceptable enough
@queerthoughts Straight from the horse's mouth: https://fosstodon.org/@libreoffice/113956950191425666
@queerthoughts @intransitivelie No, it will not force any AI on you and LibreOffice has no intention at this time to add AI support to LibreOffice.
There are community projects that would allow you to use AI if you wanted to. Most importantly locally hosted AI such as Ollama or Llama.cpp so your information is not being shared with a corporation.
@intransitivelie Been using it since I lost free home access to MS Office via my work. Never had issues exchanging files with MS Office users, including myself at work. I have a long, large archive of Office files from the mid-90s, and LO handles those better than the current MS Office.
@intransitivelie I've been saying this for a while and I don't know if it's good advice: Give the "Good at Excel" people python and an array lib like numpy