This. Believe me, Office and Office clones are very distinguishable. It's like saying a Macdonalds burger is indistinguishable from a Gordon Ramsey burger. They may both be food, but they are very much not the same thing.

There's a reason people use Office. Pretending that reason does not exist does not make the argument for switching better.

I've been using libreoffice for maybe 10 years now? I don't remember what I'm missing, could you name one or two killer features of ms office?

Imho it doesn’t come down to one or two killer features, it comes down to momentum.

Stuff like font rendering, grammar- and spellchecking, the exact set of Excel formulas, graphs, templates, and VB scripting matter. The office suite’s localization changes keyboard shortcuts, Excel formulae names, and swaps between decimal points and commas. It is absolutely horrendous, but people rely on it for their daily work.

In essence, if we accept that Excel is both an IDE and a dialect of a programming language, we can compare it to asking what makes C# in Visual Studio worse when people are used to Java in IntelliJ. The answer might be “nothing, but I’m used to my setup and it’s ridiculous that I’m even having this discussion about my main work tool” for programmers, Office users, and video editors alike.

Sort of unrelated, but, VB scripting not working on web versions felt to me like it really killed a giant moat of legacy code to draw from.

If you're forced to script in something else then why not just go to something else. Additionally, having tons of forms written by long gone employees just not port over is a tough sell at smaller offices.

I think that’s very related. It’s hard to get people to migrate to Office for Mac or the web version because they’re subtly different enough.

You're happy with what you are using, so that's great, and I'm not knocking that.

But the difference is not 'killer features". The difference is in the million small details and polish. The integrations, formats, UI, workflow, things it just "gets right" that I don't even know its doing.

I try Libre Office every once in a while. But each time I try it just feels old and clunky. It's all in the tiny details that add up to the overall experience.

Clearly you're not missing anything since you're happy with what you have. But going from Office to LibreOffice is painful. Not bullet-wound painful, more like thousand-paper-cuts painful.

A lot of things are just different. In a way that makes it hard to switch, but isn't because microsoft office is a better/premium experience.

Well probably the reason most people use it is because they are ignorant about the alternatives and ignorant about the vendor lock-in character of M§.