> I can remember the same or very similar news from Germany appearing every now and then for over a decade.
Yup I can remember (mainly via Slashdot) this being a thing going backwards and forwards for two decade or more. Back to the days of it being called StarOffice if I remember correctly.
Sometimes it seemed the city or state was just doing some elaborate license negotiation.
I remember using the original StarOffice to write up some consulting work that I’d done, it just have been the early 00s at the time, and I thought it was excellent - a worthy competitor to MS office of the time.
And then over time it felt more and more bloated and slow, to the point where I started to think I maybe misremembered how good it was when I’d first used it.
Is it just me? Or did it fall deeply into a hole? My recollection is that it hitched its wagon to Java for no good reason that I could see.
It was always pretty laggy. It didn’t and still doesn’t scale to any reasonable size document. The last thing I wrote in libreoffice was a technical specification around 200 pages long in 2019. It crashed regularly, wrecked the document and caused me a lot of work. I literally cut and pasted the entire thing into word, applied styles and cleaned it up over two days and had no problems with that. This made me dirty so I learned LaTeX and now use that.
I have colleagues who still use Libreoffice for study and have the same problems.
I've assembled and done editing passes (back and forth to an editor, using comments heavily) on two 200+ page novels in LibreOffice with none of those problems, so it sounds like something in your doc must have hit some specific edge cases/bugs.
Not doubting you - I find it clunky and fully believe there's bugs there too. I did most of my writing in Google Docs, but chapter by chapter both because I find it easier to keep individual chapters separate and because Google Docs certainly can't (or couldn't, anyway) handle anything approaching that size without slowing to a crawl, but it just felt better than LinreOffice for the actual writing.
Yup I can remember (mainly via Slashdot) this being a thing going backwards and forwards for two decade or more. Back to the days of it being called StarOffice if I remember correctly.
Sometimes it seemed the city or state was just doing some elaborate license negotiation.