Honest question: is LibreOffice still relevant? In the days of Google Drive and MS Office being available on pretty much any OS and device, do we still need an old school desktop office suite?
Depends on how passionate people are about keeping their information out of the hands of Google & Microsoft. I would say that, for anyone using linux as their daily driver, LibreOffice is still very relevant.
I'm on a personal mission to get my stuff off Google which is why I use LibreOffice on my home computer, but for work, there are some documents I could get in trouble for uploading to the cloud. I've used nothing but LibreOffice for over a year and haven't had to fall back on Office even once. To be fair, I don't usually author spreadsheets or docs for other people to see, so I can only attest to how well it opens files.
Speaking as someone who uses Google Docs at work, I am delighted that LO 5.2 works seamlessly with Google Drive and two-factor authentication.
Because Google Docs' word processor and spreadsheet are absolutely terrible for anything beyond the basics, and unlike GDocs, LO can decode OOXML with pretty good fidelity. Everyone goes on about LO and OOXML - you'll see a standard troll comment elsewhere on this HN post - but nobody ever mentions what a hash GDocs makes of even quite basic OOXML. I keep having to open email attachments with LO instead.
> In the days of Google Drive and MS Office being available on pretty much any OS and device, do we still need an old school desktop office suite?
Neither Google Docs nor Microsoft Office's web offering are terribly powerful. Neither respects its users' privacy. Using neither is particularly wise should one wish to compete with either company, nor if one is doing anything which any country those two companies operate in might object to.
So yeah, a local office suite is necessary if one wants to do office-suite-style computing.
I'd argue that style of computing is inappropriate, but others are free to disagree and do what they wish.
I am honestly not familiar with the ToS for either of these services, but I can't imagine a situation where Google would steal trade secrets from a competitor via Google Drive and not get into a carapton of trouble for it. Has this actually happened? Also, have there been cases of Google or MS snooping into users' documents? I honestly don't know.
As far as being available on any OS, MS office has a browser based version of their office suite, as well as native apps for Windows, MacOS, iOS, and Android. I believe that covers a "pretty much any OS" description.
Of course if you want to stay offline, there is no question. And I guess LibreOffice is still very relevant for the places where ubiquitous Internet access hasn't happened yet. But I would argue that the average consumer in the developed world has already overwhelmingly voted for the cloud, and outside of some communities such as HN, the question of "does Google read my docs/email/etc.?" has been completely dropped.
> I can't imagine a situation where Google would steal trade secrets from a competitor via Google Drive and not get into a carapton of trouble for it. Has this actually happened?
I don't believe it has happened, but that it can — and because it can, eventually it will.
> As far as being available on any OS, MS office has a browser based version of their office suite, as well as native apps for Windows, MacOS, iOS, and Android.
It's a convenient browser-based augmentation of an Office installation, but no more than that; there are far too many features missing. It can't even completely edit a Word document; for some things you have to open the document in Word itself to edit certain parts!
> I believe that covers a "pretty much any OS" description.
There's Linux …
> the question of "does Google read my docs/email/etc.?" has been completely dropped.
The question has been dropped, but reality remains the same. That folks don't discuss the elephant in the room doesn't make it disappear.
> I don't believe it has happened, but that it can — and because it can, eventually it will.
Can't it also happen because you view a document on your Android device? I mean, ultimately either Google discloses in their ToS that they will snoop on people's docs, or they don't disclose it and do it anyways. The former is pretty clear-cut: if Google says so publicly, we can collectively ditch it. The latter... well I guess you'll never know until someone catches them and sues their pants off.
> It's a convenient browser-based augmentation of an Office installation, but no more than that; there are far too many features missing. It can't even completely edit a Word document; for some things you have to open the document in Word itself to edit certain parts!
I have no first hand experience with it, which is why I asked the question. Yes, if it's not a compete implementation of Office, then it's not super useful for existing documents. Then again, if you mostly use Web-based MS Office, then isn't the desktop version a complete superset of the features of it?
My experience is limited to Google Drive office stuff as well as some Apple office web stuff. Both have served me so well over the years that I haven't opened LibreOffice or MS Office since roughly 2007.
> There's Linux …
I was saying that the web version covers Linux, but see previous paragraphs about how I can see that it might not be complete.
> The question has been dropped, but reality remains the same. That folks don't discuss the elephant in the room doesn't make it disappear.
I personally think that it's a big concern. Privacy is being swept under the rug in favor of usability. My point is that the question of whether people will want to use cloud services or not has been answered. The next question is possibly "how do we use/provide cloud based services while respecting users' privacy?"
> Can't it also happen because you view a document on your Android device?
There's a difference between a breach which would need to happen on your phone (where you may be able to detect it) and a breach which can happen remotely, in such a manner that you are never aware.
A sufficiently-paranoid organisation could store a binary of every system update its devices receive, and in case of a suspected breach examine them forensically; nothing they can do remotely can determine if someone silently copied data.
> The latter... well I guess you'll never know until someone catches them and sues their pants off.
So demand a system in which not knowing is impossible!
> The next question is possibly "how do we use/provide cloud based services while respecting users' privacy?"
My answer is that plaintext must only be visible on the customers' devices: providers should only be able to see chunks of data moving around, not the content of those chunks. They would make their money by providing price, reliability and services like 'send this chunk of data to that person.'
I agree with all that you are saying. I try to make sure that stuff I care about that goes online is encrypted before leaving my device and only I own the key. Still, I don't think I have quite the same reservations about putting some less sensitive content online.
There are plenty of times that you're not attached to the network, or people who don't wish to be attached to a network in order to edit a document, or don't want Google owning their work, or even having access to it.
MS Office is not available on the OS I use (not sure what 'pretty much any' means here), and even if it were I would not feel comfortable stumping up cash for it, or, more to the point, running it on my machines.
Why the pejorative 'old school' appellation? It's younger than Microsoft Office.
