LibreOffice is still improving in quite interesting new directions.
I really think that just maybe it may be about to see a renaissance.
It's smaller, cleaner and faster than it's been in about 30 years.
One team has it running inside a web server, presenting a Google Docs-style UI inside a browser. So, trendy in-browser productivity, but all-FOSS. I don't care and don't really need that, but some do.
Another team has it running locally by by compiling it to WASM and embedding the result in a web page. I think WASM is a terrible idea in general and a one gigabyte applet in a web page is, er, suboptimal, but modern computers could handle that, and it can do impressive things.
Now it works they're trying to modularise it.
Those two companies just merged, incidentally.
Another team is working on implementing live collaborative editing, again Google Docs style.
Put the three together and a whole bunch more possibilities open up.
Now your browser can just handle any MS Office format, in browser. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, whatever, you can display it, or if you want edit it, or you can output to it. Run locally or remotely, as you prefer. Standalone or collaborative.
All this has been doable with proprietary stuff for years, and now it works on Macs and Chromebooks and Chrome and Firefox and Safari, and on your phone...
There have to be ways to use that, right?
As for Word -- I mean, as you know, professor, I'm a heretic and like Word -- but could you not just run an old version without the AI bollocks?
I still occasionally use Word 97. It's hilarious to me that just under 30Y ago it was a bloated mess, and now the same binary probably runs inside the L2 cache of one of my CPU cores.
no subject
LibreOffice is still improving in quite interesting new directions.
I really think that just maybe it may be about to see a renaissance.
It's smaller, cleaner and faster than it's been in about 30 years.
One team has it running inside a web server, presenting a Google Docs-style UI inside a browser. So, trendy in-browser productivity, but all-FOSS. I don't care and don't really need that, but some do.
Another team has it running locally by by compiling it to WASM and embedding the result in a web page. I think WASM is a terrible idea in general and a one gigabyte applet in a web page is, er, suboptimal, but modern computers could handle that, and it can do impressive things.
Now it works they're trying to modularise it.
Those two companies just merged, incidentally.
Another team is working on implementing live collaborative editing, again Google Docs style.
Put the three together and a whole bunch more possibilities open up.
Now your browser can just handle any MS Office format, in browser. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, whatever, you can display it, or if you want edit it, or you can output to it. Run locally or remotely, as you prefer. Standalone or collaborative.
All this has been doable with proprietary stuff for years, and now it works on Macs and Chromebooks and Chrome and Firefox and Safari, and on your phone...
There have to be ways to use that, right?
As for Word -- I mean, as you know, professor, I'm a heretic and like Word -- but could you not just run an old version without the AI bollocks?
I still occasionally use Word 97. It's hilarious to me that just under 30Y ago it was a bloated mess, and now the same binary probably runs inside the L2 cache of one of my CPU cores.
Word 2003 works quite nicely under WINE, too...