LibreOffice just outright stating their policy of 'no AI' as a feature made me respect them so much more.

It's only tragic for a month, after which the other project gets abandoned because its unmaintainable or the vibecoder got bored and moved on to another viral idea

I'm not going to switch to something unless I know its going to be around when I need it

It's good enough that my 75yo mother picked it up without trouble when I switched her to Mint after W10 went EoL.

'prompt slot machine' <- I'm borrowing that

Is it though?

I try it but it doesn’t feel good. It feels like a clone of Office 2004.

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I just installed it, open an xlsx file, it opens to the document explorer panel not my document.

Okay, weird, where’s my file? Open it again.

It’s your first time here, customize the app! Here are 5 different UI paradigms to choose from. Okay, I guess compact?

Don’t forget the theme! Sure, okay, use automatic theme and default 2004 style icons.

LibreOffice needs to restart to apply settings. I watched it dynamically update in the background, but okay.

Restarts Tip of the day: you can change your appearance settings! Run this action now? No. Why? Close.

Okay, I spent all that time customizing my tab bar, and yet, Calc doesn’t use a tab bar, so there’s no change at all after all that? No idea if that’s a macOS thing or not because it puts the toolbar values in the menu bar.

Okay, well let’s make a pivot table. Seems decent, it’s a clean Excel clone here, decent functionality. Needs a count distinct and some custom aggregations.

What’s this “Data” field though? Drag it to first slot: LibreOffice hard crashes. At least it saved my document.

Reopen file, let’s zoom out. Click and drag zoom slider, it creates a glitched rectangle around the active cell that tears vs rest of screen that doesn’t always update. It looks like the full page only zooms on certain values while deagging, but on release that sticks.

Let’s make a chart. Select 3 items plus total in my pivot. Click chart button. 3 bars in the chart, where my total bar? Data field is blocked out on pivot take charts. Change chart type, wait 3 seconds for a re render. Try to move the chart but have to click off first.

Okay, let’s delete the chart now. Press delete button: “This function cannot be completed on the selected objects”. Huh? Oh I have to click off, then select the chart again, then delete it.

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That was my 10 minute experiment. It feels just as bad in a web browser. The Skia renderer is so much better than the old system, but like, I found all this crap in 10 minutes.

I really want this to be good, but it needs a critical editor to go through it with a fine toothed comb. Honestly, they should crib Google Sheets, since it’s got a better interface than Excel now.