brent "Apart from the technical stuff, OOXML has been bribed through the standardization boards in order to fight the ODF standard. Following another old Microsoft tradition, MS Office itself uses an "extended" version of its own standard, so the OOXML files produced by MS Office do not follow their own certified standard. How can anything be compatible with something that does not want to be compatible?
If you want to avoid file format trouble, use ODF.
If you want to produce Microsoft documents, install MS Office."
I don't want to take this thread too far from the original topic (Should @Barbiefan1475 switch from OpenOffice to LibreOffice, OnlyOffice or something else?), but this statement typifies the reasons that I moved from OpenOffice to LibreOffice a number of years ago, and moved the friends I support from OpenOffice to LibreOffice.
We live in a world in which Windows is the dominant player (as evidenced by the OpenOffice blog post "More than 333 Million Downloads of Apache OpenOffice" (August 20, 2022)) celebrating 333 million downloads. The stats suggest that 89% of OpenOffice downloads are by Windows users while only 1.4% are by Linux users:
We also live in a world in which Microsoft Office (in its several variants) is the dominant office suite in the business environment (less so, perhaps, in the home desktop market where Google Docs has a high market share) and, accordingly, docx is the de facto standard format for word processing documents in collaborative environments.
In my view, OpenOffice is wrongheaded in its obdurate refusal to fully accommodate the docx standard by allowing OpenOffice to "save as" docx if that is what the user wants to do. OpenOffice does not "refuse to bow down to the OOXML standard" in any real sense because OpenOffice allows users to open and edit docx documents. Instead, OpenOffice draws the line at allowing users to save the edited documents in docx format. That defines "half a loaf" and makes life unnecessarily complicated for OpenOffice users who collaborate with Microsoft Office users by exchanging documents.
I didn't move from OpenOffice to LibreOffice for that reason. I moved from OpenOffice to LibreOffice because OpenOffice also refuses to accommodate 64-bit, another de facto standard that OpenOffice stubbornly refuses to adopt.
I don't have an argument with users who elect to use OpenOffice (to each their own), but I think that Solus made the right decision by not including OpenOffice in the repository. OpenOffice is an application stuck in the past.
