Again, this is why we need to have this discussion. I never even fucking heard of FreeOffice before but it sounds like it would be even better then OnlyOffice so I'll try it out. Looks like there's a paid version called SoftMaker Office but it's set up so that FreeOffice is good enough for most people.
There's a whole bunch of standalone word processors, presentation creation, and spreadsheet applications, not to mention competing wholesale office suites, within the broader realm of GNU/Linux. Xubuntu and Lubuntu often eschewed full fat LibreOffice altogether for some of these standalone programs once upon a time. Concerning LibreOffice's "hegemony" among FOSS programs, that wasn't an accident or a coincidence. It's merely the latest iteration of the same FOSS office suite that derive from the efforts of Sun Microsystems.
The original suite from Sun Microsystems was StarOffice, which later metamorphosed into OpenOffice.org. OOo was actually game changing for its time because it was
just functional and robust enough to actually... y'know
do substantial office/student work and
just compatible enough with Microsoft Office to allow for
some semblance of interoperability. If you couldn't afford the $400 license for Office 2003/2007/2010, and you found Microsoft Works fucking
useless, then OpenOffice.org was basically the "go-to." Not just on Linux, but also Windows and OSX.
When Oracle Corporation bought out Sun Microsystems in 2010, ownership and stewardship of OpenOffice.org was transferred over to the Apache Foundation, who basically just let it rot on Apache Incubator from 2011 through 2014, only
then coming out with the first official version of Apache OpenOffice. LibreOffice, in this context, emerged in late 2010 when the vast majority of the developers forked the OpenOffice.org code, rebranded it as "LibreOffice," and created a non-profit called The Document Foundation explicitly for the sake of being the new governing body for the LibreOffice project responsible for its stewardship.
A huge part of why LibreOffice is simultaneously good
and bad is that it inherited a ton of legacy code and assumptions going all the way back to its StarOffice days. Back then, you just needed an office suite that could handle word processing, presentations, and basic spreadsheets in a
roughly similar manner to Microsoft Office. StarOffice was originally meant for SPARC computers running Solaris, and it
eventually broadened its scope to cross-platform development on Linux, and later Windows and OSX once the transition to OpenOffice.org happened. The moment it escaped the confines of SPARC workstations using Solaris, we had the broader public becoming aware of it as a viable Office replacement. More emphasis was placed on bridging the gap with Microsoft Office compatibility. Word and PowerPoint are
more or less adequate (some formatting and fonts get garbled, but let's be blunt here: you're more than able to fix that before printing or exporting as PDF), but Excel is always the huge sore spot.
It really can't be understated just
how entrenched VBA macros are within the professional and enterprise spaces. Reference Excel workbooks created by some douchebag 20-30 years ago on Office 1997-2003 are
still in commission, and form the backbone of basically any white collar professional office environment. The last time that anything got "renovated" was with Office 2007 and the advent of Office XML formats (re: docx, xlsx, pptx), and those Excel 2007 workbooks function
just fine on Office 365. There's no impetus to pivot unless upper management forces corporate IT to pivot over to Google Workspaces and fuck up everyone else's workflow for the next few years.
As much as I'd hate to say it: Google Workspaces basically did the OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice shtick
better, and this was
long before the "Workspaces" branding emerged. Even Google Docs was fucking revolutionary at the time it launched (circa late 2010 when it was no longer a beta test iirc). Suddenly, I no longer needed a flash drive with my school work to the public or school libraries. I could just fire up a private Internet Explorer window, log in with my Google account, and have everything available right then and there with Office XML compatibility and WYSIWYG PDF creation. Google Sheets ain't VBA compatible in the slightest, but the formulae and syntax was
almost there. Plus the macro language it used was JavaScript, so it's not like you were hurting for flexibility. Google Sheets became the prominent medium for reference spreadsheets on the internet, and Excel still retains its hegemony in the broader world of enterprise and professional computing.
I don't wanna shit on LibreOffice so much because it bailed my ass out of so many rough spots as a broke teenager doing high school and later college assignments with LibreOffice Writer and LibreOffice Impress... but that's probably like 35-40% of an office suite's value all things considered. They got all this extra stuff that no one asked for, like Draw, Base, and so on... but Calc's still total dogshit ass compared to Excel 365 (which is now
free for Microsoft account holders) and Google Sheets (again, also gratis and more robust). You never know a spreadsheet application's true value until you've tried utilising macros with nested formulae across multiple pages of the same workbook. Excel does it well 90% of the time, Sheets is the next best bet at 9.95%, and then the remaining 0.05% is... literally every fucking FOSS program under the sun that still can't agree on how to handle macros and nested formulae.
