Permanently Deleted

  • wantonviolins [they/them]
    ·
    4 years ago

    I'll knock both of them when sane alternatives like LibreOffice exist.

    That said, productivity software sucks. It hasn't meaningfully advanced in UI since the 90's, and hasn't advanced in features since online collaboration appeared in the late 00's. Development on FOSS alternatives is wasted spent chasing compatibility with Microsoft's broken formats. It performs poorly, uses absurd amounts of processing power and RAM for relatively straightforward tasks, and the plethora of supported document formats are dreadful from a portability, programmability, interoperability, or user friendliness perspective.

    The issue, then, is two-fold: productivity software is trapped in a document format hell, and the lack of code re-use across development houses prevents the software ecosystem as a whole from advancing. If it were possible to have a standardized core - a rendering engine, a math backend for spreadsheets/etc., a database format, a standard set of document formats that are extremely easily edited by humans and machines, scripting and markup languages - and re-use that core across industries, with different frontends for different purposes, the software would stop sucking. Improvements to the core would benefit everyone, and UI developments could be shared in a collaborative effort instead of a competitive environment where copying is forbidden.

    tl;dr: do a free software socialism to productivity software, rebase on web technology to benefit from a wider swath of developers and greater software maturity