Hi lads, just a quick question. Is https://www.libreoffice.org/ legit and not some dodgy Malware / Adware version?
I'm looking to install it upon my Windows 10 laptop before support runs out (I assume that Windows Defender will no longer be updated and therefore not be able to catch the latest malware).
Yeah, I would certainly say that's the legitimate Libre Office site. It's the same site that's linked to on the Libre Office Wikipedia article, so if it is a dodgy version, a lot more people than you are out of luck.
You won't regret switching to LibreOffice. I switched a few years ago when MS Office became a subscription. I just don't see the benefit of paying what is currently 85 quid a year for something that can be had for free elsewhere. LibreOffice is in a few ways not as polished as Office, you have to give them that. A few ways of doing things are less sophisticated than under Word or PowerPoint. But it gets the job done, and it's free.
I've had OpenOffice installed on all my computers for about the last ten years, and probably opened it about three times in that entire time, so that tells you how frequently I actually need office applications. I legitimately get more use out of Notepad.
>>29298 LibreOffice and OpenOffice are the two big "free as in freedom" Linux-spod alternatives to Microsoft Office. However, one of them is no longer being updated, and its users are all being encouraged to move across to the other one. I can't remember which one's which, but either you or OP should really consider making the change.
LibreOffice is the default office suite under Linux and has been ported to Windows. It has more features and better compatibility with Microsoft Office, has a larger development community and receives frequent feature and security updates.
The only real bit of a drawback I've found is that LibreOffice's user interface feels a bit dated, it could do with a revamp of menus and buttons. But it is free, and that makes up for it.
>>29298 >>29299 >>29301 In the 90s, Sun bought the company behind StarOffice (allegedly because it was cheaper than licensing MS Office for the entire org), and a couple of years later opened it up as OpenOffice. OpenOffice became the upstream for StarOffice, and a few other projects spun up downstream. In particular, Ximian started the Go-OO distribution, which RedHat and some adjacent Linux distributions adopted. When Oracle bought Sun, and decided to be Oracle, they tried to take over OpenOffice. Pretty much all of the external OpenOffice contributors hooked up with the Go-OO team to form The Document Foundation, and rebranded the Go-OO codebase as LibreOffice. It took about a year before Linux distributions that hadn't already been on Go-OO to move over to LibreOffice. Oracle eventually relented, handing over OpenOffice to the Apache Foundation, but not before laying off what was left of the team, and later transitioning Oracle Linux over to LibreOffice anyway. Apache OpenOffice hasn't released anything beyond maintenance fixes in over a decade. It's got unpatched vulnerabilities because it doesn't have any developers to fix them, but that's fine because it also doesn't have any users to be vulnerable.
If you don't specifically need MS Office but are likely to need to deal with Office documents, or generally need an office suite, LibreOffice is a perfectly serviceable alternative. I personally tend to use MS Office for work-related stuff (where I often do need specific features, such as SharePoint integration or PowerQuery) and mostly LibreOffice for personal stuff.
