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Add to SafariWhen comparing LibreOffice vs Evolution, the Slant community recommends LibreOffice for most people. In the question“What are the best Microsoft Office alternatives?” LibreOffice is ranked 1st while Evolution is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose LibreOffice is:
LibreOffice includes applications for word-processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and database management.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Comprehensive suite of applications
LibreOffice includes applications for word-processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and database management.
Pro Free and open source
LibreOffice is available for free with code available here. It's licensed under LGPL v3 with new contributions dual-licensed under MPL.
Pro Cross-platform
All major operating systems are supported, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and GNU/Linux (Arch, Fedora, Mandriva, Debian, Ubuntu, Suse).
Pro Multilingual
It is available in more than 110 languages.
Pro High compatibility with MS Office
Possible to use in corporations.
Pro Font embedding support
Font embedding ensures that the document will display correctly whether or not the target machine has that specific font installed.
Pro Portable version
LibreOffice offers a version of the suite that does not require installation. It can be kept on a thumb stick to ensure that you have an office suite on whichever machine you choose to use.
Pro The de-facto standard
Being able to tell new people that the FOSS community has an actual default office suite matters. It shows that, despite the bewildering number of options, there can be a clear winner.
Pro LibreOffice can take from OpenOffice, but not the other way around
Due to licensing each office suite uses, only a one-way transfer of code is possible, offering more long-term potential for LibreOffice over OpenOffice.
Pro The most user-friendly option
To attract new people to FOSS, having an office suite that is as user-friendly as LibreOffice is a must.
Pro Encryption support
LibreOffice allows encrypting and password-locking files.
Pro Presentations can have 3D models embeded within them
Impress supports 3D models in gITF format.
Pro Lots of extensions and dictionaries
Has many extensions that can add additional features to LibreOffice.
Pro Ribbon design
Since 5.3, LibreOffice offers a Ribbon design view (similar to Microsoft Office) (check here).
Pro Multiple themes
Many icon themes available to customise the look and get consistent look with the OS.
Pro Continued development and maintenance
Pro Good Zotero integration
LibreOffice works very well with Zotero. The integration of the Zotero plugin in LibreOffice is a breeze, citing while writing and generating the bibliography is just a click. Also good since you need to coop in an (MS) world: Libreoffice and Zotero cooperate very well to make sure your refs survive a "Save as" from one file format to another (e.g. docx to odt or the other way around). Basic (open and free!) tools is your in the market for this...
Pro Supports exchange servers
Evolution is one of the few Linux desktop e-mail clients that's supports exchange servers.
Pro Great integration with Gnome environment
Pro Manages contacts, tasks, calendar and memos as well
Pro Excellent GPG support
The integration with GPG is excellent. You can sign, encrypt, decrypt, authenticate and verify GPG signatures and GPG signed/encrypted email messages. All of that is just a setting away.
Pro Good support for Google's services
Pro Clean interface with 2 layout variants
Going to View > Preview has the option of switching between "Classical View" and "Vertical View".
Pro HTML rendering is great
Of the many email clients available on GNU/Linux, Evolution has the best HTML renderer. It renders HTML and the entire email content exactly like it would appear on a full blown web browser. Not many email clients are capable of doing that.
Cons
Con Not fully compatible to MSOffice
It's not fully compatible with MSOffice and often breaks documents.
Con LibreOffice Base requires Java
If you need to use Base, it requires Java.
Con Needs a lot of system resources
It's a large office package that needs a lot of drive space and system memory.
Con Documentation is out of date
Good luck turning off autocorrect, because the place where the documentation says that option is doesn't exist.
Con No good video editing for presentations
Con Track Changes needs to be improved
Collaborating on a single document is difficult. Track Changes makes the document hard to read as both edited and deleted text is displayed, it's not possible to print comments, tracked differences between document versions are sub-optimal and there's no system for accepting/rejecting changes.
Con Poor stability
Consistently crashes while editing. Absolutely unreliable.
Con Poor desktop integration
Since it is written in Java it does not integrate nicely with the operation systems theme, icons or dialogs.
Con Ugly interface
Ungly interface compared to others office solutions, like WPS office.
Con Won't work with themes
It does not work with custom themes due to all the different wrappers involved.
Con Ribbon is experimental
Con No Quickstart
Quickstart was removed from the Linux application. Now every time you open a file it will take at least 2,5 seconds to open.
Con Does not run as stable as OnlyOffice
It runs fine until it crashes. Users have experienced multiple crashes when using the cursor to select text in the writer, running in Kubuntu 18.04.
Con Restricted license
LibreOffice uses a more restrictive license than OpenOffice, which makes it almost impossible to backport features to OpenOffice.
Con Not a very well non-English languages spell check support
Con Many user annoyances and malfunctions which lead to loss of work and time, often not intuitive
Con No ability to access online brokerage accounts for trading
No ability to access trading and brokerage accounts via Calc to conduct automatic buying/selling like you can in MS Excel.
Con Master slide management in Impress not up to mark
As of version 6, the master slide management is not as good as PowerPoint in Windows.
Con Steady update
Con Can't choose different settings for each mail account
Settings have to applied to all mail accounts.
Con Limited configuration options
Cannot format date as preferred.
Con RAM heavy
Very heavy on RAM usage.
Con Poor integration in any non-GNOME desktop
It is written with GNOME in mind.
Con No configuration messages
Although base functions like bullets, numbered, or pre-formatted text are possible, you can't select or set the font for your messages. Not even serif or sans serif. Which is a bit spartan TBH.
Con Can be wobbly with EWS
Don't be surprised if you have to reboot it a couple of times during a working day, because error messages are piling up (e.g. connection lost, can't sync, can't store appointment, read only). Then again, is this Evolution, or what it connects to? And since such an occasional reboot is dwarfed by the fact that MS365 seems to make full IMAP/ SMTP access (close to) impossible (nice meeting invite, THX, but when is it?), just reboot and get some work done...
Con Only available on Linux
If you have to switch to another platform for whatever reason, you will need to search for a different email client.
