LibreOffice on Windows vs on Linux, Some Thoughts

Many businesses are trying to save money and use Open Source software in their offices. LibreOffice is an Open Source alternative to MS Office. And when you come across a review of LibreOffice, you find yourself stuck with someones personal opinion, whether it is a guru journalist of respectful magazine. Lets take this one from Trustradius.com, made by business professional using LibreOffice in their office. Here are some of her bottom line points:


pros

• It runs very well on a lot of laptops and computers, even if they're old.
• It has a very good document editor very similar to Microsoft Word.
• It's open source and free.
• It does not consume a lot of resources of your computer. It's very fast and reliable.

cons

• The compatibility when switching the file format could be a little bit better.
• Sometimes it crashes and you lose all your data.
• It's a good alternative to Microsoft Office but it's not quite the same. We miss some features and tools.

As a LibreOffice user I can confirm most of these points. But user states that  "it is very fast and reliable" and in the next statement writes that "sometimes it crashes". Weird statements but here is what i think about this. There is some difference in running Open Source software on Windows vs Linux (Ubuntu etc)

Open Source software , most of it, have binaries for both Windows and Linux. The fact is it was primarily developed for Linux platform and there are some differences in its behavior when running on Windows vs Linux.

First difference is in update behavior. It is important to note that Open Source software have different development cycle and update policy. They, updates, are issued much more frequently, they are not big and will not slow down your computer or your wait time.

Updates in any suite of Open Source software especially in such big packages as LibreOffice, are very frequent and it is very important to have updates enabled as a "full auto".  I had experience with Libreoffice on Windows and remember that by default LibreOffice's updates were turned off and I had to check for updates manually. If you are an office worker then updates for some software is somewhere on the back of your mind and agenda. And, in fact, windows users try to avoid any updates at all when doing some serious work on their PCs, since Windows is famous for slowing down your computer significantly.

In Linux updates for the OS and all Software installed served at the same time and automatically, unless you turned it off for some real weird reason. Update procedure is fast and most of the time system does them on the background and you never wait when shutting down or when starting PC , as you would in Windows 10. In Windows 10 you have to wait up to half hour on slower systems.
Any software which needs updating will be updated and this is default in Linux Desktop OS. When you install LibreOffice in Linux you do not need to do anything else in terms of configuring how updates are checked or served. Huge difference with what you have to do when in Windows.

Updating curve of any Open Source package and specifically such as LibreOffice  is constant and contains numerous fixes and patches, issued by Open Source community developers and contributors daily. So those rare crashes you may experience in your office, probably fixed months ago , but fixes and patches did not find their way to your machine.  Turn on auto updating in your LibreOffice if you are on Windows, and double check if Windows not blocking them.

 You also should know that LibreOffice is better maintained on Linux platforms than in Windows. In Linux all software is organized in repositories and checked for tight integrity and compatibility with OS before it is approved for inclusion. This policy makes any suit taken and installed more reliable on Linux than on Windows. Linux code is open and developers not only find and fix errors and problems faster but also fix any reliability issues more efficiently, because Linux OS code is open and time to analyze and solve a problem is shorter.

Bottom line: Update Open Source software regularly if you use it on Windows. And my opinion - if you want to use Open Source software - just move to Linux. Linux Desktop OSes are much and much more comfortable to use than what they were 5-10 years ago.