Hey Fedora community, I recently helped my Dad install Fedora with KDE on his new ThinkPad P14s Gen 5.
His experience has not been good.
He’s got this weird bug where windows refuse to render until the mouse is moved, and now has a problem with LibreOffice I’ve never seen.
My Dad is a researcher at a nearby university, and also a professor. When his students/colleagues send him .docx files made in Word, they don’t render correctly (the formatting is messed up). This is extremely problematic, and it hinders him professionally. He is very upset at me about this, since I was the one who told him that using GNU/Linux was a good idea, and now he’s saying that he wants to buy a copy of Windows 11…
Please help me fix this before it’s too late.
I’ve heard of this vaguely over the years with non-Office apps and wouldn’t be surprised to still hear of it today.
Could you perhaps share a .docx made in MS Word that knowingly renders badly in LibreOffice? I’m curious to see it myself!
Hi there! I’m very familiar with annoyed family members when a transition to Linux doesn’t go well. Sorry to hear it!
Try installing this OnlyOffice Flatpak for him, instead of the Libreoffice one. Works perfectly for everything I’ve tried, where Libreoffice unfortunately does not. Also looks more similar to ms office, as a bonus.
Note that rendering differences may also occur between different versions or installs of MS Office, for example due to different fonts being available, such as corporate design fonts.
In this case, it may be due to Windows “standard fonts” not being standard (standard only for Windows. Looking for and installing “core fonts” on Fedora may solve some problems.
But really: Your dad should be mad at his university for not promoting free software and exchangeable formats. Science is based on free interchange of ideas and data. Formats like docx and software like LibreOffice support this interchange on and between all platforms, including Windows. (Also, it saves money.)
I know it’s an uphill battle, working at an institution where the IT department gives the best recommendations and the administration ignores them. It’s still worthwhile pointing out what the real problem is.
Usual problem is that the default font(s) MS office uses on Windows are not available out of the box on Fedora. One needs to install those fonts first. This might solve a big part (maybe all) issues with the wrong rendering of documents.
You mentioned that there is another issue with rendering outside of LibreOffice… How sure are you that this issues does not influence the other one?