You said “in the real world nobody much is doing the latter”.

LibreOffice can perfectly work with files stored on other people’s computers.

There is a difference between “cloud-hosting” (= storing your documents on other people’s computers) and “collaborative editing” (= working on the same file at the same time).

Then why can SoftMaker support it well and LibreOffice can’t?

But MS doesn’t even keep to that standard anymore.

To be fair, LibreOffice had (don’t know if it still has!) problems rendering OpenOffice .odt files in the past.

How is it Microsoft’s fault that the LibreOffice team fails to properly support its formats? Others can do it.

There are still a few issues left to fix in my experience.

There is Office software that can handle Microsoft formats better than other Office software. Still, Microsoft’s file formats are open.

Honest answer: People who would create spreadsheets for themselves.

Formats aren’t compatible. Parsers are.

However, in direct comparison with SoftMaker Office (which, admittedly, is not free software), LibreOffice is inconsistent, sluggish, unstable and less compatible with Microsoft formats.

Unlikely, as even NeoMutt (which could improve it) still does it quite manually.

Ah, Graphite. I forgot the name. Thanks!

But multi-account usage in Mutt is really… leaving room for improvement.

Which one could replace GIMP? I might be curious. I saw a few development projects, but I don’t know their current state.

HTML is not that bad. I’d still argue that writing HTML e-mails is just a really bad idea. But yes, org has a somewhat cleaner syntax.

HTML is text and org is basically a better Markdown. :-)

+1 for mu4e, really awesome software. There are a few HTML composing tweaks possible, I use org-msg that lets me compose HTML with org. (See my configuration.)

Honestly: Ask the creator of that website. There is no technical reason for this.

Paying developers to do work definitely helps.

The lead developer of GIMP currently receives about €1,200 per month in donations via PayPal, and the entire GIMP project receives even more via LiberaPay. Admittedly, this is not really ‘their paid job’.

But now I’ve had to listen to open source fans for over twenty years saying that open source software shows that you don’t need a lot of money, just a lot of volunteers to do much better work together. I don’t doubt that (for example) Blender is excellent software, donations or not (they didn’t always exist). But why does this concept fail when it comes to image editing software?