Features are bad, but companies manage to market them as good things, rather than a tasty trap for the unopinionated.

Microsoft's Office 365 adverts and omnipresence has induced reasonable people to engage with the features list:

• Word Processing
• Powerpoint
• Backup to OneDrive
• Backup with that other one that's not OneDrive, and sort-of an internal website.
• Email!
• Calendars
• Spreadsheets - now with python in every cell!
• The rest of the things on page that nobody clicks on

Anyone happily typing away on Vim looks like a starving Victorian child, compared with that wealth of features.

No thank-you, I'll stick with Vim. File sharing? No, it doesn't do any of that. A 'title in the document'? Well, you could learn to write in Markdown, then use another tool to turn the Markdown into a formatted document...Vim feels great once you learn it.

Yes, I'm afraid so. It can take a few months but it's worth it!

Of course the standard alternative is LibreOffice, but it might not be the best. WAIT HEAR ME OUT I AM NOT CRAZY.

LibreOffice works well and does a lot. It has a great many features, but fewer than Office 365; no backups, or email client. Of course that's all fine - nobody needs their emails to come welded to their spreadsheets because anyone who uses LibreOffice can easily add Thunderbird or Evolution or whatever. But that line of reasoning will not lead to LibreOffice.

If we want a proper libre alternative to chonky office suites, the open source sphere shouldn't compete on the corporate arena. It should do the Unix-thing. Not the terminal, just the basic setup of small parts.

• Ghost Writer for writing words on the screen.
• Syncthing for backups and sharing.
• Spreadsheets, or maybe not. Who actually uses them? Accountants have accounting software. I've never seen anyone do good work with a spreadsheet.
• Radicale for calendar synchronization.

A full software stack can be presented could be a meta-package or a standard pre-install setup for each computer. The end work-flow won't make much different to people who have to write an occasional 'document' of some kind. Instead of clicking Start: Office: Word: people can click Start: [Markdown app]. From the outside, the FOSS-software provides a standard experience, and competes in terms of features. But once inside, the IT department could actually help people with their complaints and difficulties with software. If that Ghost Writer app turns out to be rubbish, one person, or a department, a building, or a full company can swap out one Markdown writer for another. They can change how they do backups without thinking about how it will affect encryption and their emails.

And then there are the features. Once you start to look for solutions, the smaller apps do everything, even when limited to friendly GUI apps.

• Export to PDF? With bells on. You want it for printing, or optimized for screens? How about an automatic .epub export at the same time?
• Version control? Yes. Yes, with bells on, we have the best. And it has a GUI. And every two months someone makes another GUI-wrapper, and they're all compatible, because there's only one kind of version control worth learning.
• QR Code generator? Yes. In everything. Even the spreadsheets.
• Python? No problem!
• Python in the spreadsheets? No. No the department no longer has access to spreadsheets. It's Postgresql or a post-it note. Pick one.

Featureless Software

Once you get used switching out an app without purchasing a new office suite licence and changing the web browser without the operating system crying like a teenage break-up song, you can't go back. The old features start feeling rancid.

Photoshop & CAD

Quick side note: I really amn't crazy. I'm not recommending everyone replace everything with the Ubuntu app store. I'm just saying that most work doesn't require an Adobe Suite (and plenty of people have software which far goes far beyond their needs).

Full-On Unix

Office-workers can step off at this point. We will never-again see a full office using command-line tools, sending bare-ass emails and editing spreadsheets with awk. Of course people can, because they did just that at one point. But culture's moved on.

For everyone else, the principle stands - features are bad - and we can go much further. Your email client doesn't need a separate text editor - you already have one! Websites don't need a special web interface with a new spell checker (which doesn't have any of the custom words you so painstakingly added to your word processor over the years). You don't need one searching tool for email through a website, email through the email app, another for the spreadsheets, and yet another for notes. grep handles everything, which means every time someone learns another trick while searching through emails, the same trick applies to text notes.

"Features"	Word Processing (TeX)	sc-im (spreadsheets)	aerc (email)	Website (Hugo)
Text editor	vim	vim	vim	vim
Backup tool	rsync	rsync	rsync	rsync
QR Code Generator	qrencode	qrencode	qrencode	qrencode
Text searcher	grep	grep	grep	grep
Collaboration tool	git	git	git	git?
Spell checker	vim (again)	vim (again)	vim (again)	vim (again)

Do your spreadsheets really need a QR code generator? Probably not, but you don't actually have to think about it - you just know that you can use this 'feature' with anything.

Beyond the Greybeards

People who work with servers or code often think themselves highly intelligent, and if they occasionally struggle with their tools then it just goes to show that the regular less-intelligent masses couldn't possibly fathom the commands like git init and git add -p.

If you don't believe me, watch them. Watch their patronizing eyes as they dismiss the notion of anyone less intelligent than a JavaScript writer could possibly use a modal text editor.

In truth, anyone can learn these composable, little tools once they have some use for them, and some exposure. People who write professionally might gain more from Vim than software engineers.

Actual writer, using Vim

A Law firm which runs on Linux