Looking Back On a Year of LibreOffice

superapecommando writes "Simon Phipps, former head of open source at Sun and a backer of LibreOffice, looks at a tempestuous year for the OpenOffice fork. 'Once framed as an impetuous fork, LibreOffice has become the standard-bearer for the former OpenOffice community,' he says. 'It's far from perfect, of course. New open source projects never are and volunteer projects lack the corporate resources to make it look otherwise. But I have no doubt that it's working.'"

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[TENTH SHOW JAM]

The org I work for shells out for MSDN subscription for me. I get Office 2010 for FREE and still use LibreOffice. My needs are simple and do not include learning a new interface.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[MechaStreisand]

You prefer the ribbon interface? That sort of response is not surprising. Not everyone likes the ribbon - I loathe it and would love for its designers to never have a job in software again - and right now, LibreOffice hasn't been infected with it, and I would like to keep it that way.

Re:Java?

[oakgrove]

Well, coming from a Python coder's perspective, I'll put it like this. Python's runtime isn't the fastest but the GUI toolkits used with it are usually either written in C (Gtk) or C++ (Qt) and my Python programs appear to run much faster than the equivalent Java program using its native Swing because the ui is just so much snappier. It really must be mostly a graphical toolkit issue. Anecdotally, Android apps are generally coded in Java (albeit Dalvik bytecode) and the applications on my Nexus S run blazingly fast.

All That I use

[rueger]

For years I always installed OpenOffice, but always wound up relying on MS Office because OO was slower, only about 85% compatible in terms of opening and saving files, and just generally wasn't as good. And as good as WINE is, running the MS product on Linux is not always easy or fast.

When I upgraded Ubuntu to natty LibreOffice came with it. I can honestly say that I haven't opened up Excel or Word for weeks. LO opens all of my existing files, with formatting unchanged, and works flawlessly. Plus it has that glorious one button PDF export, which in the past was so good that I would write in Word, save, and then open in OO just to use it.

For most people who use a lot of Word or Excel, but not the more exotic functions, I'd say try LibreOffice. It's fast, and does great job. It's what OO always tried to be, but failed.

Disclaimer: I still miss WordPerfect 5.1 and Reveal Codes.

Re:Send 'em back to Africa

[Anonymous Coward]

Niggers are genetically inferior.

Why don't you go and say that to a group of, say, a half dozen of these genetically inferior niggers, and then kick all their arses when they come at you? Hell, I'd pay to watch that.

Just make sure your health insurance is paid up, because you'll be on it for the rest of your life.

So, what you're saying is that blacks are genetically inferior and prone to violence. Hmm, great counterpoint!

Lacking templates

[jbov]

Disclaimer: I rarely use any office products.
I was an OO user, but switched to LibreOffice when Debian made the switch. I've been happy the few times I've used it.

Over the years, while trying to sell the idea of OO or LO to clients and friends, I've not had much success. Other than the ridiculous gripe they've had about not saving new documents as MS .doc formats by default, the major complaint has been lack of templates. A vanilla install of OO or LO doesn't have nearly the amount of templates that are bundled with MS Office. I tried pointing these users to template downloads at thedocumentfoundation.org, but there are only a handful there as well. Additionally, I just checked the LibreOffice site, and they suggest visiting opentemplate.org, which appears to be down.

As I said, I don't use any Office programs, but there is the feedback I've gotten from people I referred to OO & LO.

I've had more success with family members, but then again they are all converted to linux and never looked back.