Intel Joins LibreOffice 176
New submitter dgharmon writes "The month of February is a month to remember for the LibreOffice project. They formally incorporated the foundation in Berlin, released 3.5 with major changes and now Intel is joining the foundation as a member. Intel will also make available the LibreOffice for Windows from SUSE in Intel AppUp center. Intel AppUp Center is an online repository designed for Intel processor-based devices."
OpenOffice once again? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re: OK, so can we stop bitching? (Score:1, Insightful)
Trying to update it. The updater complains about the quickstarter still running and it exits. It doesn't tell you what that is, or how to turn it off, or even present you with the choice of turning it off. So now what do I do?
Which package manager were you using to update it? Apt-get? Oh wait, you're still in the primitive Stone Age times of each app updating itself tediously.
Another satisfied Microsoft customer??
Any answer other than "Libre Office messed up the update process" is why Apple has too much money while the open source geeks are perceived as smelly losers.
Smelly loser, n., 1: Someone whose first priority in life is not pleasing you. That's the problem here, hence your bitchy tone. If you don't like something, don't use it and quit your bitching. If the free software disappoints you, I will personally give you a full refund, how's that?
Try to use Writer as anything more than a notepad? Forget it. I loaded our company's template that uses heading styles. It already had four headings which Writer numbers automatically 1 2 3 4. Fine. So I add another heading, expecting it to be "5". Is it 5? Of course not. Writer numbers my new heading as "2" with not a damn thing I can do about it. Does no one check the code for basic things here?
You submitted a bug report advising the developers how they can reproduce this bug, right? No? Oh then you're just bitching.
Try to use the export as PDF? You better check that PDF because if you think that in 2012 we are 20 years beyond WYSIWYG, think again. Export as PDF exported a mess with every single letter replaced with various-sized dots. Jesus wept, my Commodore 64 running GEOS outperforms that. And don't you DARE say there's something wring with my system becasue using a PDF print driver worked flawlessly.
Yes, don't you DARE do that, because that would mean you failed, and clearly that's absurd! Oh wait, here I go: there's something wrong with your system. *GASP*
Seriously dude, that function works fine on mine. Just tried it to check and it works. Works on mine, doesn't work on yours. Ok, maybe it's not your system. I think this is one of those PEBKAC errors, or maybe an "eye-dee-ten-tee" error. Obviously your calm, level-headed, dispassionate approach to problem-solving has produced the wonderful outcome you are experiencing, and I'd be a fool to think otherwise.
ID10T
Re:It's a start (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Signal to Microsoft? (Score:0, Insightful)
~yawn~
I've heard this line for at least a decade.
And yet, even after all this time, I still haven't seen anyone state a compelling reason as to why it's true. What did Microsoft do that was so "evil"? Please enlighten me.
Meanwhile, Google is sniffing your wireless network as their cars drive by, making your address book public to promote Buzz, and changing their privacy policies to benefit their data-mining AFTER you have already signed up for various separate services. yet it's only Microsoft that is OMG SO EVIL THEY MUST DIE.
Re:It's a start (Score:2, Insightful)
Business has somehow gotten the whacked idea that it can't survive without paying hundreds of dollars per seat for an app that creates and edits office documents.
The geek sees the stand-alone office suite.
What he does not see is that MS Office is sold as part of an integrated office system that scales to an enterprise of any size.
Re:windows only app up (Score:5, Insightful)
Dear Linux community, you guys WANT to gain share...right? You WANT people to actually use Linux, to spread the wealth of FOSS software, to have more and more people have real choices...yes? Am I right?
As a Linux user speaking for nobody else, no, I don't really care.
As for EG, I've never used it, but I do study in a place where all machines dual-boot Windows and Linux, and despite the Linux distro booting much faster and actually having more applications (which users can't run on Windows, since it's pretty locked down), I've never seen anyone choose Linux unless by mistake, and even those proceeded to reboot the machine.
Re:It's a start (Score:3, Insightful)
You have obviously never opened a non-trivial spreadsheet in Calc and Excel. Excel is way faster. But yeah, for trivially simple docs they are comparable.
Re:windows only app up (Score:4, Insightful)
It can be difficult to update (bios/firware update?)
It can't be used on different systems. (I want my laptop and desktop and netbook to at least be similar systems.)
It is "customized" by the oem. (yay, another sybian/andriod style compatibility/UI nightmare)
It can't be easily backed up by an end user.
It is yet another layer of crap to break.
It has a tiny list of available software that has to be installed via an "app store".
It's virtually impossible to for an end user to know exactly what it is running behind the UI.
Additionally, On the laptops I've seen it on, it doesn't actually access 90% of the hardware (Usb-wifi/3d graphics/printer/scanner ?), and if I remember correctly is actually a locked efi partition with hooks directly into the bios.
That's why I'm ignoring it personally.
Now, if they can get it to be a fully featured os frontend for linux without the hardware dependent crap, maybe it could gain traction as a window manager instead of being just another piece of crappy bloatware that I uninstall.
There are two simple reasons that expressgate appears to work so well.
1) it only uses the hardware that is part of the motherboard. (see apple for how this works)
2) It's limited to only 3 or 4 activities and a few simple games.
Anyone (and everyone) can build a locked down device that plays music, surfs the web, and can play a few games on very specific hardware. (look at every handheld console in the last 4 years along with the entire smartphone/tablet market).
The entire point of a generic PC operating system is flexibility.
The single common thread with almost every successful linux distribution is the idea that the USER SHOULD HAVE A CHOICE.
Almost every single linux user I know of lists "the freedom to change things to work the way I like" as a primary motivation for switching.
"I can continue to use my $(unusual hardware peripheral)" is also right up there in the top 10 reasons.
If you don't need the ability to adapt to new requirements or to add completely new software/hardware then why are you buying a PC?
Go get a tablet, an hdmi monitor, and a bluetooth keyboard, just like my grandmother.
Re:OK, so now can we start making it usable? (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, among my other hats I'm a trained Technical Writer (in the superb Information Mapping methodology). I actually prefer LibreOffice to MS Word for just getting things done. LibreOffice doesn't has all the bells and whistles that MS Office does, and has the occasional glitch but MS Office is just painful to use. It's slow, it crashes a lot, I have to wrestle with it to get what I want done. I'm afraid I can't agree with your assessment. MS Office is worse than LibreOffice, at least for professional work. At the high end I wouldn't even use MS Office, Acrobat is much better, and beyond that is TeX/LaTeX (for pro-level typesetting). MS Word really is for n00bs that don't know much better and whinge if the interface doesn't look exactly like the version of MS Word they got their training on.
Oh, and complaining that a MS Word template doesn't work perfectly in LibreOffice is fairly lame. If you want to use Word templates you should pay for Word. How about you make a template for LibreOffice instead? - if you actually have the skill to do such a thing.
At least LibreOffice can display Word files, even a little junkily. Most versions of Word do an even worse job with Word files from different Word versions, and besides Word being so retarded it can barely deal with its own format it certainly can't deal with the formats of any other product (the bigger the organisation is, the more likely it is that they have critical systems that aren't Windows in addition to Windows desktops - but Microsoft want to pretend that this is not reality for the sake of their own business interests). If the person that made the company Word templates had instead made Open Document Format templates then things would have worked pretty sweetly for you, not matter whether you had used LibreOffice, OpenOffice or one of the other alternatives that use the (true) ISO standard format. It's just you are so inculcated with the Microsoft monoculture (you're certainly not alone in this) you blame LibreOffice for getting Microsoft's proprietary formats wrong (and Microsoft's ISO standardisation was a blatantly corrupt process and produced a 'standard' that is woefully underspecified). Please assign the blame where it is due, on Microsoft's proprietary doorstep.
Re:OK, so now can we start making it usable? (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually most people who used Wordperfect preferred it - because the prefessionals felt so much more productive in it compared to Word (same deal I guess with the Linux CLI fans compared to the OSI-inducing clickity click of Window admin tools). However, Word was favored because it got great reviews and was often bought based on the number of checklist items in the review - including one that one reviewer described as being only of use to reviewers.
I'm glad Word works for you. However that is not the experience of most people. Classic case I can remember from several years ago. A mate's flatmate had finished her Master's thesis in Psychology (lamers used Word instead of LaTeX like real scientists). It was due to be submitted the next day. She went to print it and *the same instance of Word* went and scrambled the format. Fcuk! She couldn't revert it. So she went with my mate to his word where they had the same version number of Word. Loaded it up. It was mangled in a different way. She spend the *whole night* sorting the formatting out (usual stuff, Word is a lame word processor rather than a true typesetting tool). Printed it out. Sigh, relief. Took the thesis back to her place and it was messed up on her machine, no surprise there. However, the original version she had now worked for no apparent reason. For bigger documents (although the thesis was relatively mid-sized, around 150 pages). Like I said, it is great Word works for you or you don't notice any glitches. For plenty of people Word is just too lame - including me. Installed (a legal copy) of Word 2011 on my Mac and Word is dog slow - I get the Mac 'beach ball' wait cursor even when I'm not actively doing anything in Word. In contrast, LibreOffice is lightning slick and doesn't get it my way - no beach ball there and most of the 8 GB RAM free (while Word is a hog and maxes out a whole CPU core when doing nothing). Also, I can use LibreOffice no matter whether I'm on my Mac, one of my Windows desktops, a Linux machine, or on a customer site. Plus, anyone wanted to edit my stuff doesn't have to pirate the tools to do it. For me, and plenty others, Word may be very common but that doesn't make it less sub-par compared to the alternatives.
Re:Who's Paying the LibreOffice Devs? (Score:4, Insightful)