The LibreOffice Story 254
An anonymous reader writes: Jono Bacon in his latest column writes about the story of LibreOffice and how it rose out of the ashes of StarOffice and OpenOffice.org. Bacon also touches on why he feels LibreOffice is such a key piece of Open Source for communities across the world. Jono says: "To look at LibreOffice today and compare it to Microsoft Office can be tempting. Sure, LibreOffice does not provide the same level of features and finesse Microsoft's suite may boast, but when I think of the before and after vanity shots of the suite back in 1999 and today, what the community has accomplished is phenomenal. Developing LibreOffice has been hard, technically challenging, and at times demotivating work, and contributors' efforts can be seen by millions of users across the world."
SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Reliance on MS office is the only thing that holds back many of my folks (familiy, friends) from a total FOSS conversion of their computing habits.
Yes i said "perfect". It is feasible and there are no excuses.
Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid (Score:5, Interesting)
It is a pretty safe bet that your family and friends are just using Microsoft Office as an excuse to avoid talking about Linux.
Most of the people I encounter can barely use the basic functionality of Microsoft Office, which is something that LibreOffice has covered. When you step up to more advanced features, which LibreOffice mostly have covered, you're talking about stuff that is used by a dedicated group of people. Then you have the features that are largely designed for corporate environments, which would hardly be ever used by individuals even if they used those features in the workplace. Even if LibreOffice doesn't support one of those features, it wouldn't matter.
So what those people are probably saying amounts to: they are comfortable with what they have and don't want to learn something new (may that be Linux or LibreOffice).
Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid (Score:5, Interesting)
It is a pretty safe bet that your family and friends are just using Microsoft Office as an excuse to avoid talking about Linux.
That wouldn't make a lot of sense, since my family and friends don't know what Linux is.
Most of the people I encounter can barely use the basic functionality of Microsoft Office, which is something that LibreOffice has covered.
It's true enough, but honestly, it needs to be prettier. I know it's superficial and stupid, and everyone here will say that LibreOffice shouldn't bother trying to look "pretty" or that it's already "pretty" enough, but here's the thing: I've always had terrible luck getting people to use LibreOffice. My impression is that there's no particular reason in terms of functionality, but it looks to them like it's a cheap knock-off of an old version of Microsoft Office. On both Windows and Mac, the icons seem a bit out of place, the UI takes up too much screen real-estate because things are kind of spread out, the default fonts and formatting are less attractive, the dialog boxes don't look native to the OS, and I don't even know what else people are reacting to. I think some people are confused by the way that it's sort of all one single application, but also a bunch of different applications, depending on how you launch it...?
Anyway, I can't get people to use it, even when it's exactly the tool they need. I've had an easier time getting people to use Apple's Pages/Sheets, and not for technical reasons, but because the app is prettier, the templates are prettier, and it feels easier to make a pretty document. At least, that's what I think the difference is.
But suggesting that aesthetics matter has always been blasphemy here at Slashdot.
Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid (Score:5, Insightful)
It would be beyond nice if LibreOffice could eventually be ported to Qt.
I assume that a large part of the codebase is still responsible for the platform-independent UI that stated with StarOffice. Removing that responsibility from the LibreOffice team might eventually payoff in improving the look-and-feel and freeing resources for feature enhancements.
The poor UI limits LIbreOffice. (Score:5, Interesting)
The poor UI limits LIbreOffice.
The poor UI also limits Microsoft Office, but many people have had to learn Microsoft Office as a condition of getting a job. (Microsoft Office: Often weird, unexpected things happen.)
I talked with this man at OSCON 2015:
Robinson Tryon
QA Engineer & LIbreOffice Community Outreach Herald
The Document Foundation
qubit
(AT)
LibreOffice.org
I offered to help improve the LibreOffice GUI. He is enthusiastic about that.
My first recommendation: The icon for Italics should be a capital letter I, not, as it is now, a lower-case italic A. (An I with a top and bottom line.)
Re:The poor UI limits LIbreOffice. (Score:5, Insightful)
My first recommendation: The icon for Italics should be a capital letter I, not, as it is now, a lower-case italic A. (An I with a top and bottom line.)
I never thought about that before, but you're right. That's one of the things that's just not a good UI decision. Because first of all, just as a matter of convention, most WYSIWYG editors will use an italic "I" for "Italic", and a bold "B" for "Bold". The fact that it's a convention should probably be enough reason to continue doing it.
But beyond that, there's a good not-completely-obvious reason why that's been a convention for so long. If you're thinking about it on a technical level, LibreOffice's approach makes a lot of sense: have the formatting button icons all show the same character, but formatted based on what the button does. All of the icons have a lower-case "a", but for the "Bold" button, the "a" is bold. Makes sense, right? The button is showing exactly what it does.
But if you think about it like a UI designer, there's a good reason why you shouldn't do things this way. By using the same basic character, you end up with a bunch of buttons that look pretty much the same. Look at the LibreOffice toolbar, and you see a bunch of "a" buttons in a row. At a glance, it's not so obvious which one does what. The "Bold" icon looks kind of just like a normal "a" unless you consider it with reference to the other "a" icons around it, and then you will probably notice that it's bolder. However, the "Bold" icon is separated from the rest of the icons by the "Italic" icon, which doesn't actually look like an italicized version of the "a" from all the other icons. Instead, it looks like an "a" printed from a different font, perhaps a script font. As a result, both the "Bold" and "Italic" icons are a bit unclear.
Maybe that was too convoluted to follow. However, I can honestly say that this bothered me even before I could quite put my finger on what was bothering me. As soon as I read your post, I looked at the toolbar and thought, my first instinct at a glance would be to think the "Bold" icon was to make the font "normal", and the "Italic" icon would make turn the font to "script".
I know there are people here who will say, "So what?! Just learn to use it. It's not hard to figure out or remember which button does what." Still, a good UI will be readily understandable at a glance. By having the LibreOffice toolbar filled with similar-looking buttons, it makes it just a little bit harder to quickly pick the one you want without really paying attention.
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A desire to be 'different' from OpenOffice Writer then. I have OOW up now and the italic is a barred capital I in italic.
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Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid (Score:4, Insightful)
By imperfectly mimicking the old Office GUI, the LibreOffice GUI (and UI in general) ended up falling into the uncanny valley. It sort of looks like MS Office, but because it differs in subtle ways both visually and behaviorially, it's off-putting.
If there's any OSS product that needs a UI redesign, it'd be LibreOffice. It'd be great if Mozilla could ship all their Firefox UI resources over, since it seems Firefox has so many choices they can't seem to decide which one to go with.
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LibreOffice should have a beginner's interface as simple as GoogleDocs, with a button/icon for toggling "powah user" features.
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> But suggesting that aesthetics matter has always been blasphemy here at Slashdot.
Graphics (OpenGL/WebGL) and UI/UX guy here. That is NOT blasphemy, contrary to popular opinion. The balance of _form_ AND _function_ really is the sweet spot.
Sadly, most modern UI/UX guys are retarded. Whether they be at Apple, Microsoft, Facebook,Google, etc., they all think that form is the only thing that matters, functionality be damned. Want to tell the difference between a button and static text/image. Too bad!
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What you're missing is the fact that most normal users still get files from other people, and these still don't always render correctly. For example, my kids' teachers will send out documents in Word or Powerpoint; often the clipart they love so dearly is oddly reformatted and covers text. And when the teacher assigns a PowerPoint presentation to be created, and ends up grading on the prettiness of the template, and Libre Office has only bare-bones templates, it's a bummer. Little stuff like that can be a s
Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid (Score:4, Insightful)
And when the teacher assigns a PowerPoint presentation to be created
fuck me, the world really is coming to an end
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...my kids' teachers will send out documents in Word or Powerpoint; often the clipart they love so dearly is oddly reformatted and covers text.
So, basically your kid's teachers are strutting their incompetence. If you sent your kids to secretary school they might have a point, but they went to school to prepare for college, didn't they?
I now have a laptop with Office loaded just for these types of cases.
I do too. It's covered with dust because the frequency I actually need it has dropped to nearly zero. These days, the onus is really on the author to send out documents that can be read, and requiring a Microsoft machine on the receiving side is increasingly risky. At least, the document better be sharable and view
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I nominate you to teach M$ Word users how to give their documents a title in properties so every freaking pdf you see on the internet isn't titled "Microsoft Word Document".
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In the real world I'll just use the right tool for the job.
In school, you carry your tools between your ears, you didn't go there to learn powerpointing. I hope.
Well, I could be wrong about you, but my child certainly don't go to school to learn powerpointing, and if I found that being taught instead of proper academics I'd move my child to a different school the next day.
BTW, my child's school standardized on Linux, both the back office and teaching side. Even the security system. There great education software out there, and school administration software for Lin
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The tool for the job is the document and its format. The
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I hate to break it to you but file compatibility is a garbage reason to continue to use Office. I have worked with many companies in my time and Office files are not even compatible with themselves. I can't tell you how many times I have heard people ask what version of Office are you running so I can try and save it in an Office format that will work for you. Office is barely compatible with itself over time.
Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid (Score:5, Interesting)
Does anyone know how LibreOffice compares to them?
IMHO, LibreOffice has more features than MS Office Home and Student, but cannot substitute the higher tiered editions of MS Office.
Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid (Score:4, Insightful)
Most of the people I encounter can barely use the basic functionality of Microsoft Office, which is something that LibreOffice has covered.
There is one crucial feature that isn't covered perfectly: absolute compatibility with MS Office. For a large number of office workers, Office is a collaboration tool. A document saved by one user and emailed to another, then edited and returned, needs to be able to preserve all of the formatting. Users care a *lot* about formatting, and if it gets messed up, they lose confidence in the software.
Office's formatting algorithms are abominable, and it's no surprise that LibreOffice can't mimic them perfectly. And users really, really need to apply a lot less formatting and focus instead on content.
Still... for a lot of offices, that's going to be the one unbreakable rule. MS Office is the de facto standard, and anything else needs to comply with that, even if the standard is for something user's shouldn't really want and which is poorly implemented (perhaps specifically to make it impossible to switch).
I'd love to see more offices switch to something like Google Docs or other systems with minimal formatting, so that they can stop tinkering with fonts and actually focus on the words. Sadly, users do love it.
Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid (Score:4, Insightful)
And it never will be. Ignoring the people who won't try LiberOffice because it can't duplicate MS Office's behavior in some obscure corner-case, there's the fact that compatibility with MS Office is a constantly-moving goal post. Every version does things differently and has its own, proprietary format so that no matter what happens, LibreOffice will always be trying to catch up with the latest and "greatest" version of MS Office. Of course, so will everybody using an older version of Office, but all the MicroSofties are going to pay attention to is how FOSS can't keep up with whatever MS is currently pushing.
Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid (Score:5, Informative)
There is one crucial feature that isn't covered perfectly: absolute compatibility with MS Office.
Not even MS Office has that, and that doesn't seem to matter. No, that is not where the problem lies. The compatibility only has to be good enough, and for pretty much everything it is.
Quite often it is even better than MS Office. I have used Libre Office to rescue documents which MS Office stopped loading because something broke in them. And that did not sway people enough to even make them try out Libre Office. Compatibility is a non-issue. It's all inertia.
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It's all inertia.
And you need something disruptive to change that, not something that's pretty much the same but cheaper. Google is trying (and seems to be doing fairly well) with their Google Docs offering because not only is it a capable office suite but it's platform-agnostic (web-based, even MS Office has a web-based version), has native applications for all the major mobile platforms (if you prefer that) and it is well-integrated with all their other services. But LibreOffice doesn't really have a disruptive feature, i
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No. The compatibility is *not* "good enough" for "pretty much everything". I can (and do) see breakages in just about every document I ever try to convert.
For instance, look at the indentation of bullet point items. This isn't hard, the rule is perfectly simple. Yet to this day, LibreOffice can't correctly convert from a document saved in MS Word.
Or headers and footers. The spacing is screwed up, and sometimes the fonts change for no reason. The same thing sometimes happens with styles. Unless you stick wit
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There is one crucial feature that isn't covered perfectly: absolute compatibility with MS Office.
Even MS Office isn't absolutely compatible with MS Office. [microsoft.com]
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There is one crucial feature that isn't covered perfectly: absolute compatibility with MS Office. For a large number of office workers, Office is a collaboration tool.
Panty-waistes, Real Men [artofmanliness.com] use EMACS, Subversion and LaTeX.
Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid (Score:4, Insightful)
Creating a "perfect" alternative to MS Office is harder than just engineering an office suite. LibreOffice is great in many ways, but one of the things that keeps many people on MS Office is that they've built their workflows on Outlook. Those workflows don't only depend on Outlook, but through Outlook they depend on Exchange. So if you really want to displace Microsoft, you have to create a mail/groupware client to Outlook, either by creating one compatible with Exchange or creating groupware server to replace Exchange as well. Or you need to create an alternative to both of those things that won't screw up businesses' workflows. Or I guess you can convince businesses to overhaul their workflows.
The issue of "workflow" is a huge issue that too many people ignore. Even if a different software solution provides all the same "functionality", if it requires people to change how they work, they aren't going to go for it. It's especially difficult if it changes the way people work by requiring frequent repetitive steps (e.g. if you can do all the same things, but if doing it in Microsoft Office requires 2 clicks and LibreOffice requires 5 clicks, then people are going to get frustrated).
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It's been a while, so I don't remember the links anymore and I didn't take notes unfortunately, but they were easy to find (I believe, I started drilling down from sogo.nu and the enterprise gateway all in one live-cds like Zentyal, through which I found openchange). This was a
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You may be right about this. It's been a while since I really looked into it.
However, I will note that it's not a simple issue. I remember being hopeful in evaluating Evolution years ago as a possible Outlook replacement, and it was a no-go. Speed and stability issues aside, there are a lot of little features that need to work well to displace Outlook. It's not just about being able to access calendars and contacts, but things like: How well does it support public folders? How well does it support sha
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I remember being hopeful in evaluating Evolution years ago as a possible Outlook replacement, and it was a no-go. Speed and stability issues aside, there are a lot of little features that need to work well to displace Outlook. It's not just about being able to access calendars and contacts, but things like: How well does it support public folders? How well does it support shared calendars? How well does it support delegate access? How well does it support Exchange rules? What about Out-Of-Office assistants?
Those are just a couple off the top of my head, but there are a bunch of those kinds of things-- features you might not think of immediately, but that people rely on all the time. And not only would an Outlook replacement need to offer those features, but the UI for them would have to be at least as easy/non-annoying.
Is there a drop-in replacement these days? Something that I can use with Exchange instead of Outlook? Something that I can use with Outlook instead of Exchange?
Thunderbird is your best bet. With plugins, Exchange calendar protocols seem to work as expected, though I haven't really tried every feature, nor do I want to. These days, it seems like startups are going with Google Office a lot more than Microsoft's expensive, high maintenance solutions. The wind is definitely shifting, as can be seen in Microsoft's division revenues.
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Creating a "perfect" alternative to MS Office is harder than just engineering an office suite. LibreOffice is great in many ways, but one of the things that keeps many people on MS Office is that they've built their workflows on Outlook...
Those guys are going to need to change because the world is moving on and their outmoded workflow will become an increasing liability for any organization that employs them. Particularly tech companies where frontline engineers tend to have a low tolerance for back office drones who can't fulfill their work roles efficiently because they can't be bothered to adapt.
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I'm using software that could easily replace both Outlook and Exchange right now. Fortunately, it's made by a company that is very good at engineering but terrible at PR and marketing, so Microsoft is safe.
Give us a hint?
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Oh I get it, that would imply he's terrible at PR and marketing.
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Personally, I don't even care for office suites at home. I can't remember that last time I actually used one. Last time I wanted to use an office suite, I used Libre Office and it got the job done just fine. What's actually holding me back from using Linux at home is hardware support.
There's always something that doesn't work on my computers. The last time I tried to install it, it was the video drivers that didn't work. They worked well enough to run the desktop, but as soon as I tried to play a game (o
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There's always something that doesn't work on my computers. The last time I tried to install it, it was the video drivers that didn't work. They worked well enough to run the desktop, but as soon as I tried to play a game (or even test with GLXgears) the performance was abysmal.
Meaning that you were running software OpenGL, it just means that your installation is incomplete. Usually, the installer will autosense your video hardware and install the correct driver, but if it doesn't then it is usually easy to put things right. Start with:
glxinfo | grep "direct rendering:"
Probably you will see "direct rendering: No". You are now probably one package install away from fixing it.
The last large number of times I've installed Linux it came up with functional hardwar
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Reliance on MS office is the only thing that holds back many of my folks (familiy, friends) from a total FOSS conversion of their computing habits.
How many documents do they really have that don't open properly in something like Google Docs which is available on all platforms anyway?
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I can't live without Excel's inability to avoid divide by 0 errors!; in calc a simple conditional detects a number is a zero and allows you to simply not divide by it; unlike Excel where you can test that a cell either has a number, but not that the number isn't zero.
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The FOSS movement should go all-in with LibreOffice in an effort to provide a perfect alternative to MS office.
Define perfect?
This isn't a diss on Libre office, I use it on my Macs, my PCs and my Linux machines because it is the only Office suite that is compatible across platforms.
Microsoft Office isn't compatible between PC's and Macs, (a fatal flaw in my book) the interface blows weasel balls, and Microsoft Office suffers from feature bloat in the first place. a lot of that crap I don't want at all.
Last think I want is for Apache office to be turned into na MS Office like product.
Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe he means .... the Ribbon.
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Maybe he means .... the Ribbon.
I just threw up in my mouth a little - thanks.
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In short, you want somebody to put the toothpaste back in the tube. Nobody has time for that. Too bad Larry and his boys mortally wounded OpenOffice, but they did. Just let it die in peace.
Anyway, GPL is a lot better licence for this, it means there won't be a bunch of proprietary forks. And OpenOffice development does continue, at a very slow pace, which occasionally feeds bug fixes or even features into LibreOffice, so it is actually doing something useful.
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But of course Office has had functionality updates in that time. LibreOffice has passed where Office was 15 years ago - and still isn't a match for Office.
Can you name me an essential feature in Office that was not present in word star on apple II?
False comparison (Score:3)
I know he's trying to be charitable, but there's no need.
"Sure, LibreOffice does not provide the same level of features and finesse Microsoft's suite may boast..."
Who cares? My guess is that most users don't use at least 90% of the "features" in MS Office; if we're talking only about features that Office has an LO doesn't, I'd lift that to 99%.
LibreOffice is terrific, and I wish I could convince my company to switch.
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One problem is that those, such as myself, who do use at least a few of the 90% of the "little used" features in MS Office then send thier documents to many others who have no idea that these "unneeded" features are being used. The fact a user doesn't know they are using a feature doesn't mean they are not using that feature.
In a home or very small office environment this is, of course, less likely. However, many of these people seem to find both LibreOffice and MS Office mindnumbingly complicated.
One area
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then send thier documents to many others who have no idea that these "unneeded" features are being used.
billy discovers new features in the word processor and wonders why nobody else uses them, doesn't occur to him that they are not really needed
Stability, not features (Score:2)
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most people have at least one show stopping feature that Libre Office lacks
Huh? "most people" do normal straightforward word processing, which has been a "solved problem" since the apple II. What are these fancy features needed today that were not present in 1980s word processing systems?
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That's presumably why Microsoft added the evil Ribbon, so Word users would have no idea how to find the features they use in a processor with a saner interface.
Then again, those users probably have no idea how to find the features they use in the Ribbon, either.
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The funny thing about the OSX version is that we get _both_ the menu AND ribbon. Some tasks are easier with the ribbon, others with the menu.
Trying to dictate how users should use the software is just plain ignorance and arrogance but Microsoft has never understand good UI. They always seem to be copying Apple, for better or for worse.
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it was trying to catch up to functionality of a really old Microsoft Office
Microsoft was learning where its customers wanted to use its software tomorrow.
WTF is this bizarre "magic" that microsoft puts in their software that nobody else does? WTF do you actually need in a word processor that wasn't there in 1988?
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I need:
Reliable DOCX compatibility.
I need accurate WYSIWYG printing.
I need printing functionality that doesn't get broken with each update so I don't have to keep going back and forth between the postscript and PDF driver.
I need it to be fast. Like WAY fucking faster opening documents.
I need it to work reliably. I shouldn't have to think about which word processor or spreadsheet I am using. I can use Word or WordPerfect without much concern, switch to Libre Office and the wheels fall off. Suddenly I'm in IT support mode rather than document creation mode.
Envelopes should not make you homicidal! (See printing.)
Graphing hasn't been updated for years and looks like ASS. We won;t even bother talking about its behavioral idiosyncrasies.
I can go on and on if you like.
The magic is just works versus almost-just-works.
with the exception of your first point, you can do all of that on an apple II with word star or perfect writer.
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He, he, he, tgif was way better than xfig. And both were running circles around the steamy POS named Visio. Even after 16 years since acquiring it, Microsoft still can't make a decent vector graphics program, this Visio thing continues to be a joke.
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You can use Inkscape to create shapes for Dia, a fairly decent solution for that type of thing. BTW, Inkscape is beyond awesome.
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Your post is why open software always fails to gain the lead,
holy cow batman, people are changing the world by posting on slashdot
Uh, what? (Score:5, Interesting)
To be fair, I was unaware of much of the internal considerations going on at Sun, so their reluctance to engage may have also been a result of other forces, such as external management groups or constrained engineering resources.
I can't help but wonder how this guy managed to miss the thousands of layoffs from Sun that were happening at that time--one week, it was 6,000, the next it was 8,000. The company was losing money hand over fist, and projects were being shut down right and left. This was all in the press, too. So you'd think this guy could have figured out that we had slightly greater concerns right then than a freebie that was costing us rather than making us money to develop.
(Yes, I got to watch Sun implode, from the inside. Not pretty.)
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So you'd think this guy could have figured out that we had slightly greater concerns right then than a freebie that was costing us rather than making us money to develop.
Yeah, you were busy buying companies and firing all the people who knew anything, that can really take a lot out of a company. Like all the money.
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True enough. Fortunately they didn't do that with my employer when they were acquired. (They did give the founder enough money to Go Away, which was actually probably a good thing. But that's another story. Maybe I'll write a book about it after I retire and don't have to worry about getting fired/blacklisted.)
It also didn't help that Sun were encouraging (and *paying*) their salespeople to make deals that they thought made for good PR, whether or not they actually brought in any revenue. As a result, sales
My parents and software. (Score:3)
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And spend the savings on massively more memory, or some creature comforts like a UPS or big SSD or monster display.
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In that case just go with Google and Libreoffice. Google Docs is more than good enough for the basics, writing, etc (and you don't have to bother saving and syncing); LibreOffice for anything more advanced and local sync via google drive. And the decider is, its free.
What I don't understand... (Score:3)
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Because it's a copycat of many other things already out there:
- Evernote: Notes everywhere
- Tomboy Notes: Save-on-Keypress desktop sticky notes. Public & Private host backup possible (I use this now, for reminders)
- GNote: Linux-only lightweight Tomboy Notes
- Google Keep: My preferred Android + Browser (Linux) note taker (I use this now to note what I should research later)
- Calendars of all kinds: Want to remember to do something at some time? Just put it at some free time in your calendar!
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The wet blanket says .. (Score:5, Interesting)
No, I am not that convinced. Alas. Look at some basic bug reports, and how bugs reports are treated, and you'll find some abhorrent situations. Where it could shine, it didn't. Like surpassing MS Office.
First item: the silly image formats supported by MS Offce (only), to create a market for real formats, like SVG, EPS. LibreOffice simply dropped support, had a good number of bug reports some two years ago, and still pending.
It did much better than OpenOffice in colourful gadgets and widgets to please the eye of the casual user, yes, but did not focus on real technical improvements.
Equation editor. It is just okay, but not beyond. Still the same as OpenOffice. Does it import MS formulas? Does it offer a real WYSIWYG, or does one have to continuously click forth and back? The latter.
Did I write a number of bug reports to help out? Yes, I did. What I got was UNCO, or outright rejection, like 'try the most recent version, we think it has been solved'. How to try the most recent version if it isn't in the pools of my distro? And worse: When I tried, it hadn't.
All this makes me sad, because contrary to some other posters, I feel very confidently that LibreOffice is more consistent, better to handle, and overall the better alternative already today! And I can speak from some experience, since I was responsible for the layout of two books that you can buy on Amazon, and it did a great job. Also better than MS Office which tends to break any page layout with automatic page breaks of a floating text wherever it likes, depending on the version (2003, 2007), the underlying Windows version, and the mood of the day. Yes, with the same dictionary and same hyphenation. The author was at the end of her wits when MS Office had some 30+ pages with this, while in *Office all 511 pages were identical for author, and the two proof readers.
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Did I write a number of bug reports to help out? Yes, I did. What I got was UNCO, or outright rejection, like 'try the most recent version, we think it has been solved'. How to try the most recent version if it isn't in the pools of my distro? And worse: When I tried, it hadn't.
Don't be discouraged, you efforts are indeed appreciated, even if the response may seem lacking or perfunctory. You may have just run up against an overworked volunteer having a bad hair day. Just tag onto your bug report with the new info. That update is precious, and allows the devs to be more sure that their own efforts won't be wasted. Or in the best scenario, a dev with the same bug may find your current report by web search and decide to get the code and track it down themselves, and the team gets big
More than enough (Score:2, Troll)
...LibreOffice does not provide the same level of features and finesse Microsoft's suite may boast,...
I've been using LibreOffice for a few years. Yes, LibreOffice does not have all the super-neat features that MS Office has, but LibreOffice does have all the features I need and then some.
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I see no need to pay Microsoft for a bloated office suite when LibreOffice works so well for me.
The next chapter (Score:3)
The next chapter of the LibreOffice story must be "Full port to Android". It is pathetic that this has not already happened. No fault of the LibreOffice devs, it is the fault of the corporations who never managed to get their sorry asses out of bed to put money behind an effort that benefits themselves more than anybody.
No, not Google. Google hates LibreOffice because it competes with their cloud lock-in agenda and, trust me, Google is no charitable nest of fairy godmothers. Samsung should have backed the Android port, starting years ago. Instead they wasted ten (100?) times the money that would be needed to add a half dozen full time Libreoffice devs and chose instead to publicly embarrass themselves with fiasco Tizen. As long as LibreOffice is not on Android, Microsoft still has a corporate lock-in story to tell. End that now, or is somebody stupid?
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The next chapter of the LibreOffice story must be "Full port to Android". It is pathetic that this has not already happened.
i know, right? Civilization is failing because we don't have full desktop publishing capabilities available while walking down the street.
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There's nothing I could imagine being better than reformatting a nested bullet list on my Nexus 7. Ah, what bliss that would be!
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Bluetooth keyboard. Bluetooth mouse. On an airplane, you can do that on the meal tray in economy, generally not possible with a laptop.
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Or I could just pull out my laptop.
I think being able to read documents, and possibly even do minor edits, is useful functionality on mobile devices. But there's a point at which the interface, even with a mouse and keyboard, simply falls down.
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Your laptop that weighs 5 pounds, gets 5 hours on a charge, requires a 1990's shoulder bag and won't fit on the dinner tray? Be my guest.
I suspect that you have never actually tried a mouse and keyboard on a tablet. Even with Android's relatively crappy and uneven support it's quite usable and works much batter than a laptop that just shut down for lack of power. Oh another thing, when you go through security you will need to pull out your laptop, just what you need when you're tight for a transfer. Your ta
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I have a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse that I've connected to both my Nexus 5 and Nexus 7. On the nexus 5, the small screen real estate makes it pointless, and even on the 7" tablet I find the inadequacies of the interface and the still pretty small screen real estate do not translate into a pleasant experience for editing documents and spreadsheets. I'm sure larger tablets ameliorate this problem, but there comes a point, at least for me, where the screen size gets large enough that I'd rather just buy a no
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I have a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse that I've connected to both my Nexus 5 and Nexus 7. On the nexus 5, the small screen real estate makes it pointless...
Nonsense. I use this regularly on my Nexus 4 even. Sometimes I don't bother switching to the 10 inch tablet even when its sitting right there in front of me, and use it as a stand for the Nexus 4 instead. See, the keyboard is the limiting factor, not the screen resolution (1080p) or even the screen size. But then, I mostly use my slabphone in landscape mode so maybe I'm just different.
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there comes a point, at least for me, where the screen size gets large enough that I'd rather just buy a notebook...
Notebook hardware is starting to look a bit fossilized. Crappy power management, no GPS, no cellular data, no gyros, etc. At least cameras come as standard now... usually...
The only thing that stands in the way of 100% notebook-replacement status for tablets is Google's footdragging on the necessary UI improvements, most notably a proper window manager. Which is there now, but it's years late and it isn't enabled by default.
That's the problem with Google's closed project governance. Sigh. But it's getting t
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I don't know about you, but I have a couple of tablets too. And I have had more than a few occasions when editing a document while on the road with only a phone would have been the most efficient thing to do, even with the crappy on screen keyboard.
Perhaps you mostly use your phone for texting.
Macros, Forms and VBA (Score:2)
As in, how easy is it to bolt on an interface over a workbook with e.g. non-modal dialogs (not available in Office for Mac) that affect the worksheets? I know some python scripting is possible, but if anyone has a few examples of a more complex "program," I'd really appreciate a nudge in the right direction.
Microsoft Office needs a competitor (Score:2)
While LibreOffice is undoubtedly a very capable suite, Microsoft Office has also moved on in the last 15 years. To compete (certainly in the workplace) would need a decent Outlook competitor and even additional products like Visio (I know Draw goes some way to fill that gap), OneNote (to which there is no feature equivalent application in Linux to my knowledge) and Project.
Something like LibreOffice is needed though. Having read the [lack of] new features in the upcoming Office 16 shows how Microsoft has sl
Re:Microsoft Office needs a competitor (Score:4, Insightful)
In other words, performing (well) a subset of what Office 20xx does, for free, is likely good enough for a great many users.
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LibreOffice is fine for the vast majority of users for creating and editing its own documents.
But that is not the problem.
When Shirley at the front desk can use LibreOffice to open a Word or Powerpoint document sent by an MS Office user and not have it screw up the formatting, then it will be a viable replacement to MS Office. That day is still a long way off, since it still cannot open a very simple document (Word document with text and one image) without subtle format changes.
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I don't see that Outlook is anything special. It's selling point is that it integrates with Exchange, not that it's the best way to do things.
Fuck, it took me 20 minutes to work out how to discover who an email was sent to when it arrived in my inbox (e.g. if you have a lot of aliases arriving in one inbox). Double-click the email, File, Properties, scroll down, read the raw SMTP headers. Not fucking sensible.
Let's not forget that Insert Signature can fuck up depending on your HTML/Text settings (some of
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
1. Licensing dispute
2. Reason for the fork
3. Rose from the ashes
4. Contention that Apache OpenOffice would exist if not for Libreoffice.
Happy to provide links for anything you're interested in actually discussing. Let me know.
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The point is that developing two separate FOSS office suites means duplication of efforts that could otherwise be spent furthering development on a single FOSS office suite.
Why do we even bother making more than one kind of automobile? we should save engineering effort and all drive exactly the same car, imagine how much better the world would be. Do you see the problem with this mentality?
" means duplication of efforts" no it doesn't mean duplication of effort, because these are open projects and the developers can freely look at the changes in the other versions and port them or not as they see fit.
Re:LibreOffice didn't rise from the ashes (Score:5, Insightful)
I fail to see why fragmentation is a good thing.
really? usually fragmentation is the result of two parties with irreconcilable differences. would you prefer that they spend time fighting with each other or would you rather let them duke it out in implementation land and see who can make a better mousetrap?
let's look at some fragmentation over the years and see how it worked out:
- Steve Jobs took his developers away with him when he could not reconcile his design decisions with apple. He made his own version of the mac os, called it "next step". eventually apple saw the error in their ways, brought back jobs, and now OSX is next step.
- remember egcs versus gcc? gcc was getting old and stale and stagnant, new developers wanted new features on an expedited timeline and gcc said no. so egcs was forked, new features were implmented and tested and folded back into gcc. all around a good time
- remember node.js versus io.js? again the same deal as egcs versus gcc.
you can argue duplicated effort but in fact these forks allow new ideas to happen where they otherwise would not. can you argue with this?
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and holy cow batman just about every company makes internal forks of its products for testing new features, they sure don't have every developer checking his science projects into the mainline trunk
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really? usually fragmentation is the result of two parties with irreconcilable differences. would you prefer that they spend time fighting with each other or would you rather let them duke it out in implementation land and see who can make a better mousetrap?
Usually I'd rather not see two camps split the rest of the community. Because there's developers working on other parts of the system and if you can't get them on board your fork will likely grow stale and die as it lacks all the other bug fixes, enhancements and features that have nothing to do with what was in dispute. Sure it's open source so you can borrow but it takes time and effort and as the code diverges applying the patches will get harder and harder. This usually leads to a lot of drama and a lot
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Apache OO can't import code from LibreOffice because the entire project (AOO) was moved off the LGPL when Oracle gave it to The Apache Foundation. Had Oracle chosen to keep the license as is, there would be no such restriction.
Re:LibreOffice didn't rise from the ashes (Score:5, Informative)
Let's discuss licensing.
LibreOffice is under exactly the same license as OpenOffice.Org was - it defies logic to maintain that LibreOffice broke away from OpenOffice.org because of the license, and then kept that exact same license.
Consensus is that, after Oracle's purchase of Sun in 2010, OpenOffice.org was likely to be axed. Oracle showed little to no interest in it, and said even less. LibreOffice had nearly a half-year of uncontested mind-share before Oracle finally axed their paid developers and dumped the remains of OpenOffice on the Apache foundation for resurrection (re-licensing it in the process) in what was widely seen an attempt to save face. And it still took almost another year after that for the first release, due to the Apache re-licensing (which came well after the decision to create TDF).
Wikipedia is extensively sourced here. Perhaps it would be better to point out the specific pieces you feel are wrong?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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...developing two separate FOSS office suites means duplication of efforts that could otherwise be spent furthering development on a single FOSS office suite.
The duplication of effort if there is any can't be very substantial, considering the rather lopsided manpower ratio. Think of it as more like additional independent eyeballs on the shared code, which is still most of the code base. And it would be unseemly to just let OpenOffice languish without bug fixes and security updates in its sunset years. It's hard to see anything wrong with the current situation.
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And MS have offered a subscription license model for volume licensing (OVS) since at least before 2007.
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The last time I looked, Microsoft Office did not come with Visio. Last time I was forced to use Microsoft Office, I had to get the IT department to order and install Visio (and Microsoft Project). LibreOffice can edit Visio material directly.
However, LibreOffice can also bring in (import) Dia material, which is my preferred "Visio-like" tool. I also use Xfig. LibreOffice can revise Visio material, such that I can exchange with a Visio user.
As to "Outlook", my preference has been Evolution (for a long time)
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who cares what the document says, as long as the font is good