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LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

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Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#151

Post by chronolitus »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #93
asddubs wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yup, that's the thing, people love to complain on random social media platforms, but most people can't be bothered to report bugs. been guilty of it myself as well of course

As someone who frequently encounters bugs, let me explain why I don't usually bother to file bug reports: No one cares. Choose any large long-lived open source project at random and search their issue tracker and I guarantee you can find at least 3 open bugs that are 5 years old or more. I know, because I've run into these bugs, as have dozens of others, and went to report them only to find they had already been repo…

For example, I encounter this bug every day when I open Firefox (latest version) on i3wm. "Opened 9 years ago."

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=686747

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#152

Post by tester34 »

ubercow13 wrote: post #41
unglaublich wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No... the problem with desktop software is that creating a good UI/UX is a hard software problem typically solved by software developers instead of designers. Whereas, the accessibility and power of web technologies show that making UI/UX an easier software problem (HTML, CSS, JS) automatically attracts more designers yielding better UX/UI.

>making UI/UX an easier software problem (HTML, CSS, JS) automatically attracts more designers yielding better UX/UI I find this a bit questionable. What are some examples of this good UX and UI? Many HTML-ish UIs I can think of are not good. Slack, Discord, modern Windows apps such as the new settings app for example. They tend to suffer from poor reimplementations of native widget functionality, poor implementation…

Github Desktop I'd say

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#153

Post by nickcw »

kleiba wrote: post #81

Do people use LibreOffice because it's open-source or because it you don't have to pay for it? In either case, the "enterprise edition" they envision will fail to service either camp. If you have to spend any money at all, you might as well spend the money that MS Office costs. Or else, the main competitor is not MS Office but Google Docs.

I use LibreOffice because it runs on my machine - MS Office doesn't.

If MS made a Linux version I'd probably get that.

LibreOffice is at its best if you make the docs and edit them just in LibreOffice. It's great at making structured docs. Calc is pretty good too. The PowerPoint equivalent is the weakest of the bunch, crashing frequently.

However in the biz world you end up sharing docs and sheets with MS office users and that is where things start to go sideways. Complicated MS docs are not rendered well. Excel sheets are generally Ok. PowerPoint docs don't round trip at all well so I've given up even trying!

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#154

Post by acomjean »

bluGill wrote: post #33
openfuture wrote: post #20

It's weird to me that people complain over "old and ugly" interfaces. Consistency is worth so much more than fad-chasing. Learning something is more worthwhile if you are able to trust that it won't change underneath you. Take MS Office for example, I was made to learn how to use it in elementary school, we had an exam where we got a printed out page and had to reproduce it in an hour. This was supposed to be fundame…

Your school was wrong to teach any program. Ui follows fads and always will. Thus you need to learn how to use any ui that might come.

It’s hard. I learned a lot of programs (some that don’t exist) autocad and lotus 123. Some of the principals of spreadsheets and vector programs I remember to this day. But having hands on with the software certainly helped learn it.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#155

Post by conception »

Jonnax wrote: post #38
openfuture wrote: post #20

It's weird to me that people complain over "old and ugly" interfaces. Consistency is worth so much more than fad-chasing. Learning something is more worthwhile if you are able to trust that it won't change underneath you. Take MS Office for example, I was made to learn how to use it in elementary school, we had an exam where we got a printed out page and had to reproduce it in an hour. This was supposed to be fundame…

The ribbon interface was adopted in 2007. That's 13 years ago. What is the jank? It's a tabbed interface of buttons instead of menus and sub menus. The most common operations are descriptive buttons. Give someone word 2003 or word 2020 who has never used a word processor before. Which one would be more intuitive? It's bad UI if people just learn where to click. They should be able to think in terms of "I want to do X…

Oh it’s bad to learn where just to click, I recently learned that’s how most people do it.

You might find this interesting - https://www.truity.com/blog/intuitives-guide-getting-along-s...

There was a discussion on HN about this a while back but most people learn computers by “if I want x I do y.” And guards just how they learn. Changing UI for them is catastrophic because they literally have to relearn -everything-. Op is probably a sensor and finds that stability tremendously useful.

This really helped me be less frustrated in seeing how people can’t just figure out technology on their own and how I can just mess with it until I figure out the ”language” the app is using to have users interact with it. Most people can’t do that.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#156

Post by xvilka »

Instead of delivering the dead and long stalled project Apache should admit the failure of OpenOffice (with their commit rate vs LibreOffice's one it's obvious) and redirect to LibreOffice instead. They should officially deprecate it. Right now they are stealing potential users of LO with their substandard product.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#157

Post by JTon »

mapgrep wrote: post #141

Democrats in the US House of Representatives just approved a $741 billion defense spending package. It will almost certainly clear the senate and be signed by the president. Imagine taking enough of that money to support these 40 LibreOffice developers and maybe say 20 more. There would be no need for these acrobatics around source availability. I understand why the companies need to do this. But there is an existing…

It begs an interesting question: does defense spending have a positive ROI? I don't know the answer to this question. But I'm thinking funding R&D, trade route protections, and perhaps some nefarious things can all contribute positively to American interests and thus American society.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#158

Post by signal11 »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #145
signal11 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Consistency is worth so much more than fad-chasing. Learning something is more worthwhile if you are able to trust that it won't change underneath you. Almost anything could be described as a fad. Interactive computers were seen as a fad once. Punched cards were good enough! The command line was good enough! For complex applications (roughly defined as, lots of nested menus), the ribbon UI is an improvement as it s…

>Almost anything could be described as a fad. // I think the key thing here is that MS Word had the features most people need back in Win3 days (possibly earlier?). There's stuff you want to do that punch cards don't allow, eg duplicate a program virtually; but there's not stuff people wanted to do that menu based wordprocessor UI prevented. Ribbons fine, but no advance for me over menus, on balance I prefer menus bu…

> I think the key thing here is that MS Word had the features most people need back in Win3 days (possibly earlier?).

That's a very narrow view of what people need. Children at home these days "type" essays into Word by dictating as a first-party feature. This is a pretty recent step forward -- in the past it used to be a very expensive third-party add-on with much less accuracy.

Good, scalable multi-user document editing has changed the way students and even workers take notes in classrooms and workshops. Again, a fairly recent phenomenon (although Word still isn't as good as Google Docs here -- c'mon Microsoft, keep up).

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#159

Post by bane »

openfuture wrote: post #20

It's weird to me that people complain over "old and ugly" interfaces. Consistency is worth so much more than fad-chasing. Learning something is more worthwhile if you are able to trust that it won't change underneath you. Take MS Office for example, I was made to learn how to use it in elementary school, we had an exam where we got a printed out page and had to reproduce it in an hour. This was supposed to be fundame…

Next thing you know they'll start insist on adding lowercase characters to the character set and forcing us to use color displays and Arabic numerals instead of good old fashioned Roman ones!

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#160

Post by CivBase »

openfuture wrote: post #20

It's weird to me that people complain over "old and ugly" interfaces. Consistency is worth so much more than fad-chasing. Learning something is more worthwhile if you are able to trust that it won't change underneath you. Take MS Office for example, I was made to learn how to use it in elementary school, we had an exam where we got a printed out page and had to reproduce it in an hour. This was supposed to be fundame…

I believe schools are mostly wrong in their computer education approach. The purpose and functions of MS Word (and most word processors for that matter) have not changed significantly in the last couple decades, despite the change of paint. Schools should be focused on teaching people what common applications are for and what they are capable of - not which buttons to press to perform specific tasks.
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