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LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

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Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#261

Post by macspoofing »

komali2 wrote: post #247
macspoofing wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Imagine taking enough of that money to support these 40 LibreOffice developers and maybe say 20 more. There are infinite ways to spend every dollar, why is LibreOffice funding worthy? In other words, why is LibreOffice's popularity so low that it cannot find a way to fund its operations? Which then raises the question - why do you want to fund an unpopular project?

I think the idea is that 1% of a b52 bomber might take LibreOffice to an unparalleled place for a libre project.

I get the 'idea'. There are more things to fund then there are funding dollars available ... by many orders of magnitude, so you have to make decisions. One of those decisions is whether or not to pay for a certain numbers of b52 bombers. Another, completely separate decision, is whether to fund a very specific niche open source project. Linking those two is disingenuous. If you want funding for LibreOffice, make the case to your representative. Make the case to others so they make the case to your representative.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#262

Post by coliveira »

edoloughlin wrote: post #134
Jonnax wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 I've been using Office since the early 90's and the ribbon interface for the last 13 years. I still can't find stuff easily in the ribbon interface. It's like there's some cognitive barrier to me retaining the layout of anything beyond the Home ribbon (or tab?). Any time I…

Yes, the ribbon is a futile exercise. I'm pretty sure 90% of the people don't know how to use it, and the ones who know don't remember where things are. In this sense, menus are much more successful interface, at least you know where things might be. And in fact, when I use MS Word I first try to find things in the menu, and only reach for the ribbon for items I already know from previous experience.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#263

Post by ihattendorf »

komali2 wrote: post #247
macspoofing wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Imagine taking enough of that money to support these 40 LibreOffice developers and maybe say 20 more. There are infinite ways to spend every dollar, why is LibreOffice funding worthy? In other words, why is LibreOffice's popularity so low that it cannot find a way to fund its operations? Which then raises the question - why do you want to fund an unpopular project?

I think the idea is that 1% of a b52 bomber might take LibreOffice to an unparalleled place for a libre project.

Sure, but it could also take other projects to unparalleled places. Why does LibreOffice deserve that money over other projects?

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#264

Post by lbwtaylor »

leonidasv wrote: post #104
hnarn wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, the main point I would expect from "The next five years of LibreOffice" would be a self-hosted competitor to Google Docs and Office 365. There's definitely a place for a local application editing documents, but I don't think that's what's going to matter the most five years from now when compared to a solid web based alternative -- and I also don't think a "code freeze" for the "normal" LibreOffice (not that…

They have a self-hosted online suite, it's called Collabora.

I find it really odd that they chose server side rendering. I only did a very brief demo of it, but I was not impressed.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#265

Post by coliveira »

ako wrote: post #138
edoloughlin wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 I've been using Office since the early 90's and the ribbon interface for the last 13 years. I still can't find stuff easily in the ribbon interface. It's like there's some cognitive barrier to me retaining the layout of anything beyond the Home ribbon (or tab?). Any time I…

The key question is: would somebody who learned to use office after 2007 with the ribbon interface appreciate moving back to the pre-2007 interface? My guess is that more people learned to use office after 2007 than before, so the majority of people have no problems using the ribbon. I still yearn for ms-word on dos, and oracle forms on terminal interfaces, once you learned the keyboard shortcuts, nothing was faster.…

> My guess is that more people learned to use office after 2007 than before, so the majority of people have no problems using the ribbon.

Or maybe they didn't have other options...

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#266

Post by ModernMech »

MereInterest wrote: post #235
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a lot easier for me to read through a list of things in some category than it is for me to scan through a bunch of irregularly sized tiles for the icon and description of the configuration I need. I think you hit on something here with the irregular size of the buttons, probably moreso than the icons. The arrangement makes it difficult to just read through all the options left to right, because they're all jum…

Not only are they jumbled, but they also change size/shape depending on the width of the window. A large button when full-screened becomes a small button when in a smaller window. A large button in a smaller window gets expanded to show all sub-options when maximized. There is no visual consistency for the same button.

That was a feature designed to fit more options on smaller screens. I personally like it and find it helpful.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#267

Post by lbwtaylor »

mgbmtl wrote: post #25

I hate to rant, but there is a weird sense of entitlement in many comments. An assumption that software should "just work", be completely bug free, have the best design, have developers quickly responding to bug reports, etc, while giving away the product for free. I might not use an office suite very often, but when I do, I'm grateful it exists and is free/libre. Some orgs (gov, companies, service providers/reseller…

I think there is a quasi-unique problem with Libreoffice. People love Word and Excel, in ways they don't Windows and other pieces of software that compete with FOSS.

Those two programs are so well polished, user-friendly and powerful, and are what so many people are trained on, that it can be rough transition to LibreOffice.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#268

Post by henrikeh »

Pxtl wrote: post #143
Jonnax wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think anybody is bemoaning the loss of the old Office buttons. The buttons were always kinda bad. The problem is that the ribbon also killed the menu bar. Menu bars are a standard, known quantity across every application, which clean easy semantics for keyboard access. On some OSes they even augment the menus with searchability, celebrating the power of plain text.

Alt-key shortcuts work on the ribbon and search is build in as alt+Q (at least in Excel and Word). I use both daily.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#269

Post by ModernMech »

coliveira wrote: post #262
edoloughlin wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 I've been using Office since the early 90's and the ribbon interface for the last 13 years. I still can't find stuff easily in the ribbon interface. It's like there's some cognitive barrier to me retaining the layout of anything beyond the Home ribbon (or tab?). Any time I…

Yes, the ribbon is a futile exercise. I'm pretty sure 90% of the people don't know how to use it, and the ones who know don't remember where things are. In this sense, menus are much more successful interface, at least you know where things might be. And in fact, when I use MS Word I first try to find things in the menu, and only reach for the ribbon for items I already know from previous experience.

I don't understand this criticism. The layout seems logical to me. If you want to insert something, go to the "Insert" tab. If you want page design options, go to the "Design" tab. What's so inscrutable?

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#270

Post by duncanawoods »

gitgud wrote: post #131
duncanawoods wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sad thing is that it's almost futile raising a bug against complex software like this or IDEs. It doesn't matter if it's FOSS or commercial, they already have backlogs of 10000s of bugs so unless loads of other people are reporting the same bug, it almost certainly won't be fixed. I have never had a Visual Studio or Windows bug report fixed and only a few JetBrains ones fixed. However, if it's a small tool or lib…

> It doesn't matter if it's FOSS or commercial It does matter, you can't fix a problem with IntelliJ, you need to wait until the company considers it economically viable to fix, ie enough people report it or its critical. But if something in an Open-source system pisses you off, you can fix it yourself. It not for everyone, but at least it's possible to fix FOSS systems yourself...

Oh sure, I was just meaning in terms of bug reports actually precipitating action. For this type of software it's more like software a complexity issue than an economic one.

> But if something in an Open-source system pisses you off, you can fix it yourself.

I'm literally doing that right now :)

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