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LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

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Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#281

Post by vetinari »

kuschku wrote: post #45
kungato wrote: post #17

Is there any electron gpl based Word and Excel alternative? I always imagined running on top of electron helped you skip a lot of work and helped the app not look like shit/LibreOffice

If you want to see how moving from Java to Electron destroys an application, while making it look "better", try out GeoGebra Classic 6 and GeoGebra Classic 5. The difference is stunning. Geogebra 5, written in Java, is just so much more performant, and feels so much more like an application, not a broken website. The same actually applies to pgAdmin 3 vs pgAdmin 4.

pgAdmin 4 is not an electron app. It is a real web app, written in Python and Flask, and Qt browser engine bundled together.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#282

Post by _bxg1 »

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…

> But there is an existing system for funding things with widespread benefits to society. It’s called the government.

Not if you ask the current ruling party. Even a cursory glance at the state of the Union should make it obvious there's nobody left who cares to fund things with widespread benefits to society.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#283

Post by zanny »

wazoox wrote: post #169
JTon wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ginormous defence spending is how the US do a "social state". That's pretty obvious once you see how defence money is peppered all across the country.

It doesn't mean its productive. We could be spending half a trillion on civil engineering to rebuild cities, roads, high speed rail, canals, etc. That has appreciable and visible benefits to society.

Occupying a desert on the other side of the world largely to disrupt oil pipelines seems less effective as stimulus.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#284

Post by pfranz »

jm4 wrote: post #276
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?

It's not really worthy of funding anymore. Certainly not by the government. It's just not competitive with other options. I used to be a longtime Libre Office user. Back then, MS Office was expensive and only available on Windows. Even the Mac version wasn't completely compatible. MS Office is better than it's ever been, with a variety of licensing options that are affordable. And if you're a student you can get it f…

As a counterpoint, I imagine the amount of money the US government already spends on MS Office could fund development of something as good or better than Office, while giving it away free to the rest of society improving productivity. Although, I wouldn't bet on the management of that project playing out like that.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#285

Post by munro »

I just loaded up LibreOffice to give it a try, I would like to move off of Google as much as possible. 5 minutes in, I'm like, this is not that bad! Then this happened:

> Due to an unexpected error, LibreOffice crashed. All the files you were working on will now be saved. The next time LibreOffice is launched, your files will be recovered automatically.

I really require tools with multi platform live collaboration--I've been looking at Apple's Calc, as a possible switch, as well.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#286

Post by Spooky23 »

ghaff wrote: post #232
pseingatl wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Attorney ancestors?

It's just a cutesy way of saying a long time ago when all the lawyers used Wordperfect. (A word processing program that I hated almost as much as Wordstar.)

In some places, not so long ago :)

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#287

Post by black_puppydog »

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…

At the risk of starting a fire here, I'd say a much better approach to that was unity's HUD. You could simply fuzzy-search through all the menu items. It made using GIMP delightful. :)

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#288

Post by coliveira »

ModernMech wrote: post #269
coliveira wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There are plenty of problems. In the Mac, for example, menus are discoverable because you can go to "help->seach" and type what you're looking for. This cannot be easily done with the ribbon. Moreover, once you have a clue that you're looking for an "insert" option, you still need to search around in the ribbon, since there is no logic for where the option might be hiding. A menu you can read from top to bottom, but a ribbon you need to scan from left to right and top to bottom, making it much harder to use.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#289

Post by macspoofing »

pfranz wrote: post #284
jm4 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really worthy of funding anymore. Certainly not by the government. It's just not competitive with other options. I used to be a longtime Libre Office user. Back then, MS Office was expensive and only available on Windows. Even the Mac version wasn't completely compatible. MS Office is better than it's ever been, with a variety of licensing options that are affordable. And if you're a student you can get it f…

As a counterpoint, I imagine the amount of money the US government already spends on MS Office could fund development of something as good or better than Office, while giving it away free to the rest of society improving productivity. Although, I wouldn't bet on the management of that project playing out like that.

>I imagine the amount of money the US government already spends on MS Office could fund development of something as good or better than Office

No, it can't. Microsoft lives and breaths Office 365 because that is a core part of their business. There is zero chance that a government will care as much about this as Microsoft does, or the 10,000 other companies that are trying to supplant incumbents. Add to that the fact that funding will be uneven, because if the tool achieves a 'good enough' status, why keep funding it when you have all those other interest groups vying for money. The project will be susceptible to lobby and interest groups. Maybe a Senator will see it as a job-works program and move development to Alaska to provide Alaskan programmers jobs.

Time and time again these massive government-run software project collapse on their face.

In the commercial space, government just cannot compete with private industry ... at all. And this is not a libertarian disparagement of government. Government has a proper function, and competing in software with commercial offerings is not one of them.

>while giving it away free to the rest of society improving productivity

Says who? In fact, this is guaranteed to not be the case, because who is to say that funding a word processor is a productive application of capital when you're not responding to market forces.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#290

Post by throwaway43234 »

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 a sufficiently large project (let's say 100k issues+), I think it's totally reasonable for some vanishingly small percent (say 0.003%) of issues to be really quite hard to reproduce/debug/fix without breaking other things. I don't think that in any way implies the maintainers don't care, and to not submit reports because you fear you'll end up in the 0.003% rather than the 99.997% is a bit silly if you ask me.

I maintain such a project, and most bug reports I can fix in a few minutes. Others take a few days. Still others need to be deferred until some large refactoring is completed in coming months. Others still are involved to the extent that I'm not sure I'll ever fix them. But I value them all, and there are many more in the former categories than the latter.

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