331–340 of 433 posts
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While not open source, you can definitely use Google docs for free student or not.
But it is a proprietary, private owned software. That can change anytime. Maybe not in the next 10 years, but it can and I suspect that it will.
>So in effect the government is already funding google docs
Is just purely incorrect currently.
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…
Without "fad chasing" (which is a sunk cost, a week every few years of pro graphics design), without even copying microsoft office's layout, you are losing out on new users. Why would anyone use libre office because it's open source rather than being a better functioning product that is more pleasurable to use (and look at)?
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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.
Sure, the backend is different, but in a thread about UI issues, it's the same.
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 think there is something even deeper than this. The usability of UI is directly proportional to quality of users' mental model of what the application's doing.
Minimalism can be helpful for removing the "magic." I like the way Google Docs has evolved their UI. They started matching the feature set of desktop applications. Slowly, they have removed and simplified features, leading to a beautifully minimal yet powerful interface for typesetting and writing documents.
1. We are in a hurry to go on with the download.
2. It's called a "donation" - which it isn't. It's support for the project, financing further development and bug removal, and should be presented that way.
3. We have zero information about the situation The Document Foundation is in, what it needs money for, what its income stream look like and why, etc. I think Thunderbird (https://www.thunderbird.net/) has been doing a better job in that respect.
4. There doesn't seem to be an effort to encourage or even make-it-easy-for users (corporate or individual) to engage in community activity, of the kind that increases commitment to the project and also awareness to the importance of supporting the project financially.
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Also - please consider actually supporting both projects I mentioned, financially:
* LibreOffice: https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/
* Thunderbird: https://give.thunderbird.net/en-US/
and consider doing some volunteer QA work on LibreOffice by reporting bugs or even getting into the code. I, particularly, am very involved with Right-to-Left, Hebrew and some Arabic language issues.
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 99% agree with you, except that I believe LibreOffice is not just old, it's subtly bad. I didn't notice it before but it's too adhoc, just too laggy, just too crummy at times. It lack tastes, consistency and responsiveness that you got even in office 2003. I wish LO to improve everything, they came from far and did a lot. But it's not enough.. kinda like blender 2.7 to 2.8.
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…
The most common operation is trying to decide which ribbon something is supposed to be on. And it's difficult to get straight even after more than a decade, if you're just an occasional MS-Office user.
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Recently, I installed Office 97 onto Wine just for curiosity. I could still do much with it. The only feature I really missed from Word was academic references. I could create documents indistinguishable from modern Word using the old drawing features combined with modern fonts. The drop down menus, combined with the floating toolbars were much more intuitive than clicking up and down some "ribbon". The drop down men…
> eg "Insert -> Image -> From File". In the latest version of word the progression is: "Insert > Pictures > From This device"