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LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

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Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#341

Post by einpoklum »

kumarvvr wrote: post #116
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 is one of the best things to happen to office. It was horrible to use before that. For an app as complex and feature rich as word or excel, the ribbon interface is a great way to organise commands. Not to mention context specific menu tabs. Especially in Powerpoint, my productivity has increased tremendously. I just create a table and automatically go to the last tab to format it.

> The ribbon interface is one of the best things to happen to office. It was horrible to use before that.

Says who? Do you have any UI/UX study to back up that claim? Most of us on this page seem to believe the opposite is true.

> For an app as complex and feature rich as word or excel, the ribbon interface is a great way to organise commands.

Exactly the opposite. That is, a ribbon _may_ be relevant to a feature-poor application, but much less so to a feature-rich application.

> my productivity has increased tremendously. I just create a table and automatically go to the last tab to format it.

You're conflating context-sensitive UI changes with the use of ribbons. That's a different argument. Also remember that if a Table toolbar or sidebar appears, you can have the same effect - better perhaps - without ribbons.

For an app as complex and feature rich as word or excel, the ribbon interface is a great way to organise commands.

Not to mention context specific menu tabs.

Especially in Powerpoint, my productivity has increased tremendously. I just create a table and automatically go to the last tab to format it.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#342

Post by buzzert »

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…

A great example of this working for real is Ghidra[0]! Funded by the government, a spectacular piece of open source software.

[0] https://ghidra-sre.org/

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#343

Post by veddox »

black_puppydog wrote: post #287
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…

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. :)

That is the one thing I miss most about Unity! It was such a sweet feature. (Also, Unity minimised on the vertical space it used, which was great for small laptop screens.) The new GNOME versions are much improved compared to a few years ago, but I do wish Canonical had stuck with Unity...

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#344

Post by einpoklum »

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…

The funding necessary to support LO development is so tiny relative to the US defense (read: offense) budget, that it's not even worthwhile to make this reference. The US DOD's stationary budget would probably cover this.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#345

Post by ulisesrmzroche »

crazygringo wrote: post #310
ulisesrmzroche wrote: post #305

Why so much talk about the ribbon? This article has nothing to say about that. This is about a Personal Edition and an Enterprise edition and how little revenue its actually coming in. Basically, libre office won't be libre anymore. Looks like Enterprise is gonna have a commercial license. By the way, I think the ribbon is far better than the ugly dropdown menus. It's also been over a decade since it was introduced.…

> Basically, libre office won't be libre anymore The personal version still will be, right? Now this would be something to worry about if all new feature development were put into enterprise, and the personal version stagnated. But from my experience in enterprise software, enterprise features are generally not even applicable to consumer users at all. They're things like single sign-on, approval workflow integration…

Yeah I’m cool with it too, it’s just not quote unquote true free software anymore. Which should be big news, but basically the whole first page of comments is all about the MS word ribbon

Madness of crowds for sure

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#346

Post by zzo38computer »

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…

While Microsoft has changed a lot of stuff, the keyboard commands in Windows and MS Office have remained mostly consistent in my experience, so when trying to work on someone else's computer, some things I could still figure out easily enough even though the system seems different. This could be done just as well in free software projects too (some of which already do, I think).

(However, for my own stuff, and on my own computer, I use neither MS Office nor LibreOffice nor other similar software, since I do not need them; I can use plain text, I can use TeX, I can use PostScript code (with Ghostscript), and whatever.)

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#347

Post by einpoklum »

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…

Well, I believe that FOSS software should "just work", but also that we should "just support it" if we use it - with decent bug reporting always, with QA work if we can spare a bit of time, with coding if we know how and can spare more time, and with some money if we're not poor.

So, I guess I believe in "mutual entitlement".

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#348

Post by vetinari »

kuschku wrote: post #333
vetinari wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Qt's browser engine is the Chromium Embedded Framework, Electron is the Chromium Embedded Framework. Sure, the backend is different, but in a thread about UI issues, it's the same.

The UI issues in pgadmin4 are caused exactly because it opens web pages from relatively slow local web server, synchronously.

Electron/CEF can be used to make a decently (i.e. usable) performing SQL client app (see Azure Data Studio). But not in a way that pgadmin4 did it.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#349

Post by veddox »

nickcw wrote: post #153
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 user…

At our research institute most people use Linux + LaTeX, which is great, but interfacing with MS Word is an absolute pain when you work with external collaborators. Accordingly, one of our professors‘ key argument for Mac OS is: „It’s a Unix with Word...“

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#350

Post by oblio »

shawxe wrote: post #149
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…

I agree with this completely. 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. For me, all of the pictures just lower the density of the information and cause it to take longer to parse every single time. I also question the basic premise that the tabbed interface is…

> Like many UI related assertions, absolutely no concrete evidence is being provided to support this point.

Microsoft did massive amounts of user testing, just because you don't know about it doesn't mean it's not there. This is a good starting point if you have about 20 spare hours: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/ They also backed their tests with a ton of data and metrics.

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